Juliet Martinez

Wed, May 18 2005

Going back to Atlanta

Tomorrow Paula, Joel and I will fly together back to Atlanta for the wedding of my baby brother, Kit, to the fabulous and beautiful Desiree Jennings. They make a wonderful couple.

The whole family will be there: my older brother, Stacy, his wife, Adele, their daughters Claire (from Stacy's first marriage), Saffy, Dilly, and Vivienne. My sister is going with her kids, Ashley and Brandon, and of course my little brother, the reason for the season. My paternal Uncle Russ and Aunt Karen will fly in from Grand Junction (Colorado) with my cousins Lloyd and Craig. My maternal Uncle George and Aunt Jeanne will be attending from Wichita, I believe with two of their daughters, Jennifer and Rebecca. It's going to be a grand old Carson Clan extravaganza.

I'm looking forward to it. Paula has been in such a great mood lately, and I must admit I have, too. In spite of my chest-cold-turned-sinus-infection, or maybe because of it, I have aimed to do nothing more than just parent my daughter these last couple of weeks. Every day we've just gotten up, lazed around, pushed fluids and vitamin C, played in the back yard if we were up to it. There's been an absolute minimum of cooking, cleaning, laundry, shopping, or execution of almost any other of my duties as mistress of this house.

And as a result I've found that both Paula and I have been much less stressed out than we'd been for months before this. Paula has been almost deliriously happy almost all the time. I really can't tell if she's being clingy because that's the kind of thing that manifests itself when my interests conflict with hers. No conflict, no clinginess. Amazing.

So the good times are bound to roll in Atlanta this weekend. Who knows if there will be naps or regular bedtimes or anything else that is generally considered essential. There will be food - though some of it will likely be greasy and come from a Waffle House - there will be a pool, there will be cousins and aunts and uncles and dancing at the reception. I think we're going to have a really good time.
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Mon, May 16 2005

Genetics

The other night when Paula woke up coughing and throwing up, and crying from sheer misery, I found myself reaching into the very bottom of my trick bag and pulling out my last resort. It's what I know how to do when nothing else helps.

When neither my arms nor my breasts can help my baby who's crying in the night, all I know how to do is sing to her. The song is what my mother sang to me when I cried at night: By-oh, by-oh, by-oh... by-oh, by-oh, by...

You know the tune, more famously sung as Toora-loora-loora, the Irish lullaby. But my mother sang it to me as by-oh, by-oh, by-oh.

I cradled my sick baby in my arms and rocked her gently, singing over and over the nonsense words in a minor key. I thought about where the song came from, Ireland, I guess. I suppose it's what my mother's mother sang to her on the rare occasion that compassion triumphed over my grandmother's detached parenting style. Her mother likely sang it to her.

Like most white people in the United States, I don't have a very secure cultural identity to draw from. I know something about my ancestors' origins but little about how they viewed the world, how they marked life's important moments, what significance they attached to the things I consider important.

My paternal grandmother was a woman who loved words, memorized and wrote poetry, and made sure her boys used proper English. My father and uncles are all gifted writers. I've often hoped and wondered about this and tentatively linked my love of words to my Avoa's Irish ancestors. But I have no way of proving this link.

Aside from my jokes about the DAR needing more Martinezes, I have little connection to my mother's side of the family. We are descended from Martha Washington (and her first husband, not George), so we go way back in U.S. history, but that provides basically nothing in the way of usable cultural transmission. Well, maybe if I joined the DAR I could get some, but it's just not on my "to do" list.

Of course, maternal inheritance is genetic as well as cultural. The tiny mitochondria in our egg cells provide energy for the fertilized egg and embryo that develops into a baby. And then every mitochondria in our bodies is the daughter of those first ones. So my mother gave me her mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA), and I passed it along to Paula.

Maybe mtDNA is just a symbol, though, for those acts of nurturing that take place in the dark of the womb or the dark of a midnight sickroom. The mother holds and rocks her child in the darkness, singing a song that her mother sang to her. She has no other recourse that night. All she can do is sing a lullaby and hope it helps. And so this remnant of culture passes from mother to child.
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Tue, May 03 2005

Pain

I'm in College Park, Georgia, with Paula, visiting my parents. I've been using my brother's room a lot since we arrived Saturday night, nursing Paula there, having her nap there. We slept there a couple of nights, too, while Kit took the futon in the living room.

Casting about for something to read while nursing, I found Kit's stack of journals from the Association for Baha'i Studies. I expected the articles to be unbearably dry, but picked one up anyway. This is what I found, and this is why it has changed my life:

Love, Power and Justice, a talk by William S. Hatcher (abstract and publication information).

This amazing article talks about the quest for authentic human relationships as the meaning of life and the core of what it means to be happy. In it, Hatcher contrasts the way that Russian and U.S. cultures have confronted this quest. Simply put, Russian culture holds that true happiness is unattainable; life is simply one disillusionment after another and the only way to make it bearable is to choose friends who will share your pain. A good life is lived by nobly bearing up under that pain.

To contrast, American (U.S.) culture holds that happiness is truly attainable for everyone. It is not only a goal, but a right. However, a crucial aspect of authentic relationships, empathy for another's pain, is omitted from the equation in U.S. culture. The idea is that we can be happy without ever sharing another person's pain. Hence the fantasy worlds Americans enter through movies, video games, shopping malls, dance clubs and pornographic Web sites. This is what makes us able to know full well about the suffering of the many poor, homeless, abused and suffering people we come into contact with and hear about on the news, but not feel their pain. Happiness is our birthright, right? So avoidance is our modus operandi.

The article goes on to explore how to change society from one in which people seek power over each other through ideology, to one where justice and love are the norm. It is a truly awesome article that I wholeheartedly recommend you read. I'm going to ask my brother if I can take it home with me, or at least copy it. Please contact me if you want me to send you a copy. I think Mr. Hatcher will understand.

But this idea that American culture programs its members to avoid pain, particularly the pain of authentic interpersonal communion, is making me look at my life in a very different way.

If you've been reading this blog very long, you know that I have been struggling with issues of isolation in my parenting. I have a hard time being a loving mom to an unhappy baby when there are no other adults around. There's no use pretending otherwise.

I've been trying to think of how to change my life, how to change society, how to change the way I am in my community in order to remedy this problem. If I could just get a mother's helper to come over on those long afternoons of teething. If I could just have more friends close by. If I could just live near my sister. THEN the problem would be solved.

The problem isn't in me, I've maintained. I've figured it was normal to get tapped out after long hours alone with a baby. Everybody gets tapped out - why not me? What's the matter with trying to spend a little more time away from Paula? A little "Me" time? It's so tempting.

My sister-in-law Adele and my friend Angie have both offered me a different perspective that has been hard for me to grasp.

"Go into the relationship, not away from it," Adele told me over the phone recently. I had called for advice on how to handle Paula's recent extreme clinginess and the claustrophobia I felt. "Getting away from her will only make it worse in the long run."

"Our culture just doesn't support the idea of self sacrifice," Angie said over her kitchen counter the other day. "But that's what motherhood is about and it's one of the great gifts of motherhood."

They each have three children. As far as I can tell they are right on. What they say makes sense on a spiritual level. But when it's just me and Paula and she is zinging from happy to screaming to anxious to clingy, their advice crackles through the static in my head like a radio show from another country.

But it occurred to me today that maybe my problem is related to this American cultural trend away from empathy. Maybe that's what Adele means: go into the relationship, not away from it. Angie and self-sacrifice: it's about embracing the authentic relationship, the love and the pain.

I mean, why should I feel alone if there's another perfectly great human right there with me? It doesn't make sense. Especially since that human is flesh of my flesh, blood of my blood. If I have ever loved anyone, it's Paula. Why would I want to get away from her to feel less alone?

So today when she was very tired and I had bumped her head by accident against the car door frame, and tried to pee her but she didn't want to pee, and she just was falling apart right there on my lap, I felt myself unraveling, too. My patience, my inner peace, all disappearing through that damned trap door that always swings open at the worst moment imaginable.

But I took a breath and looked into Paula's eyes.

"I share your pain," I whispered to her.

She paused for a moment, then continued whimpering as I got her latched on and nursing. But I felt the trapdoor close, the peace return. I felt like myself again, holding my dear baby, the one person I've loved more than anyone since I loved my mother as a baby myself.

This is my new mothering mantra: baby, I share your pain.
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