Our World: Population Two Three

Work: 1, Life: 2, Balance: 0

2011-09-02T12:18:00.002-04:00

Written last week on a flight to Chicago for a work trip.

I am 30,000 feet away from Amalia, and I am feeling every inch.

It has been almost three months since I last posted something, coinciding, almost to the day, with when I went back to work. My three-month hiatus from blogging has more to do with the lack of balance associated with work-life balance, but it also has something to do with the fact that when I first went back to work, I didn’t want to write about the anger and resentment I felt for fear that I wouldn’t put it into the right words.

But in just three short months, I have gained perspective. Ha! If only. Well, I've gained some, anyway.

Here is what it was like to go back to work: it was terrible. I missed Mollie fiercely, passionately, with my whole heart. I resented the fact that I was sitting at a desk while she was home. I counted down the hours I spent at the office or in meetings, and I felt so dispassionate about my work that I wondered whether it was really what I wanted to be doing. I hated pumping. Not only did it take an hour out of my day, it was an ounce-by-ounce reminder of both my physical separation and the fact that I was falling short of what Mollie needed (to eat), which made me feel like I was falling short of what Mollie needed (in general).

And here is what it is like to be back at work now: it is slightly less terrible. I miss Mollie fiercely and passionately and I resent the fact that I don’t get to spend my days with her, resent the fact that I only get a harried hour with her in the morning in between pumping, making bottles, and making myself presentable for my day, and then an action-packed hour with her at night, nestled among bathtime, nursing, bottle-cleaning, dinner-making (ours) and mealtime (hers). Pumping remains an ounce-by-ounce reminder of my physical separation, but because of a lot of research and a come-to-Jesus moment with Enfamil, I no longer feel like I’m falling short of Mollie’s needs.

And something strange has happened in the past two weeks. Lo and behold, as many a wise working-woman told me would happen, I have found that I don’t hate my job. In fact, there are days when I love it, love the fact that I spend my time affecting social change, working to make the world a more livable one, love the fact that I get to feel like a role model to this person who will someday become a teenager and hate me. My days are busy, busier than they ever were before (cue the “what did I do with all of my time before I had kids” song) and yet I manage to get more and less done. Every minute counts now, for better (I can write more emails in 20 minutes than I ever realized) and for worse (I feel tethered to the clock, I know exactly how much I can and can’t get done in any given 10-minute span of time, my days are planned to the minute).

And yet I still hate the fact of working. Rather, I hate the fact that I spent so much time and money getting to this point in my career, only to have a baby and wish that I could lead two lives – the one where I’m home with her, and the one where I’m making the world a better place while picking up a (small but critical) paycheck. Put more directly, I am a mother now.

I have no doubt that not working is just as hard as working, much like I am now certain that formula-feeding leaves parents just as crazed as breastfeeding, and sleep-training is just as exhausting as not sleep-training. Like everything else in life and in parenting (particularly first-time parenting), the decisions are hard, there’s merit on both sides of the spectrum, and the right thing for one parent is the wrong thing for another.

In the last three months, our little scrawny chicken has gotten fat. She has knee dimples, elbow dimples, and three round chins. She sits on her own, puts everything in her mouth, eats pears with gusto. She talks more when she’s around people she knows, she shrieks and squawks and kicks her legs when she’s excited. She will be six months old in just a week. It is amazing what six months can bring. Also, teeth.

I am 30,000 feet and several hundred miles away from her and I can conjure her sweet baby smell in my nose, and feel her cheek give under my lips as I kiss her in my mind’s eye. I am on my first work-trip, resenting the distance and grateful, so incredibly and unbelievably grateful for my two great loves at home.

I will be home again in 36 hours. And I will already resent Monday the very moment I pick Mollie up to feed her in the early hours of Saturday morning. In between then and now, I will meet the next generation of organizers, of world-changers, of people who work for a small but critical paycheck. Just like every day, the moment I hold her in my arms will be the sweetest homecoming I have ever known.

More of a Turkey than a Chicken

2011-06-01T10:13:00.002-04:00

For the past 12 weeks and 4 days, I have been a stay-at-home-mom. On Monday, my time at home with Mollie comes to an end and I will be back at work.

These are the cliches I am wrestling with: It is hard for me to believe how quickly the time passed, it is hard to imagine myself working in any other capacity than the job I have taken on here at home, it is amazing how different Mollie is now than she was when we first brought her home from the hospital, the thought of going back to work and being separated from her for an entire day fills me with such despair that I am fairly certain that I will have no cuticles left come Monday morning. I am also filled with such other adjectives as fear (about whether Mollie will forget me/hate me/miss me), hatred (for having to work), jealousy (of those who don't have to work), nervousness (about whether or not I really remember how to do my job), and apathy (about the work itself).

Here is a new truth that I didn't know I would come to: if I could quit my job and stay at home with Mollie, I would do it in a heartbeat. Work seems more trivial than I could have possibly imagined.

***

The year was 1989 and I was getting ready to go to someone's record hop. For those of you who were not a Jewish teenager in the late 80's or early 90's, a record hop was one way a very rich Jewish kid could celebrate their Bar or Bat Mitzvah. Those fortunate kids had two parties -- one fancy party for the grown-ups where a few of their Jewish friends were invited, and one "just kids" party where most of the 7th or 8th grade was invited. While a record hop was good in theory (twice as many presents for the lucky 13-year-old, plus the parents got to have the celebration that they wanted for all of their money) it also meant enduring the awkwardness that accompanies every dance where not-quite-teenagers are forced to co-mingle.

Suffice it to say, it took me about an hour to get ready for the party. I had picked out the perfect outfit, which will sound ridiculous over here in 2011, but I'm going to give it a shot because it is important to our story. It was a predominantly purple tie-dyed babydoll dress, under which I wore a pair of black bike shorts. I wore it with enormous "scrunchy" socks, and what we called "Chinese slippers" at the time, but which are essentially black canvass Mary Janes. I carefully did my hair, securing it into a half-up-half-down 'do with a black scrunchie, and applied the mascara and lip gloss that my mom let me wear to Bar/Bat Mitzvahs.

I came downstairs feeling pretty great, just about confident enough to ask Keith Delaney to dance after a Shirley Temple and some chicken fingers. It was critical that I ask Keith to dance at this party because I suspected that he liked me. He had been snapping my bra strap in science class for weeks, a sure sign of interest, but he hadn't said anything. I figured that the bra snapping was his way of putting the ball in my court. I was determined to run with it.

"I'm ready to go," I told my mom.

"Honey, you need to lose those socks," she responded as she picked up her keys.

Lose the socks? Was she out of her mind? The socks were critical. The socks MADE the outfit. The socks helped to establish me as an almost-cool kid. Without the socks I was just a loser in a babydoll dress, pining after Keith Delaney.

"But the socks are cool!," I protested.

"No, the socks look ridiculous."

"I'm not taking off the socks."

"Then I'm not taking you to the party."

And on it went. I'm not sure why the socks were so important to her. I don't know why she didn't believe me. But we both held firm. Finally, in the car, moments before we pulled into the parking lot for the party, I took off my socks. I held them out to her with tears in my eyes.

"There," she said. "You look perfect now. Have fun!"

I said nothing as I got out of the car, not even looking at her as I walked inside.

The party sucked. Keith didn't come and there were no Shirley Temples. Midway through it I started to feel really sick, and by the time my mom came to pick me up, I knew that I had a fever.

I sat down at the kitchen table with the thermometer in my mouth, feeling like I could fall asleep right there in my dad's dinner seat.

"Honey, I'm sorry," my mom said as she smoothed her hand across my forehead. I assumed that she was sorry that I was sick, but she continued. "You were right about the socks. I saw all the other girls walking in and they all had socks on. I'm sorry I made you take them off. I should have listened to you when you told me that they were cool."

I nodded and headed off to bed. I remember that the illness turned into some of the worst bronchitis that I had ever head, that I missed a week of school, and that by the time I got back, Keith was dating someone else, only rarely snapping my bra, and even then it seemed like it was just for sport.

I don't know why this memory has been so vivid for me these days, but I can't stop thinking about it. I have thought about it over the years because it was so shocking. It was the first time my mother apologized to me like I was an adult, worthy of a real apology. But now I am thinking about it from her perspective. She must have felt really bad for making get rid of those socks, knowing how much I wanted to be one of the cool kids, despite also knowing what losers the cool kids would ultimately turn out to be. I wonder if she decided to apologize to me, or if she just blurted it out because she felt so sad that I was also sick.

***

A million times a day, I think about the ways that I will need to apologize to Mollie, about how sorry I already am for the ways that I am already hurting her.

I'm sorry I have to work. I'm sorry I can't buy you the fancy clothes. I'm sorry that kids are mean. I'm sorry we can't take a trip to Disney World. I'm sorry I didn't listen to you.

A million times a day, I think about things that I want for Mollie's future.

I want you to be carefree. I want you to be above the popularity contest. I want you to trust yourself. I want you feel safe and secure. I want you to know that I am always listening, that no matter where I am, I love you. I want Middle School to be easier.

***

She smiles with purpose now, squeals with conviction. She rolls onto her side, talks to herself, tracks her mobile. She knows her mother, her father, her Julie, her Stephen. She is not a fan of long car rides but she is comforted by her pacifier. She tolerates her bath and she enjoys being on her tummy.

She is suddenly a baby and not a newborn, more of a turkey than a chicken, so grown up and so little at the same time, probably the way that I will always see her. I am leaving her to do her growing, her thinking, her learning, her changing, all without me there to watch it.

***

Move at your own pace, little one. I may be a step or two behind you and it might take longer than you would like for me to catch up, to catch on. But know that no matter what, no matter where I am, I am always behind you.

Of Roots and Wings

2011-05-20T09:28:00.002-04:00

I wrote this as an email to Mollie today, but because it is practically the only thing I have been thinking about for the past week, I decided to share it here.

Dear, sweet Mollie,

Last week we started transitioning you from the bassinet in our room to the crib in your room. You had been giving us signs that you were ready for this, sleeping better when we weren't in the room with you, kicking your swaddled little feet at the bassinet bumper, whinnying like a little barnyard animal as you slept. So we bought a monitor and braced ourselves for the possibility of a difficult transition, knowing all the while that it was the best decision for all of us.

The transition has turned out to be much harder on me than on you. You sleep beautifully now, from somewhere around 11:30pm until sometime close to 4:30am, at which point you nurse and go right back to sleep. You turn yourself around in your crib, doing unseen acrobatics in your sleep that land you perpendicular from the place where I put you down. You still whinny like a little foal or piglet, but you do it to yourself. And sometimes when I come to get you after I have heard you chirping for a few minutes in the morning, you are staring at your mobile of angry birds, happy as a clam even with a heavy, wet diaper.

I spent the past week looking over at your empty bassinet, steeling myself for the day when you eventually go to summer camp. Or worse, college. I liked the weeks that we spent sleeping in one room, treasured the knowledge that I was drifting into sleep closest to my two favorite people in the whole world -- you and your dad. I felt cozy and safe, the two of you within arm's reach.

But now it's time for the first real separation. As your dad took your bassinet downstairs yesterday, where it will wait for a new baby cousin to be ready to use, I had to suppress the urge to tell him to "wait!, stop!, I'm not quite ready for this." Because you are ready, little one. You are ready to sleep your own sleep, to be more than an arm's reach away from me, to find your own space in your sweet little room. And so I will hold myself back. I will let you find your way. I will cross the short distance between our room and your room, comforting myself that I am no more than a squawk away from you when you need me, when I need you.

I think that you will teach me this lesson over and over again, and that it will always be hard for me. Those roots that your father and I give you are always to be counterbalanced by the wings that you grow on your own. Every time you take flight, I will have to suppress the urge to pull you back to me, to hold you close to my heart and to the earth, just to save myself the pain of letting you go. I promise to do my best to let you fly, little one. It is a big world, and it is all yours.

You are chirping right now, so I will go to you. I will pick you up and cuddle you, nurse you and make you comfortable. I will kiss you and rock you and snuggle you back to sleep. I will remember that the freedom to love another person, even one of your own creation, is a privilege.

I love you with all of my heart.

Mama

Another Sunday in May

2011-05-10T12:51:00.001-04:00

For seventeen years, Mother’s Day has been a day for someone else. A day for people with mothers, a day for mothers. And then there it was, mine for the taking, complete with brunch and flowers and cards and Matt and my beautiful little girl. And I felt… sad.

Growing up, Mother’s Day was more or less just a Sunday with dessert. It was usually one of the first days that it was warm enough to grill, so we would invite my grandmothers over for a barbecue. They would get cards and big baskets of hanging flowers and my mom would get something nice from her mother (perfume, a pretty nightgown, a nice sweater) and something strange or passive aggressive from my dad’s (sponges, a book on how to be a good mother, salt and pepper shakers). I enjoyed the day because I was oblivious to the tension between my mom and her mother-in-law, because I loved my grandmothers in a totally unencumbered way, and because there was dessert.

Fast forward to Mother’s Day, 1991. I was 12 and Andy was coming home from college to have dinner with us, making me giddy with excitement about the chance to see him. He walked in the door with a huge bouquet of flowers, which he handed to my mom and then burst into tears. This naturally scared the crap out of me, because I’d never seen Andy cry, not even when he was stung by a swarm of bees in our back yard.

That was the Mother’s Day that I learned that my mom had breast cancer. I took it like a champ because they made it seem like some people get colds, some people get ear infections, and other people get cancer. Suspicious of Andy’s tears, I pressed them on whether mom would be better by my Bat Mitzvah, and I was assured that of course she would.

And then Mother’s Day, 1994. The first Mother’s Day after my mom died. I had just lost my mom, I was 15, I weighed approximately 93 pounds sopping wet, and so I did the most logical, teenage thing I could do: I hated. I hated Hallmark, candy, and barbecues, I hated my friends with mothers, and I hated mothers. Except that I was only 15, so I cried myself to sleep that night and spent the next morning cutting my classes, smoking cigarettes on the black top, and feeling sullen and sad.

I mostly grew out of the hate, attending the breast cancer walk in Philadelphia and later in Pittsburgh, even though getting up to volunteer for a walk at 7:30am as a college student was a sort of masochistic torture. When I got married I abdicated responsibility for Mother’s Day, even as I reminded Matt that hey, you have to call your mom. Once, in law school, I sent “The Secret Life of Bees,” a book that’s essentially about the mothers that aren’t related to us, to a few of the women who mothered me through those hate years. And when Matt’s brother got married, my sister-in-law took over Mother’s Day duties, sending an email a few days before with, “I was thinking flowers for Char” or “how about an Amazon gift card this year?” and I felt so grateful for Amanda’s ability to just walk over, look at my pain and say, “I’ll pick that up for you honey, don’t you worry your pretty little head about it.” I handed it over willingly, every time.

And then there was last year, the mother of all Mother’s Days, when I didn’t have a mother, I had just had a miscarriage, and I wasn’t yet pregnant. I don’t need to dwell on it much more than this: it was awful, hate turned into resentment.

I don’t know what I expected this year. I half-expected to “take back the day,” to feel like this day that has held so much emotion for me over the years would once again be simple, or even feel like any other day. But Hallmark is pervasive, and so are my emotions. So I didn’t get to have a personal mommy-ist triumph, nor did it feel like just another day in the life of our 64-day-old daughter.

Instead, I just missed my mother. A lot. I missed her more than I missed her the day that Mollie was born. I missed her more than when Martha was here, pinch-hitting on the mother AND mother-in-law roles. I missed her more than I do when I’m sitting quietly in Mollie’s room with Julie, more than I do in those moments when Mollie looks at me with her intense stare, more than when I’m reading her “Where the Wild Things Are” or when we walk around the Chestnut Hill Reservoir. I didn’t want the barbecue or the hanging pots of flowers, and I certainly didn’t want the awkward family drama, but I wanted the chance to have a conversation with my mother, to see her on a Sunday, maybe share some dessert.

I spent so many years hating the day, resenting what everyone else got to celebrate, that over time the day turned into both more and less than it was meant to be.

Mollie is asleep on me as I’m writing this, sucking on her pacifier every few seconds to comfort herself. She literally has everything she needs within inches and she is calm, comforted. I hope that I am there on her first Mother’s Day, to tell her how amazing it is to see her all grown up and mothering. I hope that after her years of hating and resentment over whatever or whomever she needs to hate and resent, that I can be there for her, that we can have a conversation and some dessert.

I am learning that it is the little things that add up to a Mother’s Day, the small moments and Sundays that make up part of a year, part of the role. Yet I don’t want to miss a single one, and the saddest thing of all is that if I had to hazard a guess, my mother would have said the very same thing.

So for now, this will have to do: wherever you are, Happy Mother’s Day. You are with me in the quiet moments and in the loud ones, and so you never really miss a thing. I will eat dessert for both of us.

One Fart at a Time

2011-05-02T09:37:00.005-04:00

I stare at Mollie in the early morning light on a Saturday. She is amazing. Her cheeks, begging to be kissed, are relaxed in her milk-drunk state. She inhales and exhales her sweet breath out of her slightly open mouth and I lean in to hear her breathing, to feel her breathing, to smell her delicious baby smells. Her eyes are closed and she sleeps so peacefully and I am so in love with her that I ache, and I literally have to remind myself that she is the same little person who screamed for three hours the night before. But in that moment, in the early pre-dawn moment, I don't care about her screaming. I don't mind that I can't think clearly, can't remember simple things, and occasionally forget that the milk lives in the refrigerator. She is so perfect that she is my only care, my only concern, and I am so grateful for her existence.

"Eight weeks ago we watched our first sunrise over Boston together," I tell her, marking the fact that she has been in our lives for 56 days. I tell her this every Saturday, willing myself to hold on to the feeling of that morning, even as it fades from my memory, even as I can literally feel it fixing itself in my memory like a photograph of someone else's life, now replaced by new Saturday mornings.

And then she farts.

She startles herself awake, kicks her little feet inside her swaddle blanket (baby straight-jacket), and squawks, sounding part piglet, part rooster. I laugh at her, kiss those irresistible cheeks, and think, "so this is how you learn to be a parent: one fart at a time."

Two Thursdays ago she cried inconsolably for four straight hours. Last Monday, Matt and I spent 20 minutes in our pediatrician's waiting room only to find out that Mollie had terrible diaper rash and was in desperate need of nothing more than frequent diaper changes and a massive tub of Desitin. I have stopped eating eggs. Every other day she has a projectile spit-up that lands on the floor, and there are splats in the kitchen, in our bedroom, in the nursery. Two Sundays in a row we have found ourselves out with friends but not spending time with them because we are rocking, rocking, rocking our daughter and trying to magic her back to calm. Our apartment overflows with baby things -- a boppy, a swing, a bouncy seat, a giant yoga ball. We have most of our conversations while moving, up and down on the yoga ball, side to side as we sway her. I find burp cloths in our bed, in my sock drawer, draped across my shoulder as I am ready to walk out the door.

It still amazes me how much my life has changed in two months. It amazes me even though I felt like I was truly prepared for my life to change, for the burp cloths and the baby things. I saw my friends become parents, saw the many ways that babies change you, laughed when well-meaning acquaintances posited that they would have more time for things like the gym when home on paternity leave. I knew that the waves of parenting would just keep coming.

BUT. But, wow. I was prepared for the change, but I wasn't prepared for how stunning it would be, for how different I would feel because of it. I now really think that you can't anticipate all of the madness/chaos/amazement/insert-strong-adjective-here of parenting until you actually become a parent. No matter how prepared you feel (or are), no matter how many babies your friends have had, no matter how desperate you are for a baby, no matter how many books or blogs you have read. This is the wildest, most intense, most exhausting, most amazingly terrifying experience I have ever had. I couldn't possibly have readied myself for it. I couldn't have possibly known the depths of my love, but also my self-doubt, my uncertainty, my inability to make a decision for the very real fear that I am taking us down the wrong path.

I have always questioned everything. Now I question it twice, consult the internet, call another mother, ask a friend for a second opinion, and discuss it with Matt ad nauseum, all before making a final decision.

And then she farts. Which makes me laugh out loud and forces me to calm down, trust myself, go with my gut.

She doesn't need much. She needs to be changed, fed, and burped. She needs to be kept warm enough and cool enough. She needs vaccines and pacifiers. But perhaps most of all, she needs to be loved, and cuddled, and rocked. She needs to be able to fall asleep, milk-drunk and full, and fart herself awake, trusting that someone will be there to laugh at her, change her diaper, kiss her delicious cheeks. And thanks to her, I can do those things in my sleep.

There is no such thing as an A+ in parenting

2011-04-15T15:23:00.002-04:00

Six weeks ago today, I cancelled a conference call that I was supposed to have at 2:30pm because I knew that I wouldn’t be able to speak through the contractions. 17 hours later, Amalia came screaming into the world.

As with all of the other milestones (one week, 2 weeks, 4 weeks) I can’t believe that time has moved so quickly. I can’t believe that she has been here for 6 weeks, I can’t believe that I only have another 6 weeks of maternity leave. I can’t believe that in another 6 weeks, she’ll be 12 weeks old. Parenting math is much harder than pregnancy math (a math story for another day).

There have been so many times in the past few weeks that I have wanted to pick up my computer to write down what I have been thinking about. And for some reason, I just haven’t been able to do it. People have been cutting me slack, assuming that it’s exhaustion that’s getting in my way. But that’s not it. I mean, I am exhausted, but that’s not what has kept me from writing. It’s the sheer enormity of it all, the fact that wrapping my head around this most recent life change is basically just as overwhelming as actually experiencing it.

It has been an up and down week. Last weekend went by too quickly. I had too little time with Matt and by Sunday at 11am, I was already missing him, even though there were still many hours until he had to be at work on Monday. On Monday I cried in Cris’s living room, trying as hard as I could to soak up every parental-advice tidbit she could give me, feeling grateful, so incredibly grateful when she would say things like, “I remember feeling that way,” but simultaneously feeling so doubtful of my ability to make it as a parent. But today I am feeling alright, confident in my ability to wear Mollie to the grocery store in a sling, certain that I will be able to pull off a Passover Seder six weeks after I had a baby.

I have come to the conclusion that I am trying to get my PhD in parenting right now. I am in the lab/classroom years. It is my job to repeat the experiment until I have something I can publish, something I can hold up in front of my committee and say, “look, this works!”

An ideal day goes like this: Mollie sleeps for a 5-hour stretch, eats and goes back down at 4:30 and sleeps until 7:30, she has a lovely day involving minimal spit-up or wardrobe changes (for either one of us), she smiles affectionately at the ceiling fan and enjoys her tummy time, and I manage to shower, eat three meals, drink enough water, tackle some of the laundry, and pump 4.5 ounces. We have had bits and pieces of the ideal day. She will sleep for 5 hours one night and spend that entire day gassy and uncomfortable, producing such a massive spit up that it bypasses the burp cloth and lands squarely on her father’s (clean) pants, dripping onto the floor. I will manage to eat enough food and pump, but she will be miserable every time I put her down for even a second. Or she will take good naps, eat without problems, but I somehow haven’t managed to shower, eat, or drink any water until Matt comes home at 6pm.

So every day, I go to my lab and try to re-create the pieces of the day before that worked, and then tweak the things that didn’t work to see if I can get them to work again.

I keep copious mental notes, reminding myself of when she ate, how much she ate, when she pooped, how much she pooped, whether I wore my hair up or down, whether I had three burp cloths or two, whether I burped her during or after she nursed. Of course, I can only hold on to these notes for approximately 3 seconds before I have forgotten everything I was supposed to remember. This means that my life is less like a controlled experiment, and more like a chaotic stab in the dark. I will never get a PhD this way. I will never produce publishable results. I will be ABD forever.

So the new trick is working to become okay with this chaos. It is a very difficult trick. I am filled to the brim with self-doubt, a cliché of a new mother, constantly worrying myself over questions like, “has she had enough to eat?,” “do I make enough milk?,” “how much spit-up is too much spit-up?,” “does she like me?,” “if she hasn’t smiled by exactly 6 weeks, is she developmentally delayed?” I know that these questions are cliché, because when I start to type in “how much spit-up” into Google, it smartly finishes my question with, “is too much spit-up?” Clearly, I am not the only one in a parenting lab. Oddly, this is of little comfort when it comes from strangers on the internet. When other mothers, experienced or inexperienced, ask the same questions, then I feel comforted, elated to know that I am not alone here, not the only one blowing up her lab space.

I am sickened by the thought of going back to work, of leaving Amalia in the care of strangers. Not because I think that I can do it better (see above), but because I cannot bear the thought of being apart from her all day for three whole days a week, cannot bear the fact that someone else will get to hold her, cuddle her, comfort her. I do not mind nursing her at 3am because I love being the only person in the world who sees her beautiful face at 3am. Sharing her with anyone other than Matt is difficult for me, even though I have no idea what I am doing, even though she sometimes cries so hard that she turns red and her lip quivers. I want to be the one to stop the quivering lip, to be there to kiss her delicious cheeks, to wipe away the tiny little tears that pool in the corners of her eyes. This time, there is a conclusive result: I cannot always help her, sometimes I need help. Both of those realities are intensely, emotionally trying. It must be painful to watch me struggle with it.

This afternoon I went to see a lactation consultant, one of the myriad of people whose jobs absolutely baffle me. They are like magicians, pulling breastfeeding tidbits out of a hat just when you least expect it. In the middle of the consult, Beth had Amalia on her lap and had just finished weighing her. Mollie started to cry, which was reasonable given that she was both naked and hungry. Without thinking, I leaned in and started talking to her. “It’s okay sweetpea, you’ll eat soon, I know you’re hungry and I can’t wait to feed you.” Mollie stopped crying, turned her head towards me and opened her mouth in that perfect little “o” that makes my heart stop. And Beth said, “that’s right sweetheart, that’s your mommy,” and handed her over to me. Time stood still for just the briefest of moments, and this is what I learned:

I will always be working towards my doctorate in parenting, always trying to create the ideal day, the day that works and flows just like I want it to. But what I really need to learn is to recognize the moments, good and bad, that are totally out of my control. In other words, I need to simply relax and let time stand still when my well-fed, perfectly developmentally appropriate, beautiful daughter hears the sound of my voice and feels calmed. Really, that is all the affirmation I need.

Exhaustion in Three Parts

2011-04-09T09:54:00.003-04:00

Part 1:

I wake up to the sound of the baby crying at 4:26am and think, "when did we get a cat, and who is murdering it?"

Part 2:

I step out of the shower only to realize that I forgot to wash the conditioner out of my hair. I step back in and turn on the water...with my towel on. As I loudly curse because I'm getting my towel all wet, I dunk my head under the water and curse again because in my haste not to get my towel wet, I have forgotten to turn the knob to "hot" and am standing half-naked, half-toweled under a freezing cold spray, conditioner running down my face.

Part 3:

When the baby is fussy at 5pm, I think to myself, "only 3.5 more hours until my bedtime." At 11:34pm, when she is finally settling down from her nighttime fuss and thinking about sleeping somewhere other than my arms, I think, "please little one, please go to sleep, it's the middle of the night." And then I remember that once upon a time, in a galaxy far, far away, my nights used to start at 10:30.

Three Weeks and Two Days

2011-03-28T14:29:00.004-04:00

Mollie turned three weeks old this weekend. It is such an enormous amount of time for her to have already been on the planet that I am struck by her age every time I murmur it to myself. I do not understand where the time went, how we made it from those moments when she was a few hours, and even a few days old, all the way up until now, when we can measure her lifespan in weeks. It seems unfathomable.

So it is an understatement to say that the last three weeks have been a blur. They have been a blink of the eye, one sleepless 24-hour stretch of breastfeeding, laundry, spit-up, teeny tiny clothes, thank you notes, and learning, OH, the learning.

This is a short list of some of the things I have learned in the last three weeks:

When your milk comes in, it feels prickly.
When your daughter is as perfect and tiny as ours is, people will always tell you how perfect and tiny she is, and you will have no idea how to respond. You will say, "thank you" as though you can take credit for her smallness and her perfection.
Exhaustion can be manageable, as long as you're tag-teaming, and as long as there is coffee.
Bottles and pacifiers won't cause her any real confusion, contrary to the teachings of the well-meaning, but slightly overwhelming, La Leche League.
Dr. Internet is much more knowledgeable and helpful when it comes to breastfeeding tips than she was during pregnancy.
Whenever anyone offers to help you through the first three weeks of parenting, the correct answer is, "yes, thank you!"

I hardly know how to describe how amazing our little girl is. She makes this face sometimes, eyes wide open, bright, and staring, her mouth a perfect little "o", her hands clasped in front of her, and it literally makes my heart hurt, I love it so much. I want to consume the image, eat it so as to make it wholly mine.

"It's crazy to think that she will never be this age again, that next week she will make new faces, new gestures, totally different expressions for us," Matt says. And I want to burst into tears for how sad it is that the time is literally flying by and that she is growing so quickly, and I want to jump up and down for joy, sky-write to the world about how incredibly lucky we are to have this healthy little girl we get to raise, how amazing it is that she is growing so quickly.

When I hear Mollie crying in another room, I know exactly what face she is making based on the sound of her cry. I love having that knowledge, love being one of the few people in the world who knows that about her. It is so intimate.

I spend a lot of time thinking about motherhood, things I have thought of only fleetingly over the years. I think about women in the Holocaust, unable to breastfeed their children because they were starving themselves. I grieve for those women, I grieve for the pain it must have caused them to know that they were unable to nourish their babies. I think about women who have lost their children, and I hold Mollie closer, kiss her soft head, tell her that I cannot imagine my world without her in it. I think about trying to keep Mollie safe, trying to give her good advice. I realize that I am not as cool as I thought I would be: I do not want her to try drugs and have lots of sex; I do not want her to hurt her body because it is too precious to me. I think about the fact that I have a little girl, that I was once a little girl. I think about being a mother and I think about my mother.

Late at night, I think about sleep.

This weekend our families will be in Boston for Mollie's baby naming. We will formally welcome her into the world as a member of the Jewish community. The ceremony itself is beautiful, a gesture of our commitment to raise her as a Jew, in the likeness of both her fore-mothers and the two amazing women for whom she was named. But more than the ceremony is the fact of her existence, that we have a daughter to welcome, that we have family who have new, never-before-experienced roles like Aunt, Uncle, Grandparent. We will all come together for the ceremony because of this one teeny little girl, this yet-unwritten beauty. I am struck, over and over again, by how different my world is now, how grateful I am for the change, and how quickly one little person can touch so many people.

Episode 1: The first five days

2011-03-11T09:52:00.006-05:00

This post was written on March 10, 2011, Mollie's actual due date. As is starting to become the new normal, it took me a day longer than I expected to actually get it up.

Today is the bean’s due date, the date by which medical science predicted she would be ready to enter the world. The world that she has inhabited for five whole days as of 4:48 this morning. In fact, in just 18 minutes, it will be five-and-a-half days. Twelve hours is very important when you only weigh 5 pounds.

These five days have been the most unbelievable five days of my life. And I mean that in every sense: I literally cannot believe that these five days belong to me, that I get to fold them into the story of my life. It sounds cheesy to say it, but they feel like a true gift, like something I waited all of my life to have, and now that I have it, I just want to savor each and every moment, even the ones that make me cry (and man, there are SO many of those).

I want to try to recap these five days, but I’m certain that I won’t do it justice, mainly because I can’t quite figure out how to write about our Mollie-bean and parenting and all of the million things that come with it. It sort of comes out in a list of things I cannot stop thinking about (practically in order): how beautiful my daughter is, the fact that I have a daughter, breast-feeding, the state of my nipples, Matt, parenting with Matt, not sleeping and co-sleeping, overwhelming emotions, family and friends, eating one-handed, my 4-months-pregnant-looking belly. These are the things I think about all the time, cannot get out of the running dialogue in my head. And then Mollie wakes up and whoosh! all I hear are my thoughts of how amazing she is, how cute she is when she makes that half-smile that shows the dimple on her left cheek, whether she is warm enough, comfortable enough, or hungry.

Here is labor, the short version: I started having contractions at about 11:30 on Friday, March 4^th. I went to the hospital when my contractions were about 5-6 minutes apart and the triage nurse was mean and unhelpful. We waited an hour before the doctor came in, and when she did her exam, my contractions were about 3-4 minutes apart, I was 7cm dilated, and 90% effaced. After being rushed up to labor and delivery, the wonder-doctor, the anesthesiologist, came in and gave me an epidural. Blissful, pain-free labor ensued from 10pm until about 3:50am, with only a few hiccups when the baby’s heart rate slowed down.

At 3:50am I felt a punch from within and then heard a big gush as my water broke. By 4:30 I was pushing, laughing out loud at the fact that I was actually pushing, trying to figure out how I was actually doing anything given the fact that I couldn’t feel a thing from the waist down. When my amazing labor and delivery nurse, Denise, took my hand and put it on our baby’s head after the second push, it was a feeling so miraculous that I am almost hesitant to share it here, that’s how sacred and special it was. Looking into Matt’s face, I told him, “that’s the baby!” through tears, and he laughed with me, saying, “I see it!” Then there was an urge to push, a squirm that told me I wouldn’t need to, and the baby on my chest by 4:48am. It happened so quickly that the nurse had to turn the baby towards Matt, “It’s a…” she prompted, “GIRL!” he finished. And we laughed and cried and cried and cried and laughed and kissed, while they cleaned her up and stars shot across the sky, fairies danced in the forests, Matt and I became parents, and the world changed forever and ever and ever.

I am making myself cry.

But that’s how it was, especially with the stars and the fairies. At least, that’s how it felt to look down and see this wet little head on my chest, this squirming little body, all while knowing that she was mine. I felt like a superhero at that moment, invincible not because of what I had done to bring her into the world, but because of my power to protect her.

After we went up to the room with Mollie, we started calling the people who are destined to love her most in the world. Those were some of the best calls to make because we got to hear people’s excitement over her existence and the fact that she was a girl-bean.

Julie was the first to meet her. And later that day, she met Stephen, Jason, Cris, Adam, Linda, and Katy. And still later, she met Dan and Steph. And then, much to our surprise, she met her Pop-Pop and her Uncle Andy, who drove from Philly a few hours after they got the phone call so they could meet her on the day she was born. On Sunday she met her Aunt Elissa and her cousin Ike, who suddenly looked so big that I cannot believe that Mollie will be his size in just a short 18 months.

And the next day we got to take her home. As I was being wheeled down the hall at the Brigham, holding her in her carseat on my lap, I was silently talking to her like I used to do when I was pregnant with her. “Some of these people are doctors, some of these people are sick. Some of these people are daughters, some are friends, or parents, or grandparents. Some of these people are poor, some of these people are rich. You are the only you here, and your whole life is ahead of you, waiting to happen.”

By the time we got to the car, I was overwhelmed with the emotion of driving home with our daughter, so that when Matt said, “I can’t believe they’re letting us take her home,” I knew exactly what he meant. We had spent her first two days of life inside that hospital room, and as bizarre and unfamiliar a place as a hospital is, it felt like the place where we were supposed to be with her, making home more surreal. Of course, in the grand scheme of her entire life, those two days are but a blip on the radar screen and home is always home.

In the days since we have been home, we have spent our time learning her and learning ourselves in this new role. There have been more visits and so many thoughtful gifts and emails. We have seen projectile spit-up and pee, and this morning she farted so loudly that she woke herself up. I have struggled with breastfeeding and am working through it, because there is something amazing about holding her so close to my body and actually providing all of the nourishment she needs, much like I did just six days ago, but in a totally new way.

Because she is my daughter, I am privy to certain information about her: I know how much she loves to have her hands close to her face, that she can find her thumb in a time of real need, that she curls her lower-lip under when she breastfeeds, that she has a tiny stork bite on the back of her head, that her eyes are getting pigmentation around the pupil, that she looks almost exactly like her father when she sleeps soundly. I study her face every chance I get. If I could draw, I could draw it from memory for you. I miss her when she sleeps.

One of the most amazing things I have noticed about being her mother is how wonderful it feels to be her mother, to know that no matter what, I will always be her mother. And I find myself thinking, over and over again, “She’s here! She’s here! She’s here!,” a running dialogue in my head, repeating itself regardless of my ability to have a normal conversation. As with sad things, I am always having two conversations – the one I am actually having, and the one I am having internally. The only difference is that my internal conversation is delighted, thrilled, overwhelmed with joy.

These have been some of the best days of my life in every possible way. I am exhausted. I am amazed. I am so incredibly lucky.

Because Every Superhero Has an Origin Story...

2011-03-06T11:03:00.000-05:00

...and this is hers.

Meet our little girl and future caped crimefighter Amalia Ruth. But when she's busy bringing the ne'er-do-wells of Boston to justice, she goes by her alter ego Mollie Danger.

Ok, so maybe her ninja training and spandex body armor are a few years off, but no matter what she's here and ready to take the world by storm.

I Always Thought I'd Be Taller

2011-02-27T17:25:00.002-05:00

At some point or another in one's childhood, I think that it's normal to wish that you were older. I think that's probably the reason that up until we're about 10 or 11, we count our age in halves or even quarters: "I'm four-and-three-quarters" or "I'm nine-and-a-half."

I don't remember a time in my childhood that I wasn't wishing I was older. I think that for me, the yearning had something to do with the fact that my brother was SO much older. He got to do really cool things that I was going to be too young to do for a very long time. I remember being four and wishing I was thirteen (when Andy got Bar Mitzvahed), being seven and wishing I was sixteen (the year Andy got a car), and being eight and wishing I was seventeen (the year Andy went to prom and graduated from high school).

I vividly remember being about two-years-old when my dad promised that he would teach me to fly when I turned ten (I truly believed that he could fly until I was almost eight), that I could get my ears pierced when I turned thirteen (my mom relented at 11), that I could shave my legs when I was twelve (I started shaving them at summer camp long before this), and that they would never ever let me drive (Andy crashed the car he got for his 16th birthday not long after he got it).

But for me, the yearning to be older didn't end. When I was a teenager, I wanted desperately to be in college. I thought that the world would be my oyster, that I would take it all by storm, that if I could simply bypass the years between high school and grown-up, life would be better. I even wished it in my 20s, thinking that my 30s would be so much easier -- financially, emotionally, professionally.

Wishing the years away has never really stopped me from living in the moment. Rather, it has always been a way to remind myself to slow down, to live through what I'm currently experiencing. And it has always served as a reminder that I can and should envision the future, that it might not always be as difficult as whatever I'm currently experiencing.

But there was another component to the whole fantasy of being older (and wiser) than I was. Whenever I pictured the grown-up version of myself, I was always taller. Not much taller, not freakishly tall, but certainly a few inches taller. A more respectable 5'5", say.

The taller-than-I-am image of myself has persisted throughout my adult life. When I imagined myself graduating from college, I stood in my cap and gown and modest heels, standing head-to-head with my friends. When I pictured myself walking down the aisle at my wedding, I was wearing flats, because I naturally came to somewhere around my dad's cheek. When I pictured myself in a courtroom, I comanded quite a presence in my sleek pumps, because the extra three inches they gave me made me a daunting 5'8".

And here I am, about to have a baby. I am quite round these days, so round that I wonder if I am awkwardly round, round like I give the impression that I might topple forward at any moment. I am the kind of round that causes strangers to chuckle at me as I waddle down the stairs. I look like I swallowed a bowling ball and then ate about 12000 calories. Every day for nine months.

I did not expect to be a tall pregnant woman. But even now, two weeks before my due date, I imagine a taller version of myself bending down to retrieve a dropped blankie or pacifier or taking our bundled bean out of our car. As it is, I will be stuck with myself, 5'2" on a tall day, frantically trying to scale our not-so-tall SUV in order to awkwardly haul the carseat out of the car, which is a little bit higher than is convenient for my height.

I think that the taller-than-I-am images in my mind are really about being older, being old enough, rather, to be someone's mom. My own mother was short, just 4'11" in bare feet, so it's not like I associate motherhood with exceptionally tall women. No, it's just that ever since I can remember, being older, being old enough to do SOMETHING, also meant being taller.

Now that there are just two weeks left in the pregnancy, people have started asking me whether or not I'm ready. In case you're interested, this is a terrible question for me. Of course I'm not ready. How can you be ready to be a parent? Isn't that sort of the point of parenting? You're not ready...ever... for anything? I mean, sure, you have blankets and clothes and diapers, but is that the kind of thing that makes you ready? Not by my standards.

Anyway, this is what I want to tell people when they ask: "No, of course I'm not ready. I have to grow three inches in the next two weeks; who can possibly be ready for that?!"

36 weeks

2011-02-10T15:53:00.003-05:00

Dear Bean,

I have only dared to write directly to you a few times during this pregnancy, and even then, it has only been in the privacy of my own journal, never on this website. I talk to you in my head all the time, telling you how amazing you are, how glad I am that you are growing, how exciting it was to hear your heartbeat. I call you "little love," and "sweet one," and "darling bean" in my mind. Writing to you directly has felt different than writing about pregnancy. It has felt like I would be tempting fate, possibly writing a letter that, horrifyingly, you might never get to read. I have been too scared to address you directly.

But I woke up this morning with the overwhelming urge to write to you. I am 36 weeks pregnant today, you are somewhere around 4-5 weeks from making your way in the world. Just like I cannot believe that I made it to 16 weeks, to 20, to 30, I cannot believe that we are here, glancing around the corner at the day when you will actually make your arrival in this world. It is in your hands, little love. We are ready whenever you are ready. Rather, we are ready to be not ready for the way that you will certainly turn our world upside down. We are as ready as we will ever be.

Yesterday the doctor felt your head. While I won't go into the (intimate) details of how she did that, rest assured that it felt just as strange for me as it did for you. You responded exactly the way I would expect someone who has resided completely undisturbed for 36 weeks, and your heartrate skyrocketed to 165, calming down to its usual 145 after a few seconds, in rhythm with my own decreasing heartbeat.

The amazing thing about the experience was the fact that the doctor FELT your little head. Until that moment, I had imagined so many things about you: your feet, your hands, your eventual personality, whether your first word will be "Julie" or "Stephen." But until yesterday, I hadn't pictured your little newborn head. It swam in front of my eyes with sudden clarity -- dark and curly, covered in yuck, soft and mushy and cone-shaped and requiring the utmost care. I wanted to kiss the image in my mind, wanted to reach out my hand to stroke the picture of your beautiful little head. And then I realized that sometime within the next few weeks, I will get to actually kiss you, that I will brush those dark, soft curls with my actual fingers, that I will get to hold your neck and stare at your face and be the person in your life who gives you the utmost care.

So I woke up this morning and wanted to tell you this: I cannot wait to meet you.

With every ounce of love and then some,
Your Almost-Mama

"Ready" on One! Three...two...

2011-02-01T19:01:00.004-05:00

At last week's 34-week appointment, my doctor turned to me and excitedly told me that 34 weeks is when she really feels good about a pregnancy.

Matt and I looked at her quizzically.

"34 weeks," she explained, "is when the risk for all of those horror-story-type pregnancy complications go way way down for the baby. So if you went into labor right now, we wouldn't try to stop you, we would just let your body do what it wants to do and in all likelihood, you would give birth to a perfectly healthy baby."

What good news! A perfectly healthy baby! We've waited so long to get here!

Except that Matt and I came home and promptly freaked the F out.

Of COURSE we want a perfectly healthy baby (who doesn't?). In fact, we're more or less "ready" for the baby (where ready is that place where we bought most of the things we need, or we know who we're borrowing them from, and we're ready for our world to turn upside down). Except that we're "ready" for the baby to make its appearance in six weeks. Or 5 weeks and two days at the time I'm writing this. Not now. Not 5 days ago.

So I now have a hospital bag that's packed with a really random assortment of things (pajamas, maternity clothes, underwear that I don't care about but is very comfortable). And we ordered a carpet for the nursery (greyish blue with a white border). And the baby's room is more or less coming together. You know, minus furniture. Also, my hospital bag doesn't have any clothes for the baby, which is ultimately fine because Julie is in charge of ensuring that the bean doesn't have to go home naked. But there we are: ready.

Ha!

Bean, if you're paying attention, please know that your parents are not yet ready for you to make your appearance in the world. We're thrilled and excited to meet you, but we're a little slow on the uptake over here, failing to completely realize that 34 weeks pregnant doesn't just mean that you've been growing for 34 weeks, but also that you will be here sometime within the next six.

And parents out there who are reading this, please reassure me that this is normal, that realizing you're going to be a parent eventually just dawns on you. Tell me that we're not SO slow on the uptake that this is basically a referendum on our parenting skills even before we've had a chance to implement them. Because if it's a referendum, all of the Weyants (grown and in bean form) are in for some serious growing pains!

On Fatherhood

2011-01-24T10:15:00.003-05:00

The message in my inbox, sent from Amazon.com, said, "A Gift from Daddy." I was skeptical. It isn't like my dad to buy me presents online, and it's even less like him to send me something directly to my inbox. It's just a little too...2011 for his tastes. But there it was. I clicked on the email.

When I opened it up, I saw that he had purchased the mp3 of "Free to Be, You and Me," the record I listened to over and over and over again as a kid, wearing it out and necessitating a new copy. I can still sing most of the words from memory, and they still remind me of hours spent on the brown couch, belting out the hippie tunes along with Marlo Thomas (and Friends). I was touched. My Dad bought the bean a song! So I forwarded the email to Matt and told him that we should download it when we got home from work.

Two minutes later, my cell phone rang. It was Matt.

"Hi Sweets," he said. "I'm calling with some news that I hope won't burst your bubble."

"Okay..."

"The song wasn't from your Dad. It was from me. To the bean."

...

"Sweets? Are you okay?"

"Yes! I'm more than okay, I'm, I'm just, I...YOU'RE the 'Daddy!' You're going to be a Daddy!"

I was crying and laughing at the same time, sitting at my desk with my head in my hands, marveling at a fact that had somehow escaped me despite its obviousness. But it was in that instant, in that one perfect, bright moment, that I realized, from the bottom of my toes to the top of my head, that Matt is going to be a father. And not just anyone's father, he is going to be this little bean's father. This very little bean that has been growing and changing inside of me for 33 weeks, this little bean whose heartbeat we first saw together as a tiny little pulsating lima, who he reads stories about his favorite superheroes to at night, who he wakes up every morning to cuddle, who he kisses goodnight and says, "be good to mama." He is going to be this little bean's father. He, this man I married, this man that I love more than anyone in the world, is going to be the father of this baby, this little creature that on some level, some strange maternal level, I know that I already know.

Here is what I want to tell them, these two great loves of mine: you two are perfect for each other. My sweet boy and my precious bean. You two are going to be so great together, and I already know just how lucky you are to have each other.

***

All of the women in my family have always called their dad, "Daddy." My mother told me this when I was a little girl, and it stuck with me, part history, part admonition. I was pretty young when she told me, and I remember thinking that I couldn't imagine my grandmother calling her father "Daddy." But that's because it was hard to imagine my grandmother even being young enough to have a Daddy, especially when the only image I had of her father was a picture she kept on her bureau of a serious-looking and handsome young Russian man in a uniform. But it was also because in my mind, my own father was what it meant to be a Daddy, the man who made me oatmeal in the morning, took me "flying" in his Z-car, and would occasionally wake me up early on a school day in the winter to tell me that we were skipping school and going skiing instead.

Either way, the rule was written: fathers are Daddies. To this day I still call my dad, "Daddy" when I'm talking to him, typing that word into my gmail contacts when I want to send him an email, scrolling through my phone to find his number listed under that word. He has also abided by the rule, always signing his cards and emails appropriately.

I remember the day when I was too old to hold his hand when we crossed the street. I don't remember which one of us was more sad about it. I remember the day that he taught me to skip. Wildly, recklessly, in front of strangers. People might have laughed at us, but I don't remember them. I only remember feeling like I was flying. I remember learning that my dad could roller-skate backwards, a fact I learned at my 8th birthday party when he took my hand during the "couples skate" and twirled me around the bright yellow rink while all of my friends looked on, their faces showing the same surprise that I felt.

That's what Daddy means to me. There are other lessons associated with my father, times when I slammed the door and called him Dad, times when we were disappointed in each other and couldn't manage to communicate. But when I think of "Daddy," I think about oatmeal and a fast car, falling asleep on the way home from the Poconos. I see the disco ball from the roller rink throwing tiny little lights around the smooth oval while I'm holding tightly to his hand because he's a much stronger skater than I am.

***

"A Gift from Daddy," said the email. There it is, in my inbox. A gift from my husband, from my husband to his child. Somehow that's amazing and strange, and as life-changing as many of the other moments of these 33 weeks.

Even at 24, I had the good sense to realize that you shouldn't marry a man who you couldn't see as the father of your children. Over here at the wise old age of 32, I am realizing that I will soon come to know a side of him that I have never met. But more importantly, our child will know a side of him that I will never know, and will have a relationship with him that I will never have.

Good memories and bad, the things I think about when I think about my dad are mine and mine alone. And someday, this little person will have a similar story to tell. Some of the things I can imagine, because I know Matt. But others, the ones that are truly theirs and theirs alone, will be for them to capture and hold on to, for them to remember and to pass on.

***

It's a few days early for a birthday post, but it seems like the time to say it: on the eve of your 33rd birthday,my love, I can say without a doubt that you are going to have one hell of a year.

Someplace Like Home

2011-01-19T08:23:00.001-05:00

I have been straightening my hair a lot these days. It is something that I do in the winter when it is cold, because it saves me from walking outside with a wet head every morning. But it is also something that I do when I feel like I need some control in my life, when I need a change, however small, that is entirely within my purview.

I used to straighten my hair in college whenever I broke up with a boy. In high school, I would straighten my hair when I had a week that felt particularly low and I needed to be noticed. Since Matt and I got together, these are the memorable times when I have straightened my hair: when I found out that we were leaving Oklahoma to move back to DC, after we got married (almost every week for an entire semester), when I was applying for clerkships, when I finally decided to come to terms with how miserable I was in Pittsburgh, and right now.

Which is to say that my hair has always been the one thing that I knew I could rein in, even when everything else was seemingly off track.

Matt and I have spent the last three days in Hollidaysburg, PA, the place that is more or less Matt’s hometown. To know Matt is to understand that he is a man of many hometowns. But Hollidaysburg is the one place that has been consistent for him, consistent for his family since the 1820’s, if you want to put a number to it. This is the town where Matt learned to drive, went on his first date, really figured out his parents, met his first love, broke no significant rules, came to see the meaning of family, and bought his first car. In short, this is home.

So coming to Hollidaysburg was something that we knew we wanted to do during this pregnancy. It occurred to us sometime early on, sometime before we called his grandmother to tell her that she was going to be a great-grandmother. We decided to come when I was good and huge, big enough that the bump was unmistakable, not so big that I couldn’t fly. And we let Matt’s brother, sister-in-law, and parents know that we were going to be at the homestead, hoping that they would drive from their respective towns to meet us here.

Coming to Hollidaysburg is always a mixed bag for us. On the one hand, we’re spending the weekend with family at home. On the other, we’re spending the weekend with family at home. Family is a challenging concept for both of us, which is part of the reason we have each other, part of the reason we have our urban family in Boston, and the main reason that we understand the complex realities of what it means to be from somewhere. Our lives in Boston feel so different than what life in Hollidaysburg would be like. The food, the sounds, the stars, the feel, the air, the bed, the water, the lights, EVERYTHING is different.

And yet family is family. They take you out and get you to pick out fabric so that they can make a blanket for the niece/nephew they’re so excited about. They ask you to send them a book about your faith so that they can learn a little bit more about it. They goad you into an argument about things that don’t matter. They tell you what life has really been like here while you’ve been living far away in that big city. They love you for who you are, even if they don’t understand you.

My hair has been straight for most of the time that we’ve been here, for most of January, actually. And I’m ready for it to go back to its natural state, to freely curl and frizz however it wants to, to get big and puffy and wild.

Matt held up a brand new onesie, white with tiny green elephants, so small, so cute. “I’m so excited,” he said as he hugged me. “I’m kind of scared,” I said. And he tightened his grip.

The thing about family, the thing about hair, the thing about life, is that we can control little bits of it, but we can only go so far. We live far away, but we feel guilty and genuinely sad about the things we’re missing at home. We look in the mirror and know that we don’t look quite like our real selves.

And every so often, we take giant leaps of faith, because we know that even with an apalling lack of control, we’re going to land somewhere, somewhere a little bit like home, even if at first that place is unbelievably exciting and tremendously scary, all at the same time.

You Take the Good, You Take the Bad

2011-01-11T22:30:00.004-05:00

"Where are her eyes?" she asks. Charlotte is looking up at me with her soft, blond curls framing her truly angelic face.

I point to somewhere low on my belly, somewhere near where I think the bean's face is located these days.

"Here," I say. She reaches out a hand and touches it gingerly, smiling at me, smiling at my belly.

We are in the bathroom at her house, at her parent's house, the house where I spend most of my Sunday nights. She has been potty-trained in the past year and sometimes she wants company in the bathroom, while other times she requires strict privacy: the purview of a three-year-old. I never mind being being invited into the bathroom with her after I've turned on the light or the "air" (vent), because I relish the chance to talk to her one-on-one, even with a toilet between us.

"I'm pooping," she whispers, smiling her I-have-a-secret-smile.

"Good!" I say, "that's a good thing to do when you have to poop."

I am suddenly struck by the fact that Charlotte is 3, that I have known her for her entire three years, that from nearly the moment of her birth, our lives have been connected in some way.

I have been thinking a lot about the stories of our lives, the stories that shape who we are, the facts and the histories that round out what makes us, us. It is something I come back to often, the fact that we all have a story, that there are certain immutable facts that we live through and incorporate into our sense of self.

I first started thinking about it again when I miscarried last year, when I realized that someday, the miscarriage would be a fact of my life, something I folded into the facts of my 30s, the facts associated with starting to expand our family. And lately I have been thinking about it in terms of this little bean, the fact that almost completely independently of me and Matt, this little one will be born in Boston, always a Bostonian, and will say things in college like, "I was born in Boston, my parents were living in a second-floor apartment with their two roommates."

"Does it have ears?," she asks, pulling me back from my thoughts.

"Yes!" I say. "It has ears and eyes and a nose and a mouth and hair."

"Not yellow hair, though," she advises.

"No, probably not yellow hair," I agree.

I am a fact in Charlotte's young life. I realize it at that very moment and it almost moves me to tears. It is an emotional day, and I am 31 weeks pregnant, so there are many things that almost move me to tears. But this day is different. This is the death-day, the day when the facts of my life at 15 came to require that I fold in the fact of my mother's death.

I have written before about how free I felt when it had finally been 15 years since her death, when my mother had been dead for as long as I had known her. I felt some of that freedom this year, but I also knew that it would be different, because every year is different, but because this year I am pregnant.

"After I'm done I get to go downstairs because it's not my bedtime yet," Charlotte assures me.

"But it will be your bedtime soon," I remind her, "and then it will be my bedtime, and mommy and daddy's bedtime, and then the whole world will be asleep."

"And then we'll wake up... and Santa will not have come," she concludes, not unhappily, as though just to remind me that tomorrow is not Christmas.

"That's right, tomorrow when we wake up, Santa will not have come."

She nods.

I look at her and I realize just how lucky I am to know her, how lucky I am to get to be a fact in her life. On impulse, I reach out my hand and cup her beautiful little face, whose features are perfect to me, perfect in every single way. I am so happy right here in this bathroom with Charlotte, her toilet and my belly between us.

In that instant, I think to myself that it's possible, maybe even probable, that my mother didn't dwell on what she was robbed of in her death. Maybe she tried not to think about what she would be missing. Maybe that was just too sad. Maybe she thought instead about all of the moments we did get to spend together, all of the moments and facts of her life that included me, and by extension, all of the facts of my life that included her.

I think about it now, almost constantly, how grateful I will be just to meet this little bean in a few weeks, how lucky I will feel for those first moments, those early facts, and then day by day, bathroom by bathroom, a lifetime.

"Santa will be here in the summer," Charlotte tells me.

"Nope, not in the summer, in the winter. But the baby will be here in the summer. We'll all go to the Cape together and look at seaweed."

"Oh," she says, nodding, incorporating this fact into her life. And then she puts both hands on either side of my belly, gives it a little squeeze, and grins.

I put my hands on top of hers, give the bean and Charlotte a little squeeze, and grin back.

I Thought You Were Smuggling Something Under There!*

2010-12-30T19:36:00.008-05:00

Or, How I Came to be 30 Weeks Pregnant

Last Wednesday afternoon, Matt and I got to see the bean for the first time since our 18-week ultrasound. Same drill as before: we spend a few minutes in overwhelming waiting area, get progressively more nervous while waiting and staring at other mothers-to-be, we walk into the dark ultrasound room and make stupid small talk with the ultrasound tech while I climb up onto table and pull down the elastic "waist" of my maternity pants. I forget that the ultrasound tech is going to squirt jelly on my tummy and I gasp when she does, and then I turn towards the screen because there! right there! is that perfect little heartbeat.

And then I smile and cry a little and relax, finally, because the tech is saying things like, "there are the four chambers of the heart," and "there are the kidneys," and "look at those cute feet."

All of a sudden, time slows down and it's just me and Matt and our bean, suspended in that dark cocoon of a room, like we're all swimming around on that black screen while someone waves a magic wand over us so that we're projected on some other, different screen, and larger than life.

The bean looks and feels like a real little person now. It moves around during the day, making my belly and abdomen twitch. If you were watching me at all times, you would occasionally see me frown as the bean pressed on my bladder or stuck its little fist up and under my ribs, like it's trying to do right now.

We had a chance to find out if we were having a boy bean or a girl bean and debated the option right up until the very moment when the radiologist matter-of-factly asked us if we wanted to know the gender. It is an important detail that the radiologist was matter-of-fact; radiologists seem to never think about the patient attached to the magic wand, and speak only in abrupt, short sentences. "Let's wait," I said at the very last moment, and as the radiologist casually tossed some construction-paper-masquerading-as-tissues in my direction and walked out of the room, Matt smiled at me and said, "fine by me."

So we don't know whether it's a boy bean or a girl bean, only that it's definitely a bean. With a heartbeat, and a spine, and a bladder, and more or less Matt's nose.

I can't believe that there are only 9 weeks left in this pregnancy. It's 9 very important weeks, I know, but the fact that I'm almost 31 weeks pregnant means that I'm 3/4 of the way through the whole thing. Even though I know that time will slow down in these next 9 weeks, much like it sped up during the past 9, there is a part of me that just can't even wrap my head around this final home stretch and is eager for it to slow down. I know I will rue the day that I wrote this, probably sometime around March 16th, when I will read this post and think, "dummy, you tempted karma and basically asked for this to happen!" But right now, I want to freeze the moment, like a picture I could print out from the ultrasound machine, and carry it around with me.

I am 31 weeks pregnant. I am okay. Matt is okay. The bean is head down and ready to go, organs formed, Matt-like nose ready, arms waving and moving so much that it's almost impossible to snap its photograph.

It seems like forever ago that I first found out that I was pregnant. But it was 31 weeks, just over 6 months ago, and yet almost an entire lifetime. And then in 9 (probably 10) weeks from now, the bean will be more than ready, it will be HERE. I cannot put into words how amazing this feels for me, how far it feels like I've come. So I will say this instead: my arms get tingly when I think about holding it, my chest feels tight when I think about kissing its little head, and I am excited and nervous and scared and thrilled that life is actually about to become larger than life.

*The title of this post refers to something our hostess said when she seated us at a table last night. As I was taking off my coat to sit down, she said, "I thought you were smuggling something under there! Congratulations!" And it made me laugh out loud. Smuggling, indeed.

Twenty Years in the Making

2010-12-18T15:05:00.008-05:00

I was sitting in my oncologist's office last Friday, waiting for her to come in and give me my routine exam, when it occurred to me that my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer 20 years ago. The fact stunned me, and I sat there on the exam room table, looking out at the tops of the buildings I could see from the 4th-floor room, marveling at the fact of those 20 years.

My doctor pronounced my breasts, "perfect" and my belly "so cute," and scheduled me for another routine appointment in six months. "Bring the baby!," she called as I was finalizing the details of the appointment. And I smiled at her, because it's nice that she wants to meet the baby, nice that she would be interested in knowing what the bump turns out to be.

Twenty years ago, my mother's initial instinct was to keep me shielded from her cancer. I knew about it, but in a very peripheral way. I clearly remember that she wrote a letter my teachers explaining what was going on at home, and I will never forget the look on Mr. Deluca's face when he read that letter. I remember going to the wig store to pick out a wig that matched her tight brown curls, and I remember that was terrified that the wig would fly off when she was lifted up on a chair at my Bat Mitzvah. But I remember these things in a way that is fuzzy and distant, and not just because it was 20 years ago. You see, she wanted me to be able to erase these memories, to move on with my life as though they didn't have to be part of it. She wanted to try to shield me. I know this for two reasons: one, there are other memories from the same time in my life which my mother crystallized for me, carved into stone and handed back to me wrapped in a bow. And two, with just three months until I become a mother, it occurs to me that this is part of what it means to be a parent, that you pick and choose those things from which you incorporate or shield your children, to the best of your ability, anyway.

When I was a month shy of my 24th birthday, just barely on the cusp of my first year of law school, I found a lump in my right breast. The fear I felt that day is indescribable. In fact, when I think about the way that I felt the night I first discovered that something hard and foreign was residing inside my body, I associate it with the color white, which only makes sense if you know that I often associated strong emotions with colors. White is fear or panic, and when I think about having cancer, I feel the color white with every fiber of my being.

The biopsy showed that the lump was nothing to be overly concerned about, but its discovery opened up a whole pandora's box of white. To mitigate this, I was told to get regular check-ups by a breast specialist, something I have more or less avoided, despite two additional breast lump scares, until we moved to Boston. It was here that I decided to take control of my fear, that I determined to overcome the waves of white, and talk to an oncologist who would finally assess my cancer risk.

It is no secret that my single greatest fear is having a child that I do not get to know, of raising this baby until she is 15 or he is 24 and then vanishing from the world. Yes, I have certainly heard that one could get hit by a bus at any moment, but this statement has never worked to calm me and instead reminds me that I should be smart enough to look both ways before crossing the goddamn street. No, for me, the white hot fear is cancer, not rogue buses.

While I was sitting in my oncologist's office on Friday, I realized that try as she might, my mother wasn't successful in shielding me from anything. That's partly because genetics betrayed her and I'm considered high risk for breast cancer, but it's also because in some respects, by working to shield me from the cancer mess, she made me more curious and more afraid. I have spent 20 years worrying that I will get cancer and leave young children behind when I die. I am about to have a young child. In the past 20 years, despite all of the races and the pink ribbons, despite the advances in chemotherapy and hormone treatments and radiation, despite my own measures to overcome my fears, very little has changed.

I don't know whether this baby will worry about breast cancer the way that I do. I don't know if it will understand our family history, or have a girlfriend/wife/mother-in-law who is going through her own scare. I don't know if this baby will remain unshielded from my fears, or if it will live them and devour them as though they are their own. I can only say that I hope that the next 20 years bring some kind of change. I hope that in 2031, when I realize that it has been 40 years since my mother was first diagnosed with breast cancer, I am not sitting in my oncologist's office breathlessly waiting for her to tell me that my breasts look perfect. I hope that this son or daughter knows no real cancer fear, never picks out a wig, or watches their science teacher cry, or harbors all of the memories associated with watching cancer take someone they love.

I realized the other day, sitting on that crinkly white paper in my cotton gown, that I can't really shield this little one from, well, anything. And that is what is making motherhood real for me right now. Twenty years ago, my mother sat in a similar room, wearing a similar gown, waiting for her doctor, hoping that she would hear that her breasts looked perfect. And I imagine her sitting there, thinking of her babies, hoping against hope that she would be able to shield them from whatever lay ahead.

If all goes well, in six months, I will have a 3-month-old at home. I will shave my armpits, put on the cleanest clothes I can find, and go to my routine oncology exam. I will not bring the baby with me, and I will perch on the crinkly white paper in my cotton gown and I will think about the fact that I am nearing the end of my maternity leave. And then I will wait breathlessly for my doctor to tell me that things are fine, that my MRI looked great and that I should come back in another six months. I can only imagine that no matter what I hear, I will go home after that appointment and think, "thank god for you, little one."

Eye of the Storm

2010-12-13T23:32:00.004-05:00

The last time I sat down to write something, I was 24 weeks pregnant. Four weeks have passed since then, and for the first time since I found out that I was pregnant, time went quickly. I feel like it was just yesterday that I last heard the bean's heartbeat, last peed in a cup for the nice people at Harvard Vanguard, last skipped out of work on my way to my appointment.

I can't quite figure out why time sped up this past month, and I can only conclude that the closer I get to actually having the baby, the more there is to do, and the less time I can spend fuh-reaking the F out.

A year ago this Wednesday, I was in a conference room in Boston, about to start a day-long conference that I was more or less dreading. But I got a text message that morning from Julie saying this about J and Cris: "It's a boy! A nine pound one!" And I spent the rest of the conference nearly jumping out of my seat, I was so eager to meet Oliver Paul. I showed everyone at the conference his picture, grainy and small on my phone, but nonetheless so fantastic that it was all I could do not to reach into the phone and kiss his enormous cheeks.

I remember walking through the hospital that night, bouncing on my feet and nearly speeding through the halls, Matt close on my heels. I remember whispering into Ollie's shmooshy little face, finally kissing his sweet chubby cheeks. I remember going to eat Chinese food after we left the hospital, ordering a plate of spicy pork buns in honor of the spicy pork bun that had come into the world that day.

The crazy thing is, I remember it like it was yesterday. I literally can't believe that a year has passed since Oliver was born. Today, Oliver walks, eats cheese, says "dada," and sticks his tongue out while concentrating. A year ago, he was just a spicy pork bun.

A year ago, I was living in Davis Square, I'd never met Stephen or Linda, and I was a few weeks into a pregnancy that wouldn't last. Matt had only just started his current job, Ike wasn't even sitting up yet.

And yet here we are. 12 months, 52 weeks, 365 days later. I both can't and can believe everything that's happened this year, just like I can't and can believe that I'm 28 weeks pregnant, counting down the weeks until I become somebody's mother.

I think that the last four weeks have moved at lightening speed because some months have to do that. Some months have to leave you surprised at all that's happened, bracing yourself for what's ahead. Some months move like molasses, forcing you to examine your life from every possible angle, wonder whether or not you're comfortable with what you're living, whether it really suits you.

And no matter what, there are some days in every month where you're granted the gift of freedom from your thoughts, the rare moment where you can look at a little boy who was once just a spicy pork bun and think, I am so glad I get to know you.

Happy (early) birthday, Ollie-bear. Thanks for slowing me down.

Wow.Wow.Wow.Wow.Wow.

2010-11-18T18:26:00.003-05:00

The title of this post roughly translates to the sound of the bean's heartbeat. Whisper it to yourself quickly, with short "o" sounds, at roughly the rate of 140 beats per minute. And that's the magical sound our little bean's heart makes as it flips around on the inside.

It is the best sound I have ever heard. Really. Ever.

I am 24 weeks today, and feel like a pretty good cliche. I have energy but I sleep well. I can eat a full meal and feel satisfied. Walking up a flight of steps is annoying but not totally exhausting. I crave chocolate but I also crave broccoli. I am hormonal but not totally off the deep end. I feel grateful that the bean is still warm and safe, and I don't yet feel annoyed with it for taking up so much space under my ribcage. And so far, I only get up to pee at most twice a night.

Despite all of this, despite the total unremarkable facts of this pregnancy, despite the fact that I have felt more or less okay since I passed the 16-week mark, the other day I had one of those horrible anxiety-ridden days where I just couldn't calm myself down.

The Anxiety Day came just after a very full weekend and a very long preceding week. Matt's return from Amman was fantastic. I felt like I'd never been so happy to have him home from somewhere. He came home on a Wednesday, the same Wednesday that I had my first ever work-related high-profile speaking engagement. That Thursday was my birthday, but it was also the beginning of a 3-day conference where I was supposed to remain intellectually engaged in the topics at hand while schmoozing with other lawyers. At the end of those three days, I went to work on a Saturday, and capped everything off with a birthday dinner, followed on Sunday by a football gathering at our place where I made too much food and worried that the invited guests wouldn't feel comfortable in our apartment.

I woke up on Monday feeling like I'd been run over by a truck. Which in my current state, translated to waking up and realizing the following impossibilities:

There is no way I am going to be able to cram 7 months of work into the 4 months that I have left before I go on maternity leave. And even though I probably need to take it easy on myself, I can't slow down because I haven't yet talked to my boss about my post-maternity-leave plans, and I don't want to her to think that I'm a slacker.
There is no way that Matt and I are going to be able to afford to pay for daycare and this apartment at the same time. Which is a problem because I want to think about decorating the baby's room, even just a little bit, even though it makes me feel superstitious, because it also makes me excited. Except that I can't think about decorating the baby's room if I don't know whether we're staying in this apartment, which I can't figure out until I know how much it will cost to send the kiddo to daycare, which I can't know until I figure out whether we're staying in this apartment.
There is no way to balance all of the changes that Matt and I are going to face in our relationship with the changes that we're going to confront when the baby is born; it is impossible to prepare for such things, so we are likely doomed.

This culminated in the obvious: a total meltdown at Park Street Station while waiting for my train to arrive.

Matt rescued me from Kenmore and stayed silent while I ranted for the car ride home. He was silent for two reasons. For starters, I was yelling. But also because when I finally took a breath between high-decibel tear-infused frustration, he looked at me and said, "I'm so glad you're finally ready to talk about this stuff."

What?

It turns out that Matt, like most dads-to-be (at least according to this valuable tome), think about all of these nitty-gritty details from the moment they find out that they're going to be someone's father. Moms-to-be, on the other hand, initially think about things like their changing bodies, and labor, and nurseries, and whether it's really okay to have sex in your pre-pregnancy favorite position. But eventually, all of us parents-to-be come to the same conclusion: having a baby is a giant mind fuck, and there's a lot that's going to change, a plethora of unanswered questions, and completely uncharted territory.

So my questions about where I'm going to live are other parents' questions about how to work out their call schedule. My concerns about getting all of my work done before maternity leave are other parents' nanny versus daycare conundrum. In typical Matt-Lizzi fashion, while I was spending my time marveling at the size of my breasts, Matt was patiently waiting for the day when I was ready to talk about things like our budget, our apartment, and our childcare options.

We had a long talk that night. It involved spreadsheets. We made a list of the things we need to do. We made some decisions. We made some decisions about not deciding. We reached out to some people who might have answers. We fell asleep on the couch totally exhausted. Matt read Superman to my belly.

I woke up the next day with the start of what turned out to be a 24-hour (plus) stomach virus, which I took to be my body's way of telling me to slow the F down, for REAL this time. And today I finally feel like myself again: 24 weeks pregnant, just as many unanswered questions as answered ones, and wow.wow.wow.wow.wow.wow.wow beating a steady pace inside me.

Never on a Friday

2010-11-16T17:44:00.002-05:00

The bus is packed. Bodies are pressed against bodies, windows fogged from the humidity of the rain outside coupled with the warmth of the people inside. Despite the fact that most people look showered and ready to work downtown, the bus smells like an old, wet dog. You spot the odor-culprit muttering to himself and rocking back and forth. Sighing, you heave your computer bag onto your shoulder and collect the various other bags containing your lunch, conference materials, and the cookies you're bringing in for a co-worker's birthday. You manage to grab onto a pole as the bus lurches to a start, and two of your bags swing dangerously close to the women sitting in front of you. She looks up, annoyed by the near-death encounter with your baked goods. You smile an apology, she takes in the fact of your bags, your exhaustion, and your swollen belly, and she returns comfortably to the book she was reading for the remainder of the ride.

"You're clearly and obviously pregnant now!," chirps the cheerful words from the baby website you read once a week to find out how big the baby is (the size of a Harry Potter book!). "People will smile at you on the street, give your belly unwanted pats, and stand up to give you their seat on the bus."

Except that there's a limit to even the nicest commuter's willingness to give up their seat, and I have found that it is correlated to two things: weather and day of the week. If it's raining on a Friday and you are so huge that you look like you're going to go into labor any second, be prepared to hold onto a pole while balancing 14 packages for an entire train ride, all while trying desperately not to wet your pants.

Sunny Mondays are the best. Filled with the good will of a weekend, event BU Frat boys will offer you their seat on the bus. Wednesdays and Thursdays are tricky. Women are more likely to give up their mid-week seat, more likely to stand up during the evening rather than morning commute, and are most likely to offer their seat if they are somewhere between the ages of 25 and 45. Younger women remain engrossed in their cell phones, and even when they look up, they will probably scowl the gross-ness of your condition, and then promptly return to their text message. Pregnant women are the most likely to give up their seat for other, more pregnant women, something that gives us a chance to smile at each other in a "don't other people suck?" kind of way. Most of the time, men aren't interested in giving up their seat. Chivalry is probably dead and apparently labor isn't hard enough. I'm pretty sure they're not remaining seated because they think that no good feminist would want them to stand, but I could be wrong. This is Boston, after all.

As a daily commuter, I vow to teach our children how to give up their seat for the elderly, the disabled, the exhausted-looking, the woman with a stroller, and the pregnant. I vow to teach my someday son to be chivalrous, to look up from his ipod (or whatever device) when people get on the train. I have every intention of becoming the woman who asks for a seat during my 10th month of pregnancy when it's snowing outside. But the next time it's raining on a Friday, I will probably drive.

What 6000 Miles Can Mean

2010-11-09T08:52:00.002-05:00

For the past 10 days, Matt has been in Amman, Jordan. The trip is mostly business and partly pleasure, and it marks the longest amount of time that we’ve spent apart since I got pregnant. I spent a few days in Denver around the 16th week of my pregnancy, but there’s something inherently different about Denver and Amman. I think it’s probably the 6,903 miles that separate the two cities, but I could be wrong about that.

Matt was a mess before he left. I couldn’t figure out how to help him, how to calm him down, how to make him see that this trip would be an incredible experience, an opportunity that he simply couldn’t pass up, and one that truly couldn’t have come at a better time in my pregnancy (namely, before the baby was born). The night before he left he tossed and turned, anxiety crippling his features in a way that I have never seen in the 11 years we’ve been together. It was almost too much to bear, and I complained to Julie that I wish he’d just LEAVE already, because it was too hard to not understand what he was going through and not have any power to help him.

But I was talking to an old and dear friend about it over the weekend, and she was so insightful. “Being there for you is pretty much the only thing that Matt can DO at this point,” she said. “When he’s not there, then it’s almost like he’s not part of it, because he’s not growing that little person, not feeling the aches and pains, not going through the changes that you’re actually going through.” And all of a sudden Matt’s anxiety made sense. The one thing that he can do to usher us safely through this pregnancy is to help usher me safely through this pregnancy. It’s awfully hard to usher when you’re 6,000 miles away.

But the strangest thing about Matt being gone is that it’s forced me to spend some time alone with my own thoughts about pregnancy and motherhood. A few weeks ago, this would have been a very bad thing. I would have thought about all of the ways that I was already a terrible mother, because I was likely doing something terribly wrong to hurt our little bean. But now, a few good appointments under my belt, regular movement in my tummy, and the occasional visible-from-the-outside kick near my belly button, the thoughts aren’t all anxiety-laden. Even as I sit here licking the remnants of a Milky Way from my fingertips, I know that I’m not (yet) a bad mother.

But what I realized the other night was just as shocking to me as if the bean had screamed “I hate you!” from inside my uterus. I realized that I was okay. Rather, I realized that even with Matt not there, I was doing alright, and that the bean and I are a new lumpy little unit.

I can’t explain why this realization was so jarring to me, except to say that I will look back on it as the first time that I realized that I am actually going to be somebody’s mother. The mother to somebody who will need me for most moments of their first few months, somebody who will expect me to calm their fears, exalt their accomplishments, and be present for the little and big moments of their life. Someone who will have every right to expect my unconditional love, and who will someday shout at me for smothering them. It was both a terrible and an amazing realization, because it made me feel wonderful to feel so needed at the exact same time that it made me feel terrible for needing Matt a little less.

I haven’t shared any of this with Matt yet, so when he reads this post he’ll probably feel sad. It flies in the face of what it is that he probably feels like he can do to make this pregnancy easier for me. If I don’t feel like I need him when he’s gone, then what can he give me while he’s here?

The truth of the matter is that by leaving for Jordan, he gave me something he couldn’t have given me if he stayed. He gave me confidence. He reminded me that I’m strong enough to weather a long-distance relationship, that missing someone (for a little while) can be a good thing, that I can be the type of partner who recognizes a great opportunity for her husband when she sees one. But more than that, by leaving, he made me realize that I will be the kind of mother I want to be, the kind that fails (by her own standards) many many times, but succeeds many times too. I already know exactly what kind of father Matt is going to be, because he will be the man that I married, the man who loves me and our someday-bean unconditionally and feels anxious at the thought of not being able to be there for us. I am starting to realize that together, we’re going to make a pretty good team.

Matt will be home in 2 more days, just in time to celebrate my 32nd birthday. I can't wait for him to come home, can't wait to hug him and kiss him and see his face as he marvels at how much my belly has grown in the 12 days he was gone. I have no intention of being apart from him for the rest of this pregnancy; I AM better off when he's around. But in the interest of donning a pair of rose-colored glasses, of looking on the bright side (finally), I think that this trip was a good thing for all of us, for me, and even for our growing little bean.

Over Halfway There

2010-10-28T18:00:00.000-04:00

I am 21 weeks pregnant today. As I write this, I can feel the bean doing a somersault. Maybe he’s excited and wants to come out in 18 weeks! Maybe she likes her cozy home and wants to stay there for another 20. Either way, the calendars tell me that I’m over halfway there.

“Happy halfway there!” read Elissa’s email from last Thursday. And I read it and thought, “oh my god.”

That night on the way home I turned to Matt with a panicked look in my eyes. “What?!,” he asked, “what is it?” I put my hand on his arm to steady myself. “Matt,” I said, “it has to come OUT.” He laughed. He can do that, you see, because he doesn’t have a vagina.

But in reality, I’m not scared about labor. I’m too naive to know what to be afraid of. I have conveniently skipped the “Labor and Delivery” chapter in my books. My “birth plan” is to be admitted to the hospital while pregnant and to be discharged from the hospital holding a baby. What happens in between admission and discharge is up to me, Matt, the bean, and my doctor, not in that order.

What I am scared about is actually being someone’s mother, and doing so sooner rather than later. It has to come OUT, as in, it has to come into the world, it has to exist in our apartment, it has to ride safely in our car. It has to be clothed and fed. It has to have toys and books, blankets and black-out curtains. But more than the things that it has to have, more than the mountains of necessary and not-so-necessary baby stuff that is certain to accumulate in our apartment overnight, the bean has to exist in the world as a baby. The bean has to become a person in the world.

And what a scary world it is.

I’m not talking about the world of wars and climate change and Republicans (though lord knows that I could). I’m talking about my world, the world where Matt and I are pretty young and have no idea how to be parents. I’m talking about the world where my genetically-related family lives miles and miles away. I’m talking about the world where daycare is expensive and people ask me questions about how much I care about infant CPR. I’m talking about the world where we still get wrapped around the axle (every day!) about work and bosses and dry cleaning.

Everyone says that our world will shift. These soothsayers explain it all calmly, with a wave of their hand. Sometimes the shift will seem gradual, they say, and you’ll wake up sometime in June and realize that the lens through which you view the universe is different than the lens you were using in December. Dry cleaning and bosses will seem silly in comparison. And sometimes the shift will be immediate, they warn, and the day after the baby is born you will find yourselves un-self-consciously referring to your breasts as the “moo-makers.”

To say that I’m excited about it doesn’t really explain what I’m feeling. Excited is how you feel about your birthday, or a vacation. Excitement for me always implies a known component; I generally know what I am excited about. This time, while I am excited to see our little bean live and in-person, I am also apprehensive. I am uncertain, confused, nervous, tentative. I am guarding the world that we currently live in, struggling to balance day-to-day life with the ways that day-to-day life is already 100% different, all while totally unable to comprehend how it will change even more than it has since that day in July when I found out that I was pregnant.

You see, the bean has to come OUT. I will have moo-makers and new lenses in a matter of weeks. WEEKS! That’s what it means to be over halfway there, there where the world is different, where the ground has shifted, where the population of the world (our world) has increased so fundamentally, so dramatically, that it’s like we’re making space for a bean farm, not a bean.

So in the next 18, 19, 20 weeks, I have things to do. I have to store up on fertilizer and dirt, rakes and tractors. I have to get ready for the bean invasion, the bean explosion, the magnificent mountain of bean. In plain English this means that I have things to buy, pictures to finally frame, dinner dates to squeeze in. But more than that it means that I have to do exactly what I’m already doing. I have to stand at the precipice of my existing world and peer over the edge, holding Matt’s hand and wondering what’s out there. And then, when the time is right, the bean will help us all jump, the first of many things it will do to take us to a new and different world.

A Universe Unto Itself

2010-10-20T17:45:00.000-04:00

I remember exactly where I was sitting the day that J called to tell me that Charlotte was born. I was at our kitchen table in our small apartment in Pittsburgh. I had spent the day planning for our trip, trying to nail down our precise route and figure out how we could fit all of the places that we wanted to see into just 100+ days (we couldn't). I wasn't working at the law firm anymore, so I spent my days at that kitchen table, listening to music and feeling happily unemployed for the first time in a long time.

When my phone rang, it startled me because I'd been by myself all day. But when I saw that it was Jason, my heart stopped for a split second, because I knew what he was going to tell me.

"It's a giiiirrrrrl," he said. "Her name is Charlotte and mom and baby are doing great." He went through the play-by-play of Cris's labor, and Charlotte's height, weight, and baby statistics. I know that my memory is accurate, because I wrote down everything that he said on a recipe card that I keep in the front of my recipe box, along with all of the songs that Matt and I heard in the bar that night when we went out to get a beer and celebrate Charlotte's existence.

Charlotte was the first baby that really changed my world. It's a hard thing to put into words, but the short version is that after Charlotte was born, I thought about her and before she was born, I didn't.

I thought about what she was doing, how she was growing, how her parents were adjusting, what she would be like in 3, 5, 15, or 20 years. Before Charlotte was born, there was no space for her in my head because she simply didn't exist. And then after she was born, either I found some untapped space, or I shoved over some other thoughts that weren't relevant in order to make room for her. Either way, she was in my head.

Since Charlotte, other babies have made their way into my brain space, eliciting boundless affection and a world of enrichment. My beautiful and perfect nephew, our dear friends' son who lives in Philadelphia with all of that delicious curly hair, Charlotte's adorable brother, my high school best friend's smiley sweet boy. These babies, (especially the nephew who makes my heart hurt, I miss him so much) are the opposite of how life often works. In my world, things are here today, gone tomorrow. But these children weren't here yesterday and today make up an entire universe.

It was something that I didn't totally understand before Charlotte was born, that a baby can take up an entire galaxy, that even when your life is complete, when you want and are ready for a child, it can make your life more complete somehow. Even when you are so happy about the path you have chosen, a baby can take you down a path you didn't even know existed.

The funny thing is that I know that I don't even totally understand this now, because I've watched other people go through it, rather than been inside of it myself. But as with many things on which I stand on the outside looking in, I have a sense of how much bigger my world will be after the bean is more than a bean.

It is a funny thing to credit a three-year-old with opening your eyes to a world that's a different place, but so it goes. Someday I'll explain this to her and I bet she'll do that thing where she crinkles up her eyes and nose just like her dad while smiling just like her mom. She will probably think I'm just being sentimental, OLD even. And that's fine. She will be well on her way to seeing new worlds of her own.

Happy birthday, Little C. I hope you help to water this baby for the rest of your lives together.

Lonely But Not Alone

2010-10-13T17:30:00.002-04:00

This is not the first time I have experienced something huge without my mother. For some reason, I just didn’t think it would be this hard. I would like to say that I just didn’t think about it, but that isn’t true. I thought about it a lot, but I truly believed that I would weather it differently.

These are the times I have missed her: when I look at bassinets online, when I think about where I will store the furniture we need to buy, when my dearest friends offer me hand-me-downs, when my brother says he wants to buy me something, when I have to buy maternity clothes, when my boobs are suddenly the size of grapefruits.

I am standing there, bra in hand, marveling at the fact that my breasts have morphed into something I don’t recognize, and suddenly I am weeping in the dressing room.

I am going through the book about baby bargains at the kitchen table, thinking to myself that the selection of bassinets are basically the ugliest things I have ever seen and then I realize that I am feeling bereft that there won’t be one waiting at my mother’s house ready to come to Boston when she gets the news about the bean.

I am trudging through department stores with Matt, irritated that most maternity clothes make me look like a pregnant orka, and I am furious that she isn’t there with me, that she can’t just go online and surprise me with some clothes that at least make me look like an animal that is cute while pregnant.

I am 14 again, buying bras without her. I am 17 again, trying to decide on a college. I am 24 again, picking out bridesmaid dresses with Matt. Except that I am 31, I am pregnant with my first child, and this, finally, I cannot do alone and without her.

“You’re NOT alone,” Julie says. And I know what she means. I have her, I have Andy and Elissa and my dad and Matt’s brother, wife, and parents. I have the people around whom I have chosen to expand our family, raise our child, here in Boston. I have Matt, Matt who has gone through these lonely-for-my-mom times with me as an adult and trooped alongside me through a surgical breast biopsy, to pick out bridesmaid dresses, to buy maternity clothes.

But I AM alone. I am alone because I have an abundance of love and support and I still feel lonely for my mom. I am alone because I wish
that it was different.

I hate that last paragraph. I hate that I sound so ungrateful, that I am taking all of this support for granted. I am not ungrateful, I don’t take it for granted. When I think about these people, when I think about how lucky I am, how lucky this baby is because it is already so loved, I feel like I am overflowing with good fortune. But I am overflowing with good fortune and my mom is still dead.

This is how it ends: I do get through this and I am not alone. I pick out a bassinet and a crib and a changing table, I ask if I can store it in a friend’s basement, and I hope he understands what this means to me; I tick through the list of offered hand-me-downs and I truly think, “thank god Cris saved all of this stuff!”; I avoid my brother’s request to buy me something; I buy maternity clothes that don’t make me look like an orka; I find bras that fit.

And if all goes well, in 21 weeks we bring home a live and squirming bean who is so loved that it brings some people to tears to hold him for the first time, who has her grandmother’s cheeks or her uncle’s mouth. I bring home a baby that my mother will never meet, but who I believe she will know somehow, through and through. I become the mother that my mother will never meet. And sometimes I will miss her like I miss her right now, through and through.

Our World: Getting Bigger by the Day

2010-10-06T09:55:00.009-04:00

Some of you might already know that I have been secretly blogging for a few weeks now, an activity that coincided roughly with seeing two pink lines on a "First Response" pregnancy test.

I have decided to go public with the posts, and as I'm writing this, I don't remember why I kept them secret in the first place, or why I have now decided that they shouldn't be a secret anymore. Either way, I am ready to share them with you, the two or three people in the world who are interested in reading what I have to say.

A few words of warning about these posts:

They are almost entirely about how I feel about being pregnant. There are no interesting pictures of far off lands, or stories about men touching Matt's butt in tight spaces.
They have a theme that goes something like this: I am thrilled and I am terrified in equal parts; life is crazy these days; everything makes me laugh and cry; the end. They are awfully repetitive.
I am 100% aware of the fact that I am lucky to be leading this life, but I also feel that since I am the only one I know who is living my life, I have the freedom to complain about it, cry about it, laugh about it, and talk about it.

With all of those warnings in place, please know this: if none of those things sound like something you want to read, by all means, stop reading! But if you decide to proceed, do not blame me if I sometimes make you want to throw up, shout "grow up already!" at your computer screen, or cry. You have been warned.

So with all of those caveats out of the way, welcome back! I can't promise it will be as exciting as watching a pizza hut dance party in Agra, or as crazy as taking a cooking class in Thailand, but I know for certain that we are in for the adventure of a lifetime.

You're Only What You Give Back

2010-10-04T09:47:00.001-04:00

Written October 4, 2010

Nearly nine weeks ago, something really huge happened to me. Matt, Julie, and I were frantically preparing to host our house-warming party. None of us had showered, all of us were frazzled. I was cooking and cooking and cooking. Julie was as to be expected, cleaning the house from top to bottom. And Matt was running around doing errands, taking care of things we were sure we’d forgotten to take care of, and generally trying to stay out of our way.

There came a point in the day when Julie had finished the playlist and had gone out to get one last thing, Matt was doing a final beer run, and I had cooked everything I could and was taking a moment to savor the calm before the storm. I turned to Julie’s computer, which had been slowly working its way through the night’s playlist, and picked out a couple of songs to listen to. I danced around to a few and eventually landed on Imogen Heap, who was a new addition to my list of great artists. I had been playing her song, “Earth” on repeat for weeks. I can’t tell you why it spoke to me, only that it did.

That day, I lay down on the freshly-vacuumed living room carpet and listened to the song over and over again. I thought about the fact that I was living in this great apartment with two of the people I love most in the world. I thought about the fact that my best friend was happily dating someone I suspected might be around forever. I thought about the fact that our friends were coming over to celebrate our new place. I thought about how lucky I was to have this moment, and more importantly, to realize how lucky I was. I thought about the fact that I was pregnant. And then I burst into tears.

That was how Julie found me, lying on the floor of our living room, staring up at the ceiling fan, blasting Imogen Heap, crying huge and happy tears and gasping for breath. Only she didn’t know that they were happy tears and she knelt above me, touching my shoulders, my face, looking as worried as she sounded that day in January when I told her about the miscarriage, asking me what was wrong.

“Nothing,” I told her. “I’m just, I’m going to have a baby. Julie, I’m going to have a baby and I’m going to be someone’s mom.”

“I know!,” she said, her relief so obvious I felt like I could touch it, and she settled herself down on the floor next to me, shoulder-to-shoulder, and stared up at the ceiling fan as we listened to Imogen Heap and I laughed and cried and calmed down.

It was an amazing day, the day that I knew that this baby’s heart was beating inside of me, the day that I knew that I was right about Julie and that new boy, the day that I realized just how much my little world was changing, and how beautifully.

You’re going to lose it all and find yourself on your knees
So get a grip and you might flow, reverse the great slow bleed.
I’ve tried patience but you always want a war.
This house won’t tolerate anymore.

…

You’re only what you give back.
You’re only what you give back.
You’re only what you give back.

Today we had our 18 week ultrasound and saw kicking feet and waving arms and kidneys and leg bones. I stared at that screen and thought, “I love you I love you I love you” with every single inch of my body, crying and laughing and holding tightly to Matt’s hand.

I can’t totally explain why the two moments are connected in my mind, the sun-drenched day in July with Imogen and the happy tears, and today’s low-lit room flooded with pictures of our baked-potato sized baby. I think that it has something to do with realizing change, with being in a place where change feels amazing and right, despite the difficult things that come with it.

When I got up from the carpet that day in July, I turned towards the kitchen to put the finishing touches on something that we probably never got around to eating, and there were tears drying in the corner of my eyes. I remember smiling at Julie, who smiled back at me as she picked a final piece of lint off the carpet. When I hopped off the table today, I literally burrowed into Matt, holding onto him and saying what I always say after these appointments, “did you see the bone? Did you see the kidneys?” just so that I can hear him say, “did you see the ribcage? And the brain?” There were tears drying in the corner of my eyes and I smiled at him. He grinned back at me.

Yes, you’re only what you give back. And change can actually be everything you wanted and then some.

16 weeks

2010-09-23T09:42:00.003-04:00

Written on September 23, 2010

I feel like I have to write something today because I want to capitalize on the sky-high happiness I'm feeling.

Today was my 16-week appointment and it seems like things are going well. For me and for the bean. I gained 4 pounds this month, meaning that I have gained 11 pounds so far. Which is bizarre and amusing at the exact same time. The bean has a perfect little heartbeat of 149,and it was rolling around in there so the heartbeat was pierced with occasionally little squeaks and squawks as it bumped around in its watery home.

Hooray!

The days leading up to these appointments are agonizing for me. I don't sleep, I eat white food and candy, and I generally feel nervous and worried. Every thing that is happening to me is evidence that something is wrong. I know that I'm not alone because Dr. Internet has helpfully directed me to thousands of crazy pregnant women just like me, who are experiencing the same near death symptoms as I am.
Oddly enough, these crazy sisters out there on the interwebs are comforting to me, and I am more grateful for their insanity, their complete inability to spell, and their extraneous use of exclamation points than I would have willingly admitted before I got pregnant.

An example of such words of comfort:

Ur baby sounds perrrrfect. I had so much hartburn I burped all the time and my hubby videotaped it. lol. congrats on your LO!!!!!!

(Where "LO" equals "little one." Yes, really.)

See, compared to other pregnant weirdos, I'm actually fairly normal.

I have been thinking a lot about the fact that just a few weeks ago, I was smack in the middle of my first trimester, more scared even than I am right now, more nauseated than I am right now, and so much more exhausted. It sort of feels like I dreamed it, because even though I know that it happened, I can hardly remember it happening to me.

My brother, his wife, and their amazingly wonderful son were in town last weekend and I was marveling at the fact that nephew has actually been a living, breathing person for a year already. I remember the night he was born like it was yesterday. I remember looking at him for the first time, totally breathless at the fact that this little pink person was my brother's son, and that I was lucky enough to be his aunt. I think about him all the time, probably at least once a day. I wonder what he found newly amusing that day, what made him have that beautiful belly laugh, what he learned about in his fast-moving little brain, what he incorporated into his world, what word he has come up with for milk or dog or truck.

When Andy saw me last weekend, he took one look at my little bump and said, "oh, Lizzi!" with that excitement that I'd been waiting weeks to hear. We spent so much time over the weekend talking about babies and pregnancy that by the time Sunday rolled around I was equal parts thrilled at the reality of this pregnancy, and overwhelmed by the fact that it would happen.

Andy kept talking about how he barely remembers Ike's infancy, about how he looks at him now and thinks about him exactly as he is in this very moment. I think that's probably the brain's way of coping with everything you have to cope with as a parent. Your child is exactly as they are, and they need you to be exactly what you are for them at that time in their lives. So I have decided that pregnancy is the same way. I don't remember the nausea because I don't need to remember the nausea. I only vaguely recall the exhaustion because I am supposed to capitalize on my newfound energy. And apparently, I'm supposed to eat my weight in pasta. Or not. Whatever.

If I can figure out how to put it up here, I'll leave you with a little segment of today's appointment. This was literally music to our ears today. I could listen to it all day and never grow tired.

Little bean, I am excited to be whatever you need me to be. And I promise to do my best to shield you from all of the crazies on the interwebs.

Just a Day

2010-09-16T09:35:00.001-04:00

Written on September 16, 2010

Once upon a time, way back in December 2009, I thought that I was going to be having a baby this week. I was shocked and amazed by the news because after only three months of trying, I wondered whether or not I was really ready for something so huge. But just a few weeks after I found out, before I could get used to the idea, before my waist disappeared and my boobs grew a cup size, and before the faintest whiff of trash gave me dry heaves, I lost the pregnancy. Or, the pregnancy ended. Or the mass of cells that was supposed to be growing and doubling stopped growing and doubling. More succinctly: someone died.

At least, that’s how it felt.

I heard all kinds of things in the weeks that followed, both from loved ones and well-meaning dummies, who were occasionally also my doctors. I heard that “it was for the best,” or “better to have something happen now than later,” or “it wasn’t even a baby, yet,” or, my personal favorite, “at least you know you can get pregnant!” I said very little in response, though I wanted to say, “there is nothing best or better about this,” or “it was a baby to me and to Matt,” or, “yes, but I don’t know if I can stay pregnant, so please shut the fuck up.”

Some people said nothing at all. Their silence implied discomfort, disquiet, and sometimes, a respect for my wish to stay hidden and cocooned.

Trying to explain why I felt as devastated as I felt was impossible. I couldn’t even explain it to myself. I felt a strong need to justify it to others, especially the well-meaning dummies. Some of those dummies were people whose opinions I value and respect above most others in the world, people whose counsel I seek and whose shoulders I lean on. I felt like I needed to explain why I felt so bereft, so full to the brim of grief, so very much like I was walking through a fog.

I kept picturing myself in 10th grade when I had just come back to school after my mom died. I was going through the process of meeting with my teachers to try to catch up on what I missed, and in what is now a long-established habit, I apologized for being so sad. My math teacher brightened at this and said, “well, at least now that the funeral is behind you, you will be able to concentrate on school again, you won’t have to worry that your mother is going to die.” I stared at him just like you’re staring at your computer screen right now. How can you explain grief to someone with no connection to it? How can you teach someone tact and understanding? How can you tell someone to just take you where you are, to let you feel what you feel, even if they don’t understand it? You cannot. You cannot do any of those things. And you are foolish to try.

And so I soldiered on. Not alone, of course. There are very few things that I do alone. But I felt awfully lonely. The loneliness and grief sneaked its way into the very corners of my existence. I could and did pour myself into work, but I would push and pull all of my friendships and relationships. I could talk to Matt about how I was feeling, but then I would spend days pretending that I was totally fine, when my brain was repeating, “miscarriage, miscarriage, miscarriage,” over and over again.

To be perfectly honest, much like most of the months surrounding that 10th grade conversation with my math teacher, I cannot conjure up the months immediately after the miscarriage. I remember specific things like Matt’s birthday dinner at the Summer Shack, Neema’s falafel party, and going to New York with Julie. But I don’t remember how I functioned, because in my memory, the images float by like they happened a long, long time ago and I don’t feel connected to them.

The last few weeks couldn’t have been more different than those weeks. These weeks feel brightly colored, hued in pinks and yellows and bright, vibrant greens in my mind. The smiles I see in my memory are genuine and not strained, the connection I have felt with Matt is as real as it ever gets in any marriage, and there is nary a well-meaning dummy in sight.

But the fear is very, very real.

I recently read an article about pregnancy after miscarriage, and the author concluded that while all pregnant women know real fear about their pregnancies, women who have had a miscarriage have a totally different level of fear, one that can’t be controlled or rationalized. I couldn’t agree more. I was the only person who imagined myself as that baby’s mother and after I lost the pregnancy, my imagination was all that was left.

Some days I have to work hard to imagine myself as THIS baby’s mother. It will catch me off guard, the times that I imagine it, because more often than not I imagine myself grieving, walking out of the doctor’s office after hearing the terrible news, or trying to picture getting out of bed if something goes wrong again.

Miscarriage, as it turns out, is like any other loss. Sometimes it’s with you wherever you turn. Sometimes it sneaks up on you. But no matter what you do, it is part of you who are, something to fold into the fabric of your life, like any other fact, happy or sad.

Tomorrow was my first due date, the date by which I would have been pleading with my doctor to just induce me already. And now tomorrow is just a day. Just a day when I’m also 15 weeks pregnant. Just a day.

Population Two and a Bean

2010-08-25T09:29:00.002-04:00

Written on August 25, 2010

A few weeks ago, something amazing happened. And over the course of the next six months, more amazing things are likely to happen. Please check back and prepare to be amazed.

The End.

No! Of course not! It’s more like, “Once upon a time” these days. For this, THIS is a beginning if ever there was one. This is the start of a journey, the journey of a lifetime. Three lifetimes, actually: mine, Matt’s, and the little person we hope to bring perfectly into the world sometime in March 2011.

I found out that I was pregnant exactly 12 days after I became pregnant. Which for those of you who are counting at home, is about 6 days before most normal people know that kind of thing, and made me exactly 3.9 weeks pregnant. I called my doctor immediately, because despite the fact that I had a perfectly clear answer sitting right in front of me, I was certain that something would go wrong, and I wanted her to reassure me that it wouldn’t.

She did not do that.

Instead, she scolded me for taking the pregnancy test too soon, and told me to wait through the weekend to come in for a blood test. It was a long weekend, made longer by the three additional pregnancy tests I took, with that second pink line growing pinker every time.

By the time Tuesday rolled around, I was not surprised that the blood test confirmed that I was pregnant. Instead of surprise, I was simply filled with abject fear. There wasn’t even a hint of giddy excitement, because the fear took up all of the emotional room in my brain and wouldn’t make any space for things like joy and delight. The fear spilled out in obvious and not-so-obvious ways: crying into Matt’s chest every night before bed, cursing while putting together a wooden filing cabinet, anxious and restless sleep, and trying to run over unsuspecting Newton residents on their way to 4th of July fireworks shows.

The problem was the problem that is always my problem: I cannot balance rational thought with emotional thought. I try to, I really do, but it hardly ever works for me. Which isn’t entirely true. I am both a rational thinker and an emotional thinker. I spend my days rationally and methodically convincing elected officials to do the right thing because it’s in the public interest. And I can cry with delight while I watch my best friend fall in love with the perfect person. I am Rational and Emotional and good at both, capital letters intended. But what I can’t do is reconcile both of those things around a single personal issue. So the rational side of me knew that I had just as much of a chance of having a miscarriage this time around as I did the first time around, maybe slightly higher, but only slightly. But the emotional side of me was convinced that this wouldn’t work, that this baby wasn’t going to be mine to love, that this pregnancy wouldn’t be mine to experience, that I should probably prepare myself to walk through the tunnels of grief that I walked through from January to June.

And as it usually happens, time marched on.

A few things have happened in that time. Most importantly, we saw our little bean. We saw its little heartbeat, beat, beat, beating as fast as it possibly could. And we saw it moving around, moving and shaking and dancing around, almost as if we’d caught it in a private moment. We also told some very important people. And those people cried and laughed and hugged and asked questions and reassured us and smiled fondly at us when they thought we weren’t looking. We told some not as important people, and those people asked practical questions about work and daycare and plans for after March. And some other amazing things happened in the world – dear friends started to fall in love with amazing people, parents were healthier than we worried they might be, babies with delicious thighs took their first tentative steps. And somehow, between the dancing bean, and the love from our favorite people, and the practical questions from the practical people, and the happy things that were unfolding all around us, it started to feel real for me. I started to believe that I am pregnant. I started to believe that in a few months, we’ll be falling in love, struggling with practicality, and living a totally different life.

Of course, I take myself wherever I go. And wherever I go there is doubt and fear and concern. I ask Matt 100 times a day whether or not he thinks I’m still pregnant. And he always tells me that I am, always without wavering, never rolling his eyes, just looking at me and sending clear, pure love for me and for our bean. I hear sad news about a loved one’s trials and my heart almost bursts because I want to make it better for her and her family and because I so desperately want to have a different experience. I toss and turn at night, partly because my vivid dreams don’t make any sense, but mostly because I can convince myself that any twinge or cramp is a sign that something is wrong.

But there is that pesky time again. Marching on. Moving me and Matt and the Bean steadily towards March, through fall and winter, through birthdays and holidays, and first-spoken “I love you’s,” through more fear and more doubt and tremendous excitement, through six months of a life that’s about to be so different, so absolutely different, that I just can’t wait to live it. Except of course, that the waiting is part of the story.

So welcome to the beginning of this story. I can’t promise that it will have a happy ending, but I know that the journey will be one for the ages.

Photos from Trip to Boston

2010-03-22T00:34:00.000-04:00

Here are a bunch of pics from last summer's trip to Boston.

Now That's High-Class

2009-06-21T21:39:00.002-04:00

Yep, that's right. The Charlotte airport men's room has an attendant. For real! He'll hand you a fresh paper towel (from the automatic paper towel dispenser) and wish you a good day. On your way out, you can grab a tiny cup of mouthwash and drop a single in his tip jar. You heard it here first: Charlotte airport is like the freakin' Rodeo Drive of airports.

Down South

2009-06-21T15:45:00.002-04:00

I'm heading down to Raleigh, NC, for another fun-filled week of troubleshooting routers and whipping recalcitrant traffic emulators into shape. Should be good times. At least there's tons of great barbecue in the area.

By the way, sitting in the Charlotte, NC, airport right now. When I stepped off the flight from Boston, I was slapped in the face by the hot, stickiness of 90+ degree weather. I guess the South finally recognizes that it is, in fact, summer.

Pics from Puerto Rico

2009-06-14T14:47:00.000-04:00

It's only been 3 months, but our pictures from Puerto Rico are up. Did we ever mention that we went to Puerto Rico in March?

Sometimes I Wish I'd Just Dialed In

2009-06-10T09:50:00.003-04:00

I've been traveling for business every week since mid-April. Last week I was in Colorado Springs for a one-day meeting. Let me just say that traveling to Colorado for a one-day meeting is NOT worth it. First, it takes a whole day of travel from Boston on either end, since there is no such thing as a red-eye out of Denver or Colorado Springs. Second, there is no such thing as a direct flight from Boston to Colorado Springs and back. Third, and finally, a spate of "tornadic activity", while cool from the ground, makes attempting to fly through or around it a complete pain in the ass.

So the facts are these: My flight from Boston to Denver was delayed a mere 20 minutes, but once airborne those 20 minutes stretched to two-and-a-half hours as we were re-routed up over Canada (twice!) to avoid heavy thunderstorms over the Midwest. I was sitting in the middle seat in the back of the coach cabin, which means there's only 2 inches between your nose and the back of the seat in front of you (less when the asshole in front of you leans his seat all the back), with a tremendously obese woman to my right and a young woman with her 18-month-old son to my left.

Upon finally reaching Denver, I'd missed my connecting flight to Colorado Springs. And then had to deal with United's inept customer service reps as they tried to rebook me. Unfortunately, most of this alleged rebooking involved me running back and forth from gate to gate, being told by the gate agents that the flight was closed or delayed and that I would need to talk to customer service. Their excuse was along the lines of "the weather forced us to cancel a bunch of flights and, of course, the best option for us was to fly all of these passengers to Colorado Springs and make it someone else's problem."

So here I am with a standby ticket for the last flight (already oversold) to Colorado Springs and I have to be at the meeting at 8:30 the next morning. And I do the only rational thing left: I call United, cancel my leg to Colorado Springs, rent a car and drive. In the end, I arrived at my hotel 5 minutes after my rebooked standby flight was supposed to have taken off from Denver.

The moral of the story is twofold: 1) Never fly United, and 2) Denver is close enough to anything in Colorado to make connecting flights not worth the hassle.

Samosa for Breakfast

2009-02-08T12:29:00.001-05:00

One year ago today arrived in India on an early morning flight from Colombo. To celebrate the memory, we had samosa for breakfast this morning.

In Case You Hadn't Guessed...

2009-01-20T19:07:00.003-05:00

...Lizzi went to Washington, D.C., and braved the frigid cold to witness first-hand the inauguration of President Barack Obama. She tweeted about the event a little bit, and those tweets are over in the right sidebar. Hopefully, she'll be back in Boston tomorrow, but for tonight, she's going to kick up her heels with the President at the Home States Ball. Enjoy, sweets!

The Long Goodbye

2009-01-09T14:33:00.000-05:00

I have been thinking about today for 15 years. Along the way I've thought of many other things, and I've had days and weeks and months of not thinking about today at all. But it didn't sneak up on me, not even for a moment. No, today has been with me every day since January 9, 1994.

"It's over," I wrote in my journal that day, my 15-year-old self every bit as dramatic and heartbroken as the 30-year-old who writes this. I was talking about the hell of watching my mother die. I was talking about the exhaustion of doing my homework from a chair next to her hospital bed, and the fear of giving her the seizure medication too late, and the desperate attempts to be a normal teenager while balancing a schedule that included spending all of my free time at Albert Einstein Medical Center. I don't know what I thought would be different after she died, but I did know that I was ready to release myself from all of those things, from the hospital and the pills and the balancing act.

But the fact remained that my mother was dead. And that unlike so many of my friends who were just starting to realize that their parents were real people, I was faced with the reality that my mother could only live on in my memory. Starting tomorrow, then, my memory of mother outlives her presence in my life. Tomorrow, my mother will have been dead for fifteen years and a day, and I only knew her for a mere fifteen years.

***
I picture myself at the bow of a big ship, holding my arms out to the world, titanic-style. I see myself surrounded by white light, offering my outstretched palms to the sky. There is a freedom that comes with today, with letting the past be the past, and the future be the future. I cannot put it into better words, and that is good, because I feel terribly terribly guilty about the freedom. And I also feel terribly terribly sad.

There are so many memories in the last fifteen years, memories that I wish my mother could have been in. I wish I could picture her at my college graduation, taking pictures and meeting my friend's parents. I wish I could remember the excitement in her voice when I called from Mexico to tell of my engagement. I wish I could remember that funny time in the wedding dress shop when she got angry and walked out of the store because I couldn't decide between an ivory-colored veil or a champagne-colored veil. I wish we could reminisce about those horrible mornings spent doing my hair as a kid, or those car rides to and from ballet. I wish she knew Matt, and Julie, and Evan. I wish she knew me.

And that's the thing: I think that she does. I do, I really do. I think of my mother as a continuous presence in my life, a fact that today doesn't erase. But today does change something. In my head, there's a difference between today and tomorrow.

***
I woke at 4:40am today as I do every year on this date. I didn't think I would this year, I thought that it would start off differently. But no, I woke at 4:40, just about the same time that we got the phone call fifteen years ago. I don't have to think too hard to hear my father or Andy crying. Or picture our house full of our friends and family. Or visualize the funeral home. I am moments away from those memories. And yet they were fifteen years ago.

But I have to work to remember those mornings spent doing my hair, and those car rides to ballet. I have to work to remember them because I can't reminisce about them. My mother and I have no stories that we have told so many times that we can finish them for each other. I have only the stories I that I have told, over and over again, creating a lifetime of memories with my mother from ten good years of conscious thinking with her in my life. It is amazing what ten good years can give you.

I think that I know my mother, that I know who she was and what she was like, how she viewed the world. I worry that I put her into a mold that would feel uncomfortable for her to actually inhabit, that I have made her larger than my own life just so I can keep her in it. But the worry doesn't keep me up at night. I love the mother that my mother is for me.

***
I have been experiencing this day in my head for so long that I needed to experience it out loud. I was fifteen when I realized that I would still be so young when today came around. And at the other end, at thirty, as I re-read my journal entries written in my fifteen-year-old voice, I think to myself that we never really change. I have spent fifteen years - half of my life - thinking about today. And as when I was fifteen, now that it's here, I just want to spend today thinking about today, assured in the knowledge that tomorrow is tomorrow.

Well Hello There!

2009-01-05T09:35:00.002-05:00

And Happy New Year to you, too! It's been a while since I've said hello, and even though I'm still composing posts in my head, still saying things like, "oh, we totally have to write about that on the blog," I'm not doing much actual blogging. I've started posts, loads of them, but I haven't had the energy to put them out there for our little world to see.

But here it is, a brand new year, and it seems like a good time to write. I've spent a lot of time over the course of the last few weeks thinking about where we were this time last year. I've felt nostalgic for it, missing our adventures, wishing we were somewhere different doing something new. But I've also been content to experience the adventures we've had right here at home. And I mean the little adventures like watching a friend's baby learn to walk with confidence, meeting my father's new and important friend, talking with Matt about our future. I mean sure, we've pinned a map up on our living room wall and are hard at work "planning" our next big trip. But we're also working hard to balance our home budget, organize our kitchen, and make more time for the things that are important to us. As with everything, it's a juggle.

There are a host of scary and exciting possibilities in store for 2009. But I feel surprisingly prepared for them and anxious to move forward. For those of you out there who still check in every so often, I hope that the start of your new year finds you happy and healthy, excited and nervous for whatever the year has in store. I hope that any reflection you've engaged in has been positive, and that your new year's resolutions are attainable. As always, from over here at populationtwo, we're sending out good thoughts and good cheer, and wishes for another year of adventure.

Gotta Fly

2009-01-03T23:40:00.003-05:00

I love taking pictures at airports. It probably stems, like so many things, from my love for Star Wars. Ever since I first watched Obi-Wan and Luke weave that beat-up speeder through the Mos Eisley spaceport, airports have always been a source of magic and adventure for me. Unfortunately, too often I forget to take my camera out of my bag, but every once in a while I do. So here are a couple of my favorites from my recent business trip to Washington D.C.

These photos also reminded me of a stack of pictures I took while waiting for the shuttle bus at Logan a couple of years ago. This one of the woman waiting for her ride is still one of my faves.

One Year Ago

2009-01-01T19:07:00.001-05:00

Hard to believe it's been a whole year...

Dollars and (Common) Sense

2008-12-11T22:39:00.010-05:00

Remember the movie Office Space and Michael Bolton's grand plan to steal the rounding error from every transaction the company made? For each transaction, the amount stolen was a fraction of a penny, but aggregated over thousands or millions of transactions, those fractions added up to a whole lot of dough. Then there's the decimal place debacle and the devious plan falls to pieces.

Dealing with exchange rates on multiple currencies on a round-the-world trip is a bit of the same mess as Michael, the diabolical but mathematically impaired software engineer. Every time you change currency, little bits of your carefully crafted budget are shaved off. Some of that goes directly to the bank or money changer doing the exchange. Some of it is legitimate rounding error, which goes right back to the bank on top of their service fee or commission. And some of it, like when the U.S. Dollar was tanking worldwide this time last year, is just bad luck.

In America it's easy to dismiss all of the Chicken Littles on Wall St, screaming that the Mighty Dollar is falling. But when you've based your whole trip budget on a fixed amount of cold, hard American cash, how the dollar is faring against the pound, yen, or baht becomes much more important. So I wanted to see just what the impact of last year's currency market crisis was on our trip.

When we were researching the trip, we used almost exclusively Lonely Planet guides. They're ubiquitous, everyone uses them, and, generally speaking, they're reliable. So even though we understood that the copyright date was only a couple of years old, we assumed that the exchange rate information was good. Not once did we think to double-check the exchange rate on a site like xe.com. So we planned our trip around a $50 USD per day budget.

What should have been common sense is that exchange rates fluctuate, particularly in developing nations like the ones we were going to be travelling in. While we were on the trip, I had the distinct feeling that our money wasn't going as far as I thought it should. It could be that I'm a bad haggler, and that after one bad experience in a shitty hostel, we were going for top-of-the-line budget accommodations, but look at the data. Our money wasn't going very far at all in most of Southeast Asia (where we were before Feb 2, 2008), especially Thailand. Then we went to Sri Lanka, where the LKR was running much stronger against the dollar than it had in years. Finally, in India, Nepal, and Hong Kong, we were right on budget.

So our money wasn't going that far, but just how far was it getting us. In Thailand, on average, we were short $2.76 from our daily budget (valued on Sep. 19, 2007), which equates to about one small meal for the two of us, not including alcohol. What's worse is if you look at our value of our Lonely Planet-based budget in Nepal, a difference of $7.48, or two midday meals at the Hut including beer.

According strictly to the data, the total loss due currency fluctuations was $100.33, or just under 2% of our total budget. However, consider that that's 2 whole days worth of food, lodging and activities lost due to "market forces".

So what's the bottom line? First, before setting your budget in stone, use some common sense and double-check the current exchange rates. Second, it might not be a bad idea to add a couple of days of cushion to your overall budget. In the end, exchange rates are annoying but a fact of life. As long as you use some common sense (ahead of time), you'll be able to ride out any nastiness the market can throw at you.

Out There on the Dunes

2008-10-25T00:33:00.002-04:00

I was going through some more pics from the trip and came across this shot from our night on the dunes outside of Jaisalmer. The reason for being out in the middle of the Great Thar Desert in the middle of the night is that we went on an overnight camel safari. The big oaf in the center of the picture was my trusty steed for the trek. My travel tip: riding a camel is fun for about 10 minutes, after that they are just giant, smelly beasts that are constantly ramming a 2x4 into your ass, so go for the sunset camel ride and forego the hours of pointless torture on your backside.

I shot this in RAW, but when I processed it, the whole photo was pitch black. But I cranked the exposure up as high as it would go to see if anything showed up. And what you see is what I got. Not bad for a 30-second exposure using a sand dune as a tripod.

First Glance: Chi-Town

2008-10-19T17:35:00.002-04:00

Chicago is AWESOME! More on that later, but for now, a few pics :)

When Geeks Go on Vacation

2008-10-12T23:01:00.003-04:00

About a month ago I was in Oakland on business, but instead of coming directly home after the job was done, I stayed on through the weekend to see the sights. But what sights do you see if you're a geek like me? Alcatraz? The Golden Gate Bridge? Napa Valley? Nope. You hop in your paid-for rental and hit Silicon Valley for a tour of the biggest tech companies in the world. Check it!

Green with Envy

2008-09-27T20:29:00.005-04:00

I have spent three out of the last seven weeks working out of Oakland, CA, on a project that involved the U.S. Coast Guard. Unlike my colleagues on the project, who all have significant prior military experience in very nasty situations but refer to downtown Oakland as the "Green Zone", I preferred to stay in downtown Oakland, smack in the middle of Chinatown. And when they would stroll in each morning talking about the steak they ate at Outback Steakhouse the previous night, I would tell them about the delicious hole-in-the-wall a 2-minute walk from my room, serving up tasty Cambodian food (unidentifiable fish in a banana leaf, just like Phnom Penh), or the Japanese place a stone's throw away that served a giant spicy tuna salad less than $5. And I could see it written on their faces: they had food envy. But they refused to venture into Oakland after dark, and they missed out. Their loss, not mine, because I'm still fondly remembering the 8-beer sampler from the brewpub (the Columbus IPA is good, but the Blue Whale Ale is tastier) less than a quarter-mile from my hotel's front door.

Don't worry, it's still me, so I also took pictures of the Coast Guard ships that I spent a couple of weeks working with :)

It Really Is a Small World After All

2008-09-13T17:04:00.003-04:00

It's never a good feeling to look through the "newspaper" see an article like this about someplace you've visited. I'm not saying that we dodged a bullet or anything like that, but I do feel like these explosions hit a little closer to home since Lizzi and I walked through Connaught Place one night in early March.

Two other bombs found near a movie theater and near a park in the Connaught Place area were defused, he said.

On that night Lizzi and I even tried to go see a movie at that theater, but they don't allow cameras. And we weren't going to trust them to "keep an eye" on our digital SLR for a couple of hours. My heart goes out to the survivors and the families of the victims. Like I said, I'm just feeling that the world is a little bit smaller now.

The Sunnier Side of the Bar Exam

2008-09-05T10:19:00.004-04:00

It dawned on me the other day that it's been one month since the bar exam. I was in the shower when I realized it, and I smiled to myself because it occurred to me that I didn't have to rush through the annoying task of cleaning myself in order to get back to a Contracts Outline. I could shower all day if I wanted to! (I didn't.)

I think that I might have mostly recovered from the exam. This is impressive, given that the last time around, it took me, oh, a YEAR to fully get over it. A year and some counseling. When I say that the bar exam is the single most confidence-shattering experience of my life, I'm not underestimating its power by even a little bit. But I feel almost back to my whole self again. I haven't woken up in a cold sweat since July, haven't had any nightmares about Commercial Paper, and have successfully brain-dumped all of that useless information about Mortgages. In fact, since the test ended, I haven't given that much thought to it. When my mind wanders ahead to the first week in November, I usually think first about the election, second about the fact that I'll turn 30 a week later, and last that I'll also finally get my exam results. Except that if I'm being really honest about it, I think about my exam results before I think about my birthday.

Of course, if I'm being REALLY honest, there's a nagging part of me that's 100% certain that I didn't pass, that the multiple choice questions kicked my ass so hard that no amount of solid essay answers could make up for it. But then I remember that Steph promised she'd go back to the Bahamas with me if I failed, and I think that I could do it again, if I had to.

I know you're all clamoring to run to your comments buttons to tell me that I passed, that you have confidence in me, that I didn't just jinx myself by admitting that I've brain-dumped everything related to Mortgages. But therein lies the power of the bar exam. Even though I know that you all believe that I passed, I can't even bring myself to write about that little spark of hope I'm holding on to, just in case it jinxes me even more. My Barbri books are still taking up half of our living room, just in case I need to open them again to study for the February exam.

So maybe I haven't recovered, per se. As I live and breathe, I am STILL that crazy. So keep your good karma flowing until November. And if I passed, I promise you'll be among the first to know. If I failed, well, then, be sure to remind me again what a Mortgage is all about.

These United States of America

2008-08-29T15:11:00.003-04:00

A week ago in Somerville, Massachusetts, some one thousand, nine hundred and seventy-three miles away from Denver, Colorado, I stood on my chair in a bar and watched the next President of the United States deliver one of the most stirring speeches of my young life. Surrounded by other Obama fans, all turned towards the big-screen TVs, Obama spoke to us in high-def, and oh my, was it ever.

For the first time in what felt like a long time, Obama laid out his plans for the future of our great nation. Nothing he said last week was new. In fact, most of it I'd learned from reading his book and from various other sources. But in that speech he put his ideals into one, cohesive message, and delivered it with such passion that I have a hard time imaging that I know someone who wasn't moved by what he said. I cried twice.

For a long, long time, I have struggled with my own personal brand of patriotism. Before I met Matt, I wouldn't have said that I was particularly patriotic. Much to my father's dismay, I drew anarchy symbols all over my notebooks in high school and professed a strong desire to move to another, better country. I went to Israel after my first year of college and came back spouting rhetoric about the ineffectiveness of our constitution. And I took just enough political philosophy classes in college to make myself dangerous. But all of that changed for me over the course of a very short period of time.

Just after I graduated from college, Matt and I took a road trip across the United States. Too poor to spend any significant time in Europe, Elissa suggested that we maximize our summer together and drive around the US. Matt was thrilled. I was disappointed. When I thought about our summer together, I imagined us taking pictures in front of the Eiffel Tower. But a few weeks passed on the open road and I learned that there is nothing quite like finding a love of your country while eating at an A&W's in Holbrook, Arizona, because it will take at least three days to order the part necessary to fix your truck. In the course of those 5 weeks that we drove around America, I came to appreciate the meaning behind "America the Beautiful." We saw the piddliest fireworks display I have ever seen in my life in a teeny tiny town called Lillian, in Alabama. And as bottle rocket after bottle rocket was launched into the air by teenagers, I welled up at Sousa's familiar tunes.

A little over two years later, the same music would make me cry, only this time, it wasn't on July 4th. It was on September 12th, as I watched the first of many video montages and stared in horror as I saw the twin towers fall over and over again. While most of my friends felt some amount of irritation at the swelling of patriotism that overtook the nation, I felt privately grateful. I was glad for the comfort of strangers, united as we were in making sure that our troops would be safe in the inevitable war. I saw so many of Matt's friends board a plane bound for the desert, their excited and eager faces making my stomach churn and hurt with worry and fear. Yes, I felt grateful for the patriotism then, learning, as I was, what it meant to be the partner of an officer in the United States Air Force.

It was just a few months later when I sat in a classroom in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma and learned about the Constitution. I surprised my classmates and myself by staunchly defending our governing document, the Justices who promise to uphold it, and the tenuous grasp we have on liberty. I carried a well-worn copy of the Constitution in my backpack everyday for three years. In my first year of law school, I memorized it, turning the words over and over on my tongue, listening to how they sounded in my mouth. To this day, I read the Constitution when I feel particularly lost in the world of law. And to this day, it makes me calmer to know that we created such a living document over 200 years ago.

It was just a few years later that I stood before a former Chief Justice of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court and I took an oath the Commonwealth, promising to pursue and seek justice, and to help those who need it most. In the three years since I took that oath, I have struggled to personally define its meaning. I have found that I take it more seriously than most, that I believe a promise to be a promise, more than mere words. I believe that when you agree to help those who are least advantaged, you put your heart into that work, and that it sometimes feels a lot like patriotism, this work of upholding the Constitution.

I met more non-US citizens last year than ever before in my life. And the most consistent thing they expressed to me was just how lucky I am to have been born in the United States. "A lucky accident," they said, as they struggled to find employers who would sponsor their green cards, help them to stay in this country. "Yes," I said, finally understanding, "a lucky accident."

Last week when I was listening to Barack Obama speak to the nation, I found myself thinking, "this, this is what it means to be patriotic." Here is man who understands this country. Here is someone who respects and loves this nation and sees just how amazing an opportunity we have just by the lucky accident of living here.

How democratic are we, then? How much can we change by the power of our vote? Well, everything, of course. We can change everything. Our most powerful living documents allow us to continue to create and mold this amazing nation in which we live. It is up to us, to the lucky citizens of this country, to make it better, to form a more perfect union, to establish justice, to secure the blessings of liberty. In short, if you don't already plan to do so, VOTE on November 4, 2008. And if you want to see real changes in the way that this country is run, Vote for Change, Vote for Hope, vote for Barack Obama.

Does he Like Me, Like Me, or Does he Just Like Me?

2008-08-24T19:38:00.003-04:00

As you're probably all aware, I heart Barack Obama. I heart him so much that way back when I was still visiting other countries, I signed up to receive emails from the campaign. So for the past couple of months, I've been getting emails asking me to contribute $5 by midnight, or watch an inspirational video, or re-consider my feelings for Hilary Clinton. I've done my part dutifully and with excitement for the future that I feel like I'm a part of. Really! So it shouldn't surprise you that when I got an email telling me that I could get a text message from Barack Obama, I was all in. I mean, me! A text message! From Barack Obama himself! The email said that I'd be among the first to know who Barack picked as his vice president. So I signed up. See, I'm the kind of girl who WANTS to be the first to know.

On Friday night, it became clear that the news was imminent. Barack had picked his VP! And I was going to be among the first to know! So I waited, cell phone at the ready, for my text message. I had a cocktail with my cell phone in my pocket so that I'd feel it if I got the text. No need; no text. I ate dinner with my cell phone next to my fork. No text. I was starting to get worried. I mean, maybe Barack doesn't care for me the way that I care for him. I drove with my cell phone in my hand. Nothing. Where WAS he? What was he doing? Why was he ignoring me? I brushed my teeth and hopefully checked my phone, just in case I'd missed his text while I was washing my face. Still nothing. And then I started to blame myself. Maybe I didn't give my $5 quickly enough. Maybe he doubted my dedication to his cause. Maybe, oh no, maybe he didn't really believe me when I said that I DO think he's change I can believe in. So, heart-broken and forlorn, with nary a text message in sight, I went to sleep.

But at 3:14am, my phone buzzed. Quietly at first, and then louder, because that's how I have the setting on my cell phone. And when I checked the message, rubbing sleep out of my eyes to read it, there it was: "Barack has chosen Senator Joe Biden to be our VP nominee." I smiled at my phone, content in the knowledge that Barack still knows how much I appreciate all that he's already done for this country, and all that he has yet to do. And then I went to sleep, thinking about what a great team JObama is going to be.*

* "JObama" is a registered trademark of Matt's brain, because he is the genius that came up with that name.

The Inevitable Big Mac Attack

2008-08-16T13:56:00.003-04:00

There's something about spending a significant amount of time away from home that makes you CRAVE foods from home that you don't normally eat. One night Lizzi and I spent an entire evening fantasizing about what fast food hamburger we would eat first when we got home: McDonald's? Burger King? Wendy's? In the end, it didn't really matter. We just wanted something familiar. So when we stopped in Bangkok, we satisfied our cravings with cheeseburgers, chicken McNuggets, and sodas that seemed as big as oil barrels.

But when we reached New Delhi, it was different. We weren't necessarily craving food from home, but there was something about New Delhi that screamed foreign, even alien, to me. Even before we'd left for the trip, we'd heard that McDonald's in India were something to be seen, so when we came across one on our walk back to our hostel, we couldn't resist. McDonald's in India is like Chuck-E-Cheese here in the U.S. It's pure spectacle! Everything is bright and shiny; families are there for their big dining-out night. It's chaos, but in a good way.

So we dove right in, ruining the dinner we'd planned with a McVeggie Burger and a McAloo Tiki Burger. Yeah, it's a little different, but I now can't help passing a McDonald's in Boston without wondering if they've got a McCurry Happy Meal.

Where Did She Go?

2008-08-02T15:28:00.002-04:00

Hey everybody, it's me, Matt. You don't hear from me much anymore, but I'm still around. However, today I'm hear to say that Lizzi finished the bar on Thursday and immediately found her way to another bar for some simple celebration. Ironically, the name of that bar is the 21st Amendment. Incredibly appropriate for a Constitutional law geek like Lizzi.

More importantly, after the bar, Lizzi needed some well-deserved downtime. So she and Steph packed up some sundresses, swimsuits, and sunblock and jetted off to the Bahamas early yesterday morning for a much-deserved beach vacation. She'll be back soon, I promise.

I'm Very Excited to Be Here

2008-07-30T18:14:00.000-04:00

Picture it: 2,000 lawyers in one giant room, waiting to take a big test.

C'mon people... I'll wait while you make all the jokes you can. (Points for the funniest one!)

But seriously, can you even picture it? Let me answer that for you. No, you can't picture it. Why? Because that's 2,000 people who wear black when no one's dead; 2,000 people who neurotically answer "it depends" to the simple question of "have you decided what you'd like to order?"; 2,000 people who routinely keep highlighters in their purse/briefcase/manbag; and 2,000 people who are so completely superstitious that they feel a wee bit nervous when they pretend they're too cool to be superstitious. But I'd bet my legal education on the fact that every single person there was wearing a lucky shirt and pretending it was a "this old thing?" kind of shirt. Yeah, I spent my entire day with THOSE people.

To be fair, no one was wearing black. Oh wait! Except that one guy whose t-shirt bore the words in the title of this post. His t-shirt was black. But it made me giggle. And even though he was on his way to the bathroom mid-test and laughing out loud earned me a stern look from one of the Thomas Jefferson/George Bush spawns, it was totally worth it.

But we were all there, just about the whitest crowd you've ever seen, anxiously waiting outside of the test center at 8:29, because they told us to be there by 8:30, no later! We were instructed to bring earplugs, erasers, pencils, pens, and lunch, but no highlighters, cell phones, or a beverage other than water in a clear plastic bottle. So that meant that we were also a group of 2,000 (mostly white) people with about 10,000 pencils; 5,000 erasers; 40,000 earplugs; 4,000 pens; 2,500 sandwiches; and nary a highlighter, cell phone, or diet coke to be seen. It's a trippy experience to hang out with 1,999 other people, all carrying a clear plastic bag full of proof that "I like coloring within the lines." Truly, we're who you want when you're life goes ass-up.

The worst part is over (for me, anyway), and tomorrow is the part I affectionately refer to as "write for your life." I've got 10 essay questions to answer on topics I know precious little about, which, if you calculate it out, is EXACTLY 36 minutes per essay (no more, no less!). So my hand is going to hurt like a bitch tomorrow night, but, if I do it right, so is my liver.

Those of you who were rooting for me today, sending me your smart vibes, I can't promise that I used them to their full power (those questions are HARD!) but I can tell you that I felt all of your love and energy, and that I just can't do this without you.

It Might Not Make Me Stronger, But it Probably Won't Kill Me Either

2008-07-28T09:40:00.006-04:00

It occurred to me last night that there are those of you out there who have no idea what this test even looks like. So for those of you not familiar with the particulars of the bar exam, I'd like to be the one to explain it to you.

The exam itself is two days long and each day is 8 hours, which includes 6 hours of actual testing, one hour for lunch, and a half hour of instructions for both the morning and afternoon test sessions. The first day consists of 200 multiple choice questions and the second day is 10 essays. The multiple choice questions test you on "the big six," or the six major subjects with which the National Conference of Bar Examiners has determined every lawyer must be at least a bit familiar: constitutional law, criminal law, evidence, torts, contracts, and property. I don't know who is actually in the National Conference of Bar Examiners, but I imagine them to all bear a striking resemblance to Thomas Jefferson, with a little bit of George Bush, Sr. around the eyes, maybe. The essay subjects are state-specific, and test you on various areas of the law in the state in which you're sitting. In Massachusetts, that includes agency, civil procedure, commercial paper, consumer protection, corporations, domestic relations, federal jurisdiction and procedure, leases, mortgages, partnership, professional responsibility, secured transactions, trusts, and wills. You are also expected to be able to write essays about the big six, for a total of 20 essay subjects tested.

I'm not entirely sure what the multiple choice questions are intended to prove, since they don't actually seem to test your ability to understand the big six. In fact, the multiple choice questions test you about law that doesn't actually exist anywhere, in any state. If that doesn't make sense to you, that's cool, because it doesn't make sense to me either. Some people really rock the multiple choice questions and stake their entire ability to pass on those questions. I am not one of those people, and I never have been. Multiple choice questions get me wrapped around the axle, tripped up, confused, always doubting myself between a few answers that sound basically the same to me, with neither one of them adequately capturing what I believe the real answer to be. The essays are where I shine, not because I'm so familiar with things like corporations or commercial paper (seriously, WHAT is commercial paper?!), but because I have a fairly strong ability to make up stuff that sounds really convincing. The essays are graded by hand (yes, by HAND!), by people who probably look more like John Quincy Adams than Thomas Jefferson, and they basically do a quick-read through your essay, looking for buzz words. I've always wondered what they'd do with a sentence that inherently made no sense, but had all the right buzz words in it: "Daffy Duck is the TESTATOR, and since his WILL evidences some UNDUE INFLUENCE by Kanye West, it's likely that the document will be set aside and his estate will pass to his wife, Angelina Jolie, by the INTESTACY STATUTES." I'd totally get like 10 points for that answer, even if the question had nothing to do with Daffy or Kanye. Hey, as long as John Quincy is happy, I'm happy.

Look, I know what you're thinking. I mean, when I go to a doctor, I'm always hoping that they don't actually know the answer to my medical mystery, but that they have a strong ability to make up something that sounds really convincing. Except, wait, no I don't! I mean, when you're paying someone $350 an hour, you kind of want them to know how to solve your problem, right? Of COURSE you do. Luckily, there's a sizable percentage of lawyers who charge $350 (or more) an hour and DO actually know how to solve your problem. And there are those other lawyers who charge nothing at all to help us protect that which the Constitution was designed to protect. Big shout out for the lawyers who aren't guessing!

But, see, that's the THING about this test. That's the thing that makes me curl my hands into fists and stomp my feet at 11pm when my coffee shop has closed for the night and I'm strung-out from reading my contracts outline for the 400th time.

Just after I'd finished my first year of law school I was at a friend's wedding, chatting with her father. He'd recently graduated from law school himself and he gave me the best piece of advice I've heard about the whole thing: "Lizzi," he said, "there are three very different aspects of learning the law. There's law school, there's the bar exam, and there's the actual practice of law. The only thing that all three have in common is that they have absolutely nothing to do with each other." At the time I thought he was crazy. I looked at him, stunned, and shook my head. I was mute with surprise, there was nothing on the tip of my tongue. I mean, I'd just finished my first year of law school and I felt like a rockstar. All those facts! All that information! Surely I'd learned something useful in that year. But no, he was right, there is nothing particularly useful about law school. Just like there's nothing useful about the bar exam. They're just the tickets that let you into the club. Law school is a marathon, meant more to determine your ability to endure than your ability to apply law to facts.

Like law school, the bar exam is the same kind of hurdle. And in case you haven't noticed, I'm pretty short. Hurdles aren't exactly my strongest sport. In fact, sports aren't my strongest sport. I'm the kind of girl who got an A+ in yearbook and a C- in gym. But here I am, plugging away at mile 20 of the 26.2, jumping over all those stupid fences they keep putting up. And I'll finish, I mean, of course I'll finish. I'm going to look like hell when it's over, I'm going to feel dumber, exhausted, beat-up, and strung-out. But of COURSE I'm going to finish. I can see it now, that ribbon off in the distance, waving a little bit in the breeze, Thomas Jefferson pondering quietly on one side, John Quincy looking disgruntled on the other. Hold onto your powdered wigs old men, I'm almost there.

Things that Make Me Saner

2008-07-23T14:12:00.004-04:00

Immediately after I wrote that post about being at that bad place with the bar exam, a few things happened. First, things got worse. (That's always the way, isn't it?) I had a crying breakdown to Julie over gmail chat, wherein I sat typing in all of the reasons that I was such a mess. In case you're curious, typing down all of the reasons that you're feeling batshit insane isn't necessarily the best way to make yourself less so. You're just confronted with your insanity in black and white, and by your own hand, and you feel more absurd and yet strangely less able to do anything about it. But Julie calmed me down by reminding me that it's just a day, and that my only goal was to get through the day before I could move on to worrying about the next day, or the intervening days between then and test day. And then I felt better because she was being so reasonable and calm and normal.

I felt better right up until later that day when some perv walked into the library and started touching himself in plain sight of me. I shit you not. There are actually people who think that kind of behavior is okay, people who walk into public libraries, libraries full of sweet little children, and touch themselves because they are perverted sick bastards. And that was about the time I remembered why I'm doing what I'm doing, that in the end, law is a way to keep pervs like that guy off of the street, out of your library, and away from your kids. Dude, law can help and so can I!

And then I had another breakdown. But then, THEN I got a phone call from one friend and an email from another, both of whom have been here before, both of whom have taken this test, who know how positively soul-destroying it can be. It helps that both of these women are the kind of women whose advice and counsel I respect and seek out. And even though I listened to their words and thought, "but they don't know how little I know about Commercial Paper," I started to see that there was some light at the end of the tunnel. And I actually started to remember what I feel like when I'm not taking the bar exam. Except, of course, that we ate pie for dinner last night. That's still not normal.

Every day this week I've been studying in the Lexington Library, right down the street from where Matt works. It gets me up and out of the house in the morning, plus it keeps me on Matt's schedule, which is good, because if I was left to my own devices I'd study between the hours of midnight and noon, instead of the other way around. Because we're in such close proximity, I've had the chance to meet Matt for lunch. Monday was a shared salami sub, Tuesday we tried the Indian restaurant in Lexington, Wednesday we had caprese salad and tuna fish, Thursday we went to the Japanese/Chinese restaurant (don't ask), and today we're meeting for chicken sandwiches. Every single meal has been tailored to my bizarre and unreasonable cravings, cravings that occasionally (read: usually) change in between the time that I voice them and the time I'm eating, so that I'll get to a restaurant and stare at a menu for 10 or 12 minutes, wondering what on earth I'll do if I order the sushi box when in the end I really want chicken and broccoli, oh the choices are so overwhelming! It's tough, I know. But lunch with Matt is the absolute highlight of my day, the very best and most indulgent moment that I allow myself at this point in the process. We talk about anything but the bar exam, and we spend a few minutes lamenting the fact that we'll have to give up our midday lunch dates when the exam is over and I'm (presumably, hopefully, please oh please!) working.

The past two nights I've come home to care packages. These care packages are full to the brim with items that will surely rot my teeth, but that also make me extremely thankful that I have friends and family who love me enough to help me rot my teeth. You know you're doing well when your peeps basically send you a message that says, "of COURSE you're going to pass the bar exam. And when all of your teeth fall out, we'll STILL think you're a fantastic lawyer and a pretty great friend/sister-in-law. Although, we will then reserve the right to encourage you to find a dentist. But we'll do it gently, and with love." From the very bottom of my toothless grin, I love you guys. Thanks for thinking of me.

So it's just four wee little days before the exam and even though I had a mental breakdown in the car today (nothing to do with the test, no, this one was all about why I didn't just become a saxophone teacher, nevermind the fact that I've never even held a saxophone in my life. Sure, Lizzi, it had NOTHING to do with the exam.), I'm feeling mostly alright. I mean, I'm surrounded by a mountain of candy, I've got lunch to look forward to, and there are pervs in my library. I can feel it already: it's going to be an exciting four days! But seriously this time, I'm doing alright. I mean, it IS going to be an exciting four days, but after these four days and then those excruciating two days of the exam, it will all be over. And then my biggest concern will be the future of my dental hygiene.

When the Solution is the Problem

2008-07-22T21:26:00.005-04:00

While volunteering in Nepal, Lizzi and I met a couple from The Netherlands, who had volunteered with VSN two years ago. In fact, it is through their fundraising efforts when they returned to Europe that VSN was able to build the orphanage we stayed in. On their return visit to Nepal, they brought with them two humongous crates of things that were donated by various corporations. One of those businesses donated a pair of freakishly high-tech Bugaboo strollers. The hope was that a quick photo of the orphaned kids being pushed around in their new Bugaboos would result in instant "social responsibility" points for the company. Of course, neither the VSN coordinators nor the orphanage caretakers knew what to do with a set of pushcars for babies. Because, here's the punchline: Nepali people don't use strollers. Moreover, during our entire time in Asia, we didn't see a single Asian person pushing any type of device that could be remotely construed as a stroller. Asian women (at least in the countries we visited) primarily carried their children in their arms. Of course, the sentiment was fine, and the folks at VSN were grateful. But let me tell you what they didn't need: a pair of $1,000 baby strollers they won't use, when the orphanage didn't even have a single flashlight for the eight hours a day when power is out.

At the time, the whole incident of the Bugaboos got us talking about how VSN needed more appropriate donations. Moreover, we discussed that a lot of the talk we'd been hearing at home about what the developing world "needed" just didn't make sense once we were there. Computers and the internet aren't going to solve illiteracy in developing nations because most schools still don't have power or educated teachers. In general, throwing "developed-world" technology at developing world problems creates more problems than solutions.

So what technology be more appropriate? I don't know, but some folks over at MIT seem to be on the right track. Amy Smith, a lecturer in engineering at MIT, actually holds an entire course of study in appropriate technology. She and her students have come up with some amazing and appropriate inventions for parts of the developing world. To me, she absolutely has a dream job: she travels around the world and improves the quality of life for thousands in the world's developing communities through technology. Maybe on our next trip to Nepal I'll be packing an appropriate-tech water filtration system to provide clean drinking water instead of a couple of $1,000 strollers.

And THERE It Is

2008-07-22T09:32:00.002-04:00

Remember last week when I was feeling all calm and confident? And I promised to keep you posted about my mental state in the coming days? Well, here it is folks, the much-anticipated mental status report wherein I confidently assure you that I am once again totally and completely batshit insane over this test.

It happened sometime between Friday afternoon and Sunday morning, though I suspect that Matt would report that it’s been happening slowly but surely since I started studying in June. But Friday afternoon at about 4:45pm, a kind woman announced over the library’s loudspeaker system that the library would be closing in 15 minutes. I shit you not, tears welled up in my eyes as I felt the weight of the stress of having to move to a different locale settle somewhere between my shoulders and my brain. And then Saturday afternoon, as it became increasingly apparent that I can’t, in fact, read in a moving car (um, perhaps the fact that I’ve been getting carsick since I was a child should have given this away, but no, I tried anyway), I actually felt grateful for the 90 minutes spent in the waiting room of a Subaru dealership, where Julie’s car had been towed and was getting a new alternator and several new belts. Sitting in that air-conditioned waiting room meant I got to read an extra 10 pages of Civil Procedure.

And Sunday, oh Sunday. Sunday I woke up feeling antsy, angry at myself for getting 8 hours of sleep. And when Matt expressed frustration over an undeniably frustrating experience at IKEA, I had to consciously remind myself that without Matt, I wouldn’t be able to afford to take all this time to study for this stupid test, let alone have food and shelter. After I’d calmed myself the F down, I walked back into the kitchen and looked sadly at Matt’s eyes, which were smiling at me despite the fact that I’d recently turned myself into a she-devil. “It’s happening,” I told him. “I know,” he said. “I don’t want chicken for dinner,” I said tearfully into his neck as he hugged me. “Okay,” he said, “that’s good to know. I’ll call you before I head to the grocery store.” I nodded as he hugged me, hugged me despite the fact that it was no less than 110 degrees inside our apartment, despite the fact that my wet hair was dripping all over his face, smudging his glasses.

I left our apartment a few minutes later to walk to the coffee shop that’s been my home-away-from home for the past couple of weeks. It’s full of weirdos and nerds and a quiet hum of conversation that’s more interesting than what you overhear in Starbucks. On the way, despite the fact that I feel horrible about my body these days, despite my general commitment to eat organic, I stopped at CVS and bought fig newtons, a box of cheez-its, some gummy bears, and a bottle of smart water (you know, just in case). My stomach already hurts from the cheez-its, and I’m pretty sure I’m not going to be able to eat dinner until at least 10pm tonight. On the downside, I’ll feel guilty for taking a break to eat it. On the upside, dinner will not include chicken.

And for those of you keeping score at home: the guy who hangs out at this same coffee shop who brings with him a stuffed animal that bears a creepy resemblance to a raccoon, yeah, THAT guy just sat down next to me. It’s going to be a long 9 days.

Because She Helped Me To Like Scallops

2008-07-21T10:41:00.005-04:00

Hello Internet! Remember back when we were on the trip and we'd write up birthday messages for the people whose birthdays we didn't get to celebrate because we were halfway around the world? Well we've stopped that feature since we've been home because we're, you know, HOME to actually celebrate people's birthdays. But there are some people in our lives who we think deserve to have their birthday blogged about, who we love so much that we just can't contain what we have to say about them.

Which brings me to the subject of this post. Our favorite Cris turned 30 last week and she was out of town and away from the internet (oh, the horror!). So I waited to post this until today, when I know she'll be at work and bored out of her mind. I actually wrote this post while we were gone, because when you're thousands of miles away from your friends and family, it's nice to write about them because they feel closer somehow. (For those of you out there whose birthdays have already passed who are wondering where YOUR birthday posts are, hang tight, I WILL get them to you, I promise.) But, without further ado, a birthday tribute to Cris:

Julie sent me some pictures of the little one today, and as I stared at the pictures of this beautiful baby girl in her little red hat, ready to be loved and adored by her family at Easter, it occurred to me just how much I miss that little one and her family. I only met little-C once, back when she was a wee little one-month-old, but those few moments spent holding her were perfect and precious. She looked like her father to me then, but today, looking at those pictures of her smiling in her red hat, I saw her mom's bright and pretty eyes smiling back at me, her mouth the same happy grin of Cris's. And it just about melted my heart.

I met Cris sometime early on in college. Our paths crossed and doubled back over each other through student life and Scotch n' Soda, winding its way over mutual friends and experiences. We really met through J, and for the first three years of our friendship we danced around each other, not entirely sure how we felt about each other, probably suspecting that we could be friends, but not entirely sure how to get there from here.

But all of that changed one week in March during our senior year. It was spring break and it was New Orleans, hot and muggy and drunk and antiquated, New Orleans. We literally ran into Cris and J and their merry gang of spring breakers on the street, and if you've ever been to New Orleans, you know what a surprise it is to run into someone you know. "Wait," you think to yourself, "YOU like this much debauchery too?!" And then you laugh and get a daiquiri and several hours later you've realized that duh, of COURSE you both like this much debauchery, and perhaps you should get married and have little debaucherous children together. And another daiquiri.

Cris's feet were badly sunburned, and when I say badly, I'm grossly underestimating the pain that she was in. AIR caused her pain, they were THAT sunburned. It hurt my feet to look at her feet. And yet there she was, walking around Bourbon street, drinking and laughing and having a good time. And all at once, somewhere between the time she and a few others went to watch a sex show, but before I showed my boobs off to a balcony of leering men, it occurred to me that Cris was one of the coolest women I'd met in a long, long time, and that if J continued to be an idiot about her, I'd have to beat him up.

Fast forward a few years and a few weddings and a few different cities and here we are. Over the years Cris has become someone who is a true-blue friend. Which is to say that she'd beat up anyone who had anything bad to say about me; she loves Matt fiercely and protectively (which I know because she almost always laughs at his jokes, even the truly terrible ones); and she silently suffers with worry about where we are in the world, following our itinerary to the letter, keenly aware of whether or not we're in harm's way.

In the past few months we've had a lot of time to think about our upcoming move to Boston. We keep saying over and over again that one of the best things about living in Boston will be that we'll have the chance to watch little-C grow up, that we'll get to be a part of her life almost from the very beginning. But we've also spent a lot of time talking about the fact that in addition to the little one, we'll get to watch her parents grow up too, that we get to be a part of their lives almost from the very beginning too. Because Cris came into my life at a time when I was still figuring out what it meant to be an adult, and while at the time it meant flashing a group full of strangers for a strand of shiny, plastic beads, it now means a lifetime full of wonderful meals, ordinary treasures, good jokes and bad jokes, and watching our families become grown-ups together.

Happy 30th birthday, Crissy. I promise that you're only as old as you feel. And if it makes any difference, there's a part of you that will always be just 21 to me.

love,
lizzi and matt

The Only Bar that Might Not Let Me In

2008-07-17T10:49:00.004-04:00

The MA bar exam will be over in exactly two weeks. Just two weeks from right now, I will be swinging a margarita back and forth while I gesticulate wildly and contemplate packing for my four-day jaunt to the Bahamas, all while celebrating my new freedom with respect to the likes of Corporations, Secured Transactions, and Commercial Paper.

Many of you who read this remember what I was like the first time I studied for this exam. For those of you who don't, or don't know me at all, allow me to paint a picture for you: my hair was wild, my eyebrows unkempt. My cuticles were ragged and raw. I gained and dropped 5 lbs in any given day and cried at least twice. An hour. I would be loving and happy for the briefest moment, and then wildly and explosively angry. I plunged myself into new depths of self-doubt, and spent whole days uttering an endless stream of "IwillnotpassIwillnotpassIwillnotpass" under my breath. As you might guess, this kind of confidence-inspiring mantra did wonders for my mental health and I suffered the consequences of the bar exam for months after I found out that I had actually passed, and was, wonder of wonders, a lawyer in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.

This time around, I'm actually a lot calmer. I'm too calm, in fact. I'm eerily calm. Sure, I've done a couple of hundred multistate questions. And I've reviewed a few of the essay subjects. But despite the fact that I'm having incredibly strange and vivid dreams, I'm not freaking myself out like I did the last time around. And I gotta tell you: it's kind of strange. I feel like a dull-edged version of my former bar-studying self. It's like I"m watching myself from outside of myself. And the ghost-like floating version of me is trying to knock off the version of me that's writing a blog post instead of a Trusts Outline, and ask why on earth I'm not feeling crappier about this undoubtedly crappy test. "Eh," I want to tell her, "chill out. It's JUST a test."

To compensate for my bizarre mental state, I've imposed a rigorous 16-hours-a-day study schedule for myself. Every moment of every day will be spent practicing inane multiple choice questions or working through subjects that never once, not even for the briefest of moments, held my interest in law school. It should be fun! Where fun = wanting to pull my teeth out. The one upside to imposing a ridiculous course of study on myself is that I believe it gives me free reign to give into my cravings. Last week it was spinach and scallops and caramellos. Today it was a toasted bagel with lox cream cheese. There's a half-eaten package of Rolos in my bookbag, along with a fruit leather and some smooshed pretzels.

Matt spent three days last week traveling for work. Life without him was odd and I felt like a first-year law student again, talking to Julie in the middle of the day, succumbing to my bizarre and over-the-top cravings, sleeping on the wrong side of the bed, dreaming about law that doesn't make any sense. I couldn't WAIT for him to come home, not least because I was craving this salmon dish that I really didn't have time to make for myself, but which I knew he'd attack with the vigor of a man who wants nothing more than for the beast to remain hidden this time around.

So wish me luck, Internet! I apologize in advance if my next post on this blog comes out as one enormous scream. Consider yourselves warned. And send candy.

Because You Asked, Part Two

2008-07-13T13:42:00.000-04:00

Q: Place where you wish you had more time to visit?

A: Ok, Steph asked this question waaaay back when we were in Alleppey. We answered the one about the weirdest person we'd met and if we watched TV, but at the time, we felt that we were ill-equipped to answer this one. Sure, we'd already finished almost two-thirds of the trip and only two new countries lay ahead of us, but we didn't want to cheat any one of them. So we held back. Of course, life got the better of us, and I didn't find the question again until today when I was feeling all nostalgic for the trip. Lizzi and I have talked a lot about this, and we feel that it would be best if we each answered this question.

Matt's Version
It's kind of a cop-out to say that I wish I could have spent more time everywhere we visited. Four months is just way too short for our itinerary. When I look back and see that, on average, we spent less than 3 days in any one place, I realize that we only just nicked the tip of the iceberg. But before I make my pick, I want to say that there isn't a single place we visited where I wouldn't want to spend some more time. Despite the rough time we had in Vietnam, I would wish we could have spent some more time there to really find something to enjoy about it. I'm convinced that if we'd had more time we could have escaped Hanoi and found something wonderful about northern Vietnam.

With that said, it shouldn't come as much of a surprise when I say that I wish we could have spent more time in Nepal. Even though we spent two weeks there, we really only got to see a small part of Kathmandu Valley, not to mention just a sliver of the country as a whole. But what's hardest for me to believe is that we went to Nepal and didn't spend a single day trekking. Not one! All of those glorious mountains went completely unexplored. I mean, if you're going to Nepal, you really should do some trekking. Personally, I have a dream of returning to Nepal to hike up to the Everest base camp or maybe trek the snowy ridges of the Annapurna Range. No matter what I desperately want to go back just to take in the vast outdoor adventures of the Himalayas.

But it's not all crampons and ice axes for me. Some of our friends at VSN who had more time ended up in Pokara, as well as a number of ashrams and even some of the more rural areas outside of Kathmandu. I'm not really a touchy-feely guy, but some of the meditation/yoga retreats sounded really relaxing, and, hey, I'm willing to try anything once.

Still, I feel that I didn't get all that I could have out of Kathmandu. The city has a little bit of everything from the adrenaline-addicted climbers to the electronic-music raves that went till the wee hours of the morning. With so much to experience, two short weeks really didn't do the city justice.

And, finally, there are the kids. I would go back in a heartbeat to spend more time with them, helping to build them a better school or lifting them high into the air just hear them laugh. Lizzi's not sure if I think about them at all, but I do. And I miss them dearly.

Lizzi's Version
I sort of wish we'd had more time to spend in every place that we visited. Time and time again, we said that if we'd had six months to do the trip instead of four, we wouldn't have changed our itinerary at all. We would have just spent longer in each place. It certainly would have cost about the same, since the biggest expense is definitely the plane tickets.

But when I think about this question now that we're home, I think about it in terms of the places I'd return to if someone were going to give me a free ticket. Probably first on my list would be (not surprisingly) Nepal. The people and the culture there were amazing, and there's so much of the country that we didn't even catch a glimpse of. And of course, there are lose little ones at the orphanage pulling me back. But even beyond that, there was something about that country that really just felt right to me. The pace of life is slower, by and large, than the pace we left behind in northern India, and life is simply saturated with the color, smell, and sound of Himalayan culture. It's really just an incredible place to see.

Other than Nepal, I find myself often wistfully thinking of Bangkok any time I'm in a city, which is fairly often. I just loved the hustle and the bustle of that city and the general hum of life there. I loved the mix of old and new and the fascinating place that is Thailand. If I could work in Bangkok and live in Pepsicola, vacationing occasionally in Koh Lanta and Siem Reap, I'd be a happy, happy girl.

Of course, there are days when I think that I could spend a lifetime in Munnar, that I fantasize about someday being sent on a business trip to Saigon, and I wonder what the people in the Hmong village in Lao are up to. I also think that if we'd had more time in some of the places that we didn't like as much (Hanoi for me, Delhi for Matt), we would have ended up liking them a lot more. I think that it's no coincidence that part of the reason I wish we had more time in Nepal was because it was the place we spent the longest amount of time. We actually had a brief chance to get a flavor for the place, long enough (for me at least) to want to stay.

My desire to see more of the world is curbed only by the fact that the teeny tiny portion of the world that I saw only made me wish that I could spend my days as an independently wealthy traveler, staying in one place as long as I desired. The backpacker lifestyle does get exhausting and I wonder if, had we been traveling for, say, a year, we would have eventually come to place where we thought, "good enough, let's hang out here for a while." As it is, we never really got to that point (or we did, and it coincided nicely with staying in Nepal for two weeks). The bottom line, of course, is that if the Internet wanted to send me to any one of the places we visited, I wouldn't turn down the opportunity. So, um, if any one of you really REALLY wants me to go back and love on Vietnam, all you have to do is show me the plane ticket and I'll be there in a heartbeat!

Aboard the Animal Train

2008-07-06T17:57:00.001-04:00

We sit around the table, talking at the same time, each person's voice answering someone else's question, commenting on another's thought. It is a conversation punctuated by laughter, by loud, raucous guffaws, by bursts of bright and glorious hysteria, and I look across the table to see Matt laughing so hard that his eyes scrunch into tiny little slits with wrinkles at the side as he nods his head up and down, up and down, chortling into the hand clenched into a fist at his mouth, which is wide and grinning. Cris has to excuse herself to pee, because when you laugh so hard that you have to pee, and you've already had to pee for about 20 minutes, you know that if you sit at a table for another moment, you will surely wet yourself.
**
We wake up bright and early to the sound of the baby's cries. We're not used to it, those of us who are not yet parents, and particularly those of us who prefer to use our weekends catching up on sleep. But when I stumble into the living room, my hair a wild mess, and see the little one on the floor, toys already in her mouth, I feel my un-caffeinated self softening a little, waking up by the sheer energy of the amazing little person I'm seeing first thing in the morning. "Don't worry," her father assures her, "Lizzi doesn't talk first thing in the morning. She'll be nice again in a minute." After I brush my teeth and wash my face, I come out of the bathroom and the little one smiles up at me again, hopeful that I will smile back. And I do. And then she lunges for Julie, giggling as she grabs fistfuls of her hair and pulling her towards her so that she can gum on her face with her two shiny new teeth.
***
I'm in the kitchen now, cooking pasta, chopping vegetables, marinating meat that will later spend some time and then, whoops, it's not done yet!, more time on the grill. "What are we doing in here, hmmm?," Adam moos at me. "London broil. Orzo Salad. Green Beans and Tomatoes," I respond. "Me likes," Adam assures me. I smile as I turn towards my artichoke hearts, waiting to be cut into bite-sized pieces and tossed with parsley and kalamata olives. "Grab me one," Katy calls out to Geoff and he responds in kind, equal parts affectionate and gross, grabbing a beer out of the cooler for himself and Katy. They sit around the table, feeding the baby, keeping the beer bottles out of her reach, talking about talking about talking, and I cook.
****
We wander into a restaurant in Provincetown, ready to stretch our legs after the hours and hours of traffic heading east. But none of us want to be there, none of us are interested in the overpriced menu, or the food that doesn't sound appealing. So we leave, packaging up the baby and grabbing our bags, and head out to the street, where some of us search for good pizza, others of us eating fried seafood and sandwiches. Adam, who snacked too much on the way down, is hungry for none of it. We are not surprised, we probably all have the same thought that's running through my own head: "that's Adam!" We wander around the town, smiling in the direction of Ellie and the overly tanned and muscled men, thinking that we're all tired and zonked, wondering how J and Cris do it day after day with the little one. We find ourselves in a cool little store and J is impulsive and it makes us all feel a little bit giddy for him and for Cris. They are exceptionally nice watches.
*****
We have been around the world, I think to myself as I watch Matt sleeping. We have been to corners of the earth that we will never see again. "A lot has changed in a year," Matt remarks. And he is right. A lot HAS changed in a year. But here we are, back again, back with each other, back where I cook and Geoff is ridiculous, where Adam eats snacks and Katy talks about artsy things we don't understand. Back where we would give anything, anything at all to know what Julie has to say about us, where J and Cris have done the most amazing thing imaginable and brought this new little creature into our circle, into our lives. We are back in the best part of our world, the part where our family knows us, wants nothing more than to be with us and make fun of us, where we always know we have a place to call home.

Down South

2008-07-02T23:50:00.004-04:00

If you think selecting the best out of 5,491 pictures is easy, think again. It's a huge undertaking, which hasn't been helped by a heap of procrastination, but slowly and surely, the pictures will keep coming. The latest batch comes from our first few days in Kerala in southern India.

We started in Fort Cochin, having taken the night train from Goa. While Goa was pleasant with a fresh sea breeze, Fort Cochin was hot. Damn hot! At night, we laid on our bed as naked as the nasty sheets would allow us, trying our best not to touch each other because, yes, it was THAT hot.

There's more to the story than just the heat, like our desperate craving for fresh vegetables (our intestines be damned!). But that'll have to wait until I'm a) less tired and b) have more time to actual tell a decent story. In the meantime, enjoy some pretty pictures. The second pic is of two guys performing traditional martial arts. We were just a few feet from them, and we could actual feel the impacts of their blows. They weren't kidding around.

It's Where Fenway Is

2008-06-22T23:49:00.003-04:00

It's been so long since I have written anything for this blog that I hardly know where to begin. We've been home for almost 3 months already and even though that's not quite as long as we were gone, that day is fast-approaching. There are still a lot of stories to tell from when we were gone, but there's a part of me that doesn't know how to begin to tell those stories now that we're home. One of the funny things about having kept the blog while we were gone is that it probably seems as though most of our stories are already out there, already told. But as with most nonfiction writing (and this is something I learned directly from having a best friend who happens to write nonfiction for a living), the stories we told were snapshots of our experiences. So there's this other part of me that wants to mix up the trip posts with stories of our newest adventure here in Boston. You know, ease the transition and all. So this post is not about Southeast Asia, or the trials and tribulations in Delhi, but about our newest home-of-the-moment: Boston.

None of you who read this and actually know us will be surprised to learn that our apartment is still in a state of total disrepair. So even though we actually pay rent for our apartment, and even though we're staying here for more than a few nights, it still feels a lot like we're in a state of transition. And if there's one positive thing to draw from being in a state of transition, it's the fact that I still feel like Boston is on loan to us, that we're hanging out in someone else's home. This may not seem like a good thing. And indeed, as a woman who doesn't have the easiest time adjusting to new cities, it's not always easy. But at times it gives me the opportunity to view this place as just another place, a stop along the way to somewhere called home.

Most of the people I've met who have grown up in Boston love it here. And they don't love it like some people really love, say, mint-chocolate-chip ice cream. No, they love Boston like they love their own beating heart. Without Boston, these people would cease to exist. Their blood would halt in their veins, flowing on a course to nowhere. They would collapse. And the words on their lips in their last moment would be, "Go Sox!" In my long experience with cities, I've found that you cannot dislike a city like that. It's just not possible. Cities like that, cities where the heart and soul of the city really IS the people who live there, just have a way of worming their way into your heart. Pittsburgh occasionally held that charm for me. But it always kept me at arm's length, never wanted to welcome me in to the warmth of its steel buildings. But Boston is the opposite. It holds out its arms, a Sox cap in one hand, something greasy in the other, and says, "come on in, hang out here for a while. Eat some good food. Watch some good baseball. Hate the winters, love the summers." Except that it doesn't really say that, because, c'mon, it's NEW ENGLAND. So instead it stands there looking equal parts threatening, disgruntled, and loving.

One of the interesting things about this place is that before I got here I saw it as a bastion of homogeneity. Except that now that I'm here, I do see more diversity than I expected. It's not everywhere, and it seems like things are often sort of begrudgingly progressive, but there are bits and pieces of change happening all around. And there's a pretty core group of people doing amazingly good work here. The kind of work that makes you stand up and notice it, that kind of good work. It's the kind of work that helps to reinforce my decision to do public sector work here. I think that when you're fighting the good fight, it helps to know that you're not flying solo on the battlefield.

Drivers get a bad rap around here. And not without good reason. Boston drivers are no worse than drivers in any other city. Except, of course, that they are. The traffic here is fine, better than DC, better than Philadelphia. But the drivers? They're ridiculous. Even though the Commonwealth has a pedestrian law that every pedestrian hopes to see strictly enforced, as soon as that pedestrian hops behind the wheel of their car, they'll run you down the moment you take your big toe off the curb and peer gingerly in the direction of the crosswalk. By way of example, I will tell you that before we moved here, Matt never once used the horn in our car. In fact, he didn't even know where it was. He still doesn't. But that hasn't stopped him from pounding his fist on the steering wheel in frustration, hoping to make SOMETHING emit from our car. I, of course, find this kind of driving exhilarating. Every trip to the grocery store is an exciting game of chance. There's also that added bonus to my car trips of ending up halfway-to-Concord every time I get in the car. But whatever. Concord is really pretty. And I know for sure now that it's west of where I live.

I spend most of my days studying for the Bar exam, reminding myself that the pass rate is high, that I've done this once before, and that I deserve an ice cream cone for working so hard. Because of my oh-so-diligent study schedule, I haven't seen as much of the city as I'd like to. I'll admit to being a teeny bit sight-seeing weary, to boot. But in good time, I will walk authoritatively around Quincy Market, smiling in the general direction of the tourists who are amazed and awed by this birthplace of American history. "Yes," I will think to myself, "this is Boston. Welcome to my city. Go Sox."

A Note About Receipts

2008-06-22T23:25:00.001-04:00

Written in India

This post is long overdue. It's a bit geeky, but it's still worthwhile. More importantly, it's short. Asia does not appear to have the same powerful privacy lobby that we have in the States. How do I know that? Because when we got our first ATM receipt, I looked down and noticed my credit card number. The whole thing. No X's politely obfuscating the digits of the account number. Then we noticed it again when we paid for Starbucks with a credit card in the airport -- our whole credit card number right there, for anyone to copy down. Clearly, we can't just throw them away. We spent about 20 minutes one day tearing them into tiny and tinier shreds. And then we just started saving them to throw away or shred when we get to Lizzi's Dad's house in Philadelphia. A moment of brilliance came when Chris and Amanda suggested that we burn them. Um, DUH. Except that we never stay in smoking rooms, so for the time being at least, they're still cluttering up the bottoms of our packs, waiting for the day when they meet their fateful end in a shredder. The point behind all of this is to say that even though identity theft in the US is on the rise, it's really easy to do from India. Let us know if you need some quick cash and we'll hang out by an ATM and send you some receipts!

Nepali Horticulture

2008-05-31T23:08:00.002-04:00

Ok, so this stuff really was everywhere in Kathmandu Valley, growing alongside the road, between buildings, everywhere. Even though it's not my cup of tea, it was funny to watch the guys try to replant this stuff everywhere they could. Nevertheless, the farmers in the village saw these plants as nothing but a nuisance. They would pull them up by the roots and throw them on the nearest open garbage fire. Huh.

Checking In

2008-05-23T10:59:00.003-04:00

We have been home for exactly 50 days. In that time we have lost three apartments and found one. We have attended a funeral and two graduations. We have put about 2000 miles on our car, and spent about that much in gas. One of us started a new job, one of us applied for several. We made a commitment to eat organic, to find comfort in faith, to spend more time together. In short, it's been an eventful 50 days. But it has also been an adjustment. Because for all that has happened in the past 50 days, it is incredibly, unbelievably, undeniably different than all that occurred in the 50 days before these 50 days.

Before we went on the trip, I knew that there was a chance that a trip like that could really change us. But I feared that it would change us in mostly negative ways. I worried that we would grow really tired of each other and that the trip would make us want to spend as much time apart as possible. I worried that it would be nearly impossible to integrate into my former life upon my return. I worried that I would resent Boston for not being somewhere as exciting as Bangkok. Um, I'm a worrier. But as it turns out, some of my fears were well-founded, and others of them were totally unfounded.

One of the things I have noticed over the course of the past 50 days is that I look at the world as though I'm wearing different glasses. By way of example, we went to hear Jane Goodall give a lecture a few weeks ago. Before the trip, I would have heard what she was saying, would have reflected upon her words as the true message of an incredible woman, but I would have walked away thinking that I do enough to make the world a better place without worrying about chimpanzees in Africa. For the most part, I still believe this about myself. But while I was listening to her lecture, I also found myself thinking that I DO care about chimpanzees in Africa, that I have opinions, STRONG opinions, about the effects of global warming, and that while I believe I do a lot to make the world a better place without occupying my mind with thoughts of chimpanzees in Africa, I enjoy being someone who can stop to think about chimpanzees in Africa.

Just this past weekend, as we were listening to various graduation speakers remind us to follow our passions or risk living an empty life, I found that I wasn't sitting there thinking of all of the things I have yet to do with my life, rather, I was sitting there thinking about what I have already done. I felt proud that we listened to our hearts and bought those plane tickets, that I have decided to listen to my heart and follow it to a career in the public sector, that I realize just how good my life is.

In a way, coming home has helped me to see what an incredible place this was to leave behind for a while. In this new city of ours, I literally have every opportunity at my very fingertips. And I am in a place, a good place, where I feel grateful and excited about that opportunity.

I am very fortunate to have a few people in my life who understand exactly what it is that I am feeling these days. They write me encouraging emails to remind me that the adjustment will get easier. They tell me that I'll eventually get used to living two lives, the one here that I'm actually living, and the one I might be living if I was in, say, Nepal. They say that I will grow accustomed to having two simultaneous conversations, the one I'm having with whomever I'm speaking with, and the one I'm having in my mind about whatever is going on in the wide world. I have every reason to believe that these people are right, that I will get used to this new person that I have become.

I also think that as I pursue my place in Boston, as I find where it is that I belong here, there will be a part of me that might never get used to those feelings, that might never get used to the fact that I was lucky enough to follow my passions to places farther east than here, that I am lucky enough to hear a heartfelt tale about chimpanzees and feel that I can actually do something to make their lives better, that I am lucky enough to be living that moment where I realized that to change the world, all you need to do is to positively affect just one single soul.

Checking Out

2008-05-21T23:21:00.003-04:00

As we jetted off to my graduation this past weekend, I finally felt relieved. Not that I was culminating a difficult chapter of our life, even though there was a touch of that mixed in. No, I was relieved because that morning we finally checked out of the hotel we've been living in since the beginning of April. Yes, we finally have an apartment that we love and we are excited to call home.

Think of this: we checked out of our hotel here in Boston EXACTLY six months after we moved out of our apartment in Pittsburgh. If that's not auspicious, I don't know what is.

By the Numbers

2008-05-10T13:52:00.007-04:00

Because I'm a complete dork, when it comes to reflecting on our trip, I try to capture things in terms of numbers. Because, to me, numbers make sense. Even though one of the things that I discovered on the trip is that I like people too. So, yeah, people and numbers, they are what makes me happy. We've writing so far about the people, but I can't let that go unabated any longer without paying my own homage to the actuarial side of our adventure. Here is a glimpse of our trip broken down by the numbers.

Time
Days: 108 days
Time zones encountered: 4
Longest lag (difference between current time zone and Eastern Time): 13 hours (Hong Kong, Dec 2007)
Shortest lag: 9.5 hours (India, Feb-Mar 2008)

Travel
Countries Visited: 8
Hotels/Guesthouses/Home Stays: 37 (that's a new place to call home every 2.92 days)
Total Distance Covered (includes one-way, long-haul travel, not local tuk-tuks, taxis, trains, subways, or buses): 28,306.76 miles (262.1 miles per day or about 1.14 times around the Earth)
Air Miles: 24,876.98 miles
Land Miles: 3,210.79 miles
Sea Miles: 218.99 miles

Photos
Number of Cameras Taken: 2
Total Number of Photos: 5,491 (that's 51 photos per day, folks! It's also the red line on the graph below)

I came up with a little metric that I like to call "geophotodensity," and it's defined as the number of photos taken in each country. Nifty, huh? We took the most pictures in India, almost 2,000 (a whopping 1,985 to be exact). The least number of photos came from the US the day before we left (we took 9 snaps then). But if you don't count those few shots, then China (only Hong Kong, really) is the biggest loser with only 61 photos taken.

Clearly there's a correlation between the number of photos taken and the number of days we spent in a particular country. If you're interested (I know I was), the correlation factor between those two data sets is 0.99. In other words, the longer we stayed, the more pictures we took. I used Excel, but I think a 4-year-old could have reasoned through that bit of intuition.

I normalized the number of photos taken in each country by the number of days we spent in the country to achieve some measure of how interesting we found each country. Although we took the most pictures in India, by this measure we thought Cambodia was far more interesting. Hm.

There's more analysis to do, particularly on the financial side. I'm really curious to see exactly how close we came to our budget. But this reflection took almost a month to collect the data and get the graphs just right, so we'll see when/if that bit of reflection ever sees the light of day. For now, enjoy the graphs and pie charts.

Home without a Home

2008-04-21T11:11:00.002-04:00

We've been back in the country for a little over two weeks now, and while I can confidently report that we are finally adjusted to THIS time zone (read: we are no longer waking up at 6am thinking about where to go for dinner and drinks, as opposed to waking up and thinking about what we'll eat for breakfast like normal people do), we're still not completely adjusted to the...I don't know...the HOMEness of being home.

Basically, not a whole lot has changed since Matt wrote that last post, except for the fact that I can now turn one sentence into an entire paragraph like I just did.

Boston has been less than welcoming to us. In the 10 days since we started looking for an apartment in this crazy town, we have seen forty different apartments. Yes, you read that correctly. Forty. Apartments. Which, for the record, is more apartments than we've ever seen in our long history of looking for apartments. Combined. So we still have yet to find a home, but we're reluctant to settle for anything less than something that feels like it should be home. Maybe that means we're picky. I think it means that we decided that we're ready to set down some roots and dammit, we want to set them down somewhere where we're sure they should be set down!

One of the strangest things about coming back from our trip has been that there's a part of me that feels like we never left at all, that we tesseracted through time and here we are again, having experienced a lifetime of experiences that we can't really talk about because we were the only two people there. On the other hand, it feels like we were gone FOREVER and that now that we're back, we have to re-figure out who we are and where we fit. I used to feel this way about my parents every summer after I came home from camp. It was as though I'd just experienced this amazing thing, totally separate from my life as their daughter, and I just couldn't explain it to them in a way that made sense to any of us. Of course, these feelings would usually end in a loud screaming fight sometime around the first week of school, and I'd pound up the stairs to my room, crying and yelling something along the lines of, "you just don't underSTAND meeee!" This is not really an option right now. Especially because running up the steps and screaming at the hotel we're staying in would probably just get us kicked out. But also because this time, at least, Matt and I went through this experience together, so I do get to feel like someone really does understand me.

Not a day has gone by since we've been home that I haven't pictured Sangita's sweet little face smiling up at me from the floor of the orphanage classroom, or thought of the serenity I felt while standing awestruck under the reclining buddha. But when I dwell on these things too hard, when I picture myself turning from Sangita's face and accepting a plate of daal bhatt from Didi, or walking out of Wat Pho towards the madness of the Bangkok city streets, my heart does a little flip-flop and it really does actually hurt a little bit.

Over the past few years, I have come to realize that although I am more willing to talk about my emotions and my feelings than just about anyone I know, I am reluctant to talk about the thoughts that I hold most dear, the precious thoughts that no one thinks to ask me about because they're so used to me just talking all the time about whatever is on my mind. It's a strange thing to realize that even though most of the people who know you would describe you as an "open book," there are times when you feel more private than even your most emotionally-quiet friends. Which I think is the reason that I haven't posted anything since we've been home. When we were gone, the blog was a way for me to connect my life to the people who usually hear about my life all the time. Now that we're home, I don't know where to begin with the stories about how my life was without them for the past few months. So instead I've remained quiet about it all, or at least quieter than my mind feels, trying to blend back into the life I kind of left behind for a little while, trying to feel positive about the fact that we're still more-or-less homeless.

Matt thinks that we'll both feel worlds better when we find a place to move to, when we're more settled into our lives in Boston. I really hope he's right, because it's definitely surprised me that I felt more settled in cities where the only words I could say were "hello" and "thank you" than I do in a place that's supposed to be home.

Culture Shock

2008-04-10T10:12:00.006-04:00

We've been back in the States for a little over a week, and although "home" does not properly connote our current living situation, it's good to be home. As we've caught up with friends and family, they've peppered us with questions and requests for more pictures, but even we've noticed that every sentence we speak seems to start with "When we were in [fill in the country]..." However, the one question that keeps popping up, and we've heard it no less than 10 times in the past week is: Have you adjusted to being home?

The answer to that question is a little convoluted. First, let's just say that we are slowly recovering from our jet lag, so I can safely say that we have adjusted to the difference in time zone. But here are a few ways in which neither of us has still quite overcome the shock of re-entering our lives.

Recoiling in horror that I just rinsed my toothbrush with tap water
Driving down the road and thinking that I'm supposed to be on the other side of the road
Toilet paper is abundant and readily available, like it grows on trees or something!
Washing and then eating fresh fruit and vegetables
No longer needing to grunt and point to communicate

Before we left Asia, we had talked a lot about what to expect when we got home. Would we experience culture shock? Or would it be a seamless transition back into American pop culture? I don't know if I can adequately answer either question right now. But I do know that when we were in Nepal, it wasn't this hard to find an apartment.

Safe and Sound

2008-04-04T13:07:00.003-04:00

Written and Posted from Philadelphia, PA, USA

We're home! We're really home! Sort of. Because right now, we don't have an actual home, per se. Which means we're actually homeLESS. But we're in Philly, staying at my Dad's home! And in a few days, we'll be in our new home! in a hotel in Boston!

Our flight was totally uneventful, except for the fact that it gave us the opportunity to watch movies and use clean bathrooms (yes, I'm talking about airplane bathrooms and yes, I know how ironic this is). We got in exactly on time and spent last night boring my dad with details about the trip that are probably only interesting to us. But he was a good sport and played along because I think he's happy that we're home! and safe and sound. In case you hadn't noticed, the word "home"! will be followed by an exclamation point for the duration of this post.

We will be spending the next few days trying to get over our jetlag and eating the food that we missed. It's 1:15am in Hong Kong right now and my body can't quite understand why I'm not out somewhere drinking a beer at this late hour. I'm trying to convince it that it really wants to eat a corned beef sandwich from Barson's instead. It is not complaining.

We can't wait to see you guys soon! But for now, we wanted you to know that we made it here in one piece, and that we're home!

...Come Home for Love

2008-04-02T11:28:00.005-04:00

Written and Posted from Hong Kong

Exactly one hundred and eight days ago, we sat in a tiny little hotel room somewhere close to JFK and wrote the post that preceded this journey by an evening and a long-ass plane ride. I am writing to you now from a tiny little hotel room in Hong Kong, about to spend another 16 hours on a plane to get back home.

There are a lot of reasons that we decided to take this journey. At least, I think there were a lot of reasons that we decided to take it. Now it just seems like we decided to take a journey so that we could see what there was to see, and now we have seen some of it, and we are coming home, where we will stay until we decide to take another journey again. This is enough of a reason to me now. I have thought about this post almost since the day that we left on our trip, because I am the type of person who thinks of the ending while we're just at the beginning, and I am not likely to become a different type of person any time soon, try as I might. I thought I would be able to say something profound, like tell you some kind of story about what I learned about myself on this trip. But what I learned is, of course, something I've known for a long time, a mantra that some of you are probably so sick of: you take yourself wherever you go. But see, sometimes you get to go to really cool places. And when you do, and you're able to appreciate the coolness of the places while you're actually in them, well then the self that you've taken along with you is one lucky girl.

I will share with you this one thought that I can't get out of my mind, because it seems appropriate, given the title of this post. I don't know where the original quote came from, but the more that I think about it, the more I think that the idea that you go out for adventure and come home for love seems...oversimplified to me. Because I went out for adventure and managed to find love all around me, everywhere I looked, particularly when I looked to the man standing next to me. And I'm coming home for love, but also for an adventure in Boston that I'm really just really really excited about. Basically, over the course of the past three months I've concluded that love and adventure are often the same thing, that you can go out to experience the world, or you can have an adventure all by yourself, amidst the comforts of your hometown. I wish I could explain to you guys why this means so much to me, but I can't seem to get the words right so I'll just tell you that all of you are part of the adventure that I'm so excited to get home to, and all of you are part of the love that I was sad and nervous to leave behind for three months. But in the end, it was your adventurous spirits who helped to motivate me to find a way for us to take this trip, and as usual, I took your love right along with me. Thanks for that.

I'll stop with the philosophy long enough to tell you that we'll be in New York tomorrow by 2pm, (even though we leave Hong Kong tomorrow at 10am). And I'll also tell you that this isn't the very last post for this blog, because there are still some trip stories to tell you, and tons of pictures to put up, and unnecessary advice about traveling that we want to share with you, and oh yeah, that adventure we're about to start in Boston!

So thanks for following along on this journey, for reading this blog and supporting us, and letting us complain to you about so many things. Thanks for dealing with the fact that we didn't always have a fast enough internet connection to give you pictures, or even a post. Thanks for offering your comments and your suggestions and special e-birthday wishes to Matt. If you don't hear from us for a couple of days, it's because we're too busy brushing our teeth with water FROM THE TAP, walking into public restrooms just because there's toilet paper there, and stuffing our faces with meals that involve neither rice nor curry nor lentils. See you at Vino's!

Remember When We Ate Pudding for Dinner?

2008-04-02T11:03:00.003-04:00

Posted from Hong Kong, China

When I first met Alan almost 8 years ago, we had an awkward lunch with another lieutenant at the Chinese restaurant which would come to be known as "Chickenbutt North" a few years later. Later that day, he showed up at the house I was staying at and crashed on the couch for 10 days. Then he was put up in the room next to me in Biloxi. And for the next few years, not counting deployments and visits from girlfriends, we were nearly inseparable.

Since those early days, it's been a few years and a few thousand miles. Alan lives in Germany, and I keep moving from state to state, as if I'd never left the Air Force. We stay in touch, but not nearly as much as we should. But then again, as soon as we reconnect, it's like no time has passed at all.

The other night Lizzi and I were watching an episode of Friends, one in which Monica and Chandler are still keeping their relationship a secret. Monica comes over to Chandler and Joey's apartment in the middle of the night for a bit of nooky. Of course, Joey wakes up and interrupts them. They play it off by telling him that it's actually 9AM instead of 3AM. And Joey heads off to the bathroom to wash up, where he promptly falls asleep with a toothbrush in his mouth.

I'm not saying that Alan and I have shared any moments similar to this one, but when I saw it, I immediately thought of him. Because Alan is the Joey to my Chandler, the Watson to my Holmes, the Barney to my Fred. He's a wonderful guy with a huge heart. So on his 30th birthday I wanted him to know that I was thinking of him in Nepal. And even though we are continents apart and I won't see him again until this winter, I couldn't be happier that we pushed through that awkward lunch and the 10 cramped days at Packler's house. I am honored to count him among my best friends.

Alan, Happy 30th Birthday!!

A Katybeck Birthday, A Few Days Late

2008-04-01T12:49:00.001-04:00

Written and Posted in Hong Kong

I met Katy when she was an 18-year-old freshman in college. She lived in E Tower in Morewood Gardens and I was an RA just a few floors up from her floor. To say that I met her that year is sort of not true, because I didn't meet her so much as I heard about her. She was a co-RA's favorite resident, and she became a sort of model-resident in our weekly RA meetings. Whenever anyone would do something really stupid, like that time my resident accidentally lit a cardboard box on fire in her room, one of us would turn to the other and say, "Katy wouldn't do that." She wouldn't.

The first thing I noticed about Katy when I DID actually meet her the following year was that she had the shiniest, straightest, brownest hair of anyone I'd ever met. I also noticed that her eyes got really wide just before she was about to burst out laughing, and that there was a piece of construction paper tacked to the wall near her desk with what seemed like hundreds of fortune-cookie fortunes tacked to it, the words "IN BED!" scrawled on the construction paper.

For many years, Katy remained something of an enigma to me. She's not the easiest person for me to read because we're different in so many ways. But there are times when Katy has balanced me out, been different than me in the way that I need a good friend to be different than me. And she has always, always, always loved Matt, and the quiet and calm part of her that completely and totally understands him is the quiet and calm part of her that I get, that isn't even a little bit enigmatic to me.

In the past two years, Katy did something that very few people do: she followed a dream and went back to school. She gave up a big apartment, a good-paying job she didn't really enjoy, and a city she'd called home for five years, and moved to Rhode Island to go to art school. If you don't think this is brave, then you should see the pictures of her studio, because she practically lives there. I've known Katy for about 10 years now, and I'd venture to guess that on an average day, she doesn't see herself as an inspiration to others. But for her 29th birthday, I'd like her to know that I think she's braver than she gives herself credit for, that I think she is an incredibly talented artist, and that I'm okay with not always being able to read her because I feel really lucky to have her in my life.

Daal Bhatt, American Style

2008-04-01T00:09:00.000-04:00

Written and Posted from Hong Kong

I'm sitting upstairs surrounded by 7 happy babies, watching Aladdin for the hundredth time in a week, humming along to that song where Aladdin becomes Prince Ali and rides through the town on the monkey-turned-elephant. I look up in time to see the two directors of the volunteer program peering into the room, asking if they can talk to me for a minute. Flashback to that moment as a babysitter when I worried that maybe Mrs. Brenner KNEW that I didn't make her cute little boys brush their teeth before putting them to bed and THAT'S what she wanted to talk to me about. Except that no, she just wanted to give me a present for my 13th birthday (a candle! phew!). And this time, the directors just wanted nothing more than for me to cook a western meal for 25 people that night, people who included the babies in the room, babies who had, until that night, eaten a diet exclusively consisting of rice and daal. Why oh why didn't they just have a stupid candle for me?!

I settled on spaghetti and meatballs, a salad without lettuce, bruschetta, and ice cream and cookies. Typical Nepalese kitchens don't have an oven, so anything that couldn't be cooked over an open flame was out. And I was cooking for at least 25 people, so I needed big quantities. Big quantities at affordable prices, since we were talking about a meal that was being paid for by people who build orphanages and schools and finance micro-credit loans for a living. Except that it's impossible to cook western food in Nepal for affordable prices, especially if you want to make such exotic things as spaghetti! The total bill came to about $90, which is CRAZY-high by Nepalese standards. Then again, I ended up feeding about 35 people, which is CRAZY-lot of people on short notice, even by my standards.

The meatballs were a buff-chicken mix. Not buff as in, "hey, that shirt makes you look really buff" but buff as in water buffalo. Because in places where the cow is holy, the water buffalo is a tasty treat. The spaghetti didn't turn out quite right because the Nepalese household in charge of cooking the spaghetti didn't understand that you don't turn the water OFF once it boils and the pasta goes in (like you'd do with, say, RICE), but that you boil the pasta right there, IN the boiling water (oh the insanity!). The meatballs (all 70 of them) took forever to make because we could only cook 5 at a time in this teeny tiny little pan. But the bruschetta was some of the best that I've ever made, if I do say so myself, and the salad actually had real vinegar in it (and bonus!, it didn't make anyone sick, which is huge, considering it actually contained real raw vegetables).

The absolute highlight of the evening occurred when I walked into the kitchen at the orphanage and saw my Didi (Nepali for big sister) eating the entire meal in one big bowl -- spaghetti, sauce, meatballs, parmesan cheese, salad, bruschetta, all mixed together in an Italian-style jumble, complete with extra salt and a few chilies thrown in for flavor. She looked up at me from her bowl, spoon poised above what had essentially become a bowl of American-Italianized Daal Bhatt, and said, "ekdam mikto chaa!" which is Nepali for "very delicious!" I knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that she was totally and completely lying but I didn't care at all, not even one little bit, because half of the people who ate dinner that night had never even seen spaghetti, kind of like I'd never even seen daal bhaat before I started eating it twice a day, and there's just something about cooking your brother's birthday dinner (minus the cake) in a little town outside of Kathmandu, using a teeny tiny pan and one burner and no power, that is the kind of thing that makes you realize that the world isn't so big after all, and that sometimes home is only as far away as an overpriced jar of green olives and cooking dinner for an impromptu hodgepodge family.

I Didn't Climb Mount Everest But Touched It With My Heart

2008-03-31T12:16:00.002-04:00

Posted from Hong Kong, China

Yeah, that's Mount Everest. Un-freakin'-believable!

Taste of a New Generation

2008-03-26T22:18:00.004-04:00

Posted from Kathmandu, Nepal

Aside from our daily life in the orphanage, we've got our fingers in a few other pies. Last weekend we spent the night drinking and laughing in Thamel, the backpacker ghetto of Kathmandu. In the space of 30 minutes we met a bunch of kids who came to Kathmandu for its party scene and its easy access to hash as well as a group of climbers who were planning on tackling Everest in the coming week. Back in our village, VSN is building a school, and we have been given the task of painting the classrooms. So far, we've painted the alphabet and number line in one classroom, and I think we'll be finished with the other three rooms by the time we leave.

Last night, we had a big going-away dinner for a couple from The Netherlands, who are responsible for raising the funds necessary to run the orphanage. Just to give you an idea of how little money it takes to properly run a caring, clean orphanage, this couple raised $50,000, and that allowed VSN to buy the property, build the orphanage, and operate it for the next 2 years! Lizzi has more to say about the dinner itself :)

Other than all that, it's life as usual. We watch Aladdin every day with the kids. But they get no more than an hour into it before they have to go to school or the power goes out. So we start over from the beginning each day. I'm looking forward to the 16-hour flight home just so I can watch a different movie. Maybe one that doesn't have animated genies and monkeys.

Oh, one more thing. The village we live in is called Pepsicola. Yeah, as in, Pepsi, Michael Jackson and the taste of a new generation. Recently, Pepsi built a bottling plant in the undeveloped suburbs of Kathmandu, and the town that grew around it became known as Pepsicola. It still cracks me up to hear the bus-wallahs yelling " Baneshwor, Pepsicola, ..." as they careen through the city streets.

Namaste from Nepal!

2008-03-23T23:11:00.002-04:00

Posted from Kathmandu, Nepal

We've been in Nepal for an entire week and it's one of those weeks that feels like a lifetime and a moment, at the same time. I know that there are some of you out there who are just dying to know what it's like for us over here, and in the next few paragraphs, I'm going to do my best to give you a mental picture. Briefly though, you should know that of all of the places we've been, of all of the experiences we've had in the past 3.5 months, of all of the things we've seen and done, Nepal is the best and most amazing.

As Matt said, life in Nepal is a lot calmer than life in India. Which is to say that there are still honking cars, cows in the road, power cuts, touts, undrinkable water, trash in the fields, and tons of tourists, but there are just way fewer of all of those things. It doesn't hurt that Kathmandu is in a valley, surrounded by these beautiful mountains that everyone around here refers to as hills. They're mountains to me! We're hoping to catch a plane to check out some of those really famous peaks that are about 100 km from here this weekend. (And Andy, we'll be in a plane the whole time, so we shouldn't need the Diamox!)

We're slowly but surely getting used to the power cuts and the repitious meals. But seriously people, daal bhaat really IS good. And for the vegan that reads this website: I am learning how to make it because it is seriously the most nutritious complete meal I have ever eaten. While we're talking about food, I should take a moment to tell you about mo:mo. They're these little dumplings that look like something you get at a chinese restaurant, but they're just...BETTER. Also vegan-able. They are delicious with a glass or three of Everest Beer. Yes, people, Everest Beer.

The majority of our time, at least, the part of our day that takes the most energy, is spent with the seven little reasons that it's going to be so hard to leave this amazing place.

Ramesh is 8 and he is the newest addition to the orphanage. All of his living relatives died and kind neighbors brought him to VSN when they found him living on the street. He has never been to school. He eats like he might not get another meal. But at the end of every day, when he's tired and doesn't want to admit it, he likes to curl up in Matt's lap. And just yesterday, he read me an entire alphabet's full of words, in English!

Sangita is the leader of the group. She's 7-and-a-half and she's the kind where the half is really, really important. She reminds me of a woman I used to work with in Maine, because she's got this big belly laugh that just invites your own laughter, even when you have no idea what's funny. She loves, like absolutely LOVES, to sing and dance. The bedtime ritual includes a nightly performance by Sangita. I plan to take a video of it to share with you guys who want to have your heart smitten with love for this sweet little girl.

Sujan and Poonam are siblings. Sujan is 7 and he's just got so much energy that he occasionally needs to let it out by doing gymnastics off of his bunk bed and splitting his head open right before bedtime. True story. Remind me to tell you about that time I was in Nepal and this kid cracked his head open and needed 5 stitches and there was no anesthesia and a pair of rusty scissors. Sujan is the kind of kid whose affection you sort of have to win. But once you win it, every so often you'll look over at him and catch him looking at you and winking and smiling this shy little smile and you just want to scoop him up and kiss his devilish little cheeks. Poonam is absolutely the smiliest kid I've ever met. Except that she also seems to know the power of her tears and will cry when she's not getting her way. I totally identify with her, because I remember being 5 and feeling sad enough to wail about nothing at all. She also feels a really strong connection with Matt and will walk up to him about 5 or 6 times a day just to grin and run away.

Vijay is the most ticklish of the group. He's also 5 and is a very, very happy kid. He's so ticklish that you can stand about a foot away from him, wiggle your finger in his general direction, and watch him fall to the floor, laughing and gasping for air. Because he's quiet and very unassuming, I tend to forget that he's there. But then he'll run up to me with his notebook in his hand, grinning and saying my name (which sounds a lot like "Lijjy" over here) and screaming, "tickle, tickle, tickle!"

Vivek and Vikesh are also siblings. Vivek is 4 and Vikesh is 2 and they're both just so cute that I have to remind myself not to hold them all the time. vivek is the type of kid who would probably be considered ADD at home, but here he's just got a ton of energy, is surrounded by kids twice his age, and has already experienced a life that's harder than most of us will ever dare to have nightmares about. Even in the week that we've been here, he's calmed down more, which could partly be due to the fact that he and his brother were finally united last week. Vikesh is just a little smooshy thing, always wanting to be carried, trotting around behind the older kids just in case they remember him and want to play with him.

Before we came here and spent this time with these kids, I knew that kids could be amazing and inspiring. I knew that they could make you sit back and take stock of your life and wonder what on earth you were doing before they came along. I knew that someday, when the time is right, I would want to come to a country a lot like Nepal and adopt a kid a lot like any of the kids at this orphanage. Here's what I didn't know: I didn't know that you could fall in love with a kid in an instant. I didn't know that loving a child is probably one of the easiest things to do, even when that child isn't yours, and can only say "Hello, how are you I am fine thank you" in your language. I didn't know that an orphanage could be a happy place, filled with laughter and songs and kids who are healthy and sweet and amazing. I also didn't know that despite the happiness of the New Life Children's Home, that once a day a kid like Sangita walks over to the corner, and looks out at the room with an expression on her face that spells the sadness of a thousand lost experiences. I didn't know that a kid like Ramesh would walk up and tell me that he didn't have a mother and he didn't have a father, but that he would really like both, please. I knew that being here would plant a teeny tiny seed of change in me, in the way I think about the world and the hungry and lonely children who live in it. I just didn't expect it to happen so quickly.

We've got just under a week left in this amazing little corner of the world. That's 13 meals of daal bhaat, at least three plates of mo:mo, heaps of Everest Beer, and as many hugs and kisses and tickles as I can fit into the next 6 days.

We're Still Here

2008-03-23T22:25:00.000-04:00

Posted from Kathmandu, Nepal

Well, we arrived in Kathmandu with only minor hassle. The plane was 2 hours late. Then, there was no power in the Kathmandu airport, so we couldn't get cash to pay our visa fees. And, finally, our ride wasn't there to pick us up. Pretty typical for us, actually.

Here we are. In Nepal! If I wasn't actually sitting here right now, I don't think I would believe that I was in Nepal. It's a far cry from India, and an even farther cry from home. But it's quiet, and the people are exceptionally friendly. The most noticeable thing about Nepal is how quiet it is compared to India. When we got off the plane, that was the first thing Lizzi noticed. However, I was so used to the constant, ear-splitting level of background noise in India, that I didn't notice the quiet until we'd arrived at our volunteer site. Yeah, it's quiet here.

There are a few things about Nepal aside from the quiet that take a little getting used to. Meals are served twice a day. In fact, it's very nearly the same meal that is served twice a day. It's call daal bhat, which means rice with lentil soup. In fact, it's really rice, lentils, and some type of vegetable curry. If we weren't living in an orphanage with little kids, the daal bhat would also include some spicy pickle. Daal bhat is good, really good, in fact. But I think at the end of two weeks, I'll be ready for something new to eat. Like a cheesesteak!

We also have to get used to the power cuts. The power is turned off in Kathmandu for 8 hours a day. Usually, they break it up, so it's not a single block of blackout time. Most nights the power is out from about 6PM till 9PM. Which is fine because everyone heads to bed at 9PM. And I mean everyone. We thought it was early just because we were staying in a orphanage, and the kids had an early bedtime. But we talked to some of the other volunteers, who are staying with host families, and they also remarked how their families went to bed at 9PM too.

Going to bed at 9PM is fine when you are getting up every morning at 6AM. Yep, that's 6AM in the morning! I haven't voluntarily woken up at 6AM in years. But that's the way it goes here. Up at 6AM, tea at 7AM, daal bhaat at 9AM, off to school/work at 10AM, come home at 6PM, daal bhaat again at 8PM, and then to bed at 9PM. Repeat. It's simple, and it gets the job done, but again I think I'll be ready for a change when we leave.

There's a lot more to say about what we're doing here, which is fantastic work! And all that we're learning -- we're learning to speak Nepali! But it's time for daal bhat #1.

The Next Two Weeks

2008-03-16T15:59:00.002-04:00

Posted from Delhi, India

We realized the other day that we haven't told most of you out there who are reading this blog (hello to the three people who read this blog!) that for the next two weeks, we will be volunteering in Nepal. We're not really sure what we'll be doing, but we're pretty sure we'll be somewhere near Kathmandu and that we'll be connected to an orphanage. We might even get to see those famous mountains. We'll be working with this organization, and from my limited communication with them, they seem pretty cool. So wish us luck! And in the meantime, don't believe everything you read in the paper about Nepal. Our biggest concern is that we're going to freeze our butts off! Think warm thoughts.

This Is India

2008-03-16T11:23:00.002-04:00

Written in New Delhi, India

In one scene in the movie Blood Diamond, Leonardo DiCaprio's character says in response to an American journalist grilling him on the brutality and constant power struggles fueled by the contraband diamond trade, "T.I.A." The journalist clarified, "This is Africa." In those three letters, DiCaprio's character sums up hundreds, if not thousands, of years of iniquity, tribalism, poverty, and war. India lacks the violent tribal warfare and a brutal history of tyrants, dictators, and oppressors, but over the course of the past month, Lizzi and I have looked at each other more than a few times and said, "T.I.I." This Is India.

In Kerala, T.I.I. came to mean everything moves at its own pace. There's no rushing it or slowing it down. However, in the North, T.I.I. has taken on an entirely new meaning. This new meaning is like one of those words in the dictionary that has five or six possible definitions. Kind of like something in yiddish.

Our day started where we left off yesterday (the first time we were in Delhi). We'd hired a rickshaw around 4:00PM to take us to see Huyamen's Tomb. We got a little way down the road before the driver pulled over and said that we could see a few other tombs and monuments. They were all things we wanted to see, but it was late, and most sights here close at sunset. He assured us that we could see it all; they were all on the way. So we agreed on a price, and off we went. Of course, he took us to the sight furthest away (the one he suggested), almost an hour. We sprinted through ruins, snapping pictures, thoroughly enjoying ourselves. We hopped back into the rickshaw and we headed to the next place (again, one that he wanted us to see). It was closed. So was the next one, and the next one. In fact, we didn't get to see the one place we wanted to. Then he took us to a "government" tourist office, so we could book a trip to Rajasthan (which we want to do). Of course, all day he'd been telling us that he would take us to the government tourism office, and we pressed him that we wanted the government tourism office. Nope, he took us to a private tour operator, who quoted us an astronomical price. We turned it down. We got back in the rickshaw, and by this time everything was closed. This is India.

Of course, we still needed to get around the next day to see what we hadn't seen. We negotiated the three sights we wanted to see for the same price as we had just paid. He picked us up at the appointed time. No issues there. We got to the mosque. We made it to the Red Fort. We made it to Huyamen's Tomb. We loved the Tomb and spent 2.5 hours there taking pictures and walking around the amazingly well-kept grounds. When we got back to our rickshaw, it was 4:30 and our rickshaw driver scolded us for taking so long to see something that he believed to look exactly like the Taj Mahal (incidentally, he's totally and completely wrong). We had him take us back to our hotel so we could catch a train to Agra, and when we gave him the agreed fee, plus a 100 rupee tip, he balked at us, asking for more money. "But it was the price we agreed upon!" we argued. But he clarified that he'd agreed to take us around for half of the day, and as it was 4:45, we should pay him more. In fact, he wanted to take us to seven different sites, all day, at our agreed-upon price. Knowing that we tend to take longer at the dorky historical sites than most, we told him we'd pay him the same price, but that we only wanted to see three things. Same price. We walked away. This is India.

A quick check at the hotel desk and the travel desk revealed that although both advertised that they would book train tickets for guests, neither was going to help us procure train tickets to Agra. So a trip to the train station was required. We checked out of our room, hauled our bags over to a sketchy luggage storage place, and I headed off to the train station to get train tickets while Lizzi stayed behind to do some Internet work. On the way to the train station, I was fighting off touts left and right, rivaling Luke Skywalker in my skillz. At the entrance to the train station, the rickshaw drivers saw me before I could steady my light saber, and they immediately tried to direct me to a special stand for foreigners. They pointed to a giant blue sign that said "GOVT INDIA" in a building across the street with blacked-out windows. But the sign on the train station clearly read, "International Travelers, Please Book Here" so I ignored the rickshaw drivers and walked in. Or, tried to walk in. Before I could, a man grabbed me by the arm and asked me if I had a ticket. When I explained that I needed to book a ticket (duh, I'm at the train station), he told me that the sign was ineffective, as of 2007. He led me to a booking queue, grabbed a reservation form, told me to fill it out and take it across the street to GOVT INDIA. I thanked him, turned around, and went back to my initial destination. Or, tried to. Touttwo comes up and does the exact same thing. Different guy, same story. But instead of letting me walk back, he physically led me over to GOVT INDIA. So I walk up the stairs, remembering what the guy in the private tour office had told me about being up front about being a private office, and am immediately aware that I am not where I want to be. Nevertheless, I sit down in the chair and express my unending wish to get to Agra. My not-so-helpful new friend kindly informs me that the trains are full. Before he can sell me a $260 cab ride to Agra, I walk out. I walk back to our hotel, find Lizzi at the Internet cafe, explain the situation and tell her that we'll be staying in Delhi for another night, taking a $100 cab ride to Agra the next day, booked through our hotel's tour desk, who was now only too happy to help us. This. This is India, too.

It took four hours to get to Agra instead of the one-hour trip we were assured. T.I.I. But we checked into our hotel, grabbed our cameras, and made our way to the Taj Mahal, determined not to let the stress of the previous three days stop us from getting to our destination. The touts tried to make us pay them to get to the front of the line, but we held strong. T.I.I. We stood in interminably long lines (T.I.I.), said nothing when people cut in front of us (T.I.I) and walked through the turned-off metal detectors (T.I.I.). Once inside, we took a deep breath, walked through the south gate and got our very first glimpse of the Taj. There, in all of its glory, we looked at each other and thought the exact same thing: T.I.I.

Spice Box

2008-03-16T11:07:00.002-04:00

Written from Udaipur, Rajasthan, India
Posted from Delhi, India

Last night, after spending the day walking around the city palace, but before we went to see Octopussy, Matt and I took a cooking class. Together. I mean, Matt and I cook together all the time. But this was totally different, given that usually when we cook together, I take on the role of the Alpha cook, screaming at him to get me that spoon, no THAT spoon!, and generally being bossy in my domain. Over the years that we've lived together, I've gotten progessively better at sharing the kitchen, but I am a LOOONG way from winning the "Cooperative Cook of the Year" award. So I thought that taking a cooking class together would be interesting, especially as my previous forays into the realm of Indian cooking have turned out surprisingly poor results. It's not surprising because I consider myself such a good cook, but surprising because I want, SO badly, to be able to make Indian food. I am happy to be the first to report that no Weyants were harmed in the process of making the delicious Indian meal we ate last night!

This post is named, not for a B-minus porn flick, but for the cooking class we took. It is also the name of the ubiquitous metal box found in every Indian kitchen. It's a magic box because it contains all of the spices necessary to make a basic curry. And last night, for the first time since I lived with Tejal all those years ago and watched her pull delicious meals out of about 3 ingredients, I finally understood its importance.

Generally speaking, most Indian dishes have very few ingredients. And the spices seem to be the most important part of any meal. As we learned last night, the contents of a spice box include brown cumin, fennel seeds, brown mustard seeds, turmeric powder, coriander seed powder, red chili powder, and fenugreek seeds. Those spices, together with the ever-present garam masala; salt; pepper; black cardamom; and a paste made of onion, garlic, and ginger, form the backbone of almost every single Indian dish you have come to know and love. And here was where I had my Halleluyah! moment. Whenever I have tried to make an Indian dish, my hopes were always dashed at the first taste. I've added enough red chili powder and plenty of cumin. I even went out and bought the expensive garam masala. But I never knew why, if I followed the recipe to a T, my daal never tasted like Tejal's daal, my curries always lacked...SOMETHING. Last night I found the answer in just five words: BROWN mustard seeds and BLACK cardamom! NO WAY! Way. Over here in India, mustard seeds are not pukey yellow. They are brown. And cardamom is both green and black. When I tell you that yes, there certainly IS a difference in flavor, it's like trying emphasize the difference between, say, an 18-year-old Single Malt Scotch and that stuff on the bottom shelf of your liquor store that says, "Whisky" on the label. It's THAT different.

We started off the meal with a glass of chai. Chai is ubiquitous in India, synonymous with a handshake in the US. When someone offers you chai, you drink it. And you drink it every day. Twice a day. THREE times a day. It is sweet and milky and has a nice lingering little spice. It's a warming beverage, but even in the heat of India, it can cool you down. It's amazing stuff. And here I will give a shoutout to Matt, who donned his apron as directed by our (slightly intimidating) teacher and was the first student in the hotseat, making this most-important beverage for our entire class. It was delicious.

After the chai, we made Khadai Paneer, which is basically paneer (an unfermented cheese), green peppers, and onions in a tomato-based curry. Next came Malai Kofta, which are these fried potato balls in a cream sauce, which, even though they sound heavy, are ridiculously light and delicious. The base of the kofta formed the foundation ingredients for our vegetable cutlets (a potato-vegetable snack that, dare I say it, rival latkes in their yumminess). Then came another cup of tea (of the kashmiri saffron variety) and biryani, which is a rice dish made with a bunch of spices and that ever-delicious basmati rice. Finally, we learned how to make chapati, which is the bread that's actually most often eaten in Indian households (sorry Jules, I too wish that everyone ate Naan all the time), and we each got to take a turn at rolling out and cooking this simple bread.

We ate our dinner as though we hadn't spent the past two hours snacking on the outcomes of our cooking forays, and at the end of the meal, our teacher surprised us with some gulab jamun. If you haven't had it, go, RIGHT THIS MINUTE, to the Indian section of your grocery stores and buy some gulab jamun. It's the sweetest most delicious thing you'll ever eat. I promise. And if you don't like it, which a lot of people don't, because they are crazy and think it's too sweet, that's okay, because I will visit you and eat your leftovers for you.

Now I'm not crazy enough to think that I know how to cook Indian foods after one night in an upstairs kitchen in Udaipur. But I will say that I feel significantly less intimidated by my plethora of Indian cookbooks. Which is lucky for those of you guys living in the Boston area, and particularly for those of you in the Boston area who like Indian food! But the best part is that when I make said Indian food, I might just let Matt help.

Words to Live By

2008-03-16T09:40:00.002-04:00

Written and Posted from India

Moments before I walked down the aisle on my wedding day, fear gripped my heart and Maura, my beautiful Maura, gripped my wrist. Smiling into my face, her red-blonde curls making her look angelic, as always, she whispered something to me, earnestly. And then before I could even think, before I knew what was happening, the doors opened, my nearest and dearest sat, turned in their seats, staring at me. Halfway down that aisle, arm-in-arm with my dad, I realized what Maura had said to me. "Live the day!" she said. Live the day. And in that moment, at that very moment, I knew exactly what she meant. I knew that this day was only going to come once, and that unless I lived every single moment of it, I would let it slip through my fingers virtually unnoticed. At that moment of clear and uninterupted understanding, I cried and I grinned and I thought wonderful things about all of the people in that room who were watching me watch Matt. Those first moments of walking down the aisle are blurry, unclear, but from that one moment on, the rest of the day is like looking into a movie of my life, and if it had a color, it would be clear, clear beautiful crystal blue.

I am not the type of person who remembers what people say to me. Which is to say that I remember stories, I remember backgrounds and cousins and ex-boyfriends and piles of details about people's lives. I can't forget the stories and the details, even when I wish I could. But I rarely remember those precious pearls of wisdom that people have handed out to me over the years. It's frustrating that I don't remember them, especially because I'm certain that with the pearls I could have collected from my mother and grandmother alone, I would have quite a gorgeous strand by now. Instead, I am generally left with fragments, shards of wisdom, and whatever it is that I feel in my bones just by being who I am, genetically. Most of the time, my genetic wisdom serves me well. But every so often, someone whispers words to me, and they plant themselves in my brain in a way that's utterly different than what's in my DNA. Maura's words became a mantra for me. It is something I say to every bride before she walks down the aisle, particularly if I am lucky enough to be standing with her in those precious moments before a marriage is revealed. It is something I say to myself when I am practicing meditation or yoga. And sometimes it is something I say to myself when I need to pull myself back, reign myself in, when I need to be reminded to actually EXPERIENCE what it is that I'm experiencing. These are strong and precious words, which makes sense, because Maura is a strong and precious person.

Just a day before we left on our trip, I talked to Heather for the first time in months and months and months. Matt and I had a million errands to run that day, all of which we were running with my dad, and in his excitement and urgency to help us, he was impatient with the time I was spending on the phone. "This conversation is important," I told him, and "I wouldn't be talking on the phone right now if I didn't need to be talking on the phone right now." But in the end, his restlessness was contageous, and I told Heather that I needed to go and get on with that last day. "Remember the colors," she said as we were hanging up, "SEE all the colors." I promised her I would, and rushed off to buy those ever-important last minute items without which we surely wouldn't have been allowed on the plane.

And here I am now, with just 18 days left in this trip, and I feel saturated with color, full to the brim with colors I didn't know existed. Especially in the bizarre places where some of the colors exist, places like doorways, back alleys, cars, and dump trucks. There are the usual colors to be seen on clothes and jewelry and fruit. But it's the shock of the color, the color that catches me by surprise, that is the color I rush to soak in, to take in, to really SEE, just like Heather urged me to do. I think that she would be proud of me, that her inner artist is beaming with pride at her student, working so diligently to SEE everything that there is to see.

I am writing this post today because Maura has an upcoming birthday and because sometimes, on your birthday, it's nice to know that others take your words to heart so well that the words live inside their heart, just like you do. Before Maura whispered those words to me, I would have said that I do, actually, think of myself as a live-er of life, that I really DO live the day. But now I know that I wasn't quite right, that it was Maura who opened my eyes to HOW to live a day, an day, even a most extraordinary day. So on her birthday, I wanted her to know that because of her words, I was able to live Heather's words, and because of both of them, I get to experience India in particular but this whole trip in general, as though I just, for the first time, opened my eyes to the world, and my, what a lovely hue it has.

"What the f--- is the Internet?"

2008-03-16T09:19:00.003-04:00

Posted from Delhi, India

That's the question I've been asking myself for the past 3 months. In a world that grows smaller everyday, it's amazing how difficult it can be to find decent internet access. For starters, most of Asia seems to have at least DSL or point-to-point ISDN connections to the internet; however, these are incredibly slow (around 128 kbps, which is 20 times slower than your cable modem connection in the States, or twice as fast as dial-up, if you can remember what that was like). Still, they aren't as slow as the few dial-up internet cafes we've wandered into, and there have been a few of those. Don't even think about WiFi! We found WiFi all over Vietnam, but that was an anomaly; we hadn't found WiFi until then and haven't since.

Of course, even when we find a decent internet cafe, the computers inside are nearly ancient and running pirated copies of Windows 98. Or so many other travellers are also there that we might as well send email via carrier pigeon! Unfortunately, most web sites based in the U.S. assume that you are using have American broadband access, so when CNN tries to load three video ads, a Flash-based map of Democratic delegates, and over 200 tiny images for things like menus, it's easy to bring the entire cafe to a standstill. Needless to say, this makes it all the more difficult to publish pictures and keep up with the blog. There have been more than a few times when Lizzi and I will walk out of internet cafe, steaming with frustration because we can't even do something simple like check our email.

Part of this trip for me was to untangle myself from the daily addiction to email, the web, and everything it entails. But when it's been a week and I haven't checked my email, I get a little edgy. I know that's a sure sign of withdrawl and, hence, addiction, but I'm ok with it. At least I can step awat for little bits at a time. I will say that I am looking forward to ubiquitous WiFi and blazingly fast internet connections when we get home. In fact, I might need just a little quality time to get reacquainted with my internet.

PS: I will personally buy a gift from Nepal or Hong Kong for the first person who can correctly name the movie and character the title of this email comes from. Leave your answer in the comments, and using IMDB is cheating. Trust me, I will know :)

Zero Tolerance

2008-03-16T08:55:00.003-04:00

Posted from New Delhi, India

From the very beginning, we knew that getting a refreshing, frosty, adult beverage was unlikely in India. Between Hinduism and Islam, drinking isn't entirely smiled upon. In fact, whole cities are dry. But it's possible to find alcohol here and there. The local beer is Kingfisher, and it can be found just about everywhere. But that's the rub -- it's everywhere. If you want a beer, it's going to be a Kingfisher (if you look around really hard, you can find Cobra and Foster's too, but they really aren't any better). Kingfisher is an ok beer. It's a lager; the brewers evidently took the best recipe Old Milwaukee had, but made little headway in improving it. If the beer is ice cold, it can be very refreshing on a hot day, but after two months, I need something else.

And don't think for a minute that you can find a decent mixed drink to fill the gap left by Kingfisher's mediocrity. Just like their tea, Indians like their liquor syrupy sweet. We were in Cochin when we decided that we NEEDED a drink. I ordered a Cuba Libre, one of my stand-bys at home, and when it arrived, I was so shocked by its sweetness that I looked like Popeye. Even though there was technically liquor somewhere in that glass, I wasn't about to swim through the sea of sugar to get to it.

What's worse is that most of the liquor is local. Why import millions of bottles of quality liquor when you have a labor force of 1 billion that can turn out an average bottle of liquor in less time? If you look down a bar menu, it's a guarantee that you've never heard of most of the brands of liquor: VAT69, Black & White, Bagpiper, and so on. Even buying just a shot and a mixer separately leaves you smacking your lips, wondering if you really did order rum or maple syrup in a highball.

The point of all this is that I need a drink. A good, stiff drink. It's been months since I've had a decent martini, and I'll wait as long as I have to to get one. But I really need a beer, a hand-crafted, microbrew that's NOT a lager. So if anyone is looking to buy me a drink when I get home, I like my martini slightly dirty, extra dry, up with extra olives and I desperately need an ice-cold Dogfish Head 90-minute IPA. If you even consider sending a Miller Light my way, prepare to get wet. That is all.

An Open Letter to Asia

2008-03-11T09:27:00.002-04:00

Posted from Jodhpur, Rajasthan, India

Dear Asia,

I understand your confusion over the fact that I have been married for nearly five years and yet do not have any children. I respect that you believe that something is woefully, seriously wrong with us. I promise to continue to lower my eyes and smile when you lean low and whisper to me that we should try, that very night, to make babies, that the moon is full and the stars are bright and that it is a most auspicious time. I promise that I take your concern seriously. I do. I really do. But Asia, time and time again I have walked through your streets and wanted to hand you a condom. I have wanted to explain to your mothers of 13 and 14 children that birth control IS an option, and that over in the western world we're allowed to exercise it. So, Asia, until such time as you understand that conceiving a child is low on the list of experiences I want to have while we're here, even while it's high on the list of experiences I very much want to have in my lifetime, I respectfully request that you stop offering a tea with a special blend of herbs and spices in order to fix my husband.

Love,Lizzi

Ripped from the Headlines

2008-03-11T09:16:00.003-04:00

Posted from Jodhpur, Rajasthan, India

Over the course of the couple of months that we've been traveling, we have both had occastion to notice that we're bigger news junkies than we thought we were. It shouldn't be entirely surprising, as we have started many a dinnertime conversation with "oh, I read this article today..." But somehow, it HAS been surprising and although we both religiously check our preferred news venues every time we check our email or log on to post something here, we find that it doesn't quite fill the void. So when we're traveling from point A to point B, we usually take the opportunity that public transportation provides and buy ourselves a newspaper or magazine.

What we've found is the news over here contains all of the same information that news at home contains. Plus a little more flavor and color. We've collected some of our favorite stories from our more recent purchases and want to share them with you here, so you're as amused as we have been.

In an article about the rising cost of food prices (The Week, March 2, 2008):Former chief election commissioner M.S. Gill believes that instead of a consumer price index, "[India] should have a new index, a housewife index or a kitchen index published daily. I am sure it will be watched or read more than cricket."

In an article about the changing culture inside your average bookstore (The Week, March 2, 2008):"In an environment where ice cream is sold not for the taste, but for its low-fat content promising an attractive figure, few are bothered about serious reading. Reading is a pleasure that has a limited market these days, but brands hardly let that dip their sales. A bookstore today is less about reading and more about grabbing a bite between pages, collecting points for supposed freebies, sitting at a glittering book launch and pampering authors with awards."

In a review of Michael Clayton (The Week, March 2, 2008):"[S]ometimes the shifts in narrative are difficult to follow. Also, why does the sharp thinking Clayton take a long time to see through Karen's manouevres? No explanations there."

The 11-year-old recent winner of Amrita TV's Super Dancer Junior contest was interviewed for the City Express (Kochi, February 26, 2008). In response to a question about what she planned to do with her winnings, she says, "I'm too small to handle such a big amount! My parents know best what to do with it. So no worries on that!"

A really great quote from an article about the joys of being a grandparent (The Indian Express, February 26, 2008):"[Grandparents] enjoy teaching [their grandchildren] the nursery rhymes which they have mastered over in the past 50 to 60 years, a few lines still evading their failing memory, due to palsy."

The Best of the Horoscopes (The Week, March 2, 2008):
Pisces: Your enthusiastic mind will bring you power and prestige in the coming week. Look out for chances to invest in the export sector. Get married this week, and you will get a partner who is prudent and faithful. Those working in the transport and educational sectors will have a fruitful time, and enterprises selling milk and dairy products will fetch good money.

Cancer: The romantic Cancerian will have a lovey-dovey week. Those working in the public and charitable institutions will be applauded for their work. You will be surprised by a new-found interest in the occult. Your diplomatic self will see you through litigations in court. There will be an increase in income and wealth, but do be cautious about the way you spend. Sportspersons will earn laurels this week.

Leo: Keep a tight hold on your purse strings, as you might be an extravagent spender this week. Some of you may gain through investments in estates, coal, lead and refrigerators. Farmers will have a great week. Make sure you are in good terms with all your friends, as they will bring you social and financial gains. A piece of land in a plum location or a vehicle is on the cards.

Bond. James Bond

2008-03-11T08:35:00.002-04:00

Posted from Jodhpur, India

Did anyone else know that the James Bond movie Octopussy was filmed in Udaipur? I had no idea. But it was. And they still talk about it, like it's the biggest thing that's happened in Udaipur. Ever! Most of the budget restaurants even screen the movie each night just to attract a few customers. Like us.

C'mon, like we WEREN'T going to see it. You know me, and I know me, and we all knew that as soon as I found out that a James Bond was filmed in Udaipur and I had the opportunity to watch it, I was going to. We found a divey little place and cozied up with a few lemon sodas and watched Bond do his thing. It was a nice way to waste a couple of hours. Lizzi had never seen the flick, and I haven't watched it in almost ten years. Nevertheless, it was mindless, good fun. Throughout the movie, we were picking out places that we recognized, like the intersection just outside the restaurant. And we laughed out loud at the rickshaw chase scene because I've been telling Lizzi since Bangkok that I want to film a high-speed tuk-tuk chase. Well, it looks like James Bond has already done it.

What's most strange to me is that we keep following in Bond's footsteps. First, in Thailand. And now, here in India. Dude, that guy got around. I know that at least one Bond movie was made in Hong Kong, so in three weeks, I'll let you know all about that one.

Dinner on a Banana Leaf: The Highlight Reel from Kerala

2008-03-07T05:47:00.002-05:00

Written in Cochin, Kerala, India
Posted from Udaipur, Rajasthan, India

After spending five days in Goa trying to understand the bizarre mix of culture and beach that we encountered there, we were ready to go to Kerala. We were excited for the opportunity to actually SEE things in India, rather than walking along the shoreline watching other people watch things. Just like in Bangkok and Sri Lanka, we were lucky enough to have a friend offer his suggestions on what to do in his home state. Nitin, if you are reading this, we want you to know that you absolutely MADE our trip to Kerala. We followed Nitin's itinerary to the letter, doing everything he suggested doing, even staying in the places he suggested we stay. We had an amazing time there, and I feel sad that there's a chance that I'll never be in the place that calls itself "God's Own Country" ever again. It is indeed a holy place and I'm here to tell you why.

Nitin's itinerary was a whirlwind 5-day tour of Kerala that Matt and I elected to stretch into two whole weeks. We didn't rent a car in Kerala (because we are not that crazy) so we had to rely on public busses and tuk-tuks to get us from place to place. Public transportation adds loads of time into any itinerary, and this is particularly true in India. But even though we added an additional 9 days into Nitin's plan, it almost felt too short, because there is just that much to see.

We started out in Fort Cochin, which is basically a city-within-a-city just outside of Kerala's second-largest city. It's an old place, and when you're there, you keenly feel the history all around you. There is a beautiful Catholic Church and old Portuguese mansions. There are canals and chinese fishing nets. Fort Cochin is also home to the oldest synagogue in a British Commonwealth, a fact that Matt and I found particularly interesting as we walked around the section of the city known as Jew Town, filling our noses with the scent of ginger, cardamom, and cinnamon. Walking around Fort Cochin gives you the sense that you've kind of stepped back in time, to a place where the pace in Kerala slows, and where the religious influences of a lifetime ago still hold strong. Being there was oddly surreal.

After Fort Cochin we boarded our very first vomit comet in the direction of Munnar. After the heat of Fort Cochin, the cool mountain air of Munnar was so unbelievably welcome. We changed into pants and long-sleeved shirts and headed out in the late afternoon to eat our first truly Keralan meal -- dinner on a banana leaf. Literally. They take a banana leaf, throw some rice in the middle, and then surround the rice with all kinds of daals (which are thick lentils stews, basically), and curd (yogurt), pickle (which isn't like a pickle at all, but more of a spicy/sour/salty condiment that you have to develop a taste for), and curries. Everything is vegetarian and everything is eaten with your hands (sorry dad, I know that makes you shudder). In our case, everything was unbelievably delicious. Unfortunately, we were so hungry that we forgot to tae a picture, so you're just going to have to imagine it.

Munnar is where tea is grown. And when I say that I mean that on every available hilly surface, there is a tea plant. You cannot imagine how green it is. I'm not exaggerating at all. It's just the greenest green of greeness that you can possibly imagine, as far as you can see. And it's so stunningly beautiful that even after spending a day soaking it up in its entirety, you just want to stand in awe at the beautiful green all around you. We met the most fantastic rickshaw driver ever, Manish, and for about $30, he spent the day with us, showing us all the beauty that Munnar has to offer. We could have spent a week there, relaxing in the mountain town, hiking amidst the tea plantations. If only we'd had more time!

After Munnar we got back on the REAL vomit comet and went to Periyar, where we were promised a chance to see wild elephants. Well, the elephants weren't interested in being seen, but we did have a chance to drive beautiful jungles and score a look at the largest squirrels in the world. Seriously. They're called Giant Squirrels for a reason. My general philosophy on viewing animals is that when you're in their home, you play when they want to play. And if they don't want to play, you soak up every bit of their home that you can, because a home can say a lot about a creature. The jungle was no exception and Periyar, with its cardomom plantations, enormous coconut palms, and beautiful lakes, was a wonderful place to have a cup of tea. Or seven.

Our guesthouse owner in Perriyar recommended a place for us to stay in Allepey, and although we were skeptical of his enthusiasm, we had no choice but to take his advice when Jose of Katakayam Guesthouse met us at the bus station in Allepey. And thank goodness he did, because the busride to Allepey was one of the hottest and busiest of all of our bus rides and we were really grateful that someone was there waiting for us with a rickshaw and a friendly face. By the end of that evening in Jose's house, we were even more grateful. We spent that night in the company of Jose's three beautifully intelligent boys, all three of whom were in love with Matt from the instant that they met him. And if that doesn't warm a girl's heart, nothing does.

The reason we went to Allepey was to experience Kerala's backwaters, which we did on our final two days in the State. We booked a houseboat tour which enabled us to spend 24 hours cruising the narrow lakes and waterways, getting an up-close glimpse of the people who live there. A houseboat looks like something out of Waterworld, but trust me when I tell you that the scenery is much better. You float by coconut and mango trees and kids call out to you, waving hello and asking for a school pen. And if you're lucky, like we were, your hosts are incredible cooks and they help you pick out fresh prawns when a guy on a boat comes by selling fresh prawns. We DID take a picture of that meal.

Our time on the housboat ended way too quickly and before we knew it, we were back on a bus to Cochin, where we spent our last day in Kerala walking around the city of Ernakulam, checking out the incredible shops selling expensive 22K gold jewelry, and satisfying our cravings of home with Pizza Hut.

All in all, our time in Kerala was exactly what we hoped it would be. We saw everything we wanted to see (except for the elephants, but I already talked about that) and I felt like I really got the chance to experience the State. We knew that Northern India exists at a different pace than Southern India, and we were really grateful for the chance to have a laid-back couple of weeks in the subcontinent. And of course, we couldn't have had that experience without Nitin, because he made our guidebook virtually useless, he was THAT helpful. Thank you Nitin! Your home is a lovely, wonderful place, filled with people who love it like you do, scenery that makes you rub your eyes its so amazing, and food that makes you stuff yourself until you think you'll explode!

"No Contact" Orders

2008-03-07T05:09:00.004-05:00

Posted from Udaipur, India

One of the hardest parts of traveling through India with Lizzi is the fact that I can't touch her. I can't touch her in public, that is. In fact, any public display of affection can be considered offensive. I mean, I remember back in high school when they cracked down on PDA. But they were targeting the couples who had their tongues down each others' between English and chemistry classes. A couple simply holding hands while walking to class was still ok. But not so here.

Except that it can be ok. The younger generations are ok with it. We noticed the honeymooning couples in Munnar were all cuddly and dreamy-eyed. But as we worked our way back towards the coast and then north, couples drifted farther and farther apart. By the time we arrived in Delhi, most couples walked with several paces of distance between them. Except for the younger couples in the more affluent sections of the city.

Constantly there has been a struggle for me to appreciate and respect the culture we have the privilege to enjoy and maintain some sense of contact with Lizzi. What surprised me most is how much intimacy is generated and sustained simply by holding hands with the one you love. And that intimacy is even more noticeable when the source of that intimacy is suddenly disconnected. Not only are we hot and tired and edgy and guarded and alert and overwhelmed, but we are also missing one tiny piece of what connects us without words. Making any given day just a little harder.

GOAL!!

2008-03-04T06:27:00.003-05:00

Posted from Jaipur, India

Ok, so I don't know what you yell when your cricket team scores, but it's got to be something along the lines of "GOAL!!", right? Cricket is big here. So big. In every home we've stayed in, when we ask the kids what they want to be when they grow up, it's some type of cricket player. Of course, the actual position or team or whatever they are talking about is completely Greek to me, but it's cute to see their enthusiasm. Right now, we're sitting in an internet cafe, and through its dingy windows, we can see into the room next door, which has a TV. Evidently, there is a cricket match on the tube, and about 50 Indian men are crammed into the room, eyes intently staring at the tiny 13" TV screen. Then all of a sudden, they yell and scream, and my mind flashes to one of those VISA commercials with the Italian family watching the World Cup; the father is praying; the son is cheering so emphatically, he tears his t-shirt off and rides it like a cowboy around the room, screaming "GOAL!!" Yeah, so I know nothing about cricket, but that's kinda what it's like to watch Indians watch cricket on TV.

All That and a Bag of Chips

2008-03-04T05:00:00.003-05:00

Posted from Jaipur, India

Last night we took the train from Agra to Jaipur. Luckily, it was uneventful and we arrived weary but otherwise ok. Our time in Agra was wonderful. But really, how can it not be with the Taj Mahal right there. What a sight! My pics are on my laptop, which we left at the guesthouse, but I'm sure you'll forgive me as soon as you see them. I can't believe that we saw the Taj Mahal. I want to keep saying that over and over again, because it seems so incredible, but we were there. We saw it. WE SAW IT!

When we were in Kerala, someone we met on a jeep safari said that she was underwhelmed by the Taj when she first saw it. It took her a good 30 minutes to warm up to it. But as Lizzi and I walked through the gate and the Taj came into view, their was not waiting period, we didn't have to pre-heat our excitement ovens. It was the Taj Ma-freakin'-hal, and it was right in front of us, larger than life.

We got to the Taj in the late afternoon, well after the heat of the day subsided. But the lines were still long, and people were pushing and shoving to get in. "Tour guides" were offering people the opportunity to cut to the front of the line for 500 rupees. We watched one poor white guy fall victim to it. He shelled out his cash, the "guide" escorted him to the front of the line, where the security officer told him to go to the back. The "guide" shrugged and melted into the crowd, only to appear next to us a few moments later. We laughed in his face when we offered us his "service".

One other note about queues in India is that personal space is a relative matter. In that, there was enough zipper-to-crack contact from the guy behind me that I think we might be married, at least in Vermont and New Jersey. Seriously, people, I could feel the bulge. I kept my eyes focused straight ahead and went to my happy place.

We are now in Jaipur, taking a day off to rest up and catch up on the world outside of India, which, when you're in India, seems very far away. Our trip is entering its home stretch. We have officially passed the "one-month left" milestone, meaning we have less than 2 weeks remaining in India before heading to Nepal, Hong Kong and then home. Already, we are starting to feel bittersweet about the inevitable flight back to New York, and, yes, we understand that a month is still a long time. But when two-and-a-half months have flown by the way these have, it's easy to start feeling a little sad so soon. But we stil have a month, and that's the most inportant part. The adventure ain't over yet.

We Almost Ate Somewhere Else

2008-03-01T12:03:00.002-05:00

Posted from Agra, Uttar Pradesh, India

After you see this, I don't want to hear any griping about us going to Pizza Hut for dinner.

We May Be Traveling But It Doesn't Always Feel Like Vacation

2008-03-01T11:23:00.002-05:00

Written and Posted from Agra, India

We wake up with a start at 5:30 in the morning. There is music in the air, singing in a foreign language, and honking, but that's not what woke us up. No, it's the sound of laundy being done downstairs, the loud slapping of a wet sheet against a stone, and the sound of the people doing the laundry, chatting and talking to each other. Their voices carry up the open-air stairwell to our room. We put earplugs in and fall back to sleep. But an hour later we wake again to the sound of construction. It is constant and ever-present, this changing and morphing and betterment of Delhi. This morning it is the sandstone polisher, working the floors to a gleaming, marble-like white. We make ourselves get out of bed by 8:30 because there is a lot to see and do and we want to pack it all in. We run the hot and cold taps into our bucket and begin our "shower" but then the power goes out and it's a cold bucket shower but it doesn't really matter anyway because within the hour we're cruising down the street in a rickshaw and when we look into the sunlight, we can see the dust particles in the air. In fact, the smog is so thick that it hangs low enough to obscure our vision just a few feet in front of us. By the time the smog burns off, it is early afternoon and hot. We buy a bottle of water but end up throwing it out because after we do the squeeze test, we notice water leaking out of our allegedly sealed bottle. We settle on some Cokes instead, consoling ourselves that we'll be loyal to our dentists and our gym memberships when we get back home.

The millions of school kids on their field trips stare at us as we walk by them. "Hi! Hello! Candy?" they shout at us as we walk by. When I smile at the girls, they giggle behind their hands and wave at me. When Matt smiles at them, they bump into each other, awkwardly laughing and blushing, their midnight-black braids swinging on either side of their face. The boys poke each other in the back, the language of a dare the same, even if I don't understand the words. "Hi!" a bold one finally says, his round cheeks so sweet that I want to take him into show-and-tell as my new little brother. "Hello," I reply, and he puts his hands over his heart, grinning at me.

I raise my camera to take a picture of the shy little girl sitting by herself and staring at whatever monument we've come to visit. She reminds me of my favorite girls, the ones I know who were likely to sit by themselves on a field trip, either in quiet contemplation, or uncertainty about how to join the big group. No sooner have I raised my camera than we are surrounded by a mob of shouting and excited kids, all eager to be her new best friend now that she's made friends with the white lady and her camera. I snap the pictures as quickly as I can, trying to capture their eager faces, their fingers making a peace sign or giving me a thumbs up. Through the wonders of digital photography I show them the picture and when I do, they shout and laugh, a cacophany of children's noises. "Bye! Bye America!" they say as we walk away.

In the few paces it takes for us to approach the rickshaw driver we have hired for the day, we are approached by five other rickshaw drivers and six people selling postcards, miniature chess boards, water, and jewelry. We keep our heads low, trying not to make eye contact with any of them, a constant stream of "no, thank you" coming out of our mouths.

Back in the rickshaw, our driver asks us if we could please do him the favor of stopping at his friend's store. "No buy," he says. "You see something, you like it, you buy it. They give me coupon for petrol. Good for you, good for me. Friends." And we sigh, having lost this battle a million times before, "okay," we say, "but only ten minutes." Our driver is happy, pointing out new buildings and areas of the city as we're on our way to his friend's store. Once inside, we carefully walk through every room, making sure not to spend a minute more or a minute less than we have to. We finger carpets and sandstone boxes and pashminas, knowing that we won't buy anything, feeling vaguely guilty for the shop-keeper who follows our every move. "You like scarf madam? Beautiful scarf. Cheap for you."

We head back to our hotel to check our email and reconnect with those people on the other side of the world who we miss so much. The connection is too slow, we can't get to gmail, we're pretty sure the guys next to us are cooking up a spam scam. Missing home more than when we walked in, we head back out to find some dinner, using the "if it's full of women and children, we can eat there too" test when we're in doubt. We order too much food because we want to try everything, and we talk and talk and talk about our day, about Boston, about our friends. We order two more bottles of water and we check them both before we leave the restaurant.

Walking back to our hotel, children, young, beautiful, dirty children pass us. Touching my arm so that I can't help but look at them, they hold out their hand, palm outstretched, and then bring their fingers back to their mouth. "I am hungry," they are telling me. And though my instincts are to scoop them up and walk right back into the restaurant, I adapt the same stance as I did earlier in the day when offered a miniature chess board, hang my head and say, "no, sorry. I'm sorry." I'm even sorrier when a young, beautiful, dirty child walks up to me with an even younger, beautiful, dirtier infant that is clearly hers, and the baby, only just old enough to hold her head up, holds out her hand to me. I give her 5 ruppees and walk away, feeling ashamed of my full belly, my full camera card, my full wallet.

And then it's time to relax and look at pictures, to sort through the remnants of our day, to wash the dirt off of our faces and to marvel at what our lungs must look like, given the state of the tissue we just blew our noses in. We open our sleep sacks so we don't have to touch the bed and we set our alarm clocks, making sure the our earplugs are nearby so we can put them in at 5:30am again.

This life that we're living over here is nothing like our real lives, our lives with things like the T and our cute SUV. It's nothing like the life where I covet designer jeans and Matt dreams about the Dodge Charger he wants someday. It's basically the opposite of being on vacation because for us, at least, vacation is a place where you can put your feet up, where someone brings you drinks when you ask for them, where sleeping on the sheets isn't something you give much thought to. No, this is more like a hiatus, a time warp, an experience in an alter universe. To say that it's occasionally hard and exhausting is an understatement. But I wouldn't trade it in for anything. I'd do it again in a heartbeat. All of it. The beautiful buildings and sights to see, right there alongside the hungry children. The amazing tastes and the 5:30am wake up. Yes, I know that I'd do it all over again without even thinking twice about it. There is time enough for vacation; now is the time for travel. And for the next month and four days, travel we will do.

Walking with Ghosts

2008-02-29T12:36:00.001-05:00

Posted from Delhi, India

One story we haven't told yet is from over a month ago. When we were in Vietnam, we stopped in Hue for a few days. Although we had passed through the DMZ during the night, there wasn't much to see. Mostly because it was pitch black. Oh, and we were asleep. So while we were in Hue, we took a tour of the DMZ, and you know what? There's not a whole to see. Just rice paddies and farmers and lots of green. Pretty much what I imagined it looked like almost 40 years ago. In fact, I swear I could almost see American Marines in olive drab fatigues slogging through the rice paddies. But that may just be the ghosts playing tricks on my eyes. To say that there are ghosts roaming the paddy fields is an understatement. I believe in ghosts, and I have ever since I saw the irrefutable evidence in Ghostbusters. But there really are ghosts in those soggy fields. How can there not be? So many people died in such a small piece of land. Forty years after the fact, the scars are still there: our tour guide stated that farmers use the bomb craters to collect rain water for their cattle.

Speaking of bombs and their effects, did you know that after 40 years a bomb crater is still a giant hole in the ground? Sure, flowers now grow at the bottom of it and water buffalo chew on the tall grass around its rim, but the hole is still there. And did you know that even after 40 years you can tell the difference between a 500-lb bomb crater and a 2000-lb bomb crater? The crater from the bigger bomb is, well, bigger, but somehow it seems a little more than four times bigger.

In my short life, I've visited many battlefields. Most in the U.S., but those are hundreds of years old. The scars have healed, and nature has taken its course. Some in Europe, but even those are approaching their Medicare years, and many of them have been sanitized for our use. Moreover, the axes that were ground have been put away in their sheds. But to see these battlefields surrounded by farms and jungle, it is clear that nature is moving on, but it's taking its time; these scars are faded but by no means healed. And it makes me wonder about the battlefields I've had a hand in creating. What are they going to look like in 40 years?

Fittingly the weather on our day in the DMZ was cold, misty, and overcast. It matched our sadness; it was the only appropriate weather for our day with ghosts.

Ground Control to Major Tata**

2008-02-28T12:28:00.003-05:00

Written from the Cochin Airport, Kerala, India
Posted from Delhi, India

We're sitting in yet another airport terminal right now, waiting to board our flight to Delhi (via Cochin and Mumbai). We got here right on time, no hassle with the 30 km taxi ride to the airport (though it took an hour and involved much honking). We checked our bags, took the battery out of our alarm clock as instructed by the ubiquitous mean security lady (wha? I don't get it either) and set out to find some tea. And then the power went out. Yes, in an airport. Yes, in a place where, just beyond that security door over there, they fly planes. All is well, however, because there is a generator. Or at least, I'm assuming there's a generator, because we were still able to get our hot tea, complete with warmed milk. Woe to the traveler who can't get their tea before boarding a plane that may or may not be able to take off because of a power failure at ground control! That is just SO India!

** For those of you not familiar with TATA, they're the ubiquitous and enormous private sector group in India. You see their logo everywhere -- on cars, buses, trucks, telecom, utilities, construction equipment, etc. You get the feeling that they are big brother and they are watching you because they seriously own everything. Their newest acquisition? Jaguar and Land Rover. Right.

Packing Protection

2008-02-28T12:03:00.002-05:00

Posted from India

Lizzi and I aren't the only ones getting sick on this trip. Unfortunately, our laptop gets a nasty bug every once in a while too. It's really our own fault. Wireless internet has been available in some of the guesthouses we've stayed in but not many. All of our photos and blog posts are composed on the laptop and then transferred to a flash drive, which we connect to a computer in an internet cafe. This is the computer equivalent of shaking the hand of someone who has just sneezed and then licking it. Sometimes you're going to get sick. So far, the flash drive has contracted at least one virus and a couple of gnarly bits of adware. As best as I can figure, the adware is from Thailand (looks to be something Google Toolbar coughed up), and the virus came from a dirty machine in Goa.

Viruses and adware are just a few of the bugs for which there is no vaccine. If you're going to take a laptop, which I recommend, be sure to turn on the antivirus software, download and run Ad-Aware regularly, and just be smart about what you connect to your machine, even indirectly. Just like people, your computer has a history. If you plug your flash drive (this goes for cameras too) into a different computer and then stick it in yours, your computer will be infected with everything the other computer has. The old adage holds true: wrap it before you tap it.