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!!!