I am:
pregnant,
knocked up,
with child,
in a tender condition,
full,
in the family way,
preggo,
carrying a fetus,
on the nest,
eating for two,
(by choice) up the duff,
expecting,
fertilized,
in an interesting condition,
fecund,
gestating,
incubating,
preggers,
in a delicate condition,
anticipating,
due in early July.
I have:
a bun in my oven,
a pea in the pod,
a baby bump,
no normal pants that fit me anymore,
too many hormones...
overwhelming happiness and relief.
My kitchen is now finished.
And let me tell you, I feel like I'm house sitting in a rich woman's house.
I will post photos below. But first I need to tell you an unexpected result of the renovation... I like to cook! It is amazing how fun it can actually be to cook when Tupperware and cookbooks aren't falling on my head from all sides and things are actually easy to find. Since the renovation finished, I have been on a cooking rampage. I've been a bit of a comfort food maniac. Cooking Light published this great little section of their favorite recipes, one for each day in December. I made Dijon chicken stew with potatoes and kale, chicken potpies, baked pasta with sausage and farfalle with creamy wild mushroom sauce. Then I rediscovered a cookbook we've had for years: The Barefoot Contessa. I've never really used it much because it looked so fancy, I assumed the recipes would be too hard. Wrong! They are both easy and delicious. I made her crunchy banana muffins yesterday. Tonight I made her turkey meatloaf with Parmesean Smashed Potatoes. Yum! My two favorite foods. This is all really practice for cooking a few wonderful meals for a few wonderful folks who fed us home-cooked meals in the midst of our take-out and one-pan frozen entree month-and-a-half of heck. Thank you people. (Yes, Kris, you are one of those fabulous folks. Of course you always feed me when I step over your threshold. God love ya. XOXO)
The bottom picture is of my favorite functional part of the kitchen... the Tupperware drawer. I LOVE it.
Last spring, I had the best idea ever. I thought up my dream job. It was so simple. I decided to create the position of Performing Arts teacher at my school and be that teacher. I've always loved drama. Drama games, performing in plays, and a general state of being the center of attention have always appealed to me. If I had this job I would do my favorite thing all day, share it with kids, and keep my salary and job security -- not to mention those summers off. It was a dream come true. I wrote up a proposal and gave it to the principal stating that I'd like it to happen, if possible, the year after next (2008-2009).
My colleague, D, loved the idea and said she'd teach an after-school enrichment Theater cluster with me to try my idea out. Great.
So today was the first day of "Story Theater Workshop." I worked myself into a nervous frenzy. Out of nowhere I got the idea that I would actually hate teaching drama and my dream job would disintegrate. I worried. I worried a lot.
Ummmm. It was great. I loved it. The kids loved it. I wasn't even tired afterward because I felt so invigorated. I also feel lucky to teach at a school where I would be able to do such a thing. The best idea ever is still the best idea ever. Whew.
There are many things I miss about living in New Orleans. It's weird sometimes, thinking about how it was down there, because my life is so different now in almost every way that this is possible.
Two years ago in New Orleans I hired a babysitter to watch Gus for six hours every Monday (my husband was a full-time professor at a university). Gus was around four-months old, and I felt I might lose my mind if I didn't have some hours during the day to myself. My yoga instructor referred me to Gina, an older lady from Ecuador who had a degree in social work but couldn't speak English well enough to find employment other than as a maid or babysitter. I hired her two days a week for a total of ten hours. I became her English tutor slash sugar mamma. She was, admittedly, great with my baby, even though I sometimes resented how frequently I would find myself standing in the kitchen repeating phrases that she jotted down in one of those drugstore black-and-white journals so she could memorize them later. The deal was she would lightly clean house while watching Gus for fifteen dollars an hour. It seemed expensive at the time, but Gina had an advanced degree, and I made allowances. Before long, our bond was absolute.
Gina left New Orleans with her two beautiful teenaged girls just before the floodwaters hit (she had a car, even if it was falling apart). Gus was about fifteen months old at the time. Gina's house, in our absence, was so flooded-out that she had no choice but to move. She went to Florida. I miss her terribly.
Anyway, yesterday I was thinking about her again, wondering how she's doing in Florida, in part because of a big decision I've made. For this month only, I've hired a babysitter to pick up Gus after his few hours of preschool and keep him out of the house until 4:30. This means that once a week for four precious weeks I will have eight hours to myself--no interruptions and an empty apartment--to finish a novel I've been working on for about a year.
I have time. Oogles of it. And so, at 2:30, after writing all morning, I decided to go for a run.
In New Orleans, I used to take Gus running in one of those jogging strollers each morning. We were out of the house around 8--by 9 the heat would be unbearable. Our house was a mile from Audubon Park, and it was about two miles around the park. (If you're looking at the map, I started one block east of Jefferson Avenue, running on the small streets paralell to Magazine street.) My routine was to run there and back with Gus, stopping once to feed the fat, aggressive geese that hung out at the edge of a central pool in the park. We often stopped again at a gorgeous toddler pool made of stone, with several cake-like tiers and an enormous brass woman at the top stretching out her arms benevolently, a fountain that had been dedicated to the children of New Orleans in the 1800's. The antique pool had a shallow and a deep end, and Gus had a really cute baby boy speedo, and I would stand panting and sweating after my run under the oak trees, shuck my shoes and socks and dip my feet, marvelling at the fact that no one ever visited this fountain except for a big black lab and her owner that would swing by for a drink of water and ogle my baby. I usually rushed home with Gus at around 11, praying that neither of us would get heat stroke in the liquid heat, sometimes swinging by the Whole Foods for a huge bottle of water and some lunch food on the way home. The jogging stroller always fell into the deep cracks that were everywhere on the street and sidewalk--due to the extremely high water table of the city, there was no way to keep up with the potholes--but at least there were no hills.
Yesterday I wore the same sneakers and sports bra and black running pants that I had worn in New Orleans, those I had been foolish enough to evacuate the city with (not realizing it would be more than two years before I had the time or mental strength to run again). It's strange how these physical memories are linked together with unbreakable chain.
I remembered the last time I ran in Audubon Park. It was Saturday, the day before the hurricane hit, and I wanted to go for a run before the grueling car ride out of town. It seems frivolous now, of course, but I couldn't imagine what was going to happen on Sunday. After the run, Gus napped in the jogger while I stretched in the grass, gazing up at the branches of the oak trees, half-heartedly wondering if it would all be underwater soon.
As I ran home yesterday, tomato-red and exhausted from the trip around the park (Prospect Park is much, much bigger, by the way), I had a run-in with a nice-looking middle-aged man with gray hair and the kind, withdrawn smile of a model citzen in an old-masters painting.
He paused at the instersection and cocked his head, smiling at me.
"Have a nice run," he said. "Happy Spring!"
I've been having a lot of migraines lately. I've been getting these since I was thirteen, since that time in math class when I thought I was going blind, and the boy sitting in front of me began to slip me his dad's business card (he was an ophthalmologist), and then I saw "funny lights," and then I was running down the hall so that I could vomit in relative tranquility and privacy in the girl's bathroom, where I promptly turned out the lights. I was rushed to the hospital, because they assumed I had appendicitis, then realized I'd had a migraine. These nightmarish entities have persisted in my life ever since, like a bad habit I can't shake. Sure, they ebb and flow in frequency and intensity, but they're always there. Lately they've been bad. Frequent. Excruciating. Lurking. Some people call these "cluster" migraines. All I know is that they are very, very wretched. Each day I feel like I'm waiting for the blindness, then the aura--that spindle of light that jogs slowly across my vision and announces what will be a terrible, terrible day.
But then a good friend recommended this marvelous stuff called Feverfew. It's an herb, apparently taken from these pretty flowers.
I have no idea what it does, exactly, but weirdly enough it's working. My head feels all cool and breezy. I take thirty drops in a glass of water, and poof!
The second remedy I found was, oddly, my attendance at a Richard Foreman play. The new one, entitled Wake Up Mr. Sleepy! Your Unconscious Mind is Dead had an unusually restorative effect.
I have no idea why, but the combination of this revelatory play about the effects of modern life on the subconscious mind and the Feverfew tincture fixed me.
I'm not certain this will work for everyone. It worked for me.
When we first moved here, one of the things we were excited about were the world-class museums of New York. This is dorky, I realize, but Smith and I like dimly lit museum interiors, smelling of marble and damp and very old wood. But we have a toddler, and Gus is not someone, we've learned, that you can hang out with in a museum. You may push him through the echoey corriders in a stroller if he happens to be sleeping, or you may constantly shush him when he awakes, or you may grab back his chubby hands as they reach longingly for one priceless work of art after another--but the experience is not enviable.
Of course he savors the dioramas at the American Museum of Natural History (but who doesn't?) and he can handle MOMA for about an hour if we stick to the rooms full of abstract paintings, with those alarming colors and dressy brushstrokes and wall-sized canvasses. And in some moods Gus is precocious about recalling the names of certain sculptures he finds fascinating--usually, a particular life-sized figure of a trudging man by the elevators. Still, in general it's best to leave him home with one of us, while the lucky one ventures forth to visit the museum solo.
Often, though, we feel dissatisfied with this. And so we have devised a relatively simple scheme to make a space for our artistic temperaments. One goes to the museum and rushes through in less than an hour (or less!) while the other one awaits, scowling and impatient, at a playground in Central Park.
Then switch.
It's not that bad in theory--who doesn't love the park! Jesus!--but it is an oddly excruciating experience. Once, at the Frick, the Goya show sold out during my hour, and I felt pitifully disappointed, knowing Smith would get to see the exhibition an hour later when there was space. I returned to the playground, mildly buzzing from the vision of my favorite painting at the Frick (John the Baptist, a strange desert scene, skulls), but ultimately feeling lost. I never did get to see the Goya's, and while I trust that I will surely have more experiences in front of great paintings, I doubt that the Goya's will appear again en masse in a room I could visit were it not for my toddler.
And so, on my birthday last week, Smith offered this: a trip to the Neue Galerie solo. I leaped out of bed and readied myself. I skipped to the subway and read a book while stifling giggles of pleasure, and delight. Oh, to be alone.
I couldn't believe how beautiful the Galerie was from the outside--all understated limestone--but throwing open the imposing iron gate I met a man in some sort of blue uniform who advised me the galleries were closed on Wednesdays.
"Oh," I said calmly, as my lips trembled with rage. "Okay."
It all worked out fine, however. I simply strode over to the Met. This being the other incredible, astonishing fact of life in New York--that one can just go elsewhere if one's hopes have been utterly dashed.
So I entered the museum, and checked my coat to maximize the feeling of lightness, of buoyancy, and I traipsed through my favorite Greco-Roman galleries, pausing to admire the amphoras and kraters.
Then, aware of the time--I had to get back to Brooklyn for an early dinner with Gus and Smith--I made a bee-line to the German exhibit, a showcase of paintings from 1920's Berlin. It was decay, and decadence of every type--extremely gorgeous yet horrific stuff--and I fell in love with some paintings.
Afterwards, I continued a project I started while I was living temporarily in Cambridge, Massuchesetts two summers ago (before the hurricane, before we moved here), and decided it might be interesting to take photos inside women's restrooms in museums, which are usually located in the basement. And so, at the risk of committing some grave act of exposure, I give you a pretty row of toilet stalls at the Met.
Making my way back to Park Slope, on the cold hushed streets, on the subway, I felt a kind of peaceful but not uncomplicated sense of accomplishment, wonder, mortality.
It was a good birthday, a really good birthday.
I turned 40 on Sunday. A couple of months before I had been idly flipping through a 'ladies' magazine' (Harper's?, Elle?) when I ran across a list of the top 20 things to accomplish before this landmark date. Several involved financial planning and after trying to ignore this section I admitted that if I balanced my checkbook I would be taking a big step in the right direction. Others involved buying 'landmark pieces' such as $2000 purses or a pair of crazily expensive shoes. I crafted an 'alternate' list in my mind, less ambitious, more inwardly reflective. And by the time 40 loomed near I had narrowed the list down to one thing: Spend a weekend at the Kripalu Center in the Berkshires.
I have been doing yoga since my mid-20s, off and on, and had been encouraged to do yoga since my teens, due to crippling stress headaches that didn't respond to medicine. And I am a convert. The only headaches I have had since I started have been due to caffeine withdrawal or too much alcohol. I always feel better when I do yoga - more mindful and healthy. So instead of having a big booze-up at some local bar and inviting everyone I vaguely had contact with I asked a few friends if they would like to accompany me. I didn't press anyone, as it involved a not huge, but sizable, amount of money. In the end, two friends decided to go - one, Miriam, from Brooklyn, and the other, Eve, my undergrad college roomate from Springfield, MA. None of us had been to Kripalu before. The only frame of reference Eve and I had was from a weekend at the Sivananda ashram in upstate New York - a weekend in which we rose at 5:30 for chanting, ate scant meals which lacked garlic and onions (too exciting to the system) and included 'karma yoga' (which means chores). Our expectations were moderate.
After a delicious and thrifty lunch at the Sitar Restaurant in Springfield, we drove West to the Berkshires. We suspiciously eyed the seminary-like building that houses Kripalu (in fact it had been a Jesuit seminary until the 60s) and joined a surprisingly long line of people to check in. Our rooms were spartan, but very clean and sensibly arranged. We lounged about before we hit a 4:15 yoga class.
Over the following 2 days, we immersed ourselves in the offerings of Kripalu. The food was amazing - healthy and sustaining (though I did get a 'lack of refined sugar' headache by Sunday evening). Eve and I tried a pilates mat class (underwhelming, due to an exercise-class like atmosphere we hadn't expected). Miriam and I went to a 'Balancing Your Life' workshop that was helpful in its emphasis on chosing one specific thing to accomplish. And of course we did lots and lots of yoga. I even tried a vigorous vinyasa class that pushed my limits of flexibility and caused sweat to drip from my nose. It was great to be able to roll out of bed, go to yoga, eat and relax, then do more yoga in the company of near and dear friends.
I had been encouraged by several people to try a Danskinetics class whilst there, so Miriam and I duly arrived at the large hall in which it was being held Saturday at noontime. I almost left when I saw the drum circle warming up and a middle-aged lady in loose clothing free-dancing in what I imagined to be a dance one might do after taking lots of drugs at a Phish concert. First of all, I have absolutely no background in dance. Secondly, I sensed a lot of personal interaction with fellow dancers coming up.
And I was certainly not wrong on that score - after some dancing led by the group leaders (and I have to admit it, the drum circle was excellent, their music very easy to dance to) we were split into 2 large groups. Individuals were encouraged to lead the entire group in a dance move of their own making, and as we passed each other in the middle of the room, not only were we working on duplicating said dance step, we were supposed to shout things like, "You are beautiful! You are sexy! You are mysterious!" to everyone we passed. "Am I really doing this?" I thought. And I was. Whenever I looked over at Miriam she was doing some impossibly cool dance move and I, I guess I was dancing sort of like Elaine on that Seinfeld episode. I'm glad I did it, but never again.
We were all sad when the weekend ended and are plotting our returns with various friends and even spouses and maybe children in tow. Turning 40 turned out to be pretty good after all.
