SHALL I POST IN ALL CAPS SO YOU CAN HEAR OVER THE JACKHAMMER?

Ah, the glorious sound of a jackhammer! There's nothing more beautiful at 7:00 in the morning -- when you're sick and tired of using the shop vac in the basement, that is. The basement problem is finally fixed. Or at least they say it is, and if it should happen to leak again, it's under warranty now. Yippee! Rain, you skies! Rain! Rain, I tell you!

Oh, and a sheepish thanks to everyone who commented on my last highly pitiful post. I did go see my grandmother and a friend yesterday, and I've emailed some friends, too. Eh, I get stuck in a rut sometimes, and I just need to kick myself in the butt to get started again.

Now if you will excuse me, I must go do the dry basement dance.

In Hiding

I keep people at arm's length. It's one of my many faults, and it has taken me a long time to figure it out because I can tend to be all here's my life story and everything about me sometimes. The arm's length part comes after, when I'm feeling naked about having spewed my life story. It's a balancing act, sharing too little, sharing too much, trusting too little, trusting too much.

Tonight I told a friend why I haven't been calling. I haven't been calling because I'm a bit stressed out and, frankly, a little depressed. And, honestly -- okay, I didn't tell her this part -- feeling as if I've told her too much and she'll figure out I'm not fun to be around. Winter does this to me. I'm not the kind of depressed that warrants any intervention, just the kind of depressed that makes me leave my kitchen in a hellish, crusty mess for days at a time and makes me tell myself I have been too busy to return phone calls. I'm not busy. I'm hiding, covering my nakedness. And I told her today -- mostly because she hasn't known me long enough to know not to take my sudden and unexplained distancing personally.

It's not only friends, and it's not only in the winter, and it's not only when I'm feeling down. Generally speaking, I'm afraid of being judged. I haven't spoken to my "best friend" in over six months -- not an email, nothing. Yeah, she lives very far away, but still, six months is a long time. It's not that I don't love her to pieces. I just feel inferior. She is (recently) thin, has a great job, parents with tremendous patience, and is practical and unemotional. I'm the opposite of all of that. But the truth is it wouldn't matter if I were thin or had a great job or any of those other things. I would still find reason to feel inferior and judged.

I have been avoiding my grandmother. Not even consciously, but I've been doing it nonetheless. I should have visited her last week, but the kids had colds. I didn't call her, though. I just let her figure out we weren't coming. I know I have let her down -- and not just about my failure to call or visit. I've let her down with my failure to be a good Christian granddaughter, my failure to raise Christian grandchildren. And so, when I'm near her, I can think only of what a disappointment I am to her.

Last week I went to a moms' night out with some other women in the area. One of the women there was a friend, and the others are just acquaintances. But during dinner I realized that the other women were making connections amongst themselves. Their kids were playing together, they were talking on the phone, etc. Hey, what about me? Oh, yeah, I haven't extended my hand in friendship to any of them. Mostly, with that group, I feel inferior because of my stuttering. When we are all together, my speech is atrocious. So I say to myself, "Eh, why bother?" But, as I said before, if it weren't my speech, it would be something else. Like the fact that I'm the only fat one in the group. Or that they seem so much more together. Or something. There's always something.

And so there you have it. I'm a weirdo. I can't stand that I'm like this with people. Tomorrow I'm calling my grandmother. And I might even email my best friend. But I doubt I'll be able to do it without wishing I could hide instead.

That's Me!

I've been reading a book called Live Large: Ideas, Affirmations, and Actions for Sane Living in a Larger Body by Cheri K. Erdman. Stuart Smalley affirmations aren't typically my thing, but I found the book at the library, and I like to read size-acceptance stuff whenever I can. While many of the affirmations are predictable, the section about "creating your body image" caught my attention and has me thinking.

When I look in the mirror or see a picture of myself, I am less surprised now than I used to be. I have been working on looking at myself in the mirror, studying myself objectively, and trying to keep my thoughts neutral. The goal is, as one large lady on a message board I used to read once said, to see myself in the mirror and think, "That's me!" Just a neutral declaration, no cringing, no flinching, no sucking in the gut. Just, "That's me!" I have come a long way toward that goal.

And yet, when I go about my day -- when I walk my son into his preschool, when I grocery shop, when I dance, when I shovel snow, when I do yoga, when I am intimate with my husband -- I see myself as much smaller than I am. I imagine myself as "normal." It's not a forced imagining. It's just how I view myself when I'm not thinking about it and when there's no mirror to prove me wrong -- as an average-sized woman. This completely unrealistic body image has caused me some discomfort as I've tried to move toward the "That's me!" mentality. I even tried a while back to picture myself as I really am while I was kissing my husband. It ruined the moment, and so I quickly switched back to my unrealistic self-image.

In the book I'm reading, I found the following on the topic of an unrealistic body image:

When we larger women underestimate our size, we are not in denial, or crazy, or
anything like that. We are actually responding to a sick culture in a
psychologically healthy way: seeing ourselves as smaller allows us to act as if
we are a smaller size, which in turn allows us to move through life less
encumbered by fat stereotypes. We can act as if our size is not an issue. Having
a creative body image is really a tool for living a quality life in the bodies
we already have.

Wow. So no more guilt about it. It's a coping mechanism. A way to make myself feel "normal" when the world tries to tell me I'm not. Cool!

I'm reminded of how much better my current view of myself is than the one I had when I was a teenager and a size twelve. When I was a freshman in college, I briefly dated a guy who would later sleep with my roommate. But before any of that happened, I pushed him away with/because of my negative body image. One day he kissed me and put his hand on my waist. I panicked, thinking only that he was touching an enormous, grotesque roll of fat, thinking how if I couldn't stop him from touching me, he would figure out just how hugely fat and disgusting I really was, because somehow he had failed to see it. I pushed his hand away. He tried several more times to touch me (he was an eighteen-year-old male, after all), and each time I pushed him away, preferring only our lips touch. Obviously, that relationship was doomed to fail. He was not right for me in many ways, so the story isn't a tale of "the one that got away." It's just a strange memory from a place very far from here.

Sure, it would be great to have the body I hated back then. Yet I'm so much happier now, finally looking like my old body-image, while my new body image is that of the size twelve body I never appreciated.

Big Pants

Until my previous post, it had been a long time since I'd posted about fat. You might have been wondering, even, if I'm still fat. The answer would be yes. Yes, I am. As I was scrubbing something sticky off a pair of my jeans this morning, S said, "Those sure are big pants." So there you have it. The three-year-old tells it like it is.

I think the scarceness of fat posts is a good sign. Negative thoughts about my body don't consume me the way they used to. Sure, I still get down on myself, and I would love to be smaller, but this is the healthiest I have ever been in terms of self-acceptance. Granted, I still dream about weight loss when I exercise. I wish I didn't.

I am trying to make exercise fun. I like to move my body. It's only when moving gets all tangled up with thoughts of getting smaller and starving myself that I dread exercise. I got an mp3 player and some free downloads for my birthday (no dishwasher -- long story for another day), and I've been downloading some music that's good to exercise to. It makes it fun. If I rotate the music every few days, I stay motivated and look forward to it.

My mind wanders, though. I begin to think, "Gee, I wonder if I lost a pound today." "Will my pants start fitting me looser?" Or, after a recent bout with the flu, "I wonder how much weight I lost?" These are destructive thoughts for someone like me, and so I try to stop them. I go look in the mirror to remind myself who I am. I am still fat. I am a fat woman who likes to move her body. I can even like myself that way. I'll probably never be thin. I have to make that okay.

"Those sure are big pants," S says.

I smile. "Yup, they sure are."

Baffled Again

Years ago when I read Wally Lamb's She's Come Undone, I remember stopping midway through to re-read the back cover, where someone or other was quoted as saying the book was hilarious. I began to think I was either missing the point of the book or something was wrong with me because I didn't find it amusing. It was well-written and moving and downright sad, but I would never have called it funny.

I had almost forgotten about that until I read Fat Girl by Judith Moore, a book that has been called "a nonfiction She's Come Undone." Each time I tried to comfort myself with the thought that it was only a story, I remembered the book is nonfiction. I won't give anything away for anyone who might want to read it, but I'll just tell you that the story is not a happy one.

Then I noticed the quote by Augusten Burroughs on the front cover: "A slap-in-the-face of a book -- courageous, heartbreaking, fascinating, and darkly funny."

Hm. I'm all about the slap in the face. And the courage. And the heartbreak. And okay, I suppose it might be "fascinating" to some people. And dark, definitely. But Augusten and I part ways with the "funny" business. I didn't laugh once, and while I was willing to accept that perhaps I had just missed the point in She's Come Undone, I would be willing to bet Judith Moore wasn't giggling, or hoping for giggles, as she wrote Fat Girl.

Out of curiosity, I looked up She's Come Undone on amazon.com and read the editorial review. The review contained several fat/overeating jokes. My favorite is, "Whether you're disgusted by her antics or moved by her pathetic ploys, you'll be drawn into Dolores's warped, hilarious, Mallomar-munching world." Yeah, "hilarious Mallomar-munching world." Fat girls eating candy bars are just hilarious. There was another remark about how her gluttony was "rivaled only by Henry VIII." Hardy-har-har.

Are these books funny to people because the world from a fat and abused woman's perspective is so shockingly different from their own that they can't begin to empathize? Do the publishers say "funny" on the outside of a book just because people will only read about fat women if they think they get to laugh?

Sorry, but I don't get the joke.

Grab a Book

I've been tagged by Meredith!

Here's the meme:
1. Find the nearest book.
2. Name the book & the author.
3. Turn to page 123.
4. Go to the fifth sentence on the page. Copy out the next three sentences and post to your blog.
5. Tag three more folks.

I grabbed Denise Giardina's Storming Heaven, a novel about the West Virginia coal mine wars.

He wouldn't listen.

"Them coal operators aint angels, C.J.," he said. "You got to reckon
with it."

Hm. I believe there's truth to that statement even today.

Anyway, this was a nice, quick, easy meme -- just perfect for a day when S. has abandoned all thoughts of napping and is now taking off his shirt and throwing everything off the couch so that he can stretch out, lift his chest up off the cushions, and sing like Ariel from The Little Mermaid.

And now for the tagging. Okay, Teej, Writergrrl, and Susan, grab a book if you're up for it!

Two Concerned

People kept staring, sometimes glaring at us, the other night when we went out to dinner. L's speech has been the worst yet over the last couple weeks, and right now when she speaks, her voice gets very, very loud when she is stuttering. Very, very loud. So loud that it interferes with other people's dining experiences. If she were just loud, we could shush her. But she's not loud when she's fluent, only when she's stuttering. Granted, she's stuttering almost all the time these days, so it was fairly consistently loud that night, and she right now stutters in a way that the average person might not recognize as stuttering. ("AHHHHHHHHHHH-AHHHHHH-AHHHHHHHHH-AAHHI WAAAAAAAAAAA-WAAAAAAAAAA-Want water." Did I mention she is VERY loud. And yet, it's not as if she can help it.

We just did the best we could, tried to ignore the looks others were giving us, tried not to let L see that we were flustered, and tried to keep the kids' behavior at its best so people wouldn't mistake her loudness for misbehavior, or our failure to shush her for bad parenting. The good news is that L seems to be completely oblivious to her stuttering now (although the SLP seems to think if she's getting louder, she is aware of the stuttering on some level, but she's not crying and asking for help at least). And honestly, I would much rather she be loud than frustrated or ashamed.

Now if we could just work on our frustration -- our inability to help her, the constant loudness of this family what with not only the very loud stuttering but also the very loud three-year-old who likes to make fire alarm noises and the very loud crying and the very loud electronic toys and the tendency of both kids to talk over everyone else even though we've been working on that, really, we have. I'm a stutterer myself, and even so, I am sometimes at a total loss for appropriate ways to deal with L's speech. I am surprised at my frustration, and ashamed of it. I confessed to my husband one night how frustrated I was. A look of relief washed over his face, and he told me he was terribly frustrated, too, but was ashamed to tell me. I can only imagine how lost and frustrated and guilty non-stuttering parents must feel when their kids stutter.

In the study of stuttering, there's a history of blaming the parents for the onset of the problem. These days the parents are blamed less (or at least less overtly), although they still might be held accountable for not providing a relaxing enough home environment for the child's improvement. My parents were blamed for my stuttering. A psychologist who had never met me told my father I stuttered because I was afraid of him. My father was understandably upset, and he spent years blaming himself. The research these days exonerates my parents. They didn't make me stutter, except in the hereditary sense. Their reactions to my stuttering might not have helped me to deal with it in the most positive or constructive manner, but they didn't cause the problem.

Now, as a parent myself, I am particularly sensitive to implications that the parents are at fault. A few days ago I began reading A Stutterer's Story by Frederick Murray, a stutterer and speech pathologist. The book was published in 1980 -- not so long ago, really, but far enough back that the parents were still getting lots of blame. And so we run across gems like this:

Sometimes, especially when there is a family history of stuttering, adults will overreact when a child is going through this normal disfluency stage. The danger then is that, by making an issue of his repetitions and prolongations, the adults will make the child self-conscious about his speech and actually encourage the development of abnormal speech problems.

So the thinking was that adult stutterers make their kids stutter by having a cow when little Johnny says a sound twice. It couldn't possibly be that the stuttering family members are the first to pick up on the subtle difference between normal disfluencies and the beginnings of tense/abnormal/stuttering-like disfluencies, could it? I'm convinced that stutterers have a radar for other stutterers. Sometimes I can pick them out before they actually stutter. Once, in a room full of speech pathology students, I picked up on the professor's stutter weeks before they did. They thought I was crazy until one day he blocked in class.

But back to the book. Only a few pages later, we have another gem:

Parents sometimes respond to the development of a child's stuttering by wondering what they have done to him to make it happen. This question is probably unjustified; furthermore, when it does arise, it can influence parental behavior that will work against the child's improvement.

Interesting. So even though the world of speech pathology is required to wonder if the parents are to blame, the parents themselves must not wonder such things, for such wonderings will cause more damage than the parents have already caused.

I am so glad when I read those passages that so much has changed since that time -- for example, the studies on biological children of stutterers who were adopted by non-stuttering parents and how those children were more likely to stutter than were other children regardless of who was parenting them; or the research by the Human Genome Project that found a very strong family tendency in stuttering despite the lack of any one particular genetic code for the disorder. I am glad to be raising my children in a more informed era.

And then I read the following from the handbook the SLP gave me on the program we will use with L:

[This program] accepts for treatment any child whose parents are concerned that the child is beginning to stutter. We do this for two reasons: One reason is that the parents are almost always right. We have only seen two cases where the parents were worried and the child was actually not at risk. But our second reason is that parents who are worried about their child's speech react differently to it. The disfluency may make them upset, nervous, angry, or depressed. These reactions are perfectly normal, in most cases, and usually stem from the parents' love and concern. But often, in spite of their good intentions, the way the parents react to disfluent speech communicates inadvertently to the child that disfluent speech is to be avoided at all costs. So the concern of parents may end up contributing to the problem, and we treat it as a risk factor.

It bothers me not so much because I disagree about the parental frustration being a bad thing for kids, but because on L.'s initial speech evaluation, the SLP wrote that I was "a concerned parent." Now, NOW, I know what that means: she didn't think there was a problem, but since I was concerned, she would humor me. It makes me angrier than it should. I realize they admit that "concerned parents" are usually right, but still, the implication is that if the child is showing only normal disfluencies and the parents show worry about it, then that could turn the normal disfluencies into true stuttering. The idea is still out there that parents sometimes create stutterers out of perfectly normal children.

And I admit I can't stop thinking of that label "concerned parent." I admit that I am thinking about how frustrated I felt at the restaurant the other night. I am thinking that maybe L saw through my feigned patience and maybe has been reading my worry and concern all this time and maybe, just maybe, I have driven her to stutter so severely. It makes no logical sense, I know, and I don't think I really believe it. I don't think my husband really believes he is at fault, either. But I know he thinks about it, too, and remembers the quiet, tearful conversation we had on the couch the other night, in which we shared our feelings -- in which we confessed our guilt.

Why Does She Cross Her Legs When She Blows Out the Candles?

I don't know if urinary incontinence happens to every woman who has had children, but I surely know my share of moms who wet themselves when they cough, or when they laugh too hard, or when they are puking their guts out during their subsequent pregnancies. Which is not to say, necessarily, that I am one of those free-peeing women. Which is not to say, necessarily, that I am not.

My thirty-fifth birthday is approaching fast. By this time next week, I will be a year older. Ok, well, a week older, technically, but you know what I mean. And if ever a woman such as myself were to get smacked upside the head with a point to illustrate her advancing age, it would be a night out at the comedy club for said woman and her thirty-something friend, both of whom are wearing some sort of, shall we say, feminine protection from the wetness that could possibly present itself during a particularly funny bit. Hypothetically, you know.

In stark contrast to the sad (but possibly hypothetical) reality of having to wear a Poise pad on the first night in years I've actually been carded, I am looking forward soon to something that will make me feel so much younger and more vibrant: a dishwasher! I'm getting a dishwasher for my birthday! We initially thought we would have to get the compact kind because we have such limited space in our kitchen now. However, when the guy came to give us an estimate on installation, he discovered a way we could fit in a full-size dishwasher. Yippee!!!!

We used to have a dishwasher at our old house. I've been doing the dishes by hand for the last year and a half now, and I have to say I've nearly forgotten how easy clean-up can be. I'm going to save tons of time! And I'll even cook more! Yeah, that's the ticket! And I will try new recipes and make all sorts of nutritious stuff and make my whole family happier and healthier, all because of a dishwasher! It will change our lives! I am beyond excited! And now I shall do the birthday girl's dance of joy.

After I run to get a pad. Hypothetically, of course.

Holiday Wrap-up: Interfaith Issues and New Year's Hopes

I used to feel that sluggish, deeply dissatisfied, post-holiday let-down every year after Christmas and New Year's. I feel none of that this year. Instead, I am pleased to have the holidays over and done with. Not that we had a bad time, mind you. It's just that I'm much more an observer than a true participant in Christmas these days, and staying on the periphery like that keeps the season not only more enjoyable but also more in perspective.

We had a nice Hanukkah together -- it seems like ages ago by now. A note on Hanukkah, if for no other purpose than to remind myself for next year: Those really cheap gifts purchased for the last six nights of Hanukkah should be even cheaper next time. Like three for a dollar cheap. Or homemade cheap. The kids will get plenty of stuff from other people before January rolls around, whether we like it or not.

One more Hanukkah note: The super cheap Hanukkah candles we bought were cheap for a reason. They were not only slightly small for our menorah, but they also were not straight. They looked as if they needed Viagra. And anything that causes me to think of genitalia during holiday candle lighting, no matter the holiday's level of religious significance, cannot be good.

Now on to Christmas. All in all, things went very well. My mother's behavior toward my husband was friendly. I think she was in a particularly good mood because the kids and I visited her church with her on Christmas Eve morning. Sure, my son spent most of the service either crying or plugging his ears (he's not big on loud music and new things), and he asked loudly, "Can we go yet?" every time there was a quiet moment. But my mother still seemed happy.

In the parking lot of the church, another interesting thing happened. I overheard that my mother's best friend had converted to Islam. Although I had suspected she had been wanting to convert for a long time (her husband and children are Muslim), I was surprised to hear the news from someone other than my mother, especially since I ask about this particular friend frequently since the death of one of her children. Later, I asked my mom if I had heard right. Yes, she said. Her friend had converted over the summer. "Interesting," I told my mother. "I saw that coming a while back." My mother said nothing.

My mother's silence wasn't disapproval of her friend's conversion; it was apparent from the conversation I had overheard that my mom was supportive of her friend and perhaps even a bit protective of her. So why had she not mentioned it to me? And then it hit me. Whether my mother saw her friend's conversion coming or not, she's not so blind that she can't see the writing on the wall now. I think she suspects I will convert and fears/dreads that day; she wasn't about to mention another interfaith spouse's conversion to me and push me further in that direction.

Hm. So while I still worry about hurting my mother, I no longer worry about shocking her.
The topic of interfaith marriage and religion had already been brought up, so I asked my mother whether the people at church knew my kids were Jewish. I was surprised when she said yes, she had told the other women in her Sunday school class. Somehow I figured she was keeping that fact to herself, hoping we would change our minds. My mother is generally a very private person, so I find it comforting that she has confided in these women and has a support network. I feel more free to make the decisions I want to now that I know my mother won't suffer in silence.

And that leads me to New Year's. I'm not one for resolutions, really. And so I will stop short of pronouncing that I will most definitely speak with the rabbi. I will say I'm more inclined to now than I was. And I'll avoid all those eat right/exercise resolutions as well, even though I would like to be healthier. I was ready to join the Y even, until I found out the price. (How in the world do people afford to go there?) So I'll have to come up with a better plan.

I started off the new year at a friend's brunch this morning. There were so many bright and articulate people there, and all of them friendly. My speech wasn't too hot today, and I found myself keeping to myself, reading books quietly to the toddlers who seemed all to converge on my ample lap; somehow that was safer than the grown-up conversation. It didn't help that I hit my head on the dining room's chandelier as I was filling my plate, causing a very loud clinking and clanging, and voila, yours truly, right there in the spotlight. So I wasn't quite ready to open my mouth and and feel foolish again. There'll be plenty of time for that, though. It's only January 1st.

Five More Things About Me

I have been tagged! By Meredith! Yea! I feel special! Okay, five things you don't know about me. Um. Hm. This is the place I come to talk about things I don't talk about with my friends and family. So you already know the deep dark secrets that people in "real life" don't know. But I'll try to make it interesting anyway.

1) I almost majored in music. I was a clarinet player back in the day and loved marching band in high school. (Insert obligatory joke about one time at band camp.) I even played in the concert band in college my first two semesters Not having majored in music is not one of my life's great regrets, though. I don't have the discipline to practice long hours, and although I was talented for my piddly little high school, I was not talented enough to pursue a career in music.

2) I had a hemangioma removed from my neck when I was four. It was only about the size of a strawberry, but it kept bleeding because the necklines of my shirts would rub on it. I can still remember being taken in for the surgery to have my "mole" removed. I called the plastic surgeon "the mole doctor" and used to answer every question he asked me with a robust shake of the head so I could feel my long ponytails whip around and hit my face.

3) I used to write poetry and even gave several (slow and stuttered) readings in college. I've written nothing but prose for a while now, though. I'm not sure why.

4) When I was a kid, I had a pony. My dad raises horses, and we lived out in the country, so it wasn't that out of the ordinary. I rode all the time until I was seven or eight when I was thrown. I wasn't hurt badly, but it scared me, and I never felt comfortable on a horse after that.

5) In the seventh grade, I wrote numerous shameless love letters (all G-rated, mind you) to a high school senior. Sheesh. My face still burns when I think about how bold and stupid I was. It was as close to stalking as one could come in paper form. That was my first real crush. I was sure it was true love, even though I had never actually met the boy face to face. And, hey, I just realized how funny it is that I never truly gave up the art of wooing men with writing. I did meet my husband online, after all.

Anyone who wants to be tagged and hasn't already been, I invite you to tag yourselves! Be bold! Don't sit around and wait! Just grab the bull by the horns! Shout, "Carpe diem!" Take charge! Go forth -- okay, you get the picture.

And the Verdict Is . . .

Mold. The wee one is allergic to mold. You'll excuse me if I fail to swoon from the shock. After all, I believe I've been bitching about our wet basement for nearly a year now. I had narrowed her problem down to allergies or enlarged adenoids. The allergist has confirmed the former with the scratch test (which looked more like a poke test to me) and is sending L. for an X-ray to see about the latter.

The doctor recommended many things in addition to the two medications he put her on. He said we need to scrub the basement walls with anti-mold stuff or a bleach and water solution. He recommended an air cleaner and additional dehumidifiers and a hygrometer to monitor the humidity in the house. He recommended an exhaust fan be added to our bathroom. Oh, yeah, and he said we really need to try to get the basement guys to come fix our basement sooner if possible. I spent the afternoon researching air cleaners, bathroom fans, and mold cleaners.

My mom called later to ask about the appointment. I relayed the saga of our 2 1/2 hour visit to the allergist, including a detailed description of the two, count them two, poops my daughter made during the visit, my son's pre-appointment screaming fit, and his subsequent kind and loving brotherly behavior during the "scratch test" that sent L. into screaming fits despite the thirty-dollar numbing cream for which we had sprung. And then I told my mother at length about the two medicines the doctor prescribed and about all of his recommendations for decreasing the mold in the house.

"So I suppose you're going to try the medicines and that's all?" my mother said.

Well, actually, Mom, my first order of business is to knit her a scarf of mold. And I shall cover her bed with the moldy dust from under the oak leaves in the woods behind the house. And I'm working on mold earmuffs, and even a little mold pillow sprinkled with soft and dainty spores upon which she may rest her wee head. Oh, and we're moving her bedroom to the basement.

Furrowing my brow in confusion, I told her no, of course we are planning to get the air filter and the fan, and we are going to scrub scrub scrub. She sounded surprised -- you know, as if we were too cheap and lazy for such efforts. Because she's just our kid, after all.

My mom makes me laugh. Sort of. Nervously, sometimes.

But anyway, L. was still nursing all the little needle pricks on her arm and especially the giant welt that the mold scratch left near her right wrist. She refused to get in the bathtub tonight, pointing out her booboos as an obvious defense. Because clearly, what kind of monster would ask her to bathe with such terrible wounds? I am no such monster, as it turns out, and instead I let her sit on my lap while I washed her as best I could, stopping to kiss the giant mold booboo whenever she held it up to me. Which was often.

Since the scratch test and the bath had already proven traumatic today, I decided to enlist my husband's help in giving her her first dose of the new nasal spray the doctor prescribed. I mean, really, anything stuck up a toddler's nose is just not going to be easy. And here's how it went:

Me: "Okay, this medicine goes in your nose. It might feel a little weird. Ready?"

L: "Yeah."

Me: Squirt.

L: Blink blink.

Me: "Ready for the other side?"

L: "Yeah."

Me: Squirt.

L: Blink blink.

Hm. So she's a huffer. Forget the mold earmuffs. I'm making a tiny little mold inhaler so the spores can go directly up her wee nose. Because I'm cheap and lazy like that.

December Dilemma

My son goes to a preschool that's run by a church. We chose the school because some other families at the synagogue had sent their children there -- there's no Jewish preschool in the area -- and had good things to say about it. The school receives state funding for at least one of its programs, so they keep the proselytizing out of the classroom. Christmas, however, at least in its secular form, is, of course, explored and celebrated extensively. This is my son's first time really dealing with the Christmas season and being an outsider to it all. While we do go to my parents' house for Christmas and "help them celebrate," we observe only the Jewish holidays in our home.

Because I'm not Jewish myself and have no childhood memories of Hanukkah, I'm at a bit of a loss when it comes to dealing with all of S.'s questions. He wants to know why the clerks at the store keep asking him about Santa. He wants to know more about Santa. He wants to know why his grandma and grandpa don't give him gifts at Hanukkah but give him gifts on Christmas instead. It's all so complicated. I think I've done pretty well with most of his questions, but the last one, about gifts on Christmas, is more tricky. I would really like it if my folks gave the kids at least one of their gifts on Hanukkah and wrapped the others in Hanukkah or generic paper. However, it's not so simple when we haven't been doing it that way all along. Three weeks before Christmas might not be the time to change the rules on them. And besides, it's not just my parents. There's my extended family, too, and I have a problem with telling other people how to wrap or refer to gifts that they choose to buy for my children. I always thought it wouldn't be a big deal. I mean, gifts are gifts. But now that we're getting these questions, I'm thinking maybe we've been doing this wrong.

I have to admit it makes me feel uncomfortable and a little guilty when I hear him sing Christmas songs. He's learning (and the emphasis should be on the ing, for clearly that learning is incomplete) some Christmas songs at school. Last week he was singing, "Jingle bells, jingle bells, all a sudden way." I have no idea what that meant in his little head. His lyrics were so weird and so totally him that I couldn't bring myself to correct them, though. After school today, he sang it again, his earlier error now corrected, and yet, it was oh-so-far from accurate. Now it sounds something like, "Jingle bells, jingle bells. Jingle all the way. Oh what fun it is to ride -- one whore, us, and sleigh!" That one we might have to correct, but not until after my husband gets home and hears it. I'm not messing with it until then!

I guess, as a non-Jewish mom, I'm always worrying that my kids will be "less Jewish" than the other kids at synagogue. It's one thing if a child of two Jewish parents, or even the child of a Jewish mother and a gentile father, sings a Christmas carol. But it seems somehow more noticeable when my kids do it. I'm always afraid they won't be "Jewish enough."

And yet my son, after watching my husband light his father's yahrzeit candle recently, today pretended to light a candle and began to recite his own made-up Kaddish. It sounded distinctly Hebrew and even had a few real Hebrew words thrown in, along with an occasional English word like died. The rhythm of the language is in him. And clearly, when he does things like this, I see that he is part of something much bigger, much older, than this family.

I'm hoping a few Christmas carols and a little Santa wrapping paper can't take that away.

Evaluation, Take Two

The early intervention speech therapist, whom I will call P., came this morning for L.'s informal speech evaluation. She happens to work with the woman who conducted the formal (expensive) evaluation, and she had gotten some basic information from her last week. After that, P. called me and said that from what the original evaluator said, L. probably would not qualify for early intervention services. She went on to tell me about normal speech disfluencies and how they are different from genuine stuttering. The call upset me, partly because I felt they thought I was crazy or stupid, and partly because it worried me to think that L. would be denied professional help when her father and I knew that her speech was not normal. Fortunately, P. has since changed her mind and believes L. will qualify after all.

When P. arrived today, she said she just this morning had spoken with the initial evaluator, who told her that she had (finally) viewed the speech sample tape I gave her. L.'s speech on the tape was "significantly different" from her speech in the clinical setting. I could've told her that, and in fact, I did when I gave it to her. Gee, I'm glad she finally decided to watch it. Anyway, after doing whatever fluency-counting test they do on the clinical sample and the video tape samples, she told P. that L.'s stuttering was mild in the clinical setting and moderate to severe on the videotape. Finally. Confirmation of what we already knew. P. listened to her speak some today and noted several disfluencies herself, including some occurring in the middles of sentences rather than just on the initial sounds. That, she says, concerned her. The secondary behaviors also were a "red flag," she said.

It sounds awful to say this, but I am so relieved -- relieved that someone else has seen the problem and can shoulder some of the responsibility with us. I knew L.'s disfluencies were significant. Now that we have that out of the way, we can get on with the business of helping her improve her speech and/or become comfortable enough with speaking the way she does that it does not interfere with her life.

Although I liked the initial evaluator pretty well, I like P. even better. She has a son who stutters and -- I didn't know this until our meeting this morning -- a father who stutters severely. When I answered the door this morning, she said, "I'm P. You must be M." It's the little things like that. The little things like gracefully taking away the pressure of introducing myself. She didn't do it in a condescending way, either, just in a natural way. The way someone would if she had lived with stutterers her whole life.

She also was able to detect L.'s disfluencies when she was across the room playing with her brother and P. and I were conversing. I was impressed that P. would stop what she was saying and listen attentively to the kids' conversation in order to pick up some of L.'s disfluencies. She has a good ear for this kind of thing. In the initial evaluation, I was repeatedly frustrated that I could hear L. stuttering while the evaluator was talking to me and seemed absolutely oblivious to the "evidence" right there before her. I hadn't wanted to interrupt her to say, "Listen! She's doing it now!" Today, with P., I didn't have to.

When P. left, she seemed absolutely sure that L. would qualify for early intervention. She seems to think that while L. is too young to start the Lidcombe program, there are aspects of it we could do. She didn't elaborate too much but will do so in our first meeting after the L.'s eligibility/IFSP meeting next week, I am sure.

Finally, one of the best things P. told me was a story about her son, who is in elementary school. He was in speech therapy for his stuttering for several years, and now that he is old enough to really express his opinions and talk about speech, he is saying that his stuttering, his blocks, don't bother him. He stutters fairly severely but doesn't let it get in his way. They eventually dropped the speech therapy because he just wasn't interested. She was afraid the story would be a downer for me since it didn't have a fluent happy ending. It was quite the opposite. Her son's story reminds me that even though blocks and severe stuttering episodes were very upsetting to me when I was young, they might not be to every person who experiences them. Her son has an attitude that I didn't begin to have until I was in my twenties. Perhaps the influence of a grandfather who stutters and a mother who respects and understands stutterers is part of what made his attitude so different from mine. I can't fix L.'s speech for her, but I think I can influence her attitude about it. And attitude is more important than fluency anyway.

The Basement Blues

I've been feeling a little blah. I figured it was just the time of year at first, but, as is often the case, I was eventually able to figure out what's really bothering me. Fortunately, it's nothing serious.

Problem #1: A wet basement. Our first estimate on the basement repair nearly knocked me over. I thought I had prepared myself for the worst, but I wasn't even close. Very depressing.

Problem #2: Fleas. They are back. But it's too early to spray again. Wet basements make flea problems much harder to get rid of, I have learned. They love dampness. Great.

Problem #3: Snot. For over a month now, my daughter has had what they were calling a sinus infection. She has been on antibiotics three times, and she isn't getting better. Her doctor said this morning that she will refer her to an allergist. My best guess? She's allergic to mold and mildew from our wet basement.

Problem #4: Feminine issues. I was on antibiotics myself for a sinus infection a few weeks ago, and I am left with the antibiotics' lovely sidekick, the yeast infection.

Problem #5: Feminine issues times two. I started my period the day after I started using the three-day yeast infection treatment. No tampons allowed during the treatment period. Great. Nothing like being crampy and itchy AND grossly uncomfortable.

Problem #6: Holiday shopping blues. We've been worried about money, especially after the basement estimate that took our breath away. I haven't had any work yet from the part-time venture I mentioned a while back, and all the shopping for my family's gifts overwhelms me sometimes.

Now, all in all, this stuff isn't much to complain about. The yeast infection and the period are both only temporary. We had a second basement estimate today that was only one seventh the cost of the first one (and we feel better about this company for other reasons, too). If we get the basement dry, then the fleas should be easier to get rid of. Also, if the basement is dry, L.'s snot levels might decrease, allergist or no. And shopping, I have to say, will be easier if we aren't destitute. Bring on the sump pump, baby!

Happy Thanksgiving

We got home not long ago from a very nice Thanksgiving trip. My husband and I have had some nice Thanksgivings since we've been together, but I think this one was the best yet. For the first time, my husband and I didn't have to decide which side of the family to upset. This year my in-laws joined us at my parents' Thanksgiving dinner. It was nice -- for everyone, I think. Here are just a few of the things for which I am thankful.

• my husband, who has made the last seven years of my life wonderful (and who is currently washing dishes, bless his heart)
• my children, who make me laugh every day
• my extended family, who welcomed my in-laws yesterday
• my mother-in-law and sister-in-law, who braved one of my family's get-togethers
• my health
• the health of my loved ones
• our home
• my friends, both on- and off-line

There are other things, too. Lots of them. Like The DQ pumpkin pie Blizzard. And Glide dental floss. And naptime.

A belated Thanksgiving to you all, my readers. And that goes for both of you.

Assessing the Assessment

The early intervention people came this week and started the intake process. L's evaluations should be done and an IFSP written by the second week in December. During the private evaluation, which we had to pay for, L was totally fluent. Strange as it seems to say it, I hope she is at her worst for the early intervention people.

Her stuttering is certainly cyclical. She was in a fluent period when she was evaluated, but she is now on the downswing. Her original secondary behaviors have been replaced by new ones: whispering and tilting her head to one side. These behaviors are cuter and more socially acceptable, and so people now don't even realize she's stuttering. In fact, she's so quiet, people don't even realize she's talking.

When she was stuttering at her worst in early October, there was a day she went to the grocery store with me and drew LOTS of attention from people. Every time she started a sentence, she would repeat the initial sound, stuff her hand against her mouth, and allow the pitch and volume of her voice to rise dramatically. People thought she was just yelling to be mischievous. One man even scolded her and said, "Is that you making all that noise?"

Now she does the other extreme: she repeats a sound until her air runs out, and then, rather than inhaling again, she continues to "speak" by moving her mouth but making absolutely no sound. No one else has noticed this but me. It's hard to notice. Sometimes I glance at her and see her little mouth working silently, and I realize she's been trying to talk to me for some time.
She is communicating less, or at least making fewer audible attempts to communicate. When I catch the tail end of one of her "silent stuttering" episodes, I can't understand what she has said because it's either too soft or too distorted by her use of residual air. I ask her to repeat herself, and she just pops her thumb in her mouth and turns away. Too much work. Yeah, baby, I've been there.

Again, it's not so much that she stutters. It's how she stutters that worries me. She just struggles too damn much sometimes, especially for a toddler. I cannot tell you the anger and disappointment I feel when well-meaning people dismiss as mere noisemaking my daughter's efforts to speak; she is only two, but people's reactions to her communication attempts will help shape who she is. I wish I could protect her. I wish I could live the rough parts for her.

And I wish a professional could see her when she is like this. I wonder if they would be so reassuring then. As much as I want L to experience the ease of fluency, I hope she stutters up a storm the next time a speech therapist is near her. I want an assessment based on all the evidence.

Happy Birthday, L!

Today is my baby's birthday. As hard as it is to believe that L is already two, her birth seems so long ago. Postpartum depression as well as severe pre-eclampsia that kept me hospitalized until L was two weeks old made it difficult for me to be the kind of mother I wanted to be right away, and when I think of her birth, I feel more guilt than anything else. I remember the intense anxiety I felt as the nurses brought her to my hospital room each morning. I remember a sense of relief, followed immediately by guilt, when I was put on a medication incompatible with breastfeeding. So many times I think I'd like to just start over with her.

Now when she comes into my room in the mornings, she makes me laugh first thing. Just recently she has discovered she has the power to get up from her toddler bed when she wants. This morning S woke up cranky, and although I convinced him to climb into bed with us and calmed him down, the noise had already awakened L, who soon came pitter-pattering into our bedroom, announcing, "I up!" As my husband hoisted her up onto the bed, she said, "Hi, Daddy!" She giggled as we all hugged and kissed her. She is such a joyful child. I have trouble finding words to express how much I love her.

Apparently, S does, too. When he leaned over to hug and kiss her this morning, he laughed and crooned, "Wittle metucky fwied chicken!"

I couldn't have said it better myself.

Nine Weird Things

Because I'm all about the self-tagging, I'm stealing this meme from Writergrrl. Nine weird things about myself? This one, I have to say, should not be too hard for me.

1. I am fascinated by my children's earwax. I look in their ears frequently to see if there is any ready to harvest. I am slightly disappointed when I don't see any.

2. My husband and I met online. No, we didn't have a torrid Internet affair and meet for the first time on our wedding day. We met through a personals site, met in person a couple weeks later, and dated for a year before getting married.

3. When I walk, I do a weird spelling/typing thing with my feet. I think of a word, and I imagine I'm typing it out on a keyboard, so I say each letter to myself (silently) as I step down on the appropriate foot -- the left foot for letters typed with the left hand, and the right foot for letters typed with the right hand. If two consecutive letters are typed with the same hand, I have to wait another step until that foot comes down again to continue spelling. Each word has its own weird walking rhythm. For example, the word rhythm would be R(left) H(right) (left) Y(right) T(left) H(right) (left) M(right).

4. I am really good at Pig Latin. My father used to have long, involved conversations with my brother and me in Pig Latin when I was small.

5. As I get to know new friends, I notice myself taking on some of their mannerisms. It bothers me a bit. I don't do it on purpose at all, and it makes me feel like a phony.

6. Not only do I sometimes pass out at the sight of blood, but I sometimes pass out at the mention of blood. I passed out in health class in elementary school a few times, always during the chapter on the circulatory system. And I passed out during my mother's first talk with me about menstruation. (Fortunately, the anticipatory talk bothered me much more than the actual event.) Once I passed out in an acquaintance's car when she casually mentioned that her baby's penis had bled inordinately after his circumcision. Somehow we didn't make that leap from acquaintances to friends. Go figure.

7. Some melancholy music just sucks me under. Certain songs by Nine Inch Nails, for example, can put me in a deep, dark funk for days.

8. Even at my very largest and my most out of shape, I have always been able to sit on the floor with the soles of my feet together, my heels back close to my body, my knees touching the floor, and my head to my feet or the floor. It's a fairly useless talent.

9. I have a bad habit of leaving the kitchen cabinet doors open. After I've made dinner, it's not unusual for almost every cabinet door to be open. Is it dangerous and annoying? Yes. Does that compel me to close the doors? It seems not to.

L.'s Evaluation

L. had her speech evaluation today at a local university clinic. Initially we were told she couldn't be evaluated until January, but only a few days later we got another phone call saying someone could evaluate her sooner after all. It turns out they weren't initially anxious to see L because of her age; stuttering apparently begins when children develop more complex expressive language skills. To quote the speech pathologist, "When I first heard that a twenty-two month old had been referred for a fluency evaluation, I said, 'It's impossible. She's too young.' But then when I read the case history and the sample sentences she was saying, I decided okay, maybe I'm wrong."

During the evaluation, L. was incredibly fluent. Naturally. It reminds me of the Michigan J. Frog cartoon. There were only two or three moments when she stuttered, and even those were minor. I did, however, give them a tape of her talking at home, one segment from several weeks ago when her speech was quite severe, and one segment done last night when she was just mildly disfluent. Once they watch the tape, they'll realize why I took her in, I'm sure.

The plan right now (pre video viewing, of course) is to watch her for a while. They will contact me once or twice a month to check in, at which point we will decide whether or not they should see her again, based on how her speech is then. I am also to call if it becomes severe again. They gave me a list of things to do (slow my speech, encourage turn-taking when both kids are vying for the spotlight, etc.) , most of which they said they noticed I'm already doing. If L is still stuttering in 12 months, they/we will start an intervention program that seems to work well with preschoolers.

L. was very well-behaved for the evaluation and just ate up all the attention. She did manage to embarrass me a bit with her insistence that every doll's clothes must come off. Both the pathologist and her student couldn't get over L's language level. They were most impressed with her use of the word manatee (she saw one at the zoo and liked it) and the sentence, "I pretending Mommy a bunny." It was kind of funny watching these two grown women nearly wet themselves over the jabberings of a small child. The elder woman was orgasmic over L's correct use of the "-ing" ending.

Because I'm too lazy to put the rest in paragraph form, here are a few of the main points from our post-evaluation conversation:

• L's good language skills give her a better shot of overcoming stuttering.
• Secondary behaviors are indeed rare in children, but they are not unheard of.
• L's being a girl gives her a better chance of outgrowing the stuttering.
• The fact that my dad and brother outgrew their stuttering is another sign in her favor.
• Stuttering usually begins very mildly and without any tension. It's rare for it to come on so strongly.
• They said it was a good sign that the few disfluencies L had today seemed to be without tension. (I am not sure I entirely agree with their assessment on that point. True, there wasn't much tension. But I think it was there. Just a touch, under the surface. Perhaps I'm being overly sensitive, or perhaps it is my stuttering radar picking up on what others don't hear. I'll hope for the former.)
• They recommend the Lidcombe Program of Early Stuttering Intervention if she does happen to continue to stutter after twelve months. (I had my initial misgivings about the program when they first explained it to me, but the more I learn, the more optimistic I am about it.)

Overall, I am pleased with the evaluation and the professionalism of the evaluators. They were really good with my daughter and did indeed know their stuff. And they left me with the hope that L might very well shrug this thing off and trample all over it like a jacket she's determined not to wear. Nothing would make me happier.

Hello Operator

Have you heard of video phones for the deaf? And that there are now video relay services in addition to the old text relay services so that deaf people can sign their phone conversations and have a real live interpreter voice for them? Yeah, I didn't either until I got a call from a former student a couple days ago. Wow. Let me just say that communication is so much smoother with the video relay service than it ever was with the old relay. For one thing, there's none of the super slow talking so the relay operator can type, and there's none of that GA/SK business to contend with. Plus everyone gets to communicate in his or her own language.

Still, the relay, video or otherwise, kicks my stuttering ass.

Talking on the phone under normal circumstances is hard enough for me. I was in my late twenties before I really got a grip on phone conversations; now I handle most phone calls with some easy stuttering at the beginning to clue the other person in and to get myself off on the right foot. But the relay takes me right back to my mega-blocking days of yore. What is it that is so stressful for me? There's a lot going on with a relay call -- two different languages spoken, the message being relayed through a third party -- but the pressure really isn't on me; it's on the relay operator. Yet my throat closes up on those calls. In fact, it has crossed my mind that I could just not answer the phone when it's the relay. But I gave up the drug of avoidance a long time ago; one hit, and I'm a goner.

You know, one of my funniest stuttering stories involves a relay call. When I taught at a residential school for the deaf years ago, most of my friends were deaf. One day a friend was visiting me at my apartment and needed to call her husband at work. She and her husband are both deaf, and at the time, I didn't have a TTY. So here's how the phone call worked: my friend signed to me, I voiced her message to the relay operator, and the relay operator typed the message to her husband, who read it on his TTY, and then the whole process was reversed. Complicated. And a potential pit of stuttering madness.

It started off okay, though. My speech was reasonably under control, and we were able to get through the first few exchanges okay. Then, THEN, the relay operator, a very smug-sounding man, interrupted me and said, "You know, lady, this would be a lot easier for me if you wouldn't stutter."

Dumbfounded, I began the usual spiel to educate my listener: "Well, it would be easier for me, too, but I have a speech disorder . . . "

And then my blood started to boil as I thought: Is the relay not a service for the hearing and SPEECH impaired? Are these people not TRAINED to talk to people with whom communication is guaranteed to be ANYTHING but EASY? The humiliation of being caught off guard and of having to educate someone who should already have been educated, hit me like a truck, and I finished my "education" with . . .

"SO F*CK YOU!"

And I slammed down the phone. Only then did I look up and see my friend and the look of horror on her face.

She signed frantically, "Why did you hang up on B.?"

Oh. OH! I had forgotten all about him! And her, for that matter! I apologized and quickly explained what had happened. Then I took her advice and called the relay back to speak with a supervisor about the operator's need for some sensitivity training (I also threw in a sheepish apology for the profanity). And then my friend and I had a giggling fit.

The relay center, by the way, called me no less than three times over the next twenty-four hours to offer their sincerest apologies. The call had apparently been recorded. I wondered how many times they replayed my outburst. And I hoped I hadn't gotten anyone fired.

I guess maybe that's what I worry about when I'm on a relay call now: the responsibility of speaking and maintaining everyone's employment. It can be too much for a girl sometimes. I'm going to have to look into getting me one of those video phones.