Not-beach-day Saturday

Maybe on a weekend afternoon, you decide you'll all go to the beach, because it's a nice day and your sleep-challenged toddler loves the beach so much, and it's well before his nap time, and you figure he'll toddle around on the beach a lot and tire himself out and fall asleep on the way home. And then you get to the beach, and you turn around and see this. 

So you stretch out all your parent-flexibility and decide to let him sleep. You park at the beach and, in whispers, devise a new plan: you'll take back roads all the way from Jenner to Petaluma, where you'll eat dinner at your friends' restaurant. The drive should take you a good ninety minutes, allowing him a nice long nap.

The drive is heartbreakingly scenic and, by necessity, quiet. Every so often one and then both of you peer over your shoulders, nervously, as though you are carrying a backseat full of illegal explosives, and then, seeing closed eyes and flushed face and tiny chest solemnly rising and falling, you grin at each other with relief so profound it borders on hysteria. He wakes up when you're almost through Sebastopol.

So you Google-map for playgrounds between Sebastopol and your friend's restaurant and end up at a beautiful park you've never heard of a few miles from your house. And the slides and sand and open spaces turn your sleepy-faced baby into a blur of joy.

Maybe late that afternoon there is the crispest, roundest moon you have ever seen in the pinkest sky.

Maybe the reddest trees.     

The End.

I like this

"If your heart is bleeding, make the most of it.

There is heat in freezing. Be a testament."

Motherhood can be really lonely sometimes. You’re pretty much never alone, certainly never ever again in the way you were pre-motherhood. You have a little person with you, needing you, all the time, and in the few moments that little person is not with you they still need you, they are still firmly attached to every one of your thoughts, illuminating the corners of your soul where quiet and dust used to hide. But you’re alone in how much that person needs you. No matter how supportive your partner (and I say this with full recognition of how ridiculously lucky I am to have one as supportive as Adam); no matter how richly empathic your community of friends and family and mother-peers--you are the only you your child has, and that astounding responsibility can be intensely isolating. And I like this video for serving as a reminder to all of us, mothers and others, that that is okay.

Also, I am now officially obsessed with Tanya Davis.

Also: Why do so many things I love beyond reason come from Canada? John Fluevog. Giles Herman. Vasanti Cosmetics. And now Ms. Davis. Canada, can you adopt me?

Adam's birthday

This video was Adam's birthday present from Kamal and me this year.





The day after his birthday, we went to the beach. That's been our tradition for Adam's birthday; it was actually Adam's tradition years before I came along.

It was Kamal's first time at the beach since he's been able to walk. I don't think he's ever had so much fun anywhere. Ever. It was incredible how excited he was. He was literally shouting with joy. He'd be toddling at high speed along the shoreline, leaving tiny little footprints in the sand, mouth wide open with delight, arms waving in random happy patterns, and suddenly he'd let loose this thrilled "YAAAAAAAAAA!"

He fell asleep SO. HARD. on the car ride home, then woke up to eat takeout with us from Ono'z in Guerneville. 

You get to see deliciously chubby baby legs in this photo because both of the pairs of pants Kamal was wearing (it was COLD at the beach!) got soaked through from sitting in wet sand.

It was a good, good day.

Just for the sake of history, here's Adam and Kamal on Adam's last birthday, in the pop-up outdoor dining room I jerry-rigged around the gliding picnic table I got him as a present:

And here's the video I made him the year before that, before he was ever Daddy, just about a month before we found out we were pregnant with the little embryo that would become Kamal:



Adam's birthdays are my favorite.

Ways to cope with your baby growing up*

*By which I mean "Ways I cope with my baby growing up."

1. Stubbornly continue to refer to him as your "baby," even though he is technically a toddler, and in fact actually toddles pretty much all day long.

2. Don't make any real effort at all to night wean. At night, half-asleep, savor every heart-healing cuddle, his quiet and milk-scented baby breath, the sweet small sounds he makes as he nurses.

3. After he's gone to sleep, press his little onesies to your face, breathing in his baby smell. Kiss them for prolonged moments. Call this "folding the laundry."

On being your own boss, and then having a baby and not being the boss anymore at all.

I've been the sole proprietor of my traditional Chinese medical clinic now for four years. For six or seven years before opening the clinic, I had a variety of jobs, but almost always as an independent contractor. My point is that I've been my own boss for at least the last ten years.

Having myself as a boss hasn't been easy. My self is not a particularly lax boss, especially these last few years, when the business I've been working for is my own. My self is a boss that only agrees to let me go on vacation every three or four years. She doesn't approve of lunch breaks; rather, to avoid her reproachful glare, I always work while eating lunch, and bring it with me most of the time so I'm not spending valuable work time getting takeout. She holds me to exacting standards: she insists I stay current with research; she requires that I go above and beyond the ethical norms for my profession; she doesn't let me wear jeans to work.

I thought my self was a tough boss until I had a baby. Now my boss--all twenty-something pounds and twenty-something inches of him--is the kind of tyrant that makes me realize my self (who has been deposed to a distant second-in-command) is actually a big old softy of a boss.

My current boss does not approve of vacations at all. Ever. While I think there's the chance I might be up for one in eighteen years or so, I'm not counting on it. He also does not approve of lunch breaks. Or coffee breaks. Or bathroom breaks. If I take a bathroom break, he literally screams at me until I return. This is not an equitable dynamic.

My current boss expects me or my coworker Adam to make him at least three meals a day, and has exacting specifications for those meals, but does not communicate those specifications. We are left to guess, and we do. Adam and I have long, involved strategy sessions about what our boss might find palatable. We seek out only the best ingredients, cook his meals with unremitting attention to detail, and plate his food with an eye for aesthetics. We are both good cooks; Adam in particular is a remarkable cook. With all modesty, I feel confident saying that most people would be thrilled to have the two of us employed as their dedicated personal chefs. But Boss Kamal? He regards the meal we have placed in front of him with detached circumspection. He picks up a bite between thumb and forefinger, regards it with an expression that is either disdain or indifference, places it in his mouth, grimaces in disgust, condescends to chew it a little bit, and then actually spits it out. Spits it out! With no regard for where the spit-out bite lands, as though having expelled it from his person he is relieved to no longer be concerned with it. And then, as though we cooks were not sufficiently discountenanced, he laughs. In our faces. 

Seriously. Having a baby is so weird, you guys. Can you imagine having a friend over for a meal you've cooked from scratch, and he inspects the food closely before trying it, and then tries it and makes a face and spits it out? And then laughs? You would totally never have that friend over again.  But for your baby, you will go through this ten times a day, you will buy untold quantities of his favorite freeze-dried bananas, you will wake up twenty times in one night and still love him in the morning, even if you are crying from fatigue. You will tolerate having your foot peed on and vomit in your bra. You will make up songs to sing while you are actually on the toilet, like the awkwardest karaoke singer of all time, while he sits on the bathroom tile and stares you down. You will attempt to discern whether he has pooped in his diaper by smelling his butt. While you are attempting to--this bears repeating--smell another person's butt, if he starts walking away because he just learned to walk and loves it and you haven't figured out yet whether he has pooped or not, you will crawl after him on your hands and knees trying to keep your nose to his butt. And then you will realize that you are engaging in a behavior that you find repulsive in dogs, only less successfully. And then you will wonder hard about where love has brought you, because all of it, all of this, is at once a graceless and an exalted exercise in love. 

Reminder

It's so easy--it's too easy, really--on days when I've been up most of the night rocking a wakeful baby, and he's tipped half a beet-green smoothie down my shirt, and the cat has knocked over the laundry detergent again, and patients' insurance companies are going way out of their way to avoid having to reimburse, and the dishwasher needs to be unloaded and the dog has just thrown up on the carpet--to feel awfully, woefully sorry for myself. And all I have to do is read some of my writing from ten years ago to remember how very badly I wanted a happy family, a thriving acupuncture practice, a big goofy dog that would play ball and run with me. And how I thought a vegetable garden where I could pick all the beet greens (my favorite!) I wanted, a washer and dryer in my own place, and a dishwasher--full of dishes that the lovely Adam created making a delicious dinner last night--would be the absolute height of luxury. I have a dishwasher, of all things, I want to tell ten-years-ago me. Hallelujah, here I am, in a gorgeously messy life filled with wishes-come-true costumed as problems.

Hot pink baby

Freeze-dried strawberries left in a baggie in your backpack and thereby mushed into a powder + exactly one-half second of inattention to Mr. OhmygoshILOVEstrawberries=hot pink baby