The true test of a diverse workplace

The directions option for Google maps lets me choose: by car, by public transport, or walking. And even the public transport option for Zurich includes a fair bit of walking. In a place this hilly, those "3 blocks" can mean all stairs. Many paths exist for going up and down the hills, "weg" this and "weg" that. Only a small fraction of them have any sort of ramps for strollers or wheelchairs.

Then there is the iCal function on my phone. I can set recurring events for hourly, daily, weekly, or monthly. Alas, as one of my recent, fairly emotional, posts can attest to, the Apple software does not come with a "once every 26-28 days" option.

I'm going to say that there are still not enough women working at either Google or Apple.

(What is good exercise for a pregnant lady is pretty much impossible with a stroller. 100 stairs on the walking part of Google directions.)

We could be heroes

I went out tonight. Baby A finally fell asleep (I tell you what, wow, how I practiced calm breathing) about 7:45pm and the show began at 8pm. I did a lot of mental "it is okay if we miss some. Even if we don't go" as I rocked her. Japanese food delivery bento box in hand, contents gulped down in the taxi, M and I rushed to the Peter Gabriel orchestral show, New Blood.

We had 4th row seats. It was every bit as moving, inspiring, entertaining, delightful and powerful as I expected. And being that close...was nice.



I saw him almost 8 years ago last time. The show was more theatrical, with conventional drums, bass, etc., and although it was all of the things I just said, it was also an experience that left me with a sadness. He is one of those people (like Julie Taymor, Jim Henson, Robin Williams) who you just know is doing what he was meant to do. Playing to all his skills and practically taking flight with the rightness and mastery of it. I find watching people like this a transcendent experience. A spiritual experience. And 8 years ago I had yet to find anything like that fit for myself. I was still in astronomy, hating it, and feeling every day what a bad fit it was, but terrified to try anything else.

When I switched into education, started working on museum projects and writing about learning and science, I started to find my wings. I finally understood what it was like to be excited as a graduate student and to have confidence in my own skills and potential.

I haven't written any best-selling books on academia, or designed any planetarium experiences that others would leave from transformed, but I know I might. I didn't leave the concert tonight with that sadness and longing. I'll get back to my stuff eventually, in a few months. I'll find ways to work on projects that inspire people. And to keep following my voice.

It was a good day.

Silly paperwork required.

A few years ago, I went to see a solar eclipse in Africa. M and I had already been trying to get pregnant for at least a year and a half at the time, and I bought a fertility symbol, and a bunch of baby clothes from a women's batik/sewing cooperative called Global Mamas. In cute, bright colors, three dresses and a romper. Both purchases were made as a sign of great hope that we could conceive.

When I got back, the clothes were stored away, in a box with fabric, in our extra bedroom. Two years later, and while packing the house to move Switzerland, I finally found out I was pregnant. I had already given away a few "maternity" type dresses a month earlier that my friend K had helped me let go of. I had kept them for so long and they represented a strange mix of sadness and hope. As with many of the clothes she helped me get rid of, the phrase "Can you honor the thought behind the item (uuuugly maternity dress, gift I never wore, etc.) and then let it go?"

Yup, you bet. The uuuugly dress went away. "You'll get some much cuter maternity stuff anyway when you get pregnant, to celebrate." was K's reasoning. But the baby clothes I kept because I could still always give them as a gift.

Now, they were packed in a box with itemized contents, so I could definitely find them for summer once the baby came. We got to Zurich, and the guest apartment, things got unpacked and repacked, and we moved to our current place. And the baby clothes disappeared.

I have looked everywhere for them. I can't even remember if I saw them in the guest apartment, but assume I must have because that box was itemized and they were in there. I have found every single other thing I packed. I have searched and re-searched the apartment and the storage unit. And finally I just mentally let go of the clothes. Summer is ending, and I will try to order one replacement dress on-line. It won't be the same, with the same meaning, yearning, full of good wishes and hope, but it can take on a new meaning.

Well, in the ridiculously complex process for getting baby A's US passport and consular report of birth abroad, we need not only our original birth certificates issued in the last 6 months, but also a marriage license the same, and to prove that one of us lived in the US for 5 years in a row after age 14. Really? Really, you can't take IRS and border control information. I need to get grad school transcripts, too, to prove my residence? Really?

So today I was looking for my old passport to find some dates (month AND day) of trips out of the US, and I needed to get into the lock box. It is one of those fireproof cases, where we've always kept things we want to save in a fire. I figured that was the most likely place I've stored my old passport. After an hour of searching for the key, I finally opened it.

No passport, no marriage license, no vaccination records. Just 4 things inside the lockbox. Not even important papers.

Here they are.



A part of me finally exhaled. I can't believe I finally found them. I was sure they were lost.

They are even big enough for baby A to wear next summer.

Now, where's my old passport?

Always 10 steps ahead

I fast forward a lot. I extrapolate, two, five, ten steps ahead of here and now.

Sometimes it is helpful, with a hint of side-show freaky. Like when I have 6 different
errands all in my head, mapped out (usually within a few seconds) based on not having to make left turns in a car. Or the order in which to do 10 things before boarding a train, to minimize how long it will take.

I do this with some sort of "when it is all done, then I can relax" notion in my head, I think. And unless I am alone, and not responsible for anyone else but me, and in a sealed room with no phone,...it works just like that. As soon as another person or the outside world, or heck, even a flu virus, get wind of this thinking, they all rush in and ruin my perfect little world where I get that International Foods coffee moment at the end of all the effort.

And this has been causing me a lot of grief with parenting. Even knowing that the crappy fake but sweet and easy coffee moments don't happen, the 10 steps ahead stuff gets me into trouble. Like this evening.

Baby A had what I might actually call her first tantrum when she woke up from a late, much needed nap that had been really hard to get her to take in the first place. Let's just say, he didn't wake up in a good mental space. One of those, inhale sharply, pop up on all fours immediately wakings she does so often that would have benefited greatly from me popping up and rocking her back to sleep for another 5 minutes even.

Well, I didn't do that this time, because it is hard to tell, and it was late in the day, and if she slept too long then what happened to her being hungry and me needing to give her that medicated bath for her horrible rash that isn't getting better, and I didn't want to bathe her after a meal because what if she threw up in the bath and I had to start over and I'm already tired, and she doesn't feel good, and M is out of town and I should try to keep her to a schedule because I don't want her to freak out too much and make bedtime even worse for her which will make me upset and I'm on my own with this and I get angry sometimes and I so don't want to be that way tonight and....

So I was going to talk about the screaming in the bath and my decision matrix failing me at that point, but apparently my issues with the fast forward are quite adequately covered by the 5 minutes before the bath.

The more I go down this path (and I'm a long distance runner where this stuff is concerned), the worse place I get to in terms of being flexible. And being flexible seems to me to be one of the best skills to cultivate for myself with baby A. And then I'm right back in this nasty power struggle place, where I'm fighting some "good fight" to keep the baby seated in the tub even though she's tired and upset and nothing is calming down. It really bites me in the ass, this tendency. A lot right now.

And as with many other mental habits, it was really useful at some point in my life, in another situation. To get a bagillion things done in a day. Okay, it was at least helpful toward that goal. The goal itself was a bit messed up. But it is so completely un-useful, to the point of being harmful to my connecting with my kid and noticing what she needs and letting myself do that. And it is faulty reasoning, because I have NO IDEA what this kid will do next, and I'm still learning, and she's changing all the time. My intuition can be totally wrong in these situations.

So I'm trying my best to keep reminding myself to just fix the situation in the moment, without all the what-ifs and but-thens. To trust baby A instead of my fears of some dystopian, Nanny 911 family. It is amazing how quickly I can get from a screaming child in a tub to visions of a future sociopath I raised who is being hunted by the Law & Order police. Why I go to those places in my mind, I'm not totally sure. Probably something to do with the "evil all around you just waiting to tempt you, bait you, pull you down" messages I learned as a child.

Anyway, that's my "work" right now. To stop jumping out of the moment. To just stay put, and do the best things to calm down the current situation in front of me. And I find it extremely hard. Surprisingly hard, given how useful it would be to stop jumping ahead like that. Bow to your sensei.

Familiarity breeds content

Everything is new this year. Everything is unfamiliar. My address, my phone number, my furniture, the language I need to speak in to do my shopping and errands everyday, a baby, my body, my shoe size, the "usual" things I cook and eat, banking and bill paying, garbage and recycling rules, the seasons, the customs, the holidays, the sky and the landscape, where to find light bulbs and baking soda, the people in my life.

It is all new, all at once. It gets overwhelming sometimes. To a point where I've realized how much I need to burrow into familiarity every few days. I seek out Starbucks, or an English-speaking butcher, or the International Herald Tribune's daily crossword, just to feel a bit less adrift sometimes. And no, I'm not currently learning German. I know a bit, but I'm still learning mothering, and expat-ing, and stay-at-homing, and all these other skills.

I confessed to M the other day that I don't know if I actually have the capacity left in me to learn the 3, randomly assigned, German articles that take the place of the English "the." I really feel like I may not have the brain space left for them. Vocabulary words, nouns, I'm adding a few every few months. But imagine then needing to learn a second part of each word. I don't think there is room left.

So I watch BBC on TV instead of the local channels. I ask visitors to bring Whole Foods peanut butter and oatmeal. I have images of New England on my computer wallpaper. It keeps me a bit more sane in a sea of novelty.

I've realized, too, that although I still have my friend-making skills, my life right now makes it near impossible to keep up with them like I would have pre-baby A. So I'm feeling a bit disconnected. Like I've said "I'd love to, but we can't right now," a few too many times this month. How many times can a person regretfully decline invitations before they stop being invited to things?

I guess I'm going to find out.

The plural of anecdote is data.

Well, it can be.

I both hate and love online parenting forums and discussions because they can make me feel totally horrible about myself, like a parenting super-failure, or they can make me feel normal again. The latter kind are the data of which I speak.

After a 5-7am mama-as-doorstop session, I was googling "fidgety kicking baby sleep" this morning and stumbled on a blog entry followed by a slew of comments by parents with kids like mine. Not the same age, not all girls, and definitely not all born in Switzerland. But these kids all seem to perform the same sleep gymnastics that Baby A does. I say she tries to bench-press me off the bed, they call it Kung Fu hour, and Olympic sports trials. They speak of trying to calm flailing little legs and arms that constantly wake the owner by....GASP....practically immobilizing their kids with wraps, parent legs and arms, you name it. Just like I've done.

And, just like for me, it works. About half of the time. The other half of the time, the mini-gymnast just gets pissed off and screams their head off. Yup, that sounds about right.

All of a sudden, as I'm chuckling about another parent's description of the same thing I've been though, I feel okay. I feel lighter. I even sign in and write a comment. Not only is the flailing happening to other babies, but so is the parental exhaustion and the being screamed at, loudly, when executing a move that just worked this morning. The pressure is off again. My kid is just a wiggly. Like all these other babies that parents are posting about. We've gone to doctors and read books, and we're all still no further in finding a solution to the wiggles. But boy is it nice to know there are others out there.

That transformation through mutual understanding is what makes it not only data, but very valuable data to me. When someone can describe many aspects of my kid's movement habits, even more accurately than I can, it is data. When the same 5 or 6 traits come up over and over again in these comments - fidgety, early development, sleeps in a swing, swaddling not working after about 4 months when the kids just get really good at escape, knocking binkies out of mouths, Kung Fu time, I consider that data.

Whether or not there is an explanation, there is a common experience, which is data.

Miracle of Mindfulness

Along with above-mentioned book, I packed my iPhone, my laptop, another book, and picked up an International Herald Tribune on the way in to Baby A's daycare. I may have missed the point of the first title this morning.

That dude outside

Am I normal? Is what I do, want, think, believe normal? Some of us spend time comparing ourselves to others to see if we are “normal” in whatever way concerns us. In work, in child-rearing, in dressing, in talking, you name it. We think that others know what normal is, or just are normal and we might not be. But here is the thing that really surprised me about normal when I read about it for my dissertation – it is constructed by everyone around us, including us. We have such a hard time finding “normal” because it is constantly being defined and redefined around us and by us.

A friend of mine was visiting us last week and recalled when I’d first met her (we were both still pregnant) and told her I was looking for a counselor locally who could deal with postpartum depression because I thought I was at higher risk for it. She said something about the exchange like “you just acted so matter-of-fact about it and I thought, wow, she’s this totally normal woman and just brought up counseling like it was nothing strange. I can do that, too.” It reminded me of something I think is related to academic culture – a person can redefine normal by acting as if what they are doing is normal.

The few talks I’ve given about my research, I’ve spent the talk sitting down in front of the audience. I chose to do this, first, because it is not what “normally” happens at an academic talk. It is one of those little rules that everyone learns by watching and no one ever has to be told by their advisor “you stand up when you give a science talk.” It happens at journal clubs, conferences and class presentations. Humans are good at picking up on this type of, everyone-else-is-doing-it, norms. When someone breaks this rule, people use humor, ridicule, or gossip to comment on it to others and reinforce that it was a break from what is supposed to happen. “What was X thinking, sitting down during journal club? How rude/strange/flippant/naïve.”

But I think there is a power to flipping the situation around, that only a few people ever use, but can change how the action is perceived. If the person engaged in the “deviant” behavior acts as if it is normal, instead of apologizing or being embarrassed, she can start to shake up the process. Suddenly, if X comes out journal club and says to the group “I sit because I concentrate better that way and I think it makes my journal club presentations better – isn’t that the goal?” maybe the group starts to rethink the point of the standing up “rule.” The real power to redefine (or challenge) the concept of sitting as normal, though, happens if X makes that statement in a tone of voice that is completely unapologetic, maybe even slightly mystified, the way you might defend a normal behavior to someone who doesn’t understand your culture. “Um, of course I picked up that piece of litter, that’s what we DO here.” Duh. If you can hold that line, other people start to waiver a bit.

So I’m saying there is a bit of a game of “who blinks first” going on. If you can hold your line, and act as if what you’ve just done is normal (whether or not you believe it), others start to think about what you’ve done normal. Or at least more normal than before, if you’ve broken some norm of behavior within your group. Whether you are a pregnant woman telling a new acquaintance that you are looking for a therapist and that you’ve been depressed in the past, or a science instructor who announces to the class that you keep having problems working with log-normal plots, if you can say it matter-of-factly and act as if it is okay, it starts to become ok. We are all involved in defining, and redefining normal, in the groups we are part of. This is a powerful role that can help us change all sorts of things around us.

Just to be clear, I’m not advocating doing this with sexually harassing your students, or spitting into someone else’s dinner plate. And there is an extreme example in front of me as I write this. A guy who has been talking to himself – and not apologetically, or embarrassed when someone looks at him – and after speaking with the café manager, seems to be collecting the white pebbles out of the mostly grey gravel in out in front. This guy is not going by many norms shared by those around him, for whatever reason. And at some point, he may get shooed away, or arrested, if his non-normal behavior keeps going. There is a point at which you can act as normal as you want about your behavior but you’re going to get in trouble for it.

Bedtime blues...and red (shudder)

Baby A and I had quite the afternoon yesterday. Let’s just say a lot of crying happened around nap time. And while I had a bloody nose in the morning from my cold, she managed a bloody mouth from something she did while seriously protesting being in her crib. I have no idea how she did that to her gums, but I was pretty freaked out when I first picked her up in the dark and saw dark red on her chin.

Other than those 2 minutes each of bleeding, we were okay, but in the middle of the 5-step process that she seems to need most days to fall asleep, I just realized I can’t keep doing that. It makes me tired of being a mom. Hold her, sway her, bounce her while walking, bounce her while sitting, let her roll around on the big bed to settle down. It is too much, too many options, and it turns her into a too finely-tuned baby. Not for her, but for me.

Really, as with most other realizations, it is a realization about myself, borne out of frustration. I’m not super-mom. I don’t have the patience, when I’m tired (especially then…I don’t do tired very gracefully), to go through all those steps calmly. I just want it to be over, at least for my part to be over. I want to sit down, lay down, just rest, even if on the floor. I realized it is okay for me to be the kind of person who is not so great when she is tired.

And while it is my responsibility to keep trying to get enough rest, and put sleep ahead of a lot of other things I might also want to do, it is okay that Baby A has to meet me a bit more towards center. Not because it is fair or not, but because I can’t do more than that sometimes. Because her mama is imperfect and that is totally okay. It is okay that I disappoint her sometimes and that she knows I’m not superwoman. And I think it is much better than being angry with her, for me to fall short of some of her ideals.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t think my 9 month old baby should learn to put on her own pajamas, make her own bottle, or even scream herself to sleep. I just mean that I’m coming to the realization that it is okay that I may only have enough in me to sway with patience, and I don’t have to be embarrassed (and then angry at her for asking more of me), if she cries a bit more than if I could bounce and walk, too. This morning, she cried a bit in my arms, screamed a few times while arching, and then, as I kept really nicely calm and kept swaying, she readjusted once more in my arms and fell asleep. It was all I had for her, and it turned out to be enough. She met me a little bit closer to center.

We’re starting to read a few books (I know, I know, but they come recommended this time) about sleeping and babies. Granted, head hitting the crib bars or whatever that messed up thing is that brought about a bloody gum, we’re not going to let her go that far when we can help it. This baby isn’t made to be left completely on her own to figure out sleep. But her mama isn’t made to completely put her to sleep every night, either. And that is okay. She doesn’t have to make it to some classic, babble for 5 min and drift off stage. Because I don’t think she can handle it. And in our family, I’ve decided that it is okay for each of us to have some things we can’t handle and for everyone else to pitch in (in whatever way they can, big or small) on those issues. It is part of self-acceptance for Baby A, learning by seeing us accept our own limits. Without shame or guilt. Practicing being complete beings, just as we are.

My main point….I’ve come back to this paragraph after a day. My point is that I’m going to start acting like (and hopefully eventually believing that) my okay-ness, or good enough-ness, is intrinsic. That I start with that, just by being, existing. And that then my actions, my capabilities are okay and good enough by extension, and not treating the whole matter the other way around. Until now, I have spent most of the time judging whether I’m okay as a mom (or student, or woman, or person) based on my actions. And that just leads to a lot of harsh judgment. Kind of like what I read once about love. If you are constantly trying to decide whether someone loves you enough based on their actions, you’re going to constantly be either doubting or disappointed. They will always fail you in some way. Instead, if you start with the assumption that they love you, then you are free to look for all the other reasons that he didn’t bring you flowers or she didn’t get you that thing you like so much.

So, sleep is going to change somehow. We started last night by putting teeth brushing, face washing, and pajama wearing a bit early, and then all of us piling on the big bed in her room to quietly hang out until she got sleepy. So more wind-down for Baby A, less crying about being tired and having a diaper changed, and at least last night, a baby who fell asleep with 4 minutes of walking/swaying by me. That I can handle. We’ll see what else the books have to say.