A Sigh of Relief

Well, I had my ultrasound today and everything appeared normal. But last night & this morning I found myself literally panicking in anticipation! I've never been nervous about an ultrasound before. But everything looked fine. My nervousness, however, was nothing compared to my daughter. Far from being fascinated with the computer and keyboard, she was very concerned about whatever the woman was doing to momma. So she spent most of the time with her head in my husband's shoulder, and the rest whimpering "momma" in my direction with an occasional "I'm sorry"--the cure-all for all uncomfortable situations--thrown in for good measure. She fell asleep shortly after we left the clinic, though it was only about 10:40. She has, however, been waking up between 7 and 8, unable to go back to sleep because of the sun in our bedroom. I'm investigating fabric for curtains (and then I have to find a place for the sewing machine!!)

The actual transport of "stuff" is complete, including much transferring of stuff to good causes, etc. But in light of some news I received via the ultrasound, it appears that much more "stuff" will be able to go away. And of course, the "stuff" has reached the new apartment, but has not settled in. Much is still in boxes, and we are slowly moving toward clearing the living room & dinig area. Other areas of the house are looking better.

Overall, now that the major part of the stress is behind me, I can declare, tentatively, that the move was a success. The baby is much freer and happier, albeit getting banged up from running around boxes. She goes to sleep much earlier because she exerts more energy during the day. We take occasional walks around the complex and have even gone swimming once. It is a bit hard to keep track of her sometimes, but she has some little designated play places and is exploring new (old) toys (courtesy of brother and aunts & uncles)--like dishes & Potato Heads. She is also expressing interest in potty training, but I don't know if I'm ready for that. . .

Big brother is happy with his new room, but since he can pretty much play Game Boy anywhere, is generally content. He is gone in the morning for Summer Enrichment classes that runs through the end of June--one of which involves writing for the web! He is looking forward to his new school, where he will be in orchestra, learning to play the cello.

And I am doing pretty well. Every now & then I just need a change of location, whether it is a rearranged work space or something more drastic. I believe I have been in a deep rut for a long, long time. I find that, although I am up earlier and in bed late, I have the energy to do it. I am, interestingly, losing weight, thought not drastically, likely because of increased activity. I even did a little something toward the dissertation yesterday. Perhaps things are starting to come together. And with the ultrasound behind me, I can breath that proverbial sigh of relief. The fall class situation is better, too. I will be teaching Lit in a computer classroom environment in the evenings, so no need for child care and I can rum some classes as distance if necessary. (I'm not sure my colleagues will be willing to sub--I'm not working from an anthology; rather, I'm continuing my fantasy class, so I'll probably be doing either The Tempest, The Two Towers, or Invisible Cities when the baby arrives.)

My husband is looking forward to less gas usage and the acquisition of curtains for the bedroom so he can sleep!!

And by the way, Critter #3 (as we call the new one--yes, only one!) is looking like a girl!

Moving Woes -or- The Tyranny of "Stuff"

Recently, I was corrected in my meandering suppositions about the parable of the Rich Young Man who is unable to follow Jesus because he can't leave his "stuff," not because he has familial obligations. Oh well. I don't really come from the school of "anything goes" biblical interpretation--or literary interpretation for that matter. Well, after moving to an apartment from a house, taking a severe cut in square footage, and losing a bedroom and a sun-room, I understand the tyranny of stuff and how free one must really be without possessions, or with possessions that one can merely walk away from. I am not rich--not by any means, as I've made clear in previous posts. In fact, in addition to losing space, our rent is increasing astronomically, though it may even out since I won't be paying tuition fro my son, won't be paying for cable or satellite, won't be paying for water, and should be paying less for electricity. We'll see how that works out in reality. Yes, I found myself thinking how wonderful it must be for all of one's possessions to fit into a grocery basket (cart)--I'm ready for the hermitage now!! In the process of moving, we have given many things away to charity and to the recent parish garage sale, as well as to family and friends and anyone who happens to come by before the trash collectors. And yet, so much remains that it is stacked around the living and dining areas and I have no idea how we will fit everything. Much of it is books, but there is also a lot of miscellaneous crap that begs to be kept for one reason or another. It won't let itself be discarded. So the apartment that was to afford my daughter some freedom is so crammed full of "stuff" that she can barely move (although this has resulted in her slowing her gait by about half--at least in some of the rooms) or she is constantly being told "no" because she wants to explore everything.

The expense associated with moving is astronomical--and not just the ill-fated UHaul that had to be kept two days, or a day and half, as we were told to return it ASAP (so we could be charged as if we had kept it a few 2-days! $19.99 rentals--humph! Don't believe it). We have not yet found the kitchen to be able to cook, though thankfully my mother cleaned out my refrigerator and freezer and cooked much of the edible food for all to share. That was wonderful. As was the unexpected help we received. We never could have been out otherwise-oh wait, we're still not completely out. :P But we're mostly out, and I guess that is something. Still, this whole process has been very discouraging. I keep reminding myself of the good that will come out of it--much of which is still mainly speculation.

As for the apartment, it is sufficiently clean for move-in, which is unusual. We have already had the washing machine switched for another one, only to find that the dryer only dries after 2-4 cycles. All of the closets and cabinets are built for giants--not people who are 5'4" and 5'6". The possibilities of my son being able to put away the dishes are slim. And he will never be able to play with his toys. They are too high. He wasn't inclined to play with them previously because his room was too far away from where we would normally "hang out" in the house. But had we moved him to the front bedroom, he would have been uncomfortably far away from us at night. So I was looking forward to the kids' room being a functional play room, but that won't really happen. Then there are the issues of space. We have had--and particularly at the last place where we lived--a lot of storage space in previous places. Enough space to justify not only the acquisition of stuff but also the retention of boxes in which stuff was packaged when purchased. Many of the boxes have now been purged, but the stuff remains. And as in one of the cities in Calvino's Invisible Cities, the stuff threatens to crush the inhabitants.

I have not had much time to obsess about baby stuff--and so, I have not been very worried. I had a doctor's appointment in the midst of last week's madness, and everything looked and sounded fine. No measurements, though. I like my doctor, and think I will not return to the retired army nurse midwife, who feels compelled to tell me to watch my weight as the doctor does not.

Teaching is going surprisingly well, in spite of a chaotic life and numerous setbacks--lacking computer access in the classroom the first and third days, missing day 2 because of exhaustion, lacking internet connectivity at home (another perk of the complex) until Thursday evening, being moved from my "home" building to another and having to walk and climb many stairs, not having, and then buying and forgetting, dry erase markers and so having to "wing it" without them. . . I told my class that eventually the little black rain cloud that is following me will lift or dissipate--and I like rain. But the class is very, very small--possibly as few as 9 students. The subject matter is enjoyable, and so far we have compared and discussed various definitions of fantasy and begun to discuss poetry, and I do love teaching poetry--particularly when the students are open-minded and even willing to tackle scansion!! So I have an exhilarating but exhausting hour and thirty-five minutes each day. Which means I am not unpacking while my baby is napping. *sigh* This is truly a nightmare. The good is good, but inconvenient.

Well, as I need to get up in the morning, bring my husband to work, and bring my son to Enrichment Summer School (what was I thinking??!?), and as it is 2 A.M., I will wrap up this negativity-fest. Hope to have something more thoughtful soon, but it's difficult to be philosophic in the midst of this stress, busyness and clutter. I have posted something thoughtful to the class, and my efforts there may sap my creativity for now. Ironically (or perhaps appropriately), now that I can't enjoy it, my energy level seems to be up--one of the things in all of this for which I am very, very thankful.

P.S.--I did forget to mention the frustration inherent in not being able to lift heavy boxes. So they're stacked halfway to the ceiling, and I can't move them around without someone else's assistance!! Arrrrgh!

Resisting Despair. . .

Hormones raging. Moving sucks. Not a good time to be pregnant. Not a good time for a new semester to be starting, either.

And though the UHaul (admittedly the smallest) is 2/3 full, our house still looks like a place that a family could live in comfortably without the addition of any furniture. It is rather conspicuously lacking in books. Or perhaps not. There are the stacks here and there that have not found their homes in boxes yet. No paths to holiness in this mess. Or sanity for that matter.

Things I'm Thinking About. . .

Not grammar, clearly. No dangling prepositions here, no indeed! Well, I am packing and preparing for class next week, as the move and the first day of classes are both on May 29, so this isn't really a real post, it's just my way of getting down the things that have been floating around my head as I pack, especially since I have still been glancing at blogs, and even commenting on some, but not writing my own, which means the thoughts are accumulating and have to spill out at some point or another. So to save my husband my 1 A.M. insights into life and the universe, here's a little run-down!

1) The practical stuff: I am actually wondering if getting the UHaul on the 29th was smart. I probably should have reserved it for the 28th, provided they're open on that day, loaded it on Memorial Day and unloaded it on the 29th--the official move-in day. Hmmm. . . This is one of those thoughts that might require further action on my part. . .

2) I'm thinking about gender, though not in the way mentioned here. Actually, I am rather thinking about how my own perceptions of gender relate to the academic writings on the subject (represented very well by M's post, linked above) and the religious discussions on the subject that I have seen in various places, many of which I find disturbing in their characterizations of men's and women's roles. I fall somewhere in between. I can play "gender theory" with the best of them--you should see my paper on “Literacy, Patriarchy and Performance: Pedro Almodóvar on Writers and Writing” (it's a literacy-as-gender-performativity-thing)--but how I view things in the real world diverges somewhat from what I produce for conferences and courses. ADDENDUM: How I view things in the real world diverges somewhat from what I produce for conferences and courses where the subject of gender is concerned!

3) I'm thinking about how pregnancy hormones affect the mind. I've read in books that around this or that month of pregnancy, one can become "forgetful," "absent-minded," etc., but I've never seen anything about paranoia. Granted, I can be rather a worry-wort normally anyway, but seeing as how hormones are powerful creatures, it doesn't seem unlikely that they might be affecting my obsessive worrying about whether the baby is O.K., etc. In the middle of an obsessive moment the other night, it occurred to me how spoiled I am (we are?) by medical technology. It's one of the reasons I haven't wanted, in past pregnancies, to find out the sex of my baby. That and resisting the whole "must-buy-gender-appropriate-stuff" urge--I really resent the marketing push that reinforces the need for people to find out if they're having a boy or a girl, but I digress. . . Basically, I realize that my grandmother didn't have any special assurance that her 7 children were healthy and "normal." The doctors didn't even believe her when she said that she was having twins! (They had hiccups at the same time--out of sync!) My mother had to have an x-ray before delivering me at home to make sure my head would fit through her pelvis--the fit was exact. And that little doppler thing that they use to listen to the baby's heart now--how many women never heard their babies' heartbeats in utero? They just trusted that the heartbeat was there! (And somehow did not doubt that what was inside them was, indeed, a baby.)

4) I am thinking how nice it will be, for the first time, to teach a course that I have already taught--in the way I taught it previously. I have this bad habit of revamping each course I teach each time I teach it--thereby making more work for myself. But when I was pregnant for my daughter 2 summers ago, I taught Intro to Lit with a focus on fantasy as manifested in various literary genres. While I will rearrange the sequence somewhat and pare down the assignments some, I have left the syllabus mostly the same. Yay!

5) On the dissertation front, I am thinking about D. H. Lawrence's anxieties about gender and literacy--basically, if you were a scholar, could you also be a man? He seems to think not. In Lawrence, manly men are ignorant, country men, like his own father whom he hated. He left that background to become a writer. Evidently, he felt that he had sacrificed a vital part of his nature in doing so. I like Lawrence for this reason--in the midst of his machismo, he's so conflicted! Actually, I like Forster because he's conflicted, too, it's just different. . .

6) Another dissertation-related thought is what constitutes "literate activity." It's a central idea for me, which probably means I should keep it well-guarded and certainly not blog about it. Oh well! You see, though, different theorists and historians mean different things when they talk about "literacy." Some talk about the ability to read, while some focus more on writing. Some merely concern themselves with the presence of writing within a culture, whether or not anyone actually has access to the written materials. Some measure the ability to read by the ability to, say, sign one's name--this has been a traditional marker of literacy for historians, though we should be able to perceive some problems there. Then, there's "functional" vs. "advanced" literacy. I admit to bypassing a number of these questions, as "advanced" literacy is more my concern--I know, how elitist of me. But I'm focusing on fiction, after all. There is a certain assumption of literacy on the part of the author, who assumes that someone, somewhere will be reading this work, and writes according to his or her perception of the level of literacy of that reader. Which makes postmodern fiction either completely elitist, or an admission of despair. (I'm teaching Calvino's Invisible Cities this summer. Yum!) So I use the term "literate activity," which means that any time the author portrays someone reading or writing, I'm there. But I also contend that literate conversation--that is, verbal interaction between people that is informed by literacy (especially advanced literacy)--is also literate activity. If you haven't read the same books, you can't exactly talk about them now, can you?

7) And, then, Entropy has me thinking about the Holy Spirit & prayer and the role of the Gentiles in the development of Christianity, and I thank her for not letting me forget that Pentecost is approaching!