What I'm Reading with Greta, Chapter 1: Old Friends, Familiar Faces

This is the first of a series of posts on children's literature I'll be doing, called "What I'm Reading with Greta." Greta is my three-year-old bookworm. I welcome thoughts/comments/suggestions about books you're reading with kids in your life. -AS

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"Children are made readers on the laps of their parents." — Emilie Buchwald 

Greta and I visit our public library every Tuesday morning. We hold hands in the parking lot, stop at the return table to unload our bag of the books we picked out last week, say good morning to the librarian, and head upstairs to the children's section.

Just as predictable as this routine is Greta's habit of making a beeline for one short shelf on which rests a care-worn collection of Berenstain Bears books. We have checked out every one of them at least once – the original picture books, the “beginning reader” books (which, like all books of this type, make terrible read-aloud material – but I'll save that for another blog post), and last time we even found one of the books is available as an audio version. I have to admit, I was almost as happy as Greta to make this discovery, because it meant one less Berenstain Bear book that I would be reading. 

Perhaps you've caught from my tone that these books aren't my favorites. The strange thing is, I'm the one who got Greta interested in the first place. I had fond (and apparently fuzzy) memories of reading about Brother and Sister Bear when I was a child, and I thought it would be wonderful to revisit the stories with her. Well... she has found it wonderful. My husband and I have found it to be a bit of a drag. For starters, our library has about a dozen of the books (and we now own a few additional titles), so we read and reread and re-reread the books, and while her ardor does not wane, ours wanes rather quickly. If there is any ardor to begin with. Because the other, larger problem we have with them is the depiction of Mama and Papa Bear, the latter of which is basically Homer Simpson, but less complex and way less funny. Along these lines, the morals at the end of some of these stories aren't exactly what we would have Greta internalizing – for example, in The Berenstain Bears and the Truth, Mama says that trust is something that, once broken, cannot be repaired. Hopefully for Greta, at the tender age of three, most of this is going over her head. Then there are the titles that deal with topics that are clearly for older children (and I don't fault the authors for this; if anything, we're introducing them on the early side, and that's our choice) – Report Card Trouble comes to mind as one that I've decided we won't be reading right now. I also try to avoid letting her check out Too Much Junk Food, since it follows the typical American narrative of food being “good” or “bad” fuel for our body-machines. I reject this for reasons I won't get into here (so stay tuned for that blog post, too). 

A little bartering goes a long way at the library, and I'm usually successful in getting her to put back a Berenstain Bear book that I don't want in exchange for a book from Mercer Mayer's Critter series – or by setting an arbitrary limit on how many she can get in a given trip, or occasionally by simply telling her that the book is for bigger kids, and we can check it out when she's older (say, when she's fourteen). 

Still, I think that part of what made me the avid reader I am today is that my parents mostly gave me  free rein in selecting reading material. They did quite a bit to introduce me to quality authors and works, but they didn't restrict my choices, and as I grew older, I was able to start introducing them to quality material I had found as a result of their encouraging me to explore just about whatever I wanted to. I came across the above quote from Emilie Buchwald recently, and it reminded me that sometimes my job is to provide the lap and the audio, and let Greta provide the book. It may not be my idea of a good time to read The Trouble with Friends for the sixteenth bedtime in a row, but sometimes the point is just to be reading with her (and sometimes I can amuse myself by doing voices for all the characters).  

I'm in the third trimester of my pregnancy. My IQ seems to dip when I'm pregnant, and my brain feels like when you're watching Netflix over a slow Internet connection and keep getting that buffering symbol. Every conversation I have, every book I read, I'm having to pause to allow buffering. I've had to apologize at least twice for appearing disinterested in someone's idea, explaining later that it was the result of my genuine inability to apprehend what was being said and respond with an appropriate level of enthusiasm. (And I was sincerely enthusiastic both times! Just very, very slow on the uptake.)

The result is that some of my more serious reading has been put on hold. I hope to get back to it when I'm nursing my newborn, with the help of Marc's Kindle (a luxury I didn't have last time). Meanwhile, I'm reading some things that I can dip into periodically without losing the thread of a larger argument or plot.* I also just finished rereading the entire Harry Potter series for the, oh, I'm not even sure how many times I've read those books. I pick them up individually every now and then when I need some light, fun reading, but it had been quite a while since I'd worked my way through all seven books consecutively.

Let me tell you now that these books never have, and never will, get old for me. I greet the characters as old friends, and fondly watch them grow from kids riding broomsticks for the first time to young adults battling the forces of evil in the world with all the courage, skill, and greatness of heart that they have acquired in their years at Hogwarts. I love the way the books grow steadily more complex, without losing the charm and winsome humor that got me hooked on Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, back when I was about eleven years old myself. The stories never fail to captivate me, and I still stay up past bedtime to read an extra chapter, especially when I get to the final books of the series and the suspense is killing me – even though I know how it ends. I still laugh out loud at the dialogue, I still feel my eyes sting with tears when characters die – alright, maybe I sound a little kooky, but these books have meant so much to me since I was in middle school, and I can't wait for my own kids to be old enough to enjoy them, too. It's partly the magic of nostalgia, partly the brilliant storytelling of J. K. Rowling, and partly the way that the books subtly change each time I read them, because I come to them each time a different reader.

So, while I was curled up on the couch one evening not long ago, relishing another hour spent at Hogwarts, my husband pointed out that maybe, just maybe, I had a mild case of pot-calling-kettle-black syndrome. He didn't need to explain what he meant, and I don't think I do, either. I immediately made my peace with my daughter's favorite series (although my husband and I still exchange eye-rolls and cutting remarks about them when she's not around). If she needs to take regular trips to the tree house down a sunny dirt road deep in Bear Country, well, who am I to say no? I still need to get my ticket punched on the Hogwarts Express every now and then. Anyway, I'd take that trip with her any day of the week rather than spend the time exploring with Dora. But that, dear reader, is a subject for yet another day.

*For the curious, I'm reading: What To Eat by Marion Nestle, Consider the Birds by Debbie Blue, and The Forest Unseen by David Haskell. I'm also reading The Nursing Mother's Companion by Kathleen Huggins, partly to fulfill a reading requirement for DONA certification, and partly to refresh my memory, since I'll be a nursing mother again in about – yikes – nine weeks!

What I'm Reading with Greta: Preface

Interests and hobbies and obsessions have come and gone throughout my lifetime, but one has remained constant for as long as I can remember: books. My parents are book-lovers, and spent untold amounts of time and money immersing their kids in great books. Since middle school, I've typically had two or three books going at the same time, and felt bereft when I've been "between books" -- what to do in my free time? How else to occupy myself in a waiting room or on a bus or, these days, when I'm nursing a baby or enjoying the quiet midday hours of nap time? 

My husband also loves to read, and throughout the six years of our marriage we've nearly always had a book that we're reading through together (Henri Nouwen, Bill Bryson, Debbie Blue and Michael Pollan are among the authors we've read aloud to each other). Since she was a newborn, we've been sharing books with Greta, too. We have a delightful collection of our own picture books at home (thanks in large part to generous grandparents and friends), and we visit the library at least once a week, returning each time with a stack of books to which we've each contributed new selections to try and old favorites to enjoy together again.

Since she could turn the pages on her own, Greta has been "reading" aloud to herself, making up stories and dialogue between characters (sometimes so emotionally charged that I have to double-check that she's just doing make-believe voices, and not actually in a rage). She's definitely a bookworm, and we're eager to see her learn to read -- although I'm going to savor the next few years before she's off reading entirely on her own. Once I was able to read by myself, I wasn't interested in having my parents read aloud to me anymore; I'll be happy to see Greta an independent reader, but a little disappointed when she grows out of sitting on my lap, listening to me read to her.

I'd like to capture a few snapshots of this stage of her life, when we're still reading books together (i.e. when she's still reliant on me to decipher the words). I'm seeing my daughter fall in love with books, her eyes drinking in the richly-colored pages as she journeys throughout our world and into worlds of fantasy and wonder -- and I don't want to forget it. To that end, I'll be starting a series of blog posts called "What I'm Reading with Greta" to share these snapshots. I hope you'll join me and make it a conversation, because if there's one thing I enjoy as much as reading a good book, it's discussing a good book; stay tuned!

Hello, Again + Two Poems For (or From) the Third Trimester

Well. What to say? It's been months and months since I last posted anything -- though it has not, in my (albeit weak) defense, been that long since I last *wrote* anything. I've just been too tired or too brain-fogged -- i.e., feeling too pregnant -- to really think about sharing that writing. What if there are typos? What if it's totally incoherent? What if I embarrass myself??!

My wall calendar and belly dimensions, however, tell me that the baby's birthday is drawing closer at an alarming rate. So, in the interest of putting something out there during this pregnancy, I'm offering up a couple of poems. Share some encouragement, friends, and maybe instead of nesting, I'll direct a burst of end-of-pregnancy energy into happily tapping away at my laptop... and actually hitting "Publish" every now and then.

Thanks for reading. Be in touch. We'll meet here again soon, I hope.

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These poems are riffs on a favorite of mine, "This Is Just To Say" by William Carlos Williams. You can read the original here. 

This Is Just To Say, Riff 1

I have eaten

the tomatoes

that were in

the colander

and which

we were probably

saving

for potluck

Forgive me

they were there

and I

was there, too

This Is Just To Say, Riff 2

I have eaten

everything

that was in

the house

and which 

you were probably

saving

for breakfast lunch and dinner

You'll forgive me

because I am delicious

so ripe

and so full

Broken World Joy, Part 2: Eat, Parent, and Be Merry

This post is the second part of my two-part post entitled “Broken World Joy.” Last week, I wrote about the brokenness of the world as I experience it – as inextricable from my being part and parcel of a world that has something wrong with it. I specifically talked about how the way that my husband and I invest our money takes us into complicated moral territory, and how our first task is perhaps not simply to fix, but to be brought to a place of appreciation for the depth and pervasiveness of the world's brokenness; we participate in it by being part of the world, and we often precipitate it – unknowingly and/or unintentionally – by our choices and actions. 

I hope no one took away from my post that I don't think we should be setting ourselves to the task of seeking justice where there is oppression, building where there is ruin, restoring what has been violated, and being imaginative peacemakers in every dimension of our lives.

Because I definitely believe that we should be doing all those things. My reflection was on my own tendency to pretend that I am pure, and wash my hands of the grief of the world, rather than own and embrace the world as my world, and the grief and pain and suffering as my own, both as victim and oppressor.

So, having said all that... Today, I'm sharing about a few specific ways that I own and embrace the goodness of the world. I hope you'll share your thoughts in the comment section. 

I'm currently reading Robert Farrar Capon's lovely, engaging, and sometimes hilarious book, The Supper of the Lamb. I won't go into too much depth (and I couldn't even if I wanted to, seeing as I'm only about halfway through it), but I bring it up because in it, Capon so lovingly expounds upon the joy of the world. And the joy of the world has been on my mind these past couple of weeks.

Or rather, the concept of “the joy of the world” has been on my mind. That is, I haven't necessarily been feeling all that joyful, but I've been contemplating it as more of an abstraction. This is the easier path, naturally, and my default: I have an easier time being a critic, a cynic, or just distracted by the trivial. When I hear about joyful people – and especially joyful Christians – I assume naivete at best, faking it at worst.

So that's pretty sad, huh? I think the reason I have so much trouble with joy is because I have trouble getting past the problem of pain. I became aware of this when I started to notice my habits in prayer. I pray regularly, especially before meals, because I want my daughter to see me praying and understand prayer to be an integral part of our lives. Like eating three meals and a snack every day, I want her to think of prayer as both a taken-for-granted daily activity and critically important to our well-being. Of course, we don't just pray for our own edification: our faith tradition puts a lot of emphasis of prayer as going hand-in-hand with action, one informing the other, each making the other possible. We pray for so many reasons, among them to ask for God's mercies amongst the unholy terribleness so prevalent in the world and all the suffering endured as a result.

Lately, however, my prayers have been geared more toward gratitude rather than petition. At first, I thought this a good practice; orienting myself to the things already given, I was cultivating a habit of gratefulness and appreciation for God's goodness. Except, not really. What I was really doing was withdrawing, hermit-crab-like, into a shell of being content with what is, because I doubted that God was actually listening or caring, at least not when it came to the intimate concerns of my inconsequential little life. Don't ask for what you're not going to get, I thought to myself. Praying for things is just setting yourself up for disappointment.

Now, I really don't have the experience or theological training to delve into questions of why God wants us to ask for things and what it means when we ask and things don't happen, and all the various purposes of prayer. For now, I'm going with the assumption that Jesus told us to ask for things, and thus not asking is a bad way of following Jesus. In fact, it's not following at all.

It seems crazy to me that there can be such a thing as a child soldier and that God would want me to pray for a good night's rest. How can that exist in the same universe? And why would God be inclined to look kindly on my simple request, when there are still kids with automatic weapons and stories that make me want to gouge my eyes out? Why?

I don't know. I'm not pretending to answer – or even really address – that question. All I'm saying is, my choice to withdraw my participation from the joy of the world because of the brokenness of the world is not really doing much to help anyone or anything. God can handle the criticism I aim at the heavens, but probably can't use my cynicism and despair to do much about the earth. I think the prayers for the good night's rest, the relief from the toothache, the easy labor for the pregnant friend, the safe journey for the traveling family member, and for the resolution of warfare and the end of famine and comfort for the poor – these are all requests that put us in mind of God's mercies and provision as much as the prayers of thanks do. They also put me out on a limb: an illogically hopeful limb where I choose to ask for things with no guarantee, trusting the invisible and almighty creator being to hear my thoughts and think kindly on them. And then, whatever happens, to ask, and ask again.

It's much easier for me to slip into a lazy deism where I don't need to ask anything of God because God just set it all in motion and is observing it all work out. But that's a joyless (and, come to think of it, heretical) place for me to live, and while the risks of believing in divine compassion are greater, so are the rewards – which brings me back to Capon. With joyful abandon, he writes about a world made by God “out of joy: [God] didn't need it; He just thought it was a good thing.” We are likewise responsible to delight in that same world, and Capon spends most of the book on a campaign to convince the reader to be more of a materialist. God made all this stuff and loves it; so should we, and we should accept no substitute (as an amateur chef, his versions of substitutes are diet foods and margarine). Meals, friends, the stuff of the world – all are “occasion[s] of joy.”

While Capon uses food and wine to expound on the delight we should be taking in the world, I found my thoughts turning again and again to my daughter. She is two and a half, and not a major contributor to the household. She requires vast amounts of our time and energy to keep alive and well. She is wholly dependent on us. We don't, technically speaking, need her. But we rarely think of her in these terms, because that's not the point of a child. In spite of the one-way street of effort involved in raising her, we can't imagine our lives without her. We delight in her. She is our joy.

So we are with God. I'm obviously not the first to be struck by the metaphor of God as Parent and World as Child, but I'm still taken aback at the thought that God truly delights in me and loves me. It's the simplest and earliest Sunday School lesson: God so loved the world. But as Capon says, simple does not correspond with easy. (His example: pie crust. Tell me about it, Robert.) It is challenging to imagine a divine being so lovingly concerned with my fears and bruises, but how else could it be if I am so delighted by and bound up in the concerns of the smaller world of my small daughter? And if I can take joy in her, and God can take joy in me, then I think I can start to open my eyes to every “occasion of joy” around me.

Broken World Joy, Part 1: Can't Buy Me Love

As the title suggests, this post is part 1 of a two-part blog post that I am collectively referring to as "Broken World Joy." This first part deals more with brokenness, and the second will deal with the theme joy (so that I can talk about parenting and eating, the activities that fill my days). Both have to do with the world, and what it means to live in it and be a part of it. I hope you'll share your thoughts in the comment section.

Ah, spring! When a young couple's attention turns to what to do with that big ol' tax return. Thanks to our darling daughter, we get a large sum of money from the government every year, and we have the pleasure of thinking about what we'll do with it. I always lobby for a trip to Europe; my husband, whom I lovingly refer to as Savings Nerd, suggested that we use most of it to open a Roth IRA.

Which is of course what we did. It's hard being the free spirit of the home, but what are you gonna do? Maybe we'll go to Europe next year. In the meantime, I'm glad to be married to someone who gets excited about budgeting and investing our household income.

The question of what kind of investments to make, however, are always a joint decision. We contribute a small portion each month to my husband's retirement account, and now we have the IRA, and soon we may set up a 529 plan to save for our daughter. All of this leaves us feeling like good, responsible, upright citizens and parents.

But.

The thing about all these investments is that we don't have much control over -- or even much knowledge about -- what we're investing in, and therefore profiting from (well, hopefully we're profiting; that technically remains to be seen). Our investment organization offers a "social choice" option that gives us some assurances that our money is going toward companies that meet certain standards of responsibility established by the firm; in their own words, the companies included in social choice are selected with consideration for "Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) considerations." About half of our current investments are tagged "social choice."

Still, even our attempt to be ethical investors is fraught with moral complications. The point of investing through a firm dedicated to handling other people's money is that you, the investor, don't have to pick and choose among all the available stocks and bonds. It's a full-time job, which is why we pay other people to do it; investing on our own, exclusively, would be akin to setting up a farm to grow all our own food. Sure, it's possible, but not if we want to keep working the jobs we currently have. Using professionals increases the likelihood that we will see a good return on our investments, as well; even if we were to try to take on the stock market (setting aside, for the moment, the fact that we don't have the time), we lack the education and experience to make it a worthwhile, profitable endeavor.

The obvious benefit is that (thanks to the expertise of the investment organization) we'll have a chunk of money accruing interest over the next several decades, allowing us the chance to retire in our old age and help our kid(s) get a start in life with a little money of their own. This is what makes us feel like responsible people (and maybe a little righteous, too). The liability that we grapple with is that we cannot opt out of any particular corporation, and this kind of calls into question the morality of our whole household savings scheme.

Our money goes where our investment organization puts it. To put it in concrete terms: while we might choose not to eat at McDonald's for ethical reasons, our money is invested in the McDonald's Corporation. We can only easily see the top 25 companies that are getting our money, at any given time, so we don't even have a full picture of what we're invested in. Suddenly, all the products and companies that we tend to prefer or to avoid -- well, it stops making sense a little bit, doesn't it? Why choose to buy clothes from the company that repairs and recycles your clothing, or the company that doesn't test their shampoo in rabbits' eye, if you're going to retire on the profits of the company that manufactures junk that begins its life in a sweatshop and ends it in a landfill? And what if we, the pacifists, are invested in a corporation manufacturing bombs or planes that drop bombs?

It makes us wonder whether we're crafting a public image of the Conscientious Consumer: buying secondhand, eating locally, and in general making small, daily attempts to live careful, resource-conscious, peaceful lives. Meanwhile, our private lives are being built on companies that erode communities and the very planet. It makes us question our household's integrity.

I'd like to use this paragraph to wrap up with some pithy, wise statement about how we resolve our cognitive dissonance and move forward in building a home of compassion and peace. Unfortunately, it's still an open question for me (and for my husband), and we hope to be in conversation with others in our church, community, and families of origin, so as to gain insight into how to be responsible for those under our roof -- and how to take responsibility for those on the other side of our walls. We seek to live in a way that is hospitable toward our neighbors, those next-door and those on the other side of the world. But seeking implies that some research and investigation might be necessary, before the seekers can follow through with actions consistent with their findings.

Where this leaves me is the broken part of Broken World Joy. While it would be nice to skip straight to the joy, I think that Christ's call to live compassionately requires us to sit with brokenness a while and let it permeate our hearts. Not to the point of despair, but perhaps to the point of sorrow. My friend Dave pointed out to me that when Jesus stood in front of Lazarus' tomb, Jesus' first response was to weep. Even though he was moments from calling Lazarus back to life, he first cried over the death of his friend, and perhaps more generally over the brokenness of a world that contains so much suffering and death. And only then, Dave said, did he work for resurrection.

So, I'm looking for resurrection*, but I'm also sitting with the brokenness. For now, our investment portfolio reminds me that to be in the world is to be engaged with brokenness. A long time ago, during a World AIDS Day chapel during my sophomore year of college, a speaker declared that the body of Christ is HIV positive. I was taken aback by this statement, and eight years later it is still a vivid reminder to me that my life in Christ is not about escaping the suffering of the world. It's about entering into it and walking through it patiently, honestly, and compassionately -- and acknowledging that sometimes we're part of the problem, another oppressor, and looking for ways to enact justice in our own lives before calling for it on a larger scale.

I'd love to get your perspective on this stuff -- Do you have personal experience with radically breaking free from systemic injustices, and would you count retirement savings among them? What does it mean for you to walk compassionately through your own experiences of brokenness, as well as others'?

*Thanks for this phrase, Dave. I'm going to say it myself every day.

Not a Local

In the last few weeks, I've had the uncomfortable feeling of not fitting in.

There's a lot about my present life that I wasn't expecting. If you had asked me five years ago to predict what I'd be doing now, I would have guessed we'd be living in Pittsburgh and I'd be working on my master's in library science. Terms like “stay-at-home mom,” “Mennonite,” “doula” were either not in my vocabulary or so foreign as to be laughable. As for living in the town where I went to college? What on earth would bring me back (and keep me) there?

Ah, the irony.

The problem is, inhabiting a role is not the same as feeling at home in it. Sometimes my life feels a bit like our old apartment: a temporary stop on the way to something more long-term, more comfortable. The apartment was so impermanent in our minds that we didn't even bother to paint it (which badly needed doing); we hardly decorated at all. In the same way, being a mother at home with a toddler often feels like a stop on the way to... well, to something, even if I don't know what.

This is partly true: toddlers don't stay toddlers forever. Ask any empty-nester (or just hang around one long enough) and they'll tell you just how impermanent this stage of life really is. Over in a blink of an eye, they say.

It's also true that our family doesn't plan to stay where we live (rural western New York) forever. I use that word “plan” more self-consciously and more cautiously with each passing year, given all the unplanned life events we've experienced. Still, it's hard to imagine settling in a place that isn't close to either side of the family, but rather situated awkwardly halfway in between – a worst-of-both-worlds, because we're close enough to make the drives easily, but not close enough to go and not stay the night. Community and work are two excellent reasons to stay here, but it doesn't feel like a forever-home – at least not right now – and we feel deeply that we are renters, the kind of residents who could pull up stakes and take off without too much to hold us back.

So here I reside, in a particular town and a particular season of parenthood and a particular Anabaptist denomination, having had no prior plans to find myself in any of these locations at this point in my life. I am not a local. Anyone who talks to me for long can figure that out, at least in regards to the town we call home: I don't have the personal history, the connections, or the dialect markers. I get one small town confused with another because all these little farm town main streets still look the same to me. And I can't keep straight in my mind which two-lane highway is 19 and which is 19A. I've never eaten beef on weck; I'm not one hundred percent sure what it is.

As for parenthood, it in many ways did not come naturally for me. I had trouble distinguishing my newborn's cries – Is she hungry? Over-tired? Wet? – and engaged in constant second-guessing throughout her first year. There are a handful of parenting practices that I am confident in, and everything else is improvisation with mixed results. An innocuous comment from a friend or family member can throw me into agonizing self-doubt about whether I'm too strict, too lenient, too disengaged, too much of a worrywart. Even those things that I do that I am sure of came not from my own experience babysitting or spending time with other families, but from books! How telling, that I should have to read my way into parenthood, rather than glean wisdom from experience. My life as a mother (while short – she's not yet three, after all) has been one long reminder that I am not a native in Parentland. I am an awkward foreigner, too afraid to take my nose out of the phrase book and just take a look around.

Because if I did – or rather, when I take a break from the fantasy that everyone else knows what they're doing – I realize that very few of the people I know are locals, in hardly any sense of the word. It's something special to grow up in a place and choose it as a place to settle down. If everyone were doing that, it wouldn't be remarkable, but we remark on it with a certain weight of feeling – admiration, longing, disparagement (when the point of the remark is that so-and-so never left due to some personal failing). The rest of us moved at some point, either as children or adults, and some of us moved many times, and in many ways, away from our points of origin.

We move in and out of roles and occupations, inhabiting one for a while until, like our old apartment, it no longer suits or is no longer available. I grew up with such a strong sense of belonging: I lived in the same town for all my remembered life, a town where older residents had been patients of my grandmother, a medical doctor, when she had practiced at the county hospital. Our family had a long history in our church's denomination, and even in my parent's workplace, the college where they had met as students. I attended a Christian school where some of my teachers had been colleagues (or even students) of my parents, during their years as secondary educators.

My husband could tell a similar story of his hometown. In a neighboring town's cemetery can be found the graves of ancestors who first settled in that region of upstate New York in the eighteenth century. The Smithers clan goes way back, around there.

It is not lost on me that my current discomfort with no longer being a local has much to do with my personal history of enjoying that “local” status for so long. I didn't really appreciate how at-home I felt growing up; I was more concerned with how I wasn't quite fitting, either as a point of distress or pride (because truthfully, being a local can be something of a burden – sometimes I made quite a point of fitting the local mold).

Still, it's hard to feel like I'm always exposing my ignorance about how things are done around here, wherever and whatever “here” might be. A newcomer to the area, to parenting, to the denomination that my family has chosen to call home – all of it can make me feel like a permanent novice, forever destined to make faux pas that brand me as the ignorant outsider that I am.

Yet when I tear my gaze away from my phrase book and look at everyone else in these strange new lands, literal and figurative, that I now call home, I realize that for the most part, I'm surrounded by fellow emigrants moving from one home to the next, and hoping to speak in a passable dialect. It's humbling and inspiring to see some of these same people putting down roots where there were none before, and building a home where there was none to inherit. Inhabiting a place, a role, a season of life, is not the same as feeling at home in it, but resolving to make oneself at home is not the exclusive privilege of the locals.

Perhaps one day I'll be mistaken as a local. Perhaps I'll remember, in the meantime, that even locals have to work at homemaking.

Getting Bigger All the Time

In the second trimester of pregnancy, I started singing my own version of the Beatles' song “Getting Better”:

She's getting bigger all the time

Bigger, bigger, biiiiigger!

Because I really, truly was. We didn't own a scale at the time, so I didn't know exactly what I had weighed pre-pregnancy. What I did know from prenatal appointments (which always include a weigh-in, like you're doing The Biggest Loser in reverse) was that I was gaining a lot. The official recommendation for pregnant women is that they gain about 25 pounds, if they started pregnancy at a healthy weight. I hadn't been in outstanding health when I got pregnant, but I hadn't been overweight, either, so I felt good about packing on the pounds. I was growing a baby! Bring on the fro-yo!

Until, that is, I went to a WIC appointment (which almost always entail someone getting weighed – first the pregnant lady, then the baby). The numbers on the scale set off alarm bells in the nurses' heads: in the space of a month, I had gained something like fifteen pounds, which is a bit much for that space of time. Rapid weight gain can indicate a serious condition called preeclampsia, and the nurses fired off a series of questions about vision changes, headaches, and nausea. Finally satisfied that I had no other symptoms, the nurses concluded that I was just, well, getting bigger.

Not long after that appointment, I hit the recommended weight gain, with lots more pregnancy to go. My belly expanded, as did my upper arms and thighs. I started asking friends, “What do I do when I outgrow maternity clothes? Wear a mu-mu? Or a circus tent?” A friend's five-year-old son asked why the lower half of my belly was showing, and I tried to explain that even maternity shirts weren't big enough for me anymore. I joked with my husband that I was catching up to him, but the joke lost a little of its humor for me as I realized that, seriously, I was catching up to him.

I mostly felt at peace about my size. I resented that I never stayed one size long enough to get used to my dimensions, and as a result opened the refrigerator door into my belly at least once a day for the last trimester. But aside from some bruising, it was good. It was a relief to have a break from worrying about whether I looked pudgy in an outfit, and from trying to suck in my stomach while I looked at my profile in the mirror. I was supposed to be big, and more to the point, I couldn't help it. Big I was, and bigger I got, until my beautiful daughter was born. She weighed 8 lbs 13 oz. I weighed a bit more.

Then came the long year of having a newborn at home, a husband in grad school and working full-time, and a discouraging episode of postpartum depression. I was breastfeeding, which most of my female friends and relatives with experience had assured me would be the best and easiest way to lose weight. I didn't have energy to think about a regular exercise schedule (although one probably would have helped alleviate my PPD – but I was at a point where the cure was so difficult to initiate that I just lived with the disease). I nursed my baby and waited for my original body to reemerge as I shed pounds.

Nursing really does expend a significant number of calories, but some women's bodies go into survival mode and hang on to a few extra pounds of fat, just in case there's a famine. Such was the case with my prehistoric body, and the “few extra” left me about fifteen pounds heavier than when I had gotten pregnant. I started running shortly after Greta celebrated her first birthday (she celebrated by cutting three molars in the space of seven days; the festivities were limited). I bought a scale. I started keeping track of my weight with interest. I didn't diet, but I tried to eat with care. Then, four months into it, I injured a tendon in my right hip and was left with no way to exercise until I had completed a stint in physical therapy.

Post-PT, I resumed running and began, once again, to weigh myself. (I had quit weighing myself when I wasn't exercising, because that seemed like a recipe for despair.) I was pleased as I started seeing the number drop, little by little. And yet, there were moments of doubt: a friend shared a link on Facebook to a blog post about the (female) author ditching her bathroom scale so as to define herself with a measure more accurate than pounds and ounces. I worried that I was being shallow. I also began to notice how much Americans love to talk about weight – its relationship to our notion of beautiful bodies, its role in our health, how we fret over gaining it or celebrate losing it. And weight loss, especially for American women, is fraught with the specters of eating disorders, unhealthy fixation and comparison that alienates us from other women, and the cumulative effect of decades-worth of bombardment from advertisers, Hollywood, and so forth, all of whom are constantly insinuating that whatever size you are, it's probably the wrong size. It's not a healthy culture for celebrating the diversity of body shapes and the wonderful variety within the category “beautiful.”

So I felt like I was betraying the sisterhood by wanting to shed a few pounds. Here I was, deeply and passionately opposed to those voices in our society that tell women to take up less space – physically, emotionally, intellectually – and here I was trying to get a little smaller¹. I wanted to hang on to the body-love I had experienced in the large, curvaceous person I was when I was pregnant. I also wanted to recognize the shape in the mirror, the old shape that had served me so well and fit into my jeans so easily. My pregnant body had widened the space in my mind about what it meant for me to look good and healthy, and to be happy and in tune with my own physicality. I wanted to hang on to that emotional and psychological big-ness, but I also wanted to be my old, smaller size again.

I kept my discomfort on a back burner until I came across a description of getting back in shape post-pregnancy as a woman reclaiming her body. That nailed it for me. Pregnancy is the constant nurture of what occasionally feels like a small, parasitic being that steals the enamel from your teeth. Then comes breastfeeding, which (should the mother choose and be able to do it) basically means that for six months, you are responsible for the nourishment of a rapidly growing mammal whose only sustenance is you. I would sometimes look at my daughter, in the days before she started table food, and think, “I built that. Yep, that's all me, right there. All those ligaments and eyelashes and blood cells. Well done me.” But now that glowing peach of a baby was past nursing, even on a part-time basis; it felt like it was time to reclaim what had been temporarily given over to my daughter's physical well-being: my body.

Losing weight as reclaiming my body felt much better, much righter, to me, but it still wasn't quite enough. I didn't want to merely return to the body I had once had. I wanted something more than simply taking up less space in the world, and a physical counterpart to the larger emotional space I had grown to inhabit and love as a result of pregnancy. I resolved to get stronger. Strength training would allow me to keep running without re-injuring my hip, but it also would prove to give me a bigger self: bigger muscles, and along with them, a bigger sense of what I could ask of my body and what I could expect it to do for me. Now I had brought the bigness and smallness I desired into harmony with each other; I reclaimed both my pre-pregnancy body (in pounds and ounces) and I reclaimed my during-pregnancy relationship with my body.

I want to carry this notion of bigness through my life, for the sake of myself and especially my daughter. I want her to feel good about the space she takes up, and not feel the need to corset her emotions or intellect or personality into a shape deemed more fitting by those elements of our culture that instruct little girls (and later, women) to be still, quiet and polite. Whatever their dimensions, it's women of strength – be it physical, intellectual, emotional, spiritual – who liberate me from the confining notions of femininity purveyed by pop culture; I hope to be a woman of strength for my daughter. I hope to be one of those women who takes up all the room she needs. What could be more beautiful than that?

1I got this idea of women being told to take up less space from a documentary I watched in SOC 101. If I can track down what it was, I'll update this footnote to include a citation.

***UPDATE: An astute reader suggested I pulled the idea from Jean Kilbourne's Killing Us Softly (probably #3 in the series of 4). I believe that this is correct, and I recommend it as a thought-provoking look at how women are (mis)represented in American advertising.