Juliet Martinez

Thu, Sep 30 2004

Sign up now!

Little tiny toofies

On the way home from a playdate on Tuesday afternoon, Paula and I ran into an unexpected delay. It is called teething. It went something like this: I put her in the carseat and started driving home. A few minutes later she began to whimper, then howl. I pulled over, got in the back, nursed her, peed her, made sure everything was okey-dokey, and got back on the road. A few minutes later she completely bypassed the whimper and went straight back to howling. Then she kicked it up a notch to screaming. Unfortunately we were stuck in rush-hour traffic and unable to pull over for about ten harrowing minutes.

It became what the late, great Wesley Willis would have called a death defying hell ride.

When I was finally able to get off the highway and onto a side street and over to the side of the side street and into the back seat, Paula's howling, screaming cries sounded unlike anything I'd ever heard her do. I repeated the nursing, holding, comforting, peeing, holding, cuddling, playing, nursing, hugging, cuddling drill many times, but each time I put her back into her carseat and me back into the driver's seat, the vengeful spirit of the banshee possessed her again. I finally drove a few blocks to a drug store where I purchased homeopathic teething medicine and walked around the store with Paula nursing in the sling until she fell asleep. I bought myself some chips and headed home.

Paula's two top front teeth have broken through her gums and I think she might cut another top tooth soon. She is also experimenting with cruising - pre-walking, that is, not trying to get a date - for those interested in other developmental milestones.

But other developmental milestones are not causing her to scream and scream and scream for long, long periods of time since Tuesday afternoon. Nor are they responsible for the apparent achiness of her mouth that is making her nurse differently (less effectively?) and making me have extremely huge, painful breasts. I do not like to pump and I especially dislike any circumstance that makes it necessary, but this morning I did it anyway because even though Paula seems to be nursing, I am getting little relief from it.

My strategies today for surviving the teething are:
-Taking a walk to the park and being willing to stay there all damn day if it means Paula isn't crying.
-Cold things like frozen teethers and peeled carrots - though I think these are making it worse, not better.
-Homeopathic chammomila (for her).
-Lots of protein, 5-HTP (a serotonin precursor), oceans of fish oil capsules and Rescue Remedy (for me).
-Rocking her, walking her, dancing her, singing to her.
-Chammomile tea (for both of us).
-Watching TV and reading detective novels while Paula crawls on me trying to find the off switch.
-Motrin (for both of us).
-The occasional toot from the rape whistle I bought at Walgreen's yesterday thinking Paula would enjoy hearing me make a high-pitched sound similar to what she can produce without the help of technology. She loves that sound, and no actual raping is involved, if you were worried.

All these great things are working some of the time and the rest of the time I'm spending holding her while she loses her mind from pain and I try to think of what's on that list that I haven't tried yet.

All this rollicking fun is blessing our home in a week when Joel is working every night except Tuesday (and I blew that pretty much by getting home a good two hours later than I anticipated). I am dangerously low on groceries but refuse to put Paula in the carseat again until she's feeling better, so it's canned beans and freezer-burned veggies for the time being. It's the two of us against the world (or the forces of dentition), and we're just hanging in there until it gets better.

feedback

Sat, Sep 25 2004

The sight of herself

I often sit as I am now, trying to piece together ideas that I wanted to write about while Paula sits on the floor in front of the mirror. Right now she is blowing kisses to herself in the mirror. She has not deigned to blow kisses to me or Joel yet, but I'm quite certain that she has now understood that making the kissing sound is a sign of affection. She feels that affection for herself, or her reflection. Or both.

We put this big mirror in her playroom, also known as the one room where I can almost always relax and read or write because she so admires her reflection that my role dwindles to occasionally rubbing her bumped forehead, nursing her and putting her on the potty. Other than that she just scoots around on the long-unvaccuumed vintage contoured carpet, playing with blocks, plastic rings and pill-bottle-rattles. She looks at the toy in her hand, puts it in her mouth, looks in the mirror as though thinking, "Do these rings in my mouth make me look fat?" Actually she is probably thinking, "Even with dumb plastic toys in my mouth I'm still damn cute." As far as I can tell she then says as much to the baby in the mirror, smiles, looks back at the toy.

This mirror is a large one with a nicely carved wooden frame. I bought it ages ago from a used furniture store and sometimes wonder if it would be worth anything on Antiques Roadshow. Most likely not. Anyway, it leans against the wall and Paula has already hit her head on it while lunging forward and tried to pull it down while I held her and rubbed her forehead. I frequently wonder what certain of my in-laws would say if they saw the mirror there. I must admit I've already imagined the spectre of broken glass and bleeding baby forehead. So am I being a total idiot to leave this mirror where she can fall against it and win me the Worst Mother Ever Award? Don't answer that.

A safer mirror she enjoys is the car seat mirror in my minivan. That one is the source of many tranquil car rides. She makes flirtatious faces at herself - you really should see her drop her chin to her chest, coyly look down then smile up at her reflection - while I rock out to Carlos Vives on the tape player and think about how dumb I must look playing air accordion, arguably the dorkiest of the air instruments.

I hear her squealing from the back seat and immediately my pulse speeds up, but I look in the mirror and she is just making a huge deal about how awesome she is, or how awesome that other baby is. Whether she's in the car seat or sitting on her potty in front of the mirror in her room, she has made it clear that she is everyone's favorite baby. Even her own.
feedback

Tue, Sep 21 2004

Your emergency preparedness kit

Last week I took a trip to my neighborhood library and picked some titles out of the paperback detective fiction section. I was a little embarrassed, to tell the truth, like a customer at a health food store who is only interested in chips and candy. But I shamelessly selected three books and proceeded to devour them over the last few days at home.

I don't know what it is about the d.f. genre, but I've always loved it and now I'm totally hooked. I figured that this is a harmless addiction, but then last night my supply ran out. It was awful. I got woozy, light headed. My skin began to itch and characters from boring TV shows appeared before my eyes. Okay, the itching and hallucinations didn't happen, but I started to worry that if I didn't get my fix I might implode.

Then I remembered I still had a novel from the bag my sister sent home with me a few weeks ago. It's more of a romance, but has some mystery in it, so I was able to make it through nursing Paula to sleep and sitting up with her between 1 and 2 in the morning as she slept fitfully in my arms. This morning I went back to the library to score enough books to last me at least till next Tuesday.

This has gotten me thinking about what I would do in the event of a Terror Attack. It's not something I think about often, but at moments I realize there are some ways The Terrorists could hurt me. One of them is depriving me of a supply of detective fiction.

I know that Tom Ridge of the Department of Homeland Security is trying to get the word out to people: be prepared! But honestly I don't think I'm alone in not stockpiling bottled water and batteries in case of a dirty bomb attack or other such event. It's hard for me to imagine something like that is really going to happen, and besides, Y2K came and went without us using even one of our 12-pack of sternos. Or maybe Mr. Ridge is going about it in the wrong way.

I say he ought to come at this preparedness campaign from a different angle. Instead of appealing to people's need for basics like food and water, maybe he should appeal to their addictions to frivolous and meaningless diversions. Here's a possible public service announcement:

"Are you ready for a Terror Attack?

"Do you realize that in the event of a Terror Attack, prime shopping districts could close for weeks? Chocolate could become as valuable as gold? Major sporting events could be postponed or canceled? Many people do not realize that when disaster strikes, they could be forced to endure weeks without new Manolo-Blahniks, or barter valuable jewelry for something as lame as a Tootsie-roll. Worst of all there would be only one incredibly depressing answer to the life-saving topic change, "How about those Bears?"

"Don't be caught unprepared! Stock up now on couture, chocolate and taped college football games. And remember to store plenty of beer nuts and Cheetos for the game, and clean water, too. Chocolate can sure make you thirsty!

"A message from the Department of Homeland Security."

So I looked over the "for sale" rack at the library (25 cents for paperback, 50 for hard) and picked up a d.f. book I've never heard of. What's going into your disaster preparedness kit?

feedback

Sun, Sep 19 2004

Joel is a softy

The other day I told him how some friends of ours admitted to having spent something like 500 bucks on their 3-year-old daughter's birthday party. I was both shocked and scared that this would be our fate as well when Paula starts hitting milestones we invite people over to celebrate. I mean, these friends aren't big spenders. Just ordinary people who invited their families and friends over for some arrachera and tacos de lengua in their back yard on Dora the Explorer paper plates. There was a cake, a kiddie pool (owned, not rented, not fancy), and a few extra patio chairs and psychedelic-looking beach umbrellas they bought for the occasion.

I'm thinking, "Holy crap. We can't afford to spend that kind of money on Paula's first birthday party."

Joel just got this tender look on his face and said, "I wouldn't mind spending 500 dollars on Paula's birthday party."

I smile. We're gonna be so broke.

But this is the kind of thing I love about him. If it's a question of showing someone you care about them, or taking time to enjoy the blessings that surround us, it's worth a few extra dollars.

When Joel and I met I didn't realize that he was indulgent where I was stingy, and sentimental where I was practical. I just felt relieved when I was with him that he seemed to know some emotional aikido that momentarily disabled my perfectionism and compulsive frugality. I liked it. If my life was an emotional crash diet, Joel was my huge slice of chocolate cake. Not surprisingly, I've plumped up both emotionally and physically.

For the ten years I've known him, Joel's willingness to indulge a little in life's pleasures has counterbalanced my almost ascetic thriftiness. These days as I relax with a detective novel next to Paula as she commando crawls around her room, I appreciate Joel's approach. In life play is as important as work.
feedback

Wed, Sep 15 2004

The following post is brought to you by... Paula's newly habitable room! I finally pulled out all the crap from there and can now sit and write next to her while she learns to crawl toward her reflection in the mirror I put up for her, or some other object that will no doubt fall on her and make big ouch.
feedback

That's all you'll ever be

These days for meals Paula sits in her clamp-onto-the-table-style high chair and I feed her pureed vegetables with a spoon that she plays with after each bite. About seven or eight times per meal she then throws the food-covered spoon on the floor.

It's no big deal. Because under her chair are big, overlapping sheets of pages from the New York Times. If I haven't had a chance to read them, I get a look at the headlines while I'm picking up Paula's baby spoon. It's a very, very lame way to keep up with world events, but it keeps wet mashed squash from messing up my wood floors.

And as I'm bending down to pick up the spoon - which I really do rinse off with hot water after retrieving it - Paula sees the top of my head pointing to her and thinks, "Hey! There's my favorite toy!" Plunge go the squash-covered hands into my hair. Yank go the little fingers. I gently remove her hands from my head and sit up, thinking about my new styling product (squash), and singing this little song to myself:

"Squash in my hair, you know that's all you'll ever be."

It's to the tune of this old Eurythmics song, "Thorn In My Side". My old friend Jocelyne Houghton used to sing it, inserting whatever lyrics suited the occasion. A memorable instance was after enjoying the Reed College Ren-Faire clothing-optional slippy slide. Reed College is a haven for brainy countercultural types - like Jocelyne, who went there - and its Ren-Faire is a thinly-veiled festival of hallucinogenic drugs. I'm sure you're scandalized to imagine me in that setting, but those of you who know me best know I have never needed hallucinogenic drugs to have a good time. In fact, I have often been advised never to try them, since it would almost definitely flip out my mind so that I would experience life like most ordinary people. That's enough to scare anyone straight.

But back to my story. The clothing-optional slippy slide is a long (30 foot?) sheet of plastic that is laid over the grass on a downhill slope on Reed's campus. The Reed College Countercultural Types then run water from a hose over the plastic sheet and people in suits, both swim and birthday, take a running start and then slide down the plastic and into the huge pit of grassy mud that soon develops at the bottom.

When I visited Jocelyne in Portland and went to Ren-Faire with her, she and I had a great time on the slippy slide and went down it numerous times. Truth was that the many other "fun to do while tripping" activities held little attraction for me since I wasn't tripping and my most favorite LSD-related activity (messing with people's heads while they were on LSD) was strictly prohibido (that's Spanish for "forbidden." Say, "pro-HIBB-id-oh."). And there were so many people to mess with, too! But I exercised self-restraint and instead of telling people something was wrong with their faces I just confined myself to some good, clean, mud-covered fun on the slippy slide.

After Jocelyne, her then boyfriend Jerk Boy (not his real name) and I got back to their place to clean up, I heard Jocelyne, in the bathroom, singing in that dour, ironic way she had, "Grass in my butt, you know that's all you'll ever be."

And it's stayed with me ever since. Over the years I've plugged in, "cake on my dress," "poop on my shoe," "corn in my teeth," and many other totally forgettable combinations that seemed quite witty at the time. And when I do I think of Jocelyne, whom I haven't seen for many years, and I wonder what she's doing and what dour, ironic thing she's saying now.
feedback

Thu, Sep 09 2004

When Paula was just a couple of months old and I spent almost every day lying in bed nursing her and eating endless bags of baby carrots with almond butter, a few simple questions plagued me.

What will my life be like with a baby? What do people do with an infant? Are diapers supposed to immobilize the largest joints in her body?

And I thought a lot about women I saw in Guatemala when we lived there. It's a common sight almost anywhere in the country: an indigenous Maya woman walking along the road, riding the bus, selling fruit in the open air market, all while carrying a baby slung on her back or hip and often another, much heavier, basket of produce or even live chickens on her head.

They always had their hands free, I recall. They never ever carried a diaper bag.

I have a mental image of a Maya woman working on a coffee plantation, picking the red coffee berries from dawn till dusk with a baby in a rebozo on her back. I never saw it, but it came to me by way of a book I read, I, Rigoberta Menchu, by the Nobel Peace Prize winning activist for indigenous rights. How many times as I laid in bed nursing Paula did I conjure up this image and examine the questions that swirled around it.

How did this woman feed her baby? Well, by nursing her, obviously. But how did she learn about nursing? From her mother or midwife?

And how did she handle diapering? This truly mystified me. Nowhere in my mental library of images labeled "Mayan mother" does a mother lay her baby down on the soil, grass or concrete to change a diaper. Nowhere does she stash a soiled piece of cloth to wash later and take out another clean one to change her baby into. The idea that a woman would leave her baby in the same receptacle - most likely without a waterproof cover - all day is unimaginable. Nothing indicated to me that Guatemala's indigenous cultures would find that kind of filth acceptable.

But I never saw a woman's beautiful traditional clothing soiled with urine or feces from an infant or a leaky diaper. So the question continued to plague me.

And then, when Paula was a few months old, I learned that some cultures "hold out" their babies so they can eliminate waste without the dubious benefit of a diaper. I decided to try it.

Now, a few months and many diapers and changes of clothes later, we have finally gone completely diaper free during the day. I love knowing that Paula is dry and comfortable, not sitting in her waste for who knows how long. I think about how great it feels to put on dry underwear after swimming, and I relish the thought that now Paula can just get used to that feeling all the time. Dry, clean and comfortable.

So a few days ago Paula and I walked around the neighborhood doing an errand and visiting some friends. We were on the errand, Paula in the sling, for 40 minutes maybe, so she peed when we got to our friends' house. I tried peeing her before we left but she didn't go.

Then just a couple of blocks away she began signalling urgently that she was hungry or had to pee (it's pretty much the same behavior in the sling - bouncing, meaningful eye contact, grabbing me). We were in the park so I sat down on a bench and popped her out of the sling. I covered her with the tail of the sling, pulled down her pants and cued: she peed right away.

We started to go on our way when I realized she was also hungry. So I adjusted her in the sling, pulled up my shirt and she latched on, nursing happily to sleep as I walked home.

I can't tell you what a surge of power I felt at that moment. I felt all-natural and totally endowed with maternal wherewithal. I don't need diapers. I don't need bottles. I've got everything my baby needs RIGHT HERE in my body, heart and mind! What a rush.

Now I understand what those Maya mamas do when their babies need to poop or pee. What's more, I think I understand why they do it. Rather than being inconvenient, rather than being something to struggle to get your child to do (like lay still for a diaper change), it is incredibly liberating. Pottying my infant daughter is a partnership between two intelligent people who care about and help each other. It is awesome.
feedback

Tue, Sep 07 2004

This week's witty quip

TV news anchor: "Wildfires are threatening California's wine country."

Me: "A local resident was quoted, saying, 'Why do we have to get all the wildfires? How come people in other places can't get them? This is ruining my weekend!'"

Joel: "You're not right."

feedback

Mon, Sep 06 2004

The summer wind...

The end of summer always seems to be a time of introspection for me. Two years ago my public transit meditations on the Muslim tradition of veiling, combined with a series of yoga therapy sessions, gave way to some serious hermit time after September, 11. It was a contemplative time during which my homeward commutes from my job at World Book gave me a chance think about the connection between my body and my mind. Although I felt that I changed most inside during that period, a very noticeable change took place in my body. I lost 30 pounds over the next six months.

Lately I feel like I'm in a similarly introverted phase. I've been grappling with a little falling out I had with a friend and trying to see if I can get over, under, around or through the block that I feel with her. Part of it has to do with my disappointment in her for certain, well, choices she made - ones that I faced and made differently. On one hand I feel these are moral issues that necessarily rearrange the level of trust I've always had in her judgment. On the other hand I wonder why I can't just let it go.

I'm ruminating on this daily as I do laundry, nurse Paula, or wipe the fine black dust off my counters after it filters in from the neighbor's attempt to create a mini-dustbowl.

My health is on my mind, too, as always. As you may know, I have many, many dietary restrictions from chocolate to wheat and from dairy to chile. Needless to say eating out is a laugh and a half. The consequences of violating my taboos range from digestive problems to nonstop colds and flus. Recently when people ask me how I'm doing, I have to search my mind for something to say other than, "Well, the thrush has pretty much cleared up and the pelvic pain I had was probably due to Aunt Flow, but now I have a lingering cold."

As part of my ongoing and incomplete self-education on alternative healing practices, I've been dabbling in the homeopathic arts with a beginners book and some little vials of sweet pills. So far I can't say I'm wowed by my diagnostic abilities and miracle cures, but I did find something interesting in the section of the book called Materia Medica.

Nux vomica. In defense of my pride, I won't include all the descriptions of how irritable, demanding and intolerant the Nux patient can be, but I did recognize some of the less admirable aspects of my personality there. Also something about holding others to an unattainable standard... I'd like to think I'm not like this all the time, but I have been to that mountain and I'm sorry to say I'll probably go back.

The physical symptoms really rang a bell: food intolerances, digestive problems, difficulty sleeping, early-morning insomnia, sensitivity to noises, smells, drafts and bright light; easily chilled, with a tendency toward liver problems.

I'm no expert on homeopathy, but this all makes me wonder about that body-mind connection I spent so much time contemplating two years ago as the days got shorter and the shadows longer.

I wonder if maybe I can heal my body and find that some of the things I would like to diminish in my personality might improve, too. Maybe I'll become more tolerant. Maybe I'll get better at listening to my mother-in-law tell me I have to pack a sweater for Paula now that the seasons are changing. Maybe I'll be able to have my chocolate and eat crow, too.
feedback