Life in Chicago

Weekly Photo

Veronica, 24 weeks

I'm done waiting for her hair to come in. We're going to accessorize anyway.

To view all the weekly photos, click here.

Giving Thanks

The holidays make me a little...a little...hmm, I'm not sure what the right adjective is. Edgy? Anxious? Sad? I'm not sure how to describe it. It's a less of a feeling of anxiety and more of a general tightness. I feel a swelling in my chest, a bracing against something, a fierce need to build up some strength in order to push through.

Years ago this bracing and building up was necessary to literally just make it through the holiday season without completely falling apart. Now it's more about building up strength in an effort to be able to enjoy it all. In years past enjoying the holidays wasn't even an option. It was more about making a grave effort not to spend them in a complete puddle of self-pity, despair and red wine.

After my mother died, the holidays just felt wrong. The first couple of years they were depressing things, me and my father sitting around in a haze of cigarette smoke, numbing glasses of cognac in our hands, the remains of my sad attempts to cook dinner cooling on the table. My mother had loved holidays, making each event as festive as possible, bringing excitement and warmth to everything she did. One year she stuck 4th of July sparklers in the turkey as she brought it out to the table, bright sparks cascading down around her as she made her entrance. She was like that. And when she was gone her absence was profound.

Slowly, I got better at cooking the meals and my Dad and I learned to invite over as many people as possible to join us. Things brightened. My favorite Thanksgivings took place in California, where a mish-mash of friends and family would come together to cook. Each year the meals got better but in the beginning they were pretty bad. There was the year that Holly and I decided to put a turkey breast and a ham in the same pan to conserve oven space. We laughed all evening because none of us could tell which tasted more like the other.

The last Thanksgiving that my father was alive was great. He'd been doing radiation treatments for a cancer that had grown in his mouth and his taste buds weren't quite what they used to be, but he enjoyed it all the same. Liz's chef husband Kyle made the turkey, Holly's sister Laura made a lovely spinach soup, Holly's husband Kevin made his yummy roasted garlic, buttermilk mashed potatoes, Holly made her grandmother's rolls, Liz made a sweet-potato casserole and I made macaroni and cheese. 

The year after that my father was gone, but Holly and I took on Thanksgiving ourselves. We got a big, hormone free bird from Whole Foods and spent the evening before drinking cocktails and prepping for the creamed corn, homemade cranberry sauce and chocolate pecan pies. That Thanksgiving we feasted with our friends on a meal that we were seriously proud of (even if I did spend a portion of that evening crying in the hallway of Holly's apartment building). We cooked Thanksgiving every year together after that, our friend Liz from Georgia joining into the mix and bringing her heavenly grits florentine recipe. I miss those cobbled-together, makeshift urban family holidays, even though, at the time, I missed my real family.

This year I'll be with the Booses for the third year in a row. I guess I should say that this year I'll be one of the Booses for the third year in a row. An evolution of Thanksgivings and holidays, each one different than the last. I have this perpetual (and tiresome) habit of always reminiscing on the past, something that forever hinders my present. I know that however I feel about this current sphere of holidays, I'll look back on them wistfully someday soon.

For now I wish everyone a warm and present holiday week, wherever you are.

To Know or Not to Know

This issue came up twice in a row this week, and so I thought I'd write about it.

On Sunday we had some friends over for dinner, a couple, (I made eggplant parmesan, an arugula salad and roasted brussel sprouts, in case you're dying to know), and at one point, while I was in the kitchen with the wife of the couple, we were talking about babies and when to have them.

My friend revealed that she had decided to do some genetic testing before she and her husband began trying to conceive. She had already found out that she was a carrier for a kind of scary disease and now her husband was being tested to see if he was also a carrier. "So what happens if he is?" I asked. "You don't have kids?" She didn't have an answer.

Then on Monday I had a session with a client who lost her mother to cancer in March. She just found out that her father has cancer as well. She is now unsure of whether or not she wants to have children with her partner, who has recently raised the question. She is concerned about passing along cancer genes, and she also feels fearful of dying prematurely from cancer herself, leaving her children without a mother.

I actually met with a geneticist several years ago in California. My primary care doctor referred me, after learning of my family history. I felt nervous about the meeting and almost canceled it, but at the last minute I decided that I could at least meet with the geneticist and then decide later if I wanted to have the tests. The geneticist was a young German woman and I sat across from her at her desk in my jeans and high heels. I remember having made a conscious effort to look good, as though that would keep her from assuming that I might be riddled with cancer genes.

I told her about my family, about all the different people who had had cancer, my parents, various aunts and uncles, a grandparent. It's not she wasn't warm, but she lacked empathy. It's a science to her, I had to remind myself, as she scribbled out my deathly family tree. When I was finished reciting all that I could to her about my family medical history, she leaned forward, turning the chart she'd drawn towards me. She pointed out how, on my father's side, it appeared that all the cancer was environmental, meaning that the majority of it was likely from outside causes, namely excessive drinking and smoking. On my mother's side it looked a bit more hereditary with both my mother and grandmother having had colon cancer.

It makes me nervous even to write that. I can feel a flush rise up through me thinking of my mother-in-law reading this. For so long, I've felt a lot of shame about the cancer in my family, as though it's something I can control or something that I brought on. I remember crying to a shrink years ago because I was afraid that no mother would ever let her son marry me since I might bring the scourge of cancer into the family. I still feel that to a certain degree. Like I'm tainted, like there's something wrong with me, like I'm rejectable.

At the end of the meeting I decided not to have the tests. The geneticist thought that I should. It would be go to know about, she said, a good thing to prepare for. I shook my head. There was nothing I would do differently were I to find out that I carried specific genes for cancer. As it were, I was already trying to be as healthy as possible, taking care of my body, my spirit, and living my life as though it were my only. Yet, were I to find out, it might cast a shadow across it all, one that I did not want.

Now, when it comes to being a mother, to having children, to passing down these genes, I suppose it is a different thing. There might be different considerations to make, in contrast to those I might have made when I was single and 26.

But the thing is this. I've thought about this conundrum a hundred times: If I knew from the outset that my parents would both get cancer and die before I was 25, would I still choose to do it all over again?

And the answer is a resounding yes.

I can only hope that my children will feel the same, were things to go that way.

Even in the briefest moments of walking Veronica down the hallway to her crib, just after she has fallen asleep, her soft little head against my shoulder, her breath, warm on my neck, I think: If this moment is all there ever is, it is more than worth it.

Weekly Wednesday Photo

Veronica, 23 Weeks

To see all the weekly photos, click here.

Updates

A couple of things.

First of all, you can now reach this blog using www.lifeinchicagoblog.com. Look at that. A real url. The typepad one still works but the new one is a bit more professional, or something. It's funny, I feel like I've come a long way. When I first started blogging 6 years ago the url for the original Life in LA was blogs.salon.com/0002608. That blog is still up, in case you're curious.

Second of all, The Nervous Breakdown has launched a beautiful new redesign of their site. Greg is one of the new nonfiction editors, which is exciting. In case you didn't know, this is the website Greg and I both met through two and a half years ago. We were both writing for TNB...and then we started writing to each other.

Here's a video of me reading one of my favorite pieces at a TNB reading in Chicago a couple of months ago. You can see one of Greg here.

Who She Is

As I write this I've just put Veronica down for bed and I'm listening to her cry over the monitor. The little red lights blaze across the top of the gadget with each of her cries. They taper off into aahahahaahhhhs that are so sweet they cause my chest swells with warmth. She's not really awake, this is just something she does most nights as she goes to sleep.

Sometimes it escalates and I go in and lift her out of the crib and sink down into the rocker and nurse her back to sleep in the dark. More often than not, I'll think she's awake and I'll go in, only to peer over the railing of the crib at her little open mouth, her eyes closed, and realize that she's just crying out in her sleep.

I nurse her to sleep every night around 8pm. Usually on the couch, the lights in the living room turned low. She stays up while Greg and I eat dinner, usually playing in her exersaucer while we eat, each of taking turns to make funny faces at her so that she rocks back and forth in excitement. After that I turn off the lamp behind my head and sit to nurse her while we watch Madmen episodes on DVD or catch up on email. She plays with her ear for a while in the beginning of nursing, her fingers fluttering and pulling at the cartilage, her eyes opening wide to look up at me, as if to make sure I'm still there, even though she's physically attached to me. And then, after a while, her breathing grows deeper, her eyes stay closed, and I know that she is asleep.

Sometimes I let her stay there for a while, enjoying her warmth and her presence, but eventually, after I'm sure she's asleep, I heft us off the couch, keeping her cradled in my arms against me, and I walk slowly back to the nursery. I creak across the hardwood floors and gently roll her out of my arms and onto the mattress in her crib. Then I click off the light and back out of the room, being careful not to make much noise.

And then I usually miss her for a while. I've written about this before here, but I'm still fascinated by what a physical relationship this is. It's not something that I wasn't anticipating at all. But you get so used to it. Her tiny hands all over me, the weight of her body in my arms, the way she twists and kicks, and the feel of her soft, soft head against my cheek. My body feels so solitary, so staid, when she's gone.

I meant to write a post about Veronica and the little person she is swiftly becoming, and I guess I am in a way. But I see now that what I'm really writing about is my attachment to her, perhaps in the face of her emerging independence. And I know that this is only the beginning. I have eating and walking and teenagedom to look forward to, but I had gotten used to those early months of complete dependence.

Even though it was challenging, I'd grown used to doing everything for this little person, for making each decision, and for even having to physically manipulate into various positions. But now, here she is, pushing against me, pulling herself towards something, indicating how desperately she wants to grab that cat who is walking by (poor cats, they're really going to be in for it soon). And I can't help but realize that she is her own little person already. She has wants and desires and plans and ideas that are different than mine. I find this at once heartbreaking and utterly revelatory.

I was thinking about my father tonight. He always treated me like a person. Even when I was a kid. He expected a certain level of independence and responsibility from me that I think is rare for a parent to ask of their child. I'm grateful for it. And I know that it had to do with raising three children before I was born, watching  them grow up and turn into their own people helped him to recognize that I was my own person right from the start. Where parents generally have to live through the experience of their child becoming themselves, my father had done that several times over, giving him the ability to know that I would do the same, long before I actually did it.

I always want to respect the person that Veronica is, whoever it may be. I want to recognize that, although she comes from me and from Greg, she is not us. I want to be open to whoever she wishes to be, even if it's something that I would not choose for her.

One of my favorite books is The Fairy Tales of Herman Hesse, and in it, there is a story about a woman who gets one wish for her infant son. She thinks on it long and hard and finally she wishes for all people to love him. The story follows the boy as he grows into a man and, indeed, all who encounter him love him. But he turns selfish and self-centered, and he has no respect or reverence for those around him, not even his own mother. She regrets the folly of her choice and her heart breaks for the man he has become.

I want Veronica to live the life that she will live. I cannot protect her from heartbreak or loneliness, I cannot ask that everyone love her (even though part of me wishes I could). I can only ask that she be who she is. And I can only love her for whoever that may be.

New Camera!

Greg's parents got us an amazing new camera (a Nikon D60) and I can't stop taking closeups of Veronica.