toddlerspit

I have to go to Arizona for a few days for work.  Addie was helping me pack tonight, and wanted me to make a list of everything I was going to put in my bags, and also a list of everything I was going to do while I was gone. 

“Who’s going to be in your hotel room at night?” she asked.

“Nobody, honey,” I laughed.  “I’ll be by myself.”

She threw herself into my arms, sobbing.  “No, Mommy!  Why don’t you let me come with you?  Please let me come with you!”

What’s going on here?  Is she old enough to be worried about me?  Or is she just projecting her own fears about sleeping alone on to me?  Maybe both?

Last week we were having trouble getting Addie to stay in her room and go to sleep.  After an hour and a half of tantrums and pleading, she came out of her room one last time and wandered into ours.  “It’s not fair!” she cried.  “You two get to sleep with each other, and I have to sleep by myself!”  Which is the worst thing in the world, in her book.

Eric and I looked at each other and shrugged.  She’s pretty much right.  To be honest, there are nights when we’d rather not sleep in the same bed.  Eric snores and I talk in my sleep, and who wouldn’t like to stretch out across a cool expanse of unrumpled sheets now and then?  And there’s nothing better when you’re a little kid than getting to sleep with someone.  The logic’s a little funky, all screwed up by sexuality and tradition.  

So don’t worry, Addie.  I’ll be okay for a few nights in Arizona by myself.  And you’ll be okay, too. 

Excuuuuuuuse me! for not posting in half a decade.  I had to fall off the grid for a while, or else succumb to the demons of office politics, overwork, and constant obligation.  Also, we went on a familial junket to Idaho.  We’re back now, and it’s spring break, and I am only now bringing myself to check emails and post on this blog.

We got home, with both me and Eric having wicked sinus infections, and I slept a good fourteen hours.  Traveling with kids is never not exhausting.  But it was a great trip, for many reasons:

1.  It’s such a gift to spend time with the kids away from the responsibilities of housecleaning and work and toddler birthday parties and all the other things that keep us busy (and happy, usually) here in Denver.  I felt like I got reintroduced to my babies, learned that Nolie knows a ton of words and that Addie has a wildly vivid imagination, mostly involving birthday parties, baby sisters, and princesses.

2.  Seeing Addie and Nolie bond with all their papas, nanas, aunts, uncles, and cousins.  Here’s Addie with her Uncle JB:

3.  Having absolute epilaughtic fits over the fact that Chuck Norris has two speeds:  walk, and kill.  http://www.chucknorrisfacts.com/.  Thanks for that, Uncle Jade.

4.  Learning that, right in the middle of dinky old Twin Falls, Idaho, is a beautiful gorge that has been carved out by the heft of the Snake River.  How did I grow up in Idaho and never see this?

5. Getting a dissertation from Addie on the definition of “smooch”:  “It’s a BIG kiss, mommy, like this!  With a big smack and a squeak.  No, like THIS!  Bigger!”

6.  Having Nolie race around Nana Debbie’s house, chased by her grandpa, and yelling “No tickle, gampa!  No!”  Then dissolving into fits of laughter when he caught her.

7.  Staying up late with my sister and her husband, pontificating on how hard it is to raise kids, and how they break our hearts every other second, and how it’s the best thing in the world.  I’m pretty sure I drank an entire bottle of Yellow Tail by myself, and then got rug burns ON MY FACE when I tried to show the kids some yoga breakdancing moves.  Oh, well.

I’ve been struggling with how to talk about the trip to India, and have been trying to figure out why this is.  Part of it is that it was a trip for work, not a vacation or a pilgrimage (though it ended up being a little bit of each).  So there are many correct answers to the question, “How was it?”  It was amazing, delightful, infuriating, invigorating, exhausting, and more.  There is also the fact that I’ve had to dive right back into things here with work and family and probably haven’t been able to process my experiences there.

The main thing, though, is that it doesn’t feel like it was me who went.  Or, at least, not a me that I’ve known for a while.  My life there was so far away from everything I am here.  I didn’t have Eric or the kids, not even on the phone for a few days.  And apart from a very slow, very unreliable internet connection and the fact that I sat through hours of technical talks everyday, I wasn’t accessible to work as I usually am, either.  

This happened to free up a lot of time and energy.  I was committed to staying well in India, so I really took care of myself.  I took vitamins every morning, got plenty of rest, ate well, didn’t drink too much alcohol but drank a ton of (bottled) water.  I did yoga every day, sometimes at sunrise on the beach.  I breathed.  I meditated.  The conference schedule was incredibly busy, but I made time for all of these things, and I stayed well, and I felt well.  I had long conversations with people and made new friends.  I was free to come and go as I pleased.  In short, I was another person, an autonomous person, largely free from the roles that mostly shape my life here.

That freedom was also a little nauseating, though.  I feel like I’ve brought back some of those lessons, of caring for myself and of taking time free from others’ expectations.  But I also realized how much I need Eric and the girls.  Not that I have ever considered a life other than this, other than wife and mom to these three, but I think up until the trip I had been focused on how much I was needed.  Being gone reminded me how much they I also need them.

On the second-to-last flight home, from Frankfurt to Detroit, the flight attendant came to my seat and told me they’d been telexed that I would need to contact a Lufthansa representative when we landed, something about my final flight to Denver.  I spent the next twenty minutes crying, sure that my flight had been canceled, and that I’d have to stay overnight in Detroit, and that I wouldn’t see my family for one more entire day!  I was heartbroken.

Turns out I needn’t have worried–they just wanted to tell me my luggage needed to go through customs (why the urgent telex for this, I do not know).  But in those moments, I felt that if I didn’t see Eric and the kids immediately when I got to Denver that I would die.  I would tear someone apart limb from limb.  I would crumble into nothingness.  Please forgive the dramatics, but that’s exactly how I felt.  The pull to them was enormous.

All of this, I realize, says nothing about India, or my relationship to it.  Nothing about how an elephant (the one pictured above)–the spirit of Ganesha–laid his heavy trunk on my head, and I felt as if the hand of God rested there.  Nothing about walking barefoot through the streets of Kanchipuram, through its temples.  Nothing about the deer chasing monkeys up the trees on the campus of IIT Madras, or the friends I made, or the scientists intent on changing the world, their world, India.  The poverty.  The gods.  Maybe these things will leak out in bits and pieces in coming posts.  Or maybe not.  It wasn’t me who witnessed them, after all, and the words are slow in coming.

I wrote this a few days back, but the internet access at the resort failed, so here it is, sent from my 25th hour of travel, during a five-hour layover in Detroit.  Jesus.

As I said, this institute is taking place at a resort–the MGM Resort, to be precise–which I have taken to calling Fantasy Island .  It is a huge, sprawling resort, and I’ve never experienced anything like it.  There are at least three different playgrounds, though no children play on them, a swimming pool, a vast and beautiful beach, though littered with thousands of bits of plastic debris, and hundreds of little attached luxury huts and rooms.  The rooms are a good size, relatively clean, with private bathrooms, television, and air conditioning.  There is a restaurant, room and laundry service, an Ayurvedic spa, and a conference building where we meet for our (never-ending) tutorials on nanoscience.  It is a totally self contained unit–there is nothing within walking distance except a small arts colony where tourists can go haggle over etchings of Ganesha and embroidered textiles.  Otherwise, you get everything you need from the resort.

I think it’s a close approximation of a luxury resort, in other words.  That said, signs of the surrounding developing world creep in via cracks and crevices.  Though I have a perfectly lovely room, friends here have been attacked by errant frogs, rats, mosquitoes, and various other creatures in theirs.  Two people may have malaria already.  There is an old man who wheels around the resort on a flat cart, holding a real-live monkey dressed up in a pretty dress.  It is rare to get a hot shower.  It is rare to get a tepid shower.  It took six calls to the front desk to get a battery for the clock in my room (my watch died on the airplane).  I got a massage and though it only cost $15, my purse left the spa a good $60 lighter than that, given that it was raided while I was in the sauna (note to self:  go to spa with only as much money as you need).  At least my passport was spared.  There are water damage marks on the walls and ceilings, if you look close enough, and fields nearby still show signs of the tsunami that swept through here a few years back. 

This doesn’t mention the most important element, the people in service here, who are incredibly obsequious and compliant but who also are very aware of the raw deal and who would like a better one.

I read this over and see it seems as if I’m complaining and overthinking everything.  I’m not, not in the least.  I mean, I’m in India .  I went to a spa, for chrissakes.  I have internet access.  I have a ready supply of money if I need it.  I’ve been loving the food, the cultural performances, meeting all of these incredible new people.  In fact, life is incredibly easy here on Fantasy Island .  There is plentiful and safe bottled water, the food has been fantastic (though spicy enough to melt your face off).  A phone call gets you anything you need.  These are the vast privileges of being a westerner, in a resort, in India .

Still, there are a number of Americans here who are really struggling with the small stuff.  They are freaked out by the dive-bombing flies and the “strange” food and the incredibly long Indian music concerts we’ve been attending at night.  They are “angsty” as one of them put it.  They are checking to see if they can change their return flights.

But, for me, the whole experience is a little ridiculous, a little unreal.  I find myself laughing out loud at inappropriate moments, at the incongruity of it all.  I’m not sure what I want.  No doubt about it–I like being so comfortable, so safe.  But also I wonder why come all the way to India if we are not going to see it, not going to at least understand what it’s like outside the compound walls?  I feel like I’m trapped in a reality tv show, where the producers have engineered a sanitized experience, but made things just different enough to trigger some people, making things interesting for the viewers at home.  We are completely protected, except from ourselves.  Not that a day trip into the impoverished masses will change that in anyway.  I get that.  It’s all tourism, anyway you cut it, wherever you go.

I think we’ll start to get out of the compound tomorrow, making day trips to the city, the temples, the universities.  We’ll get off the island!  Until then, I’m trapped in this air-conditioned conference room, listening to talks I can’t even begin to understand, and occasionally swatting at flies that land on my keyboard.  I don’t mean to suggest I’m not completely enjoying and immersing myself in this experience, for what it is.  It’s fantastic in so many ways.  But it’s also fantastic in a lot of ways, fantasy.  I’m just wondering at the weirdness of this strange form of tourism.

 

Three hour flight to Washington D.C., three hour layover, 7 hour flight to Frankfurt, 3 hour layover, 8 1/2 hour flight to Chennai, one hour drive to hotel.  Sounds brutal, yes?  But it was fine.  I was well prepared.  I did a bunch of reading about nanosciences and engineering on the first two flights, got good and tired, then popped an ambien for the last flight to India.  I fell asleep immediately, and was surprised and pleased to wake up pretty well rested about five hours into the flight, which was just in time to watch a very strange Indian movie about a man running from the law, and to eat my fourth meal of boiled spinach, rice, and lentils (I’ve now had what seems like 64 such meals).

Off the plane in Chennai, and walking through the airport at about midnight, I was suprised at the overpowering smell of fresh plaster, and the clean, stark white walls of the airport.  Got my suitcase and emerged into the humid night, met by hundreds of Indians, maybe waiting for family, but mostly drivers hoping to take passengers somewhere for a few rupees, I think.  A friend said that when she arrived in Delhi last week, she got in a driver’s car, and instead of taking her to her hotel, he tried to take her to his house, where he could charge her for staying, I guess.  She politely declined, then not so politely, and he eventually took her to a hotel.  Scary, in retrospect  But the institute arranged all of our drivers, assured us of our safety, so I found the sign with my name and went with the driver, no problem.  Maybe I should have been afraid, but I wasn’t.  Giving up on the fear has been a practice for this trip, I think.

The taxi was old and diesel-powered, and Chennai is humid and polluted, so I immediately felt my lungs start to constrict and figured I was going to have an asthma attack.  Mostly I was struck with the surreality of it all.  I was tired, and excited, and amazed by the amount of debris in the road, the dozens of cows picking through the trash for food, the stray dogs with their ribs sticking through.  There are ads on every square foot of space here, too.  There are messages everywhere, though I can’t read most of them.

And then there was the driving–the roads were relatively empty at that time of night, but that didn’t make things less exciting.  Here is how driving works here:  the driver basically drives down the middle of the road, straddling the white lines, when there are white lines.  When a car approaches from the other direction, also straddling the white line, the two cars honk at one another and flash lights at each other until one finally calls chicken and gets the hell out of the way.  It’s very exciting.

I see that I’ve made the mistake of getting too involved in the details because it’s different from what I’m used to.  I’m like the person who insists on showing you six hundred pictures from their last vacation. 

At the same time, it is not as foreign as I had expected, somehow.  Everything is just a little different, but not a lot.

Then again, I haven’t really escaped the hotel compound, which I call Fantasy Island.  More on that soon.

Both of my children have morphed into evil creatures from hell.

Let me explain.

Before we left for San Diego, we had two finely-tuned offspring, who were going to bed like clockwork, making great developmental strides, and overall proving quite pleasing to their parental units.  We were smug.  We were haughty.  We gloated.  Our children were perfect, and it was all thanks to us and our brilliant parenting.

Enter one week in San Diego, which Eric started off on the right foot by telling Addie, on our first night there, “We’re on vacation!  You can go to bed whenever you want!”  Apparently I had put too much sloe in the boy’s gin fizz, because rule number one in the preschooler parenting manual is to never tell your kid they can do something “whenever they want.”  Particularly when they are coked up on sugar and Christmas presents and overall travel excitement.

Something changed in Addie over the trip.  She became–please forgive the pretension–insouciant.  She screams “no” to every request I make at the moment, says “Nice try, Dad,” sarcastically to her father, better than any teenager could, and in general is a total pain in the butt.

But maybe not as much of a pain in the butt as Nolie.  Before San Diego?  You could basically walk Nolie into a dark room, and in about three seconds, she would whisper “night-night,” you could put her down in her crib, and before you left the room she was asleep.  It was pure bliss.  We were putting her down at 6:30, friends!  With no fuss or upset!  Unheard of!

Then came San Diego, where Nolie was put in the “box” (Eric’s term for the pak n play) in a large-ish laundry room.  This worked okay the first night, for some reason, although she did wake up for the day at 5am.  The next night, though, she cried the entire night, until we finally fed her about a dozen nutri-grain bars at 3 in the morning and she passed out from exhaustion.  Until 5am, at which point she was raring to go again.  Now she is in the habit of crying for hours before finally falling asleep.  I wish I was the sort of parent who could just close the door and not worry about it, but man is it stressful to have crying like this, and we go in every so often to rock her, or sing to her.  I know at some point we’ll have to commit to the cry-it-out (because this can’t go on), but for now it’s just tough.  Ugh.

I don’t think any of this had to do with San Diego or the family there, per se.  The girls had the time of their lives.  Even exhausted Nolie was a joy to be around during the day because everything was so new and fun.  It was just a total disruption of routine, the familiar.  And you all know how addicted we were to that.  So re-entry has been difficult.

I woke up yesterday morning sick, sick again, my body telling me to knock all this shit off.  Can’t get back from a trip to New York and just jump right into everything and just expect no pushback.  So I rested some yesterday, even though I should have been grading papers, finishing my draft for the conference next week, writing an abstract.  I just stopped, crawled into bed last night, let Eric love me some, went to sleep.  Today I’m trying to catch up, get ready to get on the plane for England tomorrow, totally unprepared.  But that’s what the all-day flight is for, right?

We have a new kitty, Mei-Mei, who adopted us, sort of.  She’s two, and tiny, white with gray spots and a striped tail, and sweet as anything I’ve ever seen.  Nolie is absolutely obsessed with her.  So, we’re a three-cat household now, which I never anticipated, but which is lovely, having these little lovies all around us.  Prudence and Sadie are not so sure, but we think they’ll come around.  Maybe I’m extra attached right now because I’m leaving so much.

I’m headed to India in January after all, making for a lot of traveling in a little time.  I’m trying to explain next week’s trip to Addie, but it’s hard to know how much she understands.  Eric says both girls we’re asking for me this weekend, and seemed relieved when I got home.  So a week away will be tough, so soon, and for so long.

There’s the missing Eric that happens, too.  In New York one night, a few of us went out to a jazz club where Miles Davis had played, and I knew Eric would have loved it.  And I felt sad that he wasn’t there, resolved again that when I got home I’d start to make arrangements for us to go out more together.  Because there’s nobody in the world I’d rather be with, out in the world, and we just haven’t been making it happen. 

Still, I’m looking forward to walking London, to riding the train through the countryside, to spending a few days just talking about movies at the Spielberg conference.  I’m looking forward to sleeping in and eating and just wandering some.  And I’ll be just as glad to come home, and to breathe a little as we head into Christmas.

I’ve also resolved not to travel in spring, to re-root, re-center, and get some things figured out.  Again.

See you soon…

There are lots of posts brewing, things I need to write about:  my knock-down, drag-out combat with losing three pounds, and my fears about spending the next five days in potato-land; the discovery that contrary to everything I’ve been telling myself, the difficulties Eric and I have been having have mostly to do with me, my struggle to give and receive love; the way I’ve been noticing how present fear is in my life; the goodness of my friendships, my family, my marriage, my work. 

But none of this is fully formed yet, and I need some more time to think.  For now, I’m bustling around packing things into ziploc bags and folding laundry in preparation for the trip tomorrow.  I’ve tried to streamline the kidfrastructure, but the success of our travels will totally depend on the kindness of strangers:  will someone help us and our two suitcases, stoller, pak n play, and two backpacks to a luggage cart?  Will there be a Skycab there?  Will someone watch Addie while I get through security with Nolie?  Will I have to go six hours without peeing because I can’t fit all of us in a stall? 

It’s the little things.  People always step into help.  There’s no need to worry.  But still I do, traveling with these precious girls.

With that, we’re off to Boisiego, as Addie calls it (she’s still not sure who’s where, whether we’re going to Boise or San Diego, and who will be on the other end of the long plane ride.  Grandpa Bill?  Grandpa Phil?  Nanas or Abuelitas?  Uncle JB or Joe or Jade or Steve?  Cousin Gwenn or Raiff or Kamille or Kiara or Ben?  Where?  But she’s getting it). 

See you next week.