Single moms

Today I had such bad cramps that I threw up four times before I could even have breakfast. Walking around doubled over (why "doubled", i wonder) I asked Ig to change the baby's diaper and dress her. And I thought, damn, single moms have to do these things regardless of how sick or in pain they are...

Single motherhood is definitely not something humans are meant to go through--there should be co-ops where single moms from all backgrounds can move to during the first three years of their children's lives... in every city in the world where family networks are not already co-op like...  then those days when they just can't, there's another person there who can help...

anyway. that's my great idea for today.

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.