Wherein I ponder (*shudder*) "meal planning"


One of the reasons I like to travel, aside from all the relaxing and adventuring, is the chance to reevaluate my life at home. I find that the perfect formula for quality self-reflection is geographical distance + routine change + not having to clean my house.

On our recent family trip to Traverse City, while I wasn't busy chasing Bea or trying to convince her that stagnant, bug-infested pool water is not awesome for drinking, I did some thinking about life-stuff I want to change. First, I realized I need to get out of the house more to work on my dissertation. I also decided I need some new challenges on my horizon that don't involve academia or baby. As soon as we got home, I signed up for a 10k and a class. (In my next post, maybe I'll talk about my experience so far training for my first run. As for the class--well, it has some tangential ties to my research, but it's mostly just for me; the idea of studying a new language sets my nerd heart aflutter.)

I also thought about how I need to do more scheduled activities with Bea. Following her around the house while she opens cupboards and sticks her foot in the cat's dish fills me with desperation and ennui; that really had to change. Since returning from the trip, I've taken out my art supplies and we've made some pictures together. It's wonderful. It's something we can do together that we both genuinely enjoy. Granted, she always wants to draw with three pencils jammed in each hand, which is annoying, but really, the child's 15 months old, so I can't get too worked up about it.

                                   Bea scribbles, and I fill in the occasional triangle until she wrenches the pencil out of my hand.

Finally, I thought about the eternal, vexing question of What to do for Dinner. With a small kitchen, a small child, and very small windows in which to cook, I have to be deliberate about choosing and shopping for meals. Justin works late, at least for now, so the task of dinner falls mostly to me. Granted, he takes over some of the cooking on weekends and is always fine with ordering in, but there are usually a few nights a week when I am duty-bound to plan a civilized, decent meal for the three of us. Before Bea was born, this used to be a pleasure (cue music and the corking of wine) but these days it's not always my favorite thing.

So, yeah, meal planning. Meal planning. Meal planning. A bleak phrase. It's so far from my usual strategy of wandering the sample area of the grocery store, popping bits of olive into Bea's mouth, waiting for inspiration to strike. Sometimes inspiration will come, but often it's just in the form of a lame rationalization: c'mon, toast and eggs is a great dinner! Hey, what's wrong with cheese and a baguette for dinner? It's romantic, in an impoverished kind of way! Or, what if I make a ton of guacamole-- like six avocados' worth? That totally counts, right?

I've lately been calling this condition Dinner Block. And just as blocked writers need tricks for clearing their cognitive hurdles, I need a system. For no particular reason, I decided that Mondays would be a grain-based dish (rice, quinoa, etc.), Tuesdays would be pasta, and Wednesdays salad. Thursday-Sunday would be kept open for going out to eat, ordering in, making dinner-sized sundaes, or using the new oyster knife Justin got me for my birthday to have an oyster party. Monday-Wednesday are, hands down, the toughest nights for me, so those nights need a system.

So, okay, so grain, pasta, salad. GPS.

After we got back from vacation, I launched in immediately. The week started with a Sunday trip to the farmer's market. My usual farmer's market M.O. is to wander around, surveying the produce and just buying what looks good. But this time, before we left, I sat on the floor for a good 20 minutes, waist deep in a nest of cookbooks, thumbing around for recipes to fit into the GPS slots.

And you know what? It was so, so fun. Before long, I'd filled a few notebook pages with ideas, and as I built up a collection of recipes my GPS categories suddenly got more flexible and interesting. Inventing and justifying culinary taxonomies is a fun thing if you haven't tried it. (What? You haven't tried it?) Are Mark Bittman's lettuce and rice noodle-stuffed spring rolls a salad, a pasta, or a grain? Couscous is a pasta, right? Is tuna salad a salad? For a real trip, take a look at the salad section of Nourishing Traditions. The crowning jewel? "Meat Salad."

The fun continued at the market, where I tweaked the week's dishes to reflect what I found. Monday's grain recipe was still kind of up in the air (something with farro?), but I'd settled on Tuesday's pasta of fresh tuna, radishes, and celery. When I didn't see any celery, I snapped up some kohlrabi instead, just because it looked good and crunchy. Wednesday's menu was a roasted corn salad with tomatoes and feta, so I grabbed an armload of unshucked corn, which Bea and I had a blast peeling a day or two later. I also happened to notice a bunch of mint that would be delicious in the corn salad, so into the basket it went.

So far--and it's just been a couple weeks--the creative constraints have made for some fresh, seasonal meals. While we're not eating anything radically different, I feel more relaxed. It's like I've outsourced the dinner decision-making to my more uptight self so I can turn my attention to something else. I also like to think that since I master-minded this little system, I can dump it at will and go get calzones. Calzones are a grain, alright?

What does each noun mean?

Here's Ray Bradbury on writing in a conversation with Paris Review. His advice reminds me of Lynda Barry's exercises in What It Is. I wonder if Barry knew the interview or if the two writers were just thinking along on the same, marvelous cosmic wave length.

"Three things are in your head: First, everything you have experienced from the day of your birth until right now. Every single second, every single hour, every single day. Then, how you reacted to those events in the minute of their happening, whether they were disastrous or joyful. Those are two things you have in your mind to give you material. Then, separate from the living experiences are all the art experiences you’ve had, the things you’ve learned from other writers, artists, poets, film directors, and composers. So all of this is in your mind as a fabulous mulch and you have to bring it out. How do you do that? I did it by making lists of nouns and then asking, What does each noun mean? You can go and make up your own list right now and it would be different than mine. The night. The crickets. The train whistle. The basement. The attic. The tennis shoes. The fireworks. All these things are very personal. Then, when you get the list down, you begin to word-associate around it. You ask, Why did I put this word down? What does it mean to me? Why did I put this noun down and not some other word? Do this and you’re on your way to being a good writer. You can’t write for other people. You can’t write for the left or the right, this religion or that religion, or this belief or that belief. You have to write the way you see things. I tell people, Make a list of ten things you hate and tear them down in a short story or poem. Make a list of ten things you love and celebrate them. When I wrote Fahrenheit 451 I hated book burners and I loved libraries. So there you are."


I really like this--the clarity and practicality. There's something even kind of American in the commitment to things, stuff, nouns as the starting point for a task so elusive and intangible as writing. Some day soon I'm going to clear a few days from my schedule and actually write creatively the way I used to do in college (happy non-academic moments wedged in between paper-writing and exam studying--and I thought I was oh-so-busy then. Ha!).

In Joshua Foer’s nifty new book about the art of memory, Moonwalking with Einstein, he says that memorizing connects us to an oral tradition in which the culture’s most valuable ideas weren’t written down but memorized. One of the main qualities of a good memorizer is the ability to look to the past. Surprise, surprise: Americans are notoriously poor at committing stuff to memory because we’re so focused on the future.

I’ll cop to being a stereotypical American in this respect. While I don’t think I’m an awful memorizer (want a Robert Frost poem, anyone? No?), I have been future-oriented all of my life—or at least since around 13 or 14 when I discovered the cause-and-effect satisfaction of earning good grades and managing my weight.

I sometimes think about what I’ve lost in this drive toward the future. Whole potential experiences, thoughts, and features of my personality have probably been lost, sink-hole-like. Some people are haunted by things they never accomplished. I’m haunted by time I didn’t waste when I should have.

This all to say that it has been challenging adjusting to having a baby. The loss of sleep and freedom are rough (this is a lot easier now that she’s almost a year), but I’m still a little perplexed by this new reality in which my own future is not only irrelevant but is actually an impediment to the process.

I’ll be sitting on the floor watching Bea turn a small object over in her fat little hands, or I’ll be dragging her out of the kitchen for the twentieth time, explaining that we can’t, however much we’d like to, stick our hand, wrist-deep, in cat food. While all this is happening in real time, I’ll feel like I’m being slowly erased, like small particles of me are being spun out into the air, diffused and gone. The experience is at once sweet, serene, and also kind of scary.

For the record, I hate the psycho-pop mandate to Be in the Now. Now makes no sense. Now is the stuff of nostalgia, an invention. There’s a stink diaper to be changed, and that’s not a now I want to live in.

Besides, everything I’m doing for Bea now is designed to move her into the future. I have to make sure she is fed and loved today so can exist tomorrow and the next day and on into the future, happy and undamaged. Just to prove what a little speed racer she is, her face keeps changing. She’s looking older. She keeps getting taller. The calendar keeps bossily informing me of her tumble routine into the future. I need to help her get there. It’s kind of like the way nature takes what it needs from the mother’s body and gives it to the fetus (traces of depletion in postpartum bones and teeth and hair). The future needs me less than it needs her. No surprise there.

So I help her move forward. I’m fine with that. I just need to figure out where that puts me in the meantime. I suppose it puts me in the meantime. Whatever that means.

Making Room

Even though it makes me sound kind of cranky, I’ll be totally honest: I used to wonder why some expectant parents put so much time into decorating their babies’ rooms. Spending weeks preparing a nursery seemed sweet and all, but also sort of frivolous. Why go to the trouble of endlessly pondering paint colors and “themes”? Does a newborn notice, much less care, if her room is rose or coral, or if you’ve stenciled stars or seagulls over the crib? Why not just get a few workable basics and then spend the rest of the pregnancy reading some good novels and getting actual work done?

I’m still sympathetic to this perspective, but I’ve also been drinking liberally of the expectant parents’ Kool-Aid. Decorating for a new baby is basically unnecessary, but it’s a great way to bond with your fellow decorator and build your shared anticipation for the new family member. And anything that builds anticipation (anticipation being one of the life's supreme joys) has to be a good thing. Besides, arranging cute toys on shelves is way more fun than scrubbing bathroom grout at 4am or cleaning behind the stove with a Q-tip, or whatever it is that Very Pregnant Women possessed by mystical Nesting hormones supposedly do. (I wouldn’t really know, since my cleaning sprees lately have consisted of doing the dishes for approximately 4.2 minutes and then flopping dramatically on the couch to recover.)

Point is, Justin and I had a great time decorating the wee bedroom/walk-in closet that our baby will occupy. We thought a lot about how to combine items we already own with a few new objects to make a cheery space that still manages to be restful and serene. We wanted something that she can grow into, but that we can also enjoy. We’re not quite there yet—we still want to hang a large, colorful geological map over her crib and replace the rocking chair cushions with a neutral shade—but we’re liking where things are at the moment.

The crib has three nifty features: it’s a mini-crib, which means it's small and can fit through doorways; it rocks (literally); and it comes with attachable wheels. It'll be great as we gradually transition the baby from our bedside into her own room. (Our room is just through the door.)

The rug, from Anthropologie, was our one splurge. I knew I wanted some bright splashes of color to offset the cool grays and whites, and the rug helps accomplish that. It's actually brighter than the pics suggest.

My favorite corner of the room is this Eames “hang-it-all” rack (a cherished Christmas gift last year from Justin) combined with a framed print we bought at a comics and graphic arts festival in Brooklyn several months back. The instant I saw those plump, Matisse-like baby-ladies, I knew this picture had to go in our kid’s room.

Early on, I also knew I wanted the baby's room to have a cuckoo clock. I picked up a mousy brown one on ebay and slathered it liberally with magenta paint. Turns out, the color matches the rug perfectly.

This little gent is my first and only venture into stuffed-animal making. To protect my ego, let’s describe him as “rustic.” Despite lumpen, ambiguous appearances, he was supposed to be a rabbit (witness the tail below). But he might just be a cat. Or a gourd.

The felt pockets over the changing table (below) were a stroke of genius from Justin. They’re actually intended for hanging indoor plants, but they’ll work great as holders for diapers and toys. The thought of hanging heavy shelves over the changing table scared me, but these containers are soft and hard-working. It's hard to tell from the photo, but the blue shade is really vivid, and the felt fabric is sturdy and soft.

Voila! Now if only the human baby would arrive so I can stop test-driving the crib, swaddle blankets, and changing table with a sock monkey.

Such a good read

Promises I Can Keep is easily one of the best books--fiction and nonfiction included--I’ve read this year. When I first saw it cited on a blog, my interest was piqued by the subtitle: "Why Poor Women put Motherhood before Marriage."

I instantly had to know the answer. Why do they?

Why indeed when study after study shows that having a baby when young and single impairs a woman's career prospects and earning potential. And yet many poor, unmarried women decide to have babies while in their teens or early twenties. Why do something so obviously self-defeating? To answer this question, the authors conduct in-depth interviews with single mothers from eight poor Philadelphia neighborhoods. Their research offers some very convincing answers and, in the process, they help restore the humanity of the women involved-- humanity that gets obscured when the "unwed mother” becomes a political flash point. The book quotes heavily from the interviews, so we really get to hear the women's voices and see them as individuals. And because the authors are so explicit about their research methods, the book is also a great window into how sociological research is conducted.

While I don’t want to give away all of their conclusions, I found it fascinating to read that for many of the mothers, having a baby meant having an opportunity for meaning and self-worth where other forms of meaning (professional, educational) were all but absent. Contrary to stereotype, nearly all of the mothers surveyed say they enthusiastically anticipate marrying someday. In fact, they see marriage as a sacred institution and they disdain divorce, but, for them, a wedding is the culmination of years of hard work --a picket-fenced dream that comes only after one has saved money and established a career and yes, become a parent. After all, good men are in short supply, and few can be depended on for happiness or security. Raising a child, though, gives a young woman a chance to form emotional bonds and do something that really matters.

28 Weeks

Two things:

1) It's been one of the snowiest winters on record in NYC. Perfect for staying inside and consuming chocolate and episodes of Downton Abbey.

2) When I emailed this photo of myself from my iphone, autocorrect changed the word "preggers" to "prejudge."
Pfft.

Thinking about Denial

So I was lying on my back today, watching my belly take on weird, sculptural shapes as my unborn baby decided that she preferred my right side—no, my left side, before she finally settled somewhere in the middle under my belly button. Like most pregnant women, I really like these unmistakable physical signs. The wooshing heartbeat, the fluttering and more ferocious kicks, the smooth proof of the ultrasound screen, the shifting topography of my belly as she flops around—all help me know that I didn’t just imagine her. Maybe it’s because I like my truths nice and literal, or that I have an unlimited imagination and might otherwise wonder if I’d made the whole thing up, but I do like the basic reassurance of these cumulative symptoms.

Weirdly, as I’ve been consumed with tracking the physical evidence of pregnancy, I’m also finding myself really drawn to accounts of women who are pregnant without knowing it. I keep thinking of stories I’ve heard of women going to the hospital complaining of strange abdominal pains only to find out, surprise, it’s labor time. This is the stuff TV writers fall all over themselves for. Think of Peggy’s little surprise in the second season of Mad Men. Her only proof (and grasped only retrospectively, at that) seemed to be her mysterious fatness, a symptom that seemed almost preposterous in both its theatrical execution and its uniqueness. Really, Pegs? Nothing else going on in your body to clue you in? And if there were other clues, why didn’t the writers let us in on them?

Then there are those true, sad stories of real women shocked by the discovery--often under the florescent lights of the ER--that they’re mothers. And what in the world does it mean to be a mother in the biological sense only-- before the awareness kicks in?

I find it astonishing that someone could go month after month and not perceive the wild factory of person-making happening just below her skin. But I also can guess how it’s possible. These symptoms, so factual and convincing to me, seem so not just because they are real, but because I’m paying attention. If I weren’t paying attention—if I decided to explain them away out of fear, distress, or ignorance—I could probably make them all but disappear. Denial is a powerful thing. It’s not the case that my symptoms mystically Summon me to Motherhood. They don’t command my attention and thereby make me a better, more conscious person than I already am. My attention is already there, and these bodily clues are just meeting me half way.

I also know that in a very basic way class plays a role in my feelings about pregnancy. The luxury of paying attention, of exulting in physical symptoms rather than fearing or repressing them, is related to my security about bringing this kid into the world. Because I’m not terrified about how I’m going to feed her and because she’s arriving as a very wanted little person, I can cherish the weird changes she’s putting me through and all the traces of her existence I have already. I can meditate on her for hours, and in so doing, make her more real than she otherwise would be.

“Pregnancy denier” is the oddly political-sounding term that medical researchers use for women and girls who remain unaware of being pregnant throughout the period of gestation. Deniers are different from concealers—those women who know they are pregnant but hide the fact from others. Sometimes this lack of awareness has basic physical roots. A young girl who has just entered puberty might misinterpret pregnancy for something else. A woman who experiences irregular or non-existent periods could understandably go nine months not knowing she’s pregnant, especially if she has other medical conditions that make her body seem opaque to her or her. In one study of pregnancy denial, an obese 32-year-old woman showed up at the ER complaining of urinary problems. A sonogram revealed a live term fetus. She had an emergency c-section and delivered a live 9-lb male baby. The study described the infant, with troubling vagueness, as being “in poor condition” and closed with the recommendation that physicians screen for pregnancy all adolescent girls and women who present in ERs with abdominal complaints.

Unsurprisingly, pregnancy denial can also be associated with psychological disorders. According to some research I looked at, many women who deny pregnancy suffer from dissociative psychopathology (though having this disorder doesn’t necessarily mean a woman will deny her pregnancy). Other illnesses that can lead to denial are schizophrenia and Cotard’s syndrome, a frightening neurological condition in which patients doubt their very existence. But researchers who have tried to pinpoint a single pregnancy denier profile have come up empty. One study that set out to seek a “type” concluded that the group of women involved was “heterogeneous, and a clear-cut typology of a 'pregnancy denier' could not be established.”

A sad and rather obvious fact is that women who don’t know (or accept) that they're pregnant tend not to receive prenatal care. One study of two hundred women who didn’t seek care found that the main reasons were, in order of frequency, substance use, denial of pregnancy, financial reasons, and concealed pregnancy. It's also no surprise to learn that women who don’t know they are pregnant deliver babies that are smaller and less healthy than average.

Interesting, women who showed up at hospitals just in time to deliver or shortly afterward tended to take responsibility for their infants once they were born. This is very good news, but I doubt that “taking responsibility” and bonding always go hand-in-hand.

All this leaves me with the feeling that I’m lucky to be in a place of awareness and readiness. It’s sad to think that for whatever reason (financial, medical, psychological) all pregnant women don’t have this luxury.

There's a lot more to say on this topic, of course, but there are other things I also want to research. I’m really interested, for one, in how very young teenage girls process the experience of being pregnant. Guess I need to start watching more reality TV?