not really back

i'm here at home and have tons of writing and reading to do and translating and cleaning.
but instead of doing what i have to do, i am simply feeling good today. i feel at peace and joyous and well. for no reason. as if i did not have a care in the world.

which is why i cannot write. when life is good, what's there to say?

so no, i am not back yet. not really, not today.

Baby Einstein

Aitana likes Baby Monet's video of the seasons. I like to pretend that her favorite is Summer, but I think she prefers Spring. My theory is that since Spring is the first one, her attention is still fresh and impressionable. And the colors of the flowers help, too.

(I am multiply exiled. I no longer live in my country. I no longer live in a real community of friends or family--my own nuclear family does not count as a community. It is way too small. I feel like an outsider where I live, exiled from this society of an odd normalcy that I cannot relate to. And now, I am even exiled from my own blog. ..)

She is sitting on my lap wanting to do something interesting. But it's hard to do things with a creature whose head still falls forward when she sits up too straight.

Perhaps we should go outside. Perhaps perhaps perhaps.

Let us try another Baby Einstein video. Maybe that is interesting enough...

The Veil in School

And other things...

There is a debate here about Muslim women's veils... there are some schools in Spain where nobody can wear anything on their head (baseball caps or condom hats or veils... and wigs?)... so it's opened this debate which in France is more-or-less sealed: the state forbids females from wearing veils to school, whether they want to wear it or not, because it signals oppression. That means some teenage girls do not go to school at all. That means some teenage girls who might have grown to not wanting to wear it, will now wear it and be activists about it. That means that some who are religious and want to wear it are not allowed to do so by the state. And some who did not want to wear it at all are now happy because they don't have to and their parents still send them to school.

I think that no school should should forbid the veil (I'm not saying chador or burka), until it also forbids rosary beads, crucifixes and crosses on necklaces, t-shirts that claim any ethnic or regional identification... etc... as a matter of fact, it should be illegal for parents to pass on their religion to their children, because that violates kids' freedom of choice, dammit! If you grow up in an X-adoring household you will probably follow X without really having had the freedom to choose, to know options, to judge by yourself... that is one of the things that they say here: "if a girl grows up in a household in which the veil is so normal that she cannot imaginer herself without it, then she is sort of forced to wear it..."  Wha...!?

Well, Aitana is starting to change from Fidgety Baby to Fussy Baby so I better cut that transformation short!!!

-Y

Nothing at All

it had been a while, i guess, since i wrote anything that was not part of an editing job that i was doing for a friend...

i have been well. i have been working, that's why, i guess. i was editing and translating and getting paid for it and feeling useful and capable beyond my innate and surprisingly well-rounded parenting skills (so far--cooking for a baby will prove a challenge. here in spain people actually cook for their babies, instead of buying Gerber Baby Food... and given our finances we will probably be like everybody else... that is, we will try...)

aitana got her first vaccines two days ago. it was painful to see her scream when the needle went in, piercing the tender skin of her thigh... she was utterly shocked and suffering. she had a mark on her thigh that is just now receding, poor thing... she was nice, however, with a fever--slept through the night as usual, only waking up to feed, not fussy, and during the day she was a little more clingy but not especially fussy or annoying. i think she is learning that we are learning all the time. it's all good...

i have no special insights into anything, no special things to say.

every night we watch a Sopranos episode or two--in spanish spanish, so that we miss the new york/new jersey italian gangster accents that are probably half the show's attractiveness--and every night ignacio downloads the next two. we like the fact that we are watching it years after it came out, because it's funny to see the early 1990s as so dated. they don't use cell phones. they are just starting to use laptops. i don't know, stuff like that.

any other showtime or hbo series we should target for illegal downloads?

the other solution

so if i went to madison on january sans my baby, i could get a job at the U that would keep me from having to pay tuition, thus, having to accumulate more debt

without my baby i would have to totally focus on writing, and i would hopefully pay cheap rent, because tamara would rent me a room in her place...

without my baby my heart would break but i might be able to see a light at the end of the tunnel, and have that be a different tunnel and a different light.

suicidal mom

yesterday i thought i should kill myself before my daughter gets to know me, so that she won't miss me. i would leave her a letter, like Billy Elliot's mom, telling her that i loved her more than i ever loved anything or anybody, and admitting right away that what i had done had been entirely a selfish act, and my only consideration had been to her, to do it before she would miss me.

it is very difficult, however, to commit suicide at home here. there is no gas, there are no sleeping or other such pills, there is no bathtub. i would not use a gun, and i have no access to one, obviously. i could not jump off a tall building--there are none in town--or crash the car--i don't know how to drive stick shift--. so i ended up looking on the internet for "infallible suicide at home". there are no such entries. there were for painless suicides, but those were not useful. i finally succumbed to looking it up in wikipedia, and there i found the only one that i could readily use that is, indeed, infallible. usually. hanging.

so as i lie in bed with my daughter in my arms i thought of all the ceilings in the house and realized that there was nowhere to hang from... alas! but surely outside, in the little terrace? i looked at the window and saw the iron bars there and knew that indeed, they would do. so i had the most difficult part. now to the second part: what to tie around my neck and around the iron bar. there is no rope here, unlike my home in PR where my father kept long coils of rope for spelunking... a belt? but how do you get a belt that's long enough to tie both to your neck and to an iron bar? i didn't trust that method... i was growing restless... nothing at all? i went to the bathroom to pee and i saw the little electric heater and its long white cable. a cable! an electric cord thingy that is long enough and strong enough... surely that would do... i just had to practice knots...

so i had it--ig's old computer cable thing, the iron bar, and knotting. my daughter is only 5 weeks old, so i have time to figure all this out before she in fact gets to know and miss and remember me... what kills me (no pun intended!) is that once i'm dead, and all that stupid debt is cancelled, i'm dead, you know? i cannot enjoy not being weighed down by all of this crap because i'm dead.

this morning i figured out the solution, or at least, one of them: i will go to madison in january, alone.

Baby!

so then my gynecologist sees me on monday and says, you might as well come to the hospital tonight, your uterus is starting to get ready... your c-section will be tomorrow.

and then on tuesday at 11:42 am the team of doctors and nurses (it definitely was not me giving birth) brought a baby into the world--or one of those spaces that are more like the world's waiting rooms, nowheres in particular, a surgery room in a hospital--and took her quickly away before i saw her. i heard a nurse say, "pero si es preciosa!" and thought that that was a good sign. a few minutes later, 5?, 10?, the "matrona" came in with the baby and put her so close to my face that i could kiss her, and let me look at her for a few seconds before taking her outside for her dad (and grandmother and aunt) to see.

then they sewed me up and that took forever. i kept thinking of the precious time that my daughter--whose name was by then, after having seen her, Aitana, and not Sabrina, the poor thing--and i were losing. those first minutes of human contact that any other mammal needs and knows as essential for survival in the wild. it's a good thing we don't live in the wild. but if she does badly in math, i know it's that stretch of time in which the poor newborn human was carried around and placed in plastic boxes without actual embracing into the family of humans that engendered and birthed her. like mammals do.

then they took me to this other place called "recuperación" and left me there for, what, two hours?, as long as it took for the anesthesia to leave my body. as long as it took for me to move my legs. i realized Aitana would not just do badly in math, she would have all sorts of emotional and mental issues related with distance and self-alienation.

then they took me to what would be my room for 6 days. the first thing i saw was ignacio, with his shirt unbuttoned, with the baby held against his chest. so it would just be the math, then!!

alejandro was there. he seemed scared or anxious, of course, because of the way i looked and having been told that to take the baby out i had to be opened up a bit and that i would be in some pain and weak. he was playing on his DS.

ignacio showed me the baby and the nurse put her on my chest. she said i should immediately try nursing her. i did. she sort of pouted and slept on, lying on my bare chest.

that night she did suckle, but i thought it was just instinct, that there was no milk. my chests were not swollen. but she swallowed, something, i thought. turns out indeed, she was by that night already drinking my milk. i was a pround c-section mom who produced milk on her first evening!

my mom and my sister stayed all the while. my in-laws came to meet their grandchild. ignacio left to take alejandro to judo class. then he came back with the boy, who stayed until 7:30. too many visitors for the first day with my baby! i slept a bit, but the room was too full of people. i gazed into the child's face, and thought that indeed, she was surprisingly cute for a newborn baby--no wrinkles, no weirdness. my mother-in-law kept saying, she didn't suffer, that's why. my mom said, yeah, her head didn't get deformed coming out.

that made me think of the child's experience--she's calmly sitting in my womb, sort of hunched over, and suddenly without much having changed except for the womb moving oddly every other day, there's an opening and the space which was wet and dark is no longer enclosing her and these hands come and tug her out, and they lift her away from her home and bring her into the world. suffering? pain? trauma? stress? no. but shock and surprise and utter discombobulation?? totally. i wonder what that means, what that does, how that was taken in by this tiny newborn human mammal...

in any case. so the days went by in the hospital room. i showered every morning. ignacio slept there every night--by the third night, he did so on the spare bed in the room which had been occupied 'til then by a woman who had given birth--how i envied her swift motions about the room!--and he would get up to give me Aitana from her little "nest" and put her on my chest, and get up when i need to go pee, to take Aitana and put her on his chest... and get up again when she woke up, and... so on and so forth...

it was a whole week there. my mom and my sister came everyday at noon because before then, no visitors were allowed. before then and after 9. ig would stay with us, i'd have breakfast... we had our little routines...

we came home yesterday. no routines! the bed is flat, no palanca can bring up the back! no meals cooked by cooks! nobody cleans the bathroom! and my mom and my sister are gone! i cried a bit this morning. i am not depressed, but teary. i cried because when i came home my cat Maqroll was waiting anxiously for my love and attention, and i could give him only love from the distance of my 5 feet 10 inches, and not from the closeness that he is used to... but it's just tears. not sobs. tears of sadness. i think it's tears of sadness for what is gone, for the life that i do not have anymore, for the things that i will miss and the cat's feelings, which are hurt and i cannot soothe with words.

it's also tears of loneliness in this country. i have my best friend here to help. that will carry me through the next two weeks. then that's it. humans are not meant to live in couples only--they live in families. that is because you need families to raise newborn human mammals, who take forever to be a bit independent, who need a lot of time and attention.

and right now, my newborn human mammal needs me to feed her.

i have only known her for one week, and i love her soooooo much...

-y

but susana is here. ignacio asked, is susana a good cook? sus, it is up to you to answer that!!!

Peed pants

Alejo is at it again: today he peed on himself while we were having lunch--he liked his food, we were talking and eating normally, it was not a stressful or different lunch in any way... and when he got up I saw that he had soiled the chair. He said nothing about it and if I had not noticed the chair, he would've stayed wet and dirty all day. He had already changed into his kimono to go to judo class, and of course, that got a bit wet because his underpants were totally wet. His father asked him about him having peed, and Alejo lied saying that in school the teacher had done this or that, but when I showed him the seat cushion he had to admit that he had wet his pants at home, not in school.

We made him wear a Pull-Up, and he was a bit flustered and asked if he was going to have to wear it to go to his mom's house. We said: your underpants and your pants are totally wet and dirty: what do you think? He cried a bit, but he always cries when his father reprimands him, so it is hard to know if peeing his pants and being caught and being made to wear diapers causes him a particular distress, or not at all... I am starting to see that it does not distress him much at all--that it is an annoyance that he prefers to put up with, the whole reprimand-diaper thing, instead of actually going to the toilet...

I told him that the Pull-Ups are not to humiliate him or make him feel bad, but because we are literally concerned about him getting rashes, since he does not change or clean himself and simply spends all day with wet, and then dry, urine on the sensitive skin of his private parts... and we are worried about him smelling so bad that the other kids will notice and make fun of him. He sometimes does smell bad enough that at ten feet away from him we know he is walking around in clothing that has dry urine all over it. He is not happy about wearing diapers but he is not unhappy enough to stop his behavior... I have asked him to please think hard about why he does this, so that we can think of a solution, but he simply stays quiet or says that he doesn't know... His father keeps telling him to go to the bathroom when he feels the slightest need to do so--as if Ale were peeing his pants after having held it in so long that he couldn't make it to the bathroom on time. This happened sometimes throughout his 4th and 5th year of age, but the end result would be pants with some urine, underwear with some urine, not totally peed through and through. I know that the boy does not pee on himself because he cannot hold it in: he simply lets go and pees on himself, period. It is not when he is doing something fun, or when he is doing something that he does not like. It is not when he is anxious or angry, or when he is happy or relaxed. There is something, some reason, some physiological thing, I guess, that is behind this behavior... does he like the sensation of letting go and peeing on himself? Could that be it? It is not for attention per se, because he tries to hide his soiled underwear, and he doesn't say anything, letting it dry on him. Is it a cry for help in some way? Maybe--but help in what??

I looked up "my 6-year old pees on himself" in google and saw tens of parents, many of them stepparents, asking similar questions in situations that were similar: kids who had already learned to use the toilet, and who do not wet their beds at night, suddenly start, at age 4, or 5, or 6, or 7, or 8, or 9, even, to we themselves. But nobody had answers, just questions!

Over Christmas vacation he did not pee on himself as much but only because every couple of hours we would have him stop what he was doing and go to the bathroom. He would sometimes say, "I have nothing, I cannot do anything" but most of the time, he actually peed. I guess we will simply have to make ourselves remember that he cannot do this on his own, that, like his homework, he needs to be supervised regarding peeing... but we cannot do anything about school, and sometimes he stinks from having peed his pants in school and spent all day drying it out on him...

So that's it for today--I don't know how to help him, and that drives me crazy!

Sorullitos de maíz

so i am about to make sorullitos de maíz for the first time since i came to spain. (my dad wonders if i have something against capital letters. i think i do, actually). it is not easy, finding the right cornmeal. but i think i found it, and so i will now go into the kitchen and make some sorullitos, minus the gouda/edam cheese because they sell those in slices here, not in a ball or a quarter of a ball that you can grate... oh, well...

i will make the sweet kind. you know, following this recipe:

http://www.publiboda.com/cm/pbreceta/3327/SORULLITOS_DE_MAIZ.html

there they have both the sweet and the non-sweet variety.

for the sauce, which i may or may not make, i'm not sure, i always add secret ingredients which make people say, oh, this is the best mayoketchup sauce ever, or, depending on the country, this is the best ever pink sauce.

besides the mashed garlic, mayonnaise, and ketchup, squeeze half a lemon (small), put in some salt (just a small bit), some sugar (even less), some pepper (more than the salt), and half a teaspoonful of mustard, the grainy kind... um, what's it called... you know, the one with little mustard seeds.

that is my advice for the day: go out into the world, buy cornmeal, and come back home to make sorullitos. fry them and have some with coffee or hot chocolate or tea-with-milk or whatever warm thing you may want to drink this wintry day...

i am now officially starving. which sucks, because once the masa is ready you have to wait a while for it to cool down a bit. not a half hour, that's insane, just enough so that you don't burn your hands... argh!

c-section!!!

so i went to the doctor today and she looked at me with a mean face and said, "haven't you told this baby that she has to turn around?"

Aitana is just sitting there, instead of being upside down, she's just sitting there waiting... fool!

i said, "she's only human: its uncomfortable for a human being to be upside down for weeks and weeks..." ignacio said, "see? she is just being logical to the extreme, like you, regardless of how not logical it is to be logical at certain times."

so that's the news. BUT the doctor said that she will not perform the c-section until at least the 20th of january--THIS doctor says that it's better if i actually go into labor. the doctor who saw me before, and the matrona, said the opposite: that it's better, for my own recovery, if the c-section is performed before i go into labor, and not in the middle of the process, because i cannot deliver a child who's sitting.

that's the news: i have another appointment in a week, to see what's happening, to monitor the baby's progress, and i wish they let me, if it is indeed going to be a c-section, have it done on the day i should've given birth, the 17th... it's a good number, and my mom can spend a longer time with me and help me recover... and be with her grandchild...

anyway. we have to go buy Reyes gifts now...

ciao!!!