Scrubbing off the rust

I didn’t mean to disappear into the ether like that, but to be honest I’m not sure if I’m back for real. I’m missing blogging, but also am feeling really hesitant to write again because of The Thing That Happened That Sent Me Over Here in Secret.

And I have all sorts of things to write about – my college reunion, my new realization of the sheer enormity of the bullet I dodged by not marrying my ex-girlfriend, the amazingness and total fucking frustration of parenting an almost-two-year-old, the exhiliration of training for my first triathlon, and lots of other things.

But really what’s pushing me to write today is our upcoming trip to see Bubba’s birth family. We’ve told friends, including friends involved in open adoption, but it feels lonely not to get to have a conversation about it with the blogosphere (even the itty bitty blogosphere that even knows I’m over here in this mostly-anonymous corner).

This is our first time meeting Bubba’s dad, and the second time meeting his mom. Last year before we met his mom I was terrified. I wanted desperately for her to think we were good parents to him. And it was a wonderful meeting, so much more relaxed and easy than any of us would have dreamed. So I’m nervous about seeing her this time but also excited. As for dad, I have no idea. They’re together, but the roles they have played have meant that we’ve had very few conversations with him, really haven’t gotten to know him at all. So I have no idea of what to expect, what to say. He’s more intimidating to me, somehow – maybe it’s the mystery factor?

They have a lot of things going on right now that I can’t blog about, even anonymously. It’s painful not to be able to share this anywhere, but the things they have going on are things that we decided we won’t share with anyone until Bubba is old enough to understand and can decide for himself who to tell. It feels like the right decision but I feel like we’re being tested. It’s very difficult to watch what’s happening in their lives, to think about how we will tell Bubba about it someday, without getting to talk to people who get it.

Cryptic much?

We leave Saturday. I’d like to be able to write more about this when we come back. For now I’m mostly hoping a few folks will read this so I can feel like we have some back-up.

Should I stay or should I go?

Well great, now it’s the Clash that’s stuck in my head. Yours too.

Here’s the question of the day: do I go to my 10-year college reunion?

On the plus side, my ex-girlfriend/now friend is going with her son and has hooked us up with a friend’s cute little lakehouse for the cost of a cleaning service. I can show off my cute wife and cute son. I’ll see some people I had forgotten about but will be really happy to see anyway. I unambivalently skipped my high school reunion and then was sorry later when I heard the gossip. And it’s 2 hours away by car, so it’s an easy trip.

On the con side, I’m naming a million stupid reasons why I shouldn’t go (Bubba sleeps badly when we travel, we’re travelling a lot this spring, I don’t want to pay the fees), but I think what it really truly comes down to is I’m afraid I won’t have anyone to talk to. That I’ll go out to dinner with a bunch of people my wife doesn’t know and I don’t care about, or that I’ll wander around campus and not recognize anyone or, worse, I’ll recognize people and we won’t care about talking to each other. Apparently I am just that insecure.

Am I being completely ridiculous? Or is it really an overblown kind of event and not worth all the pomp and circumstance of finding something all white to wear to march through the pre-graduation parade with a ridiculous sign in my hand making fun of the class of 1998? And why am I being so freakin’ indecisive about this?

I thought something was wrong

It had been probably 4 weeks since we heard from Bubba’s first parents. This is long for us, but not unheard of. The weird part was that we had been trying to reach them, and they weren’t responding to email or returning our calls (including a message I left asking if we could see them in May), and their voice mail didn’t have their voices on it anymore, just the automated recording.

I felt like something was wrong, but we didn’t know what to do. Finally, yesterday, an email from them. There was a car accident, but everyone was okay. They totalled the car and were rushed to the hospital about 3 weeks ago. They’ve both been in physical therapy and just got a new car Friday, so they haven’t been able to get around, including to work, which obviously carries its’ own stresses. They also lost their cell phones – and all their programmed numbers – in the accident, which is another part of why we hadn’t heard back from them.

It feels awful to hear about something like this weeks after the fact. I know we’re not the first people they would call, of course, but it’s scary to know this happened and we had no idea. What could we have done besides call them and tell them we love them, even if we had known? I have no idea.

Still.

But we are going to see them. We’re planning a trip in over Memorial Day to see family a few hours away from where they live now, and when we asked if we could see them then the answer came back full of exclamation points. It will be the first time we get to meet Bubba’s first (actually his only) Dad. Nervous will come later. Excitement is now.

Sweat

I did my second run today. After last week’s run my knees hurt and my back definitely registered the impact of all that pounding, but neither one was particularly bad. I skipped Thursday and then went to a cardio/weight training class on Friday, which felt good. Yesterday I walked for an hour and 10 with a feverish, cranky child on my back (feverish and cranky don’t actually help my conditioning but seemed worth mentioning anyway).

Seems like somewhere along the line I managed to pull a muscle in my newly-sculpted shoulder/upper arm. Stupid. So I’ve left it alone since last Wednesday (including during Friday’s class) and it’s starting to get there. I tend to be stupidly stubborn about leaving injured muscles alone to fully heal, but the last time I tried to train for a triathlon I did just that and pulled a hip flexor muscle which ended the whole thing.

Today I did 3 1/2 miles in about 35 minutes, which I’m pleased with. After talking with my jock-friend E. I think I’m going to sign up for a sprint triathlon at the beach (about 75 miles from here) in late July. That gives me about 18 weeks from now, and most of the training programs I found on-line are between 16 and 20 weeks. Most of them also suggest a minimum of 4 days of training per week, which I haven’t been able to do consistently since Bubba arrived, so that might be the biggest challenge.

Anyway, onward and upward. I’m sore in (mostly) the right places and waking up starving. This is good.

A hundred years later

19 1/2 months after birth and 6 months after finalization, 47 calls, letters, and emails to a dozen different bureaucracies later, Bubba’s birth certificate arrived today in the mail.

Legally, I’m Bubba’s “mother” and Baby Mama is his “parent.” It could have been weirder.

I love that we have a legal document that says we’re his parents. It kills me that his first family is nowhere to be found in this paperwork.

Kitty!

Yesterday morning around 6 I woke from a dead sleep to the sound of Bubba, three inches from my head, shrieking “kitty!”

He’s in a toddler bed that Baby Mama cut the legs off, with a guard rail that’s worked perfectly for containment since he was 4 months old. But now he’s out, the stinker.

When I put him to bed last night he rolled onto his belly as usual, offered his doll a pacifier, and curled up with blankie. A half hour later we’re sitting on our bed watching Grey’s Anatomy, and his door opens and he emerges carrying a train, calling “Mommy, train!” Very excited. We spent the next half hour getting back up and silently putting him in bed, over and over. It wasn’t too bad, and he wasn’t upset – he was just too excited to stay in bed when he figured out that he could get out on his own.

But now what? Tips? Ideas? Do we take the guard rail down altogether, or do we leave it up in hopes that it will at least keep him in bed if he wakes up in the middle of the night? And how can we teach him to entertain himself in his room instead of standing at the gate calling for us?

Does a body good

This year I used the birthday check my Nana sent to schedule a couple of appointments with a nutritionist and one with a personal trainer.  My motivation was partly to get a grip on my hypoglycemia-induced blood sugar crashes, partly to get a better grip on my eating habits, and – let’s face it – partly so I could just be a little leaner and a little buffer.

I don’t believe in diets, and around the time I graduated from high school I made a very conscious effort to stop saying anything bad about my body forever and ever. We don’t own a scale, and, unlike in high school, I don’t surround myself anymore with only size-4 white girls. So I approached this with some trepidation, but both the trainer and the nutritionist were great about hearing what I had to say about it and steering the conversations towards health and building muscle, rather than weight loss. (As an aside, Sster has been writing so well about this recently over at Boomerific. I haven’t commented but she’s speaking my language).

And damn, they’re good. After a couple of months, I can see the difference in my arms and shoulders, and my pants are all a little big. I haven’t had a single blood sugar crash (it used to happen maybe once or twice a week), and it was surprisingly easy to rid myself of the skip a snack/eat half a bag of tortilla chips while making dinner habit once I started eating smarter and not ignoring my body’s genuine need to eat something every 3 hours or so. It feels really healthy. Somewhere in there I lost about 6 pounds, which wasn’t the point but I can’t pretend doesn’t please me, patriarchy be damned.

I’ve been thinking about training for a sprint marathon this summer. It’s felt so good to get into better shape – even after working out regularly for years apparently your body can get really used to what you’re doing and this shake-up of my workout has really made a difference. And it’s inspired me to do more. My friend E. has done a bunch of sprint triathlons and is registered for 3 (!) this summer, and she agreed to be my training partner. I’m not actually registered yet so maybe I’m telling you all for accountability.

So in that vein, I’m going to use this blog to track my own training.

I’ve been running, which I hate, but today I ran 3 miles with the help of a treadmill, my trusty ipod, and a People magazine (seriously, how many toys and how much fancy equipment does a person need to do something we were literally built to do?). It’s probably been a decade since I did that. It felt great, though it was only 7 hours ago and I’m sore already, so whether this is sustainable remains to be seen. But a year ago I was in PT 3 days a week for a knee that wouldn’t let me off the floor without groaning, and today I ran 3 miles as the first half of my workout.

I’m a freakin’ machine. (Though tomorrow I may be a rusty, broken machine. I’ll let you know).

On a totally unrelated note

It’s very difficult to be competent around someone who is quite sure you’re incompetent.

Discuss.

Cranky

Bubba has been pretty cranky for a while about day care. We’ve assumed it’s been about adjusting to the obvious issues around having a day care in your own house, with the biggest issue being the sharing of his Mama. Since we had this reading done a week or so ago we’ve been talking about it a lot and thinking about it a little differently.

(As an aside – I still don’t know if I believe this woman – or anyone – is actually psychic, but we both like her a lot and trust her immensely as a person, so we figured that whether she’s pyschic or just perceptive, if she struck a nerve like this we should probably listen. So that’s my I’m-not-off-my-nut caveat.)

It’s so hard to know at this age when a bad mood or bad behavior – like biting – is about adjusting, a developmental stage not necessarily related to the external stuff, or just personality. Every couple of months he’s a new person, so if he has a bad week or so we do what we can to make it better for him and hold out for growth and change.

Baby Mama has been trying to hold him a lot more during day care, which is helping. He’s still resisting the sling and the ergo except outside of the house, so it’s hard, but he does respond well. We also just arranged a kid-swap one day a week with a friend who sends her child to our day care one day a week – we’ll send him there and stop billing her. He’s completely enamored with this little girl (and we’re completely enamored of her parents and decided our kids should get married so they can be our machatunem), so maybe it will feel special to him to have a day a week when they get to hang out all day.

We’ve also tossed around the idea of sending him to a local daycare one day a week, which would probably (given the neighborhood where we live) have the advantage of being largely black and Latino kids and probably bilingual English/Spanish. But sending my little tiny guy off to be cared for by people we don’t know just strikes fear into my heart – is this what it feels like for people to enroll their kid in daycare if they don’t have their own?

Friends who are parenting adolescents tell me they would trade the emotional work for the physical work of diaper changes and bedtime routines in a minute, but I find the emotional work now to be a huge learning curve. We’re relying on a pyschic to tell us what’s going on with our kid. I wish he could talk – the current spoken and signed vocabulary of animals, methods of transportation, and foods doesn’t smooth the process much.

/Ramble

Out of the dark ages

This was in today’s paper.  Please someone tell me this was an accidental re-write from the days when, um, feminism didn’t exist. Is this a joke?

Biology is what it is. I’m not disputing the facts of this. But her slant on it is killing me. And now I’ll shut up so you can read it. But really – what do you think?

***

Want to have a baby? Now’s the time

Women eager to have children need to direct career drive toward mating

Women who want to have children should make it a priority in their twenties to find a partner. That’s because one of the most dramatic issues facing Generation X is infertility. No generation of women has had more trouble with fertility than this generation, who received the terrible baby boomer advice, “Wait. You have time. Focus on your career first.” But in fact, you have your whole life to get a career. Obviously, that’s not true of having a baby. If you are past your early twenties, and you’re single and want to have children, you need to find a partner now. Take that career drive and direct it toward mating – your ovaries will not last longer than your career.

In case you’re waiting for “the right time,” there is no evidence to show when is best to interrupt a career to have a child. No matter when it happens, a women’s career is thrown off track. Phyllis Moen, professor of sociology at the University of Minnesota, says, “Don’t wait until the right time in your career to have a child or it will never come.”

There is plenty of evidence to show that the quality of your eggs takes a nose dive at age 35. And about 20 percent of pregnancies end in miscarriage, which means you have almost a 50 percent chance of having to go through three pregnancies to have two children. And it’s recommended that you breast feed, which decreases your ability to get pregnant, at least while you’re breast feeding. So be realistic: You can’t count on getting pregnant three times in three years. You can’t control fertility. Waiting until your midthirties to start a family, if you want to carry the babies yourself, is a risky endeavor. Which means, of course, you probably want to find a partner by the time you’re 30.

The good news is that psychology research shows you will gain more happiness anyway by finding a partner than by having a good job. While you should not have to choose between a satisfying marriage or a good job, your biological clock does not care. You can control where you spend your time and energy, and you should search for your mate if you don’t want to face fertility problems.

What’s the alternative? There is no science magic that makes a midlife pregnancy a low-risk endeavor, but here are two things you can do while your clock ticks to decrease the risk of a high-risk pregnancy.

1. Hedge your bets by testing your eggs for premature aging.

Eggs age differently in different women. And the aging process can get faster or slower relative to the general population. That means that while most women need to start having babies before age 35 to manage risk well, some women need to start even earlier. If you want to know if you fall into that category, go to Repromedix.com. Dr. Mike Burns, chief executive of the Woburn infirtility testing laboratory, says the firm combines indicators based on age, eggs, and the amount of two specific hormones to determine a woman’s age in fertility years.

2. Freeze your eggs. If you don’t want to exert control over your life by searching for a husband, how about saving some good eggs? The Wall Street Journal reported that even though it’s actually not proven technology, women are signing up in droves for egg-freezing services. The procedure is expensive – up to $14,000 – but often that’s easily affordable for women who will spend their most fertile years climbing corporate ladders.

So if you don’t have ethical problems with the technology, maybe you should consider it. You never know where you will fall in the fertility lottery: Hedge your bets the best you can.