Creepy

I do not understand it. Why does Creepy have an insect family? Is she adopted?

Christmas in Spain

so yesterday was Christmas day.

first things first. the night before yesterday was Christmas eve.

So in my mother-in-law's house--mind you, it is really the house of both parents-in-law, but it is always her house--"the family" got together to have "dinner". That means that besides Tororo (real name, Teodoro) and Rosa (real name, Carmen Rosa), there were: Ignacio and Alejandro (and I); Ignacio's sister Carolina, her husband Maxi, their daughters Sonsoles (13), Angela (10) and Paloma (7); Ignacio's next sister Rocío, her husband, Christian (who's German), their children Guillermo (8) and Teresa (6), and Ignacio's youngest sister, Raquel. Her husband, Frenchman Vincent, is in France with his brother this year. In Paris. I am not supposed to eat seafood, particularly shellfish, mind you, because I'm pregnant. Right.

What's a Christmas Eve dinner like in Spain, you ask? Tororo was sitting by himself at the table waiting for the rest of the family to sit there. The rest of the family was all over the house: the kids were playing here and there, I was talking with Christian in the living room... Rocío came with Sonsoles and Paloma and Teresa singing Christmas carols and scolded Ignacio for changing the lyircs of one... (the real lyrics say, stupidly enough, "watch how the fish in the river drink when they see that God is born; they drink and drink and drink;" Ignacio said that the fish were drunks... Rocío was offended. How could he make fun of such a serious, sensible, sacred song?) I went and sat with Tororo. Paloma had written down the names of each person and put them on plates, arbitrarily. I paid mine no heed and sat where I pleased, and changed Ignacio's as well.

There we were. On the table there was this, um, spreadable pate made of tuna and mayonnaise and something else, probably, which was very good. Tororo and I ate a lot of it while we waited.

Well, we had, um, something called berberechos, which are like little clams or little mussels (real name: cockles). Then we had, um, some other sea creature. Rice and squid. You know, where the rice is gray because of the ink. It was not hot. It was lukewarm, actually. Then we had desserts.

Spanish Christmas desserts are not good, either: they consist of "turrones", some of which are good and some of which are just weird, and other assorted bought things like powdery cookies and marzipan stuff. Nothing like a cake or a pie or a mousse or a custard or a something that somebody has made. Well, Christian brought this dry cake that was good, sort of like a flatter Pannetone with powdered sugar on top. A miners' dessert, he said.

Conversations came and went. We turned the TV on. Paloma played a lousy organ. Her mother made her stop because it sounded so bad, although the child played well. Tororo got upset. He wanted to hear more. Raquel got upset at something else. Ignacio got upset at something. Rosa got upset at something. The kids annoyed Tororo. Maxi annoyed Tororo. Carolina and Rocío and Rosa and Raquel and Ignacio were annoyed at Tororo's annoyance. Carolina kept telling me that I could sit and do nothing only because I was very pregnant with Aitana, but that next year I would be working like they were. I smiled and said nothing. I do not think that next year I will do much. Not unless I am served a hot meal, dammit! Or at least something that I can remember two days later, jeez...

Christmas Day: lunch at the same place, same people, plus 2: these two nieces-cousins something or other, named Teresa (thirty-something) and Marta (early twenties). For starters, we had mussels. And shrimp. And prawns. Then we had octopus. Well, these are not my relatives so I understand that they would not change their Christmas menu for the pregnant lady who should not eat seafood. Then we had a choice: a thin fillet of pork in milk and mustard sauce, or a, a, i guess a pudding of fish, breaded. I had a piece of both. With some mashed potatoes. Mashed potatoes in Spain ALWAYS come from a box: they do not conceive of actually buying potatoes, boiling them and mashing them. And they do not add much margarine or butter, they just add the milk or the water.

Same desserts. With an extra turrón, one of chocolate. Which means, really, a fancy chocolate bar that they split with a knife and put on a plate. Like a Hershey's bar. On a plate. That's a Spanish Christmas dessert. (Other desserts, not in Christmas. are: a banana on a plate, which you are supposed to peel with a knife, and cut it, and eat the pieces with a fork).

This time, at least the pork was hot. Although, by the time it reached the table, of course, it was not hot. Neither were the "mashed potatoes" that had come from a box. These things had been sitting in the kitchen while we all ate seafood. And bread. And stuff.

I think that unless you are wealthy enough to hire cooks and aides for Christmas dinners, who can bring stuff out and take away plates and continue cooking or reheating things while you go through the appetizers and the first round of food and bring out the last things steaming hot, and actually mashing real frikin' potatoes... then you should move on... no three course meals in which the last course is cold, and which require that everybody work getting up, taking things to the kitchen, bringing stuff out again, cleaning up halfway through dinner, constantly working instead of relaxing and eating... I don't get it, actually. It makes no sense to me: people who have servants, live their lives one way. People who do not, should realize that their lives would be much better if they lived them some other way. Say: put on the table all of the food that will be eaten, and people can actually eat the food that is supposed to be eaten hot, when it is hot, and if they want cold prawns, they can have them. But no!!!!!!!!!!!!! That would violate the canons of decent living. So you have to eat cold pork and cold mashed potatoes. Less people were upset by each other this time. In general, people did not speak as much. And Tororo and Maxi took naps after eating, so that made things easier.

Carolina told me the same thing again: next year, you have to work! And I will reply the same thing: only for a hot meal!

Aitana

1) estoy bien, estamos bien, todo bien. ha nevado un montón y está nevando ahora mismo. peso 77.5 kilos y la babé no-nata, algo así como 2.75 kilos. y que me dicen que bien, que eso está por el libro... 2) sin embargo, la beba no está del todo encajada en donde tiene que estar, y que eso puede deberse a que su cabeza es más grande que el hueco pélvico donde suelen encajarse ya en la semana 36-37... hoy fui a ver a la matrona, y al parecer la nena estaba con la cabeza abajo, no debajo de mi pulmón derecho como en la última ecografía... pero no está encajada en su posición. si sigue así, dando tumbos, y el 4 de enero no está ahí metida en el hueco pélvico, me citan directamente una cesárea, ya sea el mismo jueves 7, o por tarde, el lunes 11 de enero. la matrona dice que así evitan que me ponga de parto, y sea peor para todos puesto que simplemente no cabe y no cabrá... 3) que la niña ha sido llamada por mí, y por su padre, y por Susana, y por otras personas allegadas que se refieren a ella de vez en cuando, Sabrina, porque así se llamaba. yo le voy a hablar en inglés hasta que vaya a la escuela, para que sea bilingue (aquí no hay escuelas bilingues, todas las películas son traducidas, y los canales infantiles, y sería una pena que siendo yo bilingue la nena no lo sea porque no tendría exposición a ningún otro idioma que el español...) Y en inglés, sabrina suena muy bonito, así que cuando me daba alguna patada o se movía mucho, le decía, "Sabri, crazy girl, what are you doing!?". en fin, en resumen, ya tenía nombre: Sabrina. las cualidades positivas de este nombre son su sonoridad divertida, provista por esa "br" en el centro, que obliga al que lo pronuncia a poner su boca en forma de beso por unos segundos. Al terminar en "ina" además, parece señalar a una niña, a una joven. Y la S es una letra visualmente muy atractiva, además de sonar como el sol, sssss, es una excelente primera letra. así pienso yo en los nombres--pienso en su sonido, en cómo se ven escritos, en cómo fluyen, en qué tipo de cara uno se imagina al oírlos (una cara sonriente, alegre; una mirada misteriosa, seria, profunda; una cara seria, una mirada serena; una cara adulta; una cara de bebé... por eso había eliminado Jimena, porque suena a una mujer adulta, seria, y no me gusta cómo se ve escrito. Con X se vería mejor, pero aquí no se escribiría así... ) caveat aside, de repente la niña ha cambiado de nombre. su padre ha dicho hace una semana o dos, ¿qué tal el nombre Aitana? y ahora en Puerto Rico, mi madre, mi hermana, Ángel, y mis sobrinos, decidieron que Aitana es el nombre, y punto. Ignacio se sumó a su campaña y le dijo a Alejandro, que si la niña se llamase Aitana, sus nombres "empezarían los dos por A, ¡qué bien, no!" y yo me puse a pensar... Sabrina evoca sonrisas, sol, una cara alegre y risas, una niña feliz, una joven divertida, impulsiva, enérgica, graciosa... pero no evoca adultez. no puedo imaginar a una mujer hecha y derecha llamada Sabrina... hmmm... qué lío! Aitana evoca a una joven seria, profunda, pensativa, más bien callada, de pelo oscuro... una niña tímida, quizás, pero segura de sí misma, que escucha, que lee, que observa. y me he dado cuenta de que yo quisiera que la nena se llamase Sabrina para que fuera como su nombre, pero que quizás la nena no sea como su nombre... quizás sea, en su infancia, como yo, y sólo al llegar a adolescente, a los 17 por ahí, se decida a dejar a un lado la timidez y sonreírle y amar a la humanidad. entonces, su nombre comenzaría a tener sentido, pero es un nombre que se le quedó pequeño y que no usó cuando lo tenía que usar! y hoy pensé--es que mi hija se hubiera llamado Aitana, es un sonido que va más con todos los nombres que consideré, que hasta Gaitana consideré, que es un nombre indígena--indígenas europeos, que fueron colonizados y desaparecidos por los romanos--que es un nombre raro... y me di cuenta que mi resistencia se debía a tres cosas. primero, a que ya me había acostumbrado a Sabrina y le había cogido cariño a la nena así llamada, y ahora es como si Sabrina hubiese dejado de existir y en su lugar hubiera otra niña... segundo, a que Sabrina en inglés suena bonito, y Aitana no tiene inglés... y tercero, a que Aitana no tiene apodo, y Sabrina ya era de vez en cuando, Sabri. bueno, a cuatro cosas. la cuarta, a que me molesta que me presionen, a que me intenten dirigir por aquí o por allá en algo que me parece tan íntimo y tan personal como nombrar a un ser humano no-nacido, algo serio y que una tercera persona, sea abuela o vecina, da igual, no debe ni siquiera opinar hasta que se le pregunte! no he resuelto estas resistencias, pero sí he decidido que la niña, hija mía y de su padre, es una Aitana. que Sabrina es hija de otra persona, una persona con una carga emocional y mental más liviana que nosotros... era esa la razón por la cual quería ese nombre, para aliviar la carga de locura depre que la niña tendrá que aprender a manejar de su entorno... pero bueno, el universo ha dicho, asume quien eres y afronta la realidad!!! eso comunico, entonces. eso... he asesinado a una niña que nunca llegó a nacer. la he matado. existió por un mes o dos meses, y ya no más. ¿será posible?

Being a (pregnant) stepmom

we think that the boy has some issue, something beyond our capacity to address as simple parents, let alone parent/stepparent combo...

although he is clearly intelligent (some children aren't, you know, it's the truth) and resourceful in some ways, he has learning disabilities, or perhaps, difficulties... he has difficulties relating to other children, and can do so only under particular circumstances, he has developed difficulties at playing, which he did not have before... he is now, a week short of turning 6, peeing on himself... he has difficulties, in the end, relating to himself, to the person that he is becoming, to his life, of which he is increasingly aware the more time passes and the more mature he is...

the poor boy, after all, has two families that are very different. in one, his father is a grouchy man who both scolds him constantly, and sometimes scolds him jokingly, and often scolds him as if he were joking precisely because he--the dad--is trying to reduce the strength of the rebuke... and a stepmom who tries to stay out of the way of these interactions when they happen... (the rest of the time i keep telling the father, do not scold him for stupid things, he does enough things that require scolding as it is, and in a few months time, scolding will lose all effect because it is used many times a day, every day... and especially, do not scold him jokingly, because the child is too young and not bright enough with words to understand sarcasm, or to realize that you are in fact, scolding him but trying to be "nice" about it... ) and we don't know exactly what goes on in the other family, but we do know that there is a lot less discipline, a lot less scolding, and a lot more freedom to watch television endlessly, do no chores, and that type of lax child-rearing that works wonders...

the child never knows where he will sleep, where he will be that weekend, what day of the week it is. mom's house? dad's house? the grandparents' house? he has not been able to learn the days of the week or the months of the year, or to manage time at all...

i think he has add. so ig looks it up.

he finds this webpage, it describes the boy as if it were about him, personally.

so now we should learn to deal with our part of being his family. learn to discipline him and help him and learn to be organized and timely. ig has to stop waiting for the last minute to say, "let's go, hurry up, we're late," and instead, give the child 10 minutes even if a "normal" child would need just 2... that sort of thing... be very specific about what the child is doing wrong instead of saying, "stop misbehaving" or something that some other child would react to... etc...

whatever.

as a stepmom, however, what should i do? it is not the same, what parents can and should and need to do, and what stepparents can and should and need to do... does the child need an extra parent? no. the child has too many parenting models as it is... he needs something else, and i can only give something else, but no webpages or books address the roles of stepparents of children with ADD or other psychological issues that are related to parents' bad divorces...

and not only am i a stepmom to him, i will soon be the mom of his sister. and that will change everything, but what will it change i to? for one thing, i will feel with the right to discipline this child of mine, and get more directly involved when her father does or says something crazy. my stepchild cannot help but notice that when it is his sister, i get involved, and when it is him, i do not, or do so less... he doesn't know that when he is not present, i do intervene... perhaps from now on, i shall do so. i shall say, hey, this or that... i dunno...

in any case.

the environment in the house is a lot more tense--the boy is getting increasingly difficult, and it is hard to know how to deal with all of this, and to think ahead, all the time, "oh my god, imagine how much worse it will be when the baby comes..."

help!

the heat is on

in every sense of the phrase.

it's like 0 degrees out there. probably less. centigrades, that is.

so indoors, the heat is on.

i have to send steve, flo and franco my two "finished" drafts--the intro and chapter 1--this friday. so the heat is on (o-woo-oh-oh, o-woo-oh-oh, baby can you feel it!?)

and my mother and husband have changed the name of my baby-in-belly and now call her, Aitana. naming the unborn child is relatively important, and having sort of fallen into the notion that she had a name and that it was Sabrina, to now find that there are still open possibilities out there, means that we shall not simply "fall into" the name, but actually pick it. so the heat is on.

who sang that, anyway?

the thing is (still) that i think of sabrina, sabri, as an airy, light, charming girl. girl, in my mind's eye, from the age of 9 months to, say 3. then again from like 9 to 11; sabrina in those ages is a fun child. she is a happy young adult, sort of, thus named. the name gives me no more clues as to her adolescence, and between 4 and 9 there's this unknown, unknowable period. before 9 months there's not much there to be this or that. just life. but as an adult, my adult daughter--when i am a middle-aged and then old woman--may not be aptly named sabrina. she cannot be light and airy and charming as an adult: she will have been raised in my home, by ig and me, with her older half-brother, in burgos, spain. it is practically impossible for her to retain "sabrinaness" throughout her life.

this worries me, people, because unlike the wise native american groups in the wild midwest and west and east and wherever it was they were, whose names changed as a person aged and changed, in our culture you are stuck with your name forever. and there are names that i have readily dismissed because they do not sound right for anybody under the age of 50--but then again, there are those other names that do not sound right for some people over the age of 30. is sabrina one of these names, at least, in our daughter's case?

this is a serious matter that i had recognized in the back of my mind, but had not confronted directly. now, the possibility of this other, more serious name, forces me to Think (the heat is on). because Aitana is a totally different name from Sabrina. i mean, obviously it's a different name. but i mean, it's Totally different.

Aitana does not name a charming, smiling, happy girl, a charming, witty, sharp-eyed young woman... that's what Sabrina, Sabri, does. Aitana names a more serious person, a deep person, a darker person, a more profound person.

how much of us is shaped by our name? the immediate answer would be, "very little." it doesn't seem possible that, being given a particular name, a person ends up with certain ways which, under a different name, he or she would not have ended up having... but hey, a name is a word and words are powerful. a word puts together a series of sounds, and images, it orders sounds and it orders these squiggles we call letters, and assigns this orderly, repeated, institutionalized Sound/Image to One. Susana. Ethan. Yesenia. Ruth. Ignacio. Sabrina. Aitana. Ellen. we should not underestimate the power of such a naming sound, such a naming image. we see it or hear it, and think, that's me. in school, the teacher pronounces it, and it's you. it's written down somewhere, and it's you. names can have heavy sounds. or they can look frightening. they can make you feel, seem, older than you are. or younger. i hated my name for a long time. it felt totally wrong. it still sometimes feels like it does not totally fit, like there is something extra--it does not lack something, it has too much of something.

i do think that there is some, however small, influence. and before the child is born and is totally under our crazy influence, beyond our control, i would like to try to have all these other details that provide tiny, probably meaningless and irrelevant, influences, under control. these we can deal with now, these i can try to make right. the heat, as you can see, is on.

because you can probably tell that i would rather have a Sabrina than an Aitana. but, that is, only if she is indeed Sabrina, and not misnamed as such. if she is named Sabrina, but at the age of 28, is nowhere near the name... then that will be because she will actually be near the other name, Aitana. the more serious woman.

serious, not necessarily depressed. just like sabrina, at that age, can be high-strung and highly energetic, not necessarily happy.

Aitana: beautiful, profound, dark blues, blacks, oceans, mountains.

Sabrina: light, charming, smiles, whites, feathers, tickles, joy, giggles.

what do do?

Time is on nobody's side.

I always liked The Beatles more--they never lied about time taking sides.

I feel like I am running against the clock. It is a feeling one often gets when one is in school, as I am. You have all these deadlines and all this seemingly free time to use for working on whatever needs to be worked on. "Free" time which is in fact, empty time. Those of us who do not deal well with emptiness in our own lives--those of us who, sometimes, with or without reason, feel some sort of "emptiness," should not be given loads of empty time. It kills us. It drives us mad. Empty time is slow and dense and gray, even when it sometimes is light and airy and smells of freshness. It slows us down, it makes us write internet blogs or watch bad tv or Think, with a capital T, of things that are, or should be, minuscule. And then it happens: we have filled this empty time with the easiest thing at hand--sleep, Thoughts, bad tv, itunes organization, doing other people's work, helping somebody else out, chores that could've waited, good tv, internet searches--and its emptiness is coming to and end. The stupid hourglass' empty side is only a reminder that there is now a full one: now there is no more time and we need it desperately.

I must finish this week--today is Thursday!--the introductory chapter of my dissertation. I did no work for 6 days. Some of those hours in which I did not work, I could not have worked. Alejandro was here, a mini-vacation on account of the Spanish Constitution and the Immaculate Conception. We had to cook, eat, we had to entertain him, we had to help him with his homework. We had to visit the grandparents. Other hours were wasted hours. Yesterday was all lost, for no reason. Now I'm on today, and that's that. Now the emptiness of time given is smiling at me scornfully, and I am ill at ease.

Now I must turn to the blank page--more emptiness, in a life that is emptiness-impaired!--and fill it with words. Words that I have not taken the time to construct.

-y

sideways baby

so today i went to an ecografía and it turns out that Sabrina is lying there sideways. the doctor said, that doesn't mean anything--she might turn upside down in a few hours (upside down would be the right side up, that is, feet up, head down). but if she is still lying there sideways when i go to my next appointment on January 4, then i will need to get a c-section immediately!

it made me sad to think of all the millions of women and babies that have died, and probably still do, because the dumb babies are lying there sideways! there is no way that you can give birth to a sideways baby! before c-sections and ecografías to let you know beforehand the fetus' position, a woman would go into labor and die trying... or the baby would die in there, after the uterus had shed all its amniotic fluid and he had no oxygen...

but i do not want a c-section, mostly because it would be done two weeks before the 40th week, for some reason, and that means:

1) that the baby would be born right on, or the day before, the Three Kings Day

2) that the baby might have to spend time there in a little incubator, like my nephew Seba

in any case...

tuesday night my mother-in-law bought the stroller for us! and a "changing thing". i cannot call it a changing pad because it is like a structure, you know? ignacio made me buy stuff too--for myself, for the hospital, and for baby maintenance: nailcuting scissors, and a brush and a comb; and pacifiers.

they say, a pacifier you can make the child stop using. a thumb you cannot...

i think sportacus is worse than barney.