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What Am I Missing Here?
y boss is such a sweetie. Whenever we’re in meetings and someone makes a statement that is so confused, addle-headed, or just plain out there, instead of responding with a “what the hell are you talking about?!” he does the nice thing and takes the onus on himself for the lack of understanding and asks, “what am I missing here?” It’s such a considerate act that keeps the other person from getting pissy and defensive. And for this post, I plan to steal his technique.
I am the first one to admit that like my fellow Ivy Leaguers Barack and Michelle, some have accused me of being elitist. Yes I have a penchant for subject-verb agreement, I shop at Target and not Walmart, and would commit hari-kari if my daughter told me that she wanted to dance on a pole rather than go to college. If that is the definition of elitism, well I guess I am guilty.
I put this out there because in my prethinking of how this post might be received, my concern was that it might be seen as elitist. Yet I happily own my elitism when it rears its ugly head. However, in this situation, I’m not sure this is about elitism. Something else is jangling with me that I don’t think can be simply written off as my being part of the club that refuses to drink White Zinfandel. There’s something else amiss. Let’s get to it.
Last week I received the FAO Schwarz holiday catalog. As a good consumer with a young ‘un, I decided to flip through their offerings to see if there was anything special that had Zara’s name on it. Of course, the first item that caught my eye was this wooden doctor’s office playset:
Yes, she’s not old enough for this and with the current state of medicine it is really really really not a good idea for her to go into medicine, but I thought it was cute…and wasn’t made of bright plastic.
I also saw some other interesting career/activity playsets.
Here’s the workbench playset: (It’s listed for boys, but we don’t follow no stinkin’ gender rules!)
The ice cream cart:
A grocery cart:
The grilling set:
And then I came to the item that has continued to puzzle me. It puzzles me for these reasons:
It is in the (high end) FAO Schwarz catalog
It costs $150
I cannot imagine any desire to buy this item for a child
I’ll say no more. I’ll just show you. Here is the $150 wooden housekeeping cart playset:
Please note that this isn’t the let’s clean the house type of housecleaning playset. This is a replica of the carts that housekeeping services use to clean hotels and buildings. I’m not trying to say that housekeeping isn’t a perfectly reasonable job, but is it a job for “let’s pretend?”
Maybe I’m particularly sensitive to this because just two generations ago my grandmother was on her knees cleaning people’s houses so that my mother and aunt could get their educations and advanced degrees. My grandparents came to the US from the West Indies, struggled and scraped by so that we, their descendants, could get ahead. They wanted us to work with our minds and not on our knees.
So I’m looking at this housekeeping playset and I’m asking myself, what am I missing here? Help me out. (Boss also says this as well.)
h heaven…just the day before I was all chillaxed on the beach. Now it was time to pack up, turn around, and go back home. Suck much?
Remember the trouble we had with good ol’ Megatur, the company that we had arranged to do our airport/hotel transfers when we arrived in Faro. Somehow they never received our flight information and thus didn’t have us on the list to pick up after our fun transatlantic journey. Well in order to avoid this unfortunate recurrence, I spent Wednesday, Thursday and Friday of our vacation working with the concierge in an attempt to contact them about our return. Oh yeah…but when every single phone number listed on the confirmation sheet is no longer working, reaching them becomes a little bit challenging. But thanks to the perseverance of the nice concierge, on Friday afternoon, she made contact.
Megatur planned for a 7 AM pickup for our flight which departed at 9:40 AM. Considering that we were a 45 minute drive away from the airport and had to check in our 5 million bags and go through security I worried that the timing was a little tight. Yet, hey, they must know what they’re doing right? My anxiety worsened on Friday evening when we received a fax from Megatur letting us know that they would be picking us up at 7:30 in the morning, not 7 AM. Wasn’t this cutting things more than a little too fine? Gulp!
The first priority of this return trip was to pack more reasonably. The giant 22 inch carry-on bag was not of much use to me when it was wedged and unreachable in the overhead compartment. This time, I said to myself, I would do it differently. This time I would have everything we needed for Jubby within reach. To this end, I purchased a cute (but very overpriced) Club Med carry-on bag that was actually a carry on and not a small suitcase. (I also bought the matching tote bag and messenger bag. WTH, they were cute, after all!) Unfortunately, this meant that when we added the old carry on and our box of wine to the tally, we were now checking 7 items, somewhat of a ridiculous amount for three people who’d been away for a week.
We thought we were doing very well with our packing (despite Zara’s insistence on removing the items we had placed in the suitcases) until the bellman arrived at 7:15 and we found that we still had not closed all the bags he was to take. We hastily closed everything (only losing Jubby in the hallway once), then managed to throw together our carry-ons, get Jubby in her GoGo Kidz/car seat contraption and head out.
Now I have to digress for just a minute here. One thing I can say about my dear AdoringHusband is that he knows nothing of the word speed. As my late mother would say, “he has two speeds, slow and stop.” This background is important for what happened next. We exited the elevator and I began walking quickly so that I could check out and get to the airport shuttle. I was aware of someone walking very closely at my heels. This startled me because I hadn’t seen anybody else come off the stairwell and there was no one else on the elevator with me and AdoringHusband, so where did this fast walking person come from? I turned around and almost fell over with shock. There right behind me was AdoringHusband walking with a speed that I had never seen in the seven years that I have known him. I didn’t know that his legs actually moved that fast! Wonder of wonders. For some reason, he didn’t think my complimenting him on his alacrity was a real compliment.
I went to the desk to check out while AdoringHusband got Jubby secured into what I thought would be be small transport van that was taking us back to the airport. Yet after my dawdling at after realizing that I had spent €658 on incidentals at an all-inclusive resort (yikes!), I made my way outside and discovered that a ginormous bus filled with people was waiting for me in order to leave for the airport.
The ride back to the airport happily, was uneventful. Yet I began to get that anxious feeling start up in my stomach that told me I was back on the anxiety train. Would we make our flight? What about our connections? What snafus were ahead for us? Little did I know what actually would await us.
We ended up needing two luggage carts to handle all of our baggage. Again, not so smart. I chose what seemed to be the fastest moving line, but of course as is typical with me, I am cursed with bad line selection karma. The line I choose moves fast just until I get into it. This time was no exception. I don’t know what was going on with the check-in guy for our line, but it seemed that almost every passenger required him to pick up the phone and call somebody to assist with the situation. This was not a good sign. In addition, I had to prevent my dear husband from attacking a man who he assured me was attempting to push his luggage cart into Jubby as she sat in her car seat/GoGo Kidz carrier contraption. All I know is that I had to defuse the situation by moving Jubby away from the man’s cart and keeping AdoringHusband from attempting to use the patented stare of death to kill the man.
Eventually we managed to make it to the slow check-in guy. I handed him our tickets. He looked at them. He asked where we were flying to. I said, “Philadelphia.” Then he reached for the phone. I was very very unhappy.
After he got off the phone, he said something about having too many bags. I said that I would pay for the extra bags. He said, “You paid for the bags?” To which I replied, “I’ll pay for the bags.” This seemed to satisfy him and no mention of paying for bags was heard again. Then he tried to put a bag tag on Jubby’s car seat. We explained that it would be going into the plane and thus didn’t need a tag. He said it still needed one. Hell, by this point, I would have plastered myself in baggage tags if it would have helped him move a little faster! It was 9:15 already! He then pointed us toward another conveyor belt where we had to take the stroller and the wine box. “Fragile,” he explained. “Arrgh!” we exclaimed as we ran over there and dropped them with the laconic agent.
We made as valiant a dash as we could to the security line and managed to get through our screening relatively quickly despite my continued setting off the alarm and needing a manual patdown. We ran through the terminal forgetting that we would have to go through passport control again. The passport control guy wanted to make chit chat and I was like, we gotta go! We made it to the gate just as they had started boarding the bus transports to take us to the plane. Phew, I thought. We made it and the worst is over. Yeah right.
This time I made AdoringHusband responsible for wrestling with the Car Seat of Concussions. As is typical for him, he didn’t see why I made such a big deal about carrying the seat. I wanted him to experience it firsthand. I don’t think he realized it, but he came very close to braining people several times. The looks he was getting! One man was on the verge of pulling his wife out of harms way. I’m telling you that seat is dangerous!
Luckily Jubby behaved fairly well on the flight to Dublin. AdoringHusband and I actually got to eat some breakfast while she slept in her car seat. The funny thing was, this Aer Lingus flight was filled with children. Portugal must be the place that Irish vacationers go with their kids. There was so much crying and shrieking and whining that had Jubby decided to act up she would’ve fit in with the chorus. She woke up about an hour before we landed in Dublin, ate some goldfish, drank juice and didn’t try too hard to climb under her seat.
The big problem was…time. We left Faro late and arrived in Dublin late. Why I thought a two-hour connection would be doable I do not know. What I didn’t know at the time is that Dublin is not a place one should ever connect through if at all humanly possible. Dublin Airport is an incredibly busy airport. Also, we were told, it is a place that a lot of people emigrate from so customs and security are a lot tighter. It is one of two airports in Europe that does have US Customs preclearance prior to boarding the plane. All that means is that were 15 more layers of rigmarole required to get through the Dublin Airport than any other airport in Europe that I’ve encountered.
Our plane arrived about 40 minutes late. It also taxied to a gate in the farthest, most remote part of the airport (naturally). When we managed to deplane and realized that we were miles away from where we needed to be and had no boarding passes for our connection and no time to get them, I think that panic was an inadequate word for what we felt.
The there was the GoGo Kidz problem. This GoGo Babyz Kidz Travelmate Car Seat was supposed to make Travels with Toddler much, much easier. Yet somewhere along our travels to Portugal I must’ve disassembled the darn thing improperly because the damn thing never hooked right or simply again. It is supposed to me a matter of seconds to place the car seat and secure it. Well, something went drastically wrong with ours. So wrong that it currently sits hidden in the garage so that we don’t have to look at it again. But back to the story. We deplane in Dublin and the panic sets in. Jubby wants to run away but I’m trying to hold her still and AdoringHusband is trying to get the car seat onto the GoGo Kidz carrier. He tries and tries. The plane empties completely, the flight crew passes us in the terminal and AdoringHusband is still trying to get the car seat to sit on the GoGo Kidz stably. By now, he sounds like a person with Tourette’s Syndrome. All the shits and fucks that are coming from his mouth… and I am 2 seconds away from freaking the hell out. I want to start moving even if it means carrying Jubby and the car seat. AdoringHusband does not agree. “Just give me another minute!” he snaps.
Have you ever been so upset, so totally tweaked that you can feel hysteria welling up inside you? I could feel myself start to lose it. I shifted from one foot to the other, tears welled up in my eyes, and at the same time uncontrolled crazy-lady laughter started to come up in my throat. I was about to lose my shit. Calmdowncalmdowncalmdown… And then Jubby went into her boneless baby routine.
At long last Tourette’s Man finally managed to get the car seat on the GoGo Kidz carrier. We put Jubby in and we ran. We ran down hallways, up escalators down other hallways, scooting around people like we were playing some demented video game. When we finally arrived down by passport control and baggage claim, I was so thankful that AH had gotten the GoGo Kidz to work. There was no way we could have made it that far that fast carrying Z.
We ran through baggage claim and went up to departures to get to the outside (before security) check-in gate. When we arrived panting and bedraggled, the woman we encountered tried to tell us that the flight was closed. Our heads exploded. But then she asked, “were you on a connecting flight?” “Yes, from Faro,” we gasped, “They didn’t give us boarding passes and we were told we had to come out here.” She looked at Jubby and took pity on us.
We passed through this front level screening and then moved to the screening at the counter. There the woman had to account for all of our baggage. Unfortunately the dimwitted man at the ticket counter in Faro gave us more stubs than we had bags. This was a major problem since if the bags couldn’t be accounted for, we would have big problems! the bags She threatened to make us check everything, including our carry ons. I tried to explain that this was not tenable since we were traveling with an infant. We just couldn’t check everything. And she got all “Well then you have to figure out what happened with these tags!” That’s the point at which AdoringHusband lost his shit. “What the hell are you talking about?! Just because this idiot gave us too many tags, we’re penalized!”
“AdoringHusband,” I said sharply. “Breathe.”
“Look,” I began to the woman,” we’re a bit stressed and I apologize. But the agent in Faro was not quite sure what he was doing. He put a checked bag tag on Zara’s car seat when we told him that it was going into the cabin. He also initially tried to check us just to Dublin and not to Philly.”
Sufficiently mollified, she pulled the tag from Jubby’s car seat and went through each other tag a bit closer. Two minutes later we found that the checked bag number was seven, as we said, and we inched closer to the plane.
She printed our boarding passes and handed them to us with customs forms. Her last words to us were, “go right to the plane.” I was like yeah right we’re gonna stop and have a couple of cappuccinos! Of course we’re going right to the plane. She also mentioned something about filling out the customs forms but that didn’t sound right. You do that on the plane before you land, right? Anyway, I was too busy running toward security.
Amazingly, we found our way into the line that had nobody in it. Once again, I set off the alarm, but after my patdown I grabbed Jubby and put her back into carrier and we ran. And this is where we had our next near international incident.
We are flying through the airport with me in the lead pulling Jubby in the GoGo Kidz/car seat while I am weaving in and out between people again. At this point I am completely and totally frantic. I am afraid that I am not going to make the plane, that we will have to find someplace stay in Dublin, and everything will be ruined if we don’t make this plane. So focused am I on getting to the gate that I cut across a gentleman a little too sharply and his leg caught on the car seat carrier. I didn’t have as good grip on the handle as I thought and when I felt this resistance, the handle pulled right out of my hands! I turned around and saw my precious daughter in her car seat tumble sideways to the floor and start to cry. OMG! Zara!
I run back and am on the floor checking her out to make sure she’s not hurt. She’s crying wildly but doesn’t seem to be injured especially since she was in her car seat. At this point I’m crying and berating myself for worrying more about the plane than Zara, but I did not see AH during all this drama. Again he was trying to kill someone with the stare of death. Somehow he had gotten the idea that it was the man’s fault for this whole incident when the fault was mine. Finally I heard the man say to his friend “the girl came running around and she tripped over my leg and now the guy is looking at me like he wants to start a fight! I’ll give him a fight, but nonna this was my fault!” I looked over at AdoringHusband and see him glowering at the man with a look that spoke of a horrific and painful death. He had his fists clenched and looked ready to spring.
I could tell that I had to do something very quickly or the situation was going to escalate. “AdoringHusband!” I began, “it was me! It was my fault. The man didn’t do anything.”
At first he looked unconvinced. Then his glaring softened a little bit though he still appeared to want to hold the guy responsible for something: like being alive. Eventually we scraped ourselves off the floor, got our things and continued wheeling a still crying Jubby to the gate. Or at least to where we thought the gate would be. There was a sign for gate 33 but instead of seats, waiting passengers and an airplane, all we saw in front of us was a woman sitting at a podium in front of a down escalator. What now? I wondered.
We ran up to her somewhat frantically blurting that we were trying to get to the flight to Philly at gate 33. “Well you have to go through customs first,” she explained, “did you fill out your form?”
Oh good lord! Is this what that agent was talking about? Of course, I had not even thought about filling it out during our trecherous run to this point. So now I’m digging in my purse trying to find a pen, filling out the stupid form and trying to figure out how are we going to get Jubby down the escalator in the contraption without any more mishaps. I guess I seemed like I was at the end of my rope.
“Take a breath,” the customs lady said, “the plane isn’t going anywhere without you.” And to prove that she was actually a good fairy, she called someone who put us on the special elevator down to…well, one of the weirdest situations I’ve seen in an airport. It looked like the area you normally go through in passport control as you’re leaving the airport but instead you went through one of the lines, had your passport stamped and then stood in another line waiting to get to your plane. And the additional problem was that there were multiple plane lines, so we almost ended up in the line for Washington, DC. Eventually we were directed to the jetway for our flight to Philly. We had made it.
We banged our way down to our assigned seats apologizing, sweating and feeling like idiots. People looked at us like we were Martians. Zara sneezed in one man’s direction and he acted as if he had been shot. “Just allergies,” I tried to assure him, but he gave me the fisheye anyway.
Unsurprisingly, after all that running around with her in her car seat, the last thing Zara wanted to do when we finally got to the plane was to actually sit in her car seat. She got coaxed with a lollipop to stay in her seat until takeoff and after that we just did the best we could (and contemplated Benadryl). We rotated the toys, played Baby Einstein videos, ate bland pasta and continued to apologize to the guy in front whose seat she continued to kick.
After the first four hours of the flight I decided it was time to give dear Daddy a shift with Jubby. AdoringHusband happily agreed to this and we switched seats. Yet for some reason he did not seem to understand that when it was your turn to take care of a child, that meant the child got your full attention. You didn’t try to feed her while continuing to watch to Demi Moore in Flawless, missing her mouth in the process. And his repertoire of activities was sorely limited.
“Well she doesn’t want to sit and she doesn’t want to be held, so what am I supposed to do with her?” he asks me.
“Is that all you can come up with to entertain her?”
“Yes.”
I rolled my eyes. So even though I was on break, so to speak, I ended up having to intervene many, many times because my dear husband was doing a pretty half assed job of parenting on an airplane, especially when there was a movie he wanted to watch.
Amazingly we landed in Philly. We were home and our adventure with the toddler was over. It was just a matter of getting our bags, the car and driving back to the old homestead to make sure the cats were still alive.
We deplaned and Jubby and I stood near the gate as Tourette’s Man worked to reassemble the damn GoGo Kidz carrier. The plane emptied. A flight attendant asked us if we needed help. “We’re OK,” I reassured her. Tourette’s Man continued to struggle and curse. I attempted to keep Jubby from picking up the trash on the floor around her. Ugh. But I was done with the anxiety, done with the freaking out ’cause we were home.
It took AH so long to get that damn seat together that by the time we got moving, everyone from our plane had gone from the hallway and through customs. The good thing was that we were right on time for our bags to come out on the belt.
We wisely got a skycap to help us with our 5 thousand bags. And then we saw it. AdoringHusband’s brand new Tumi suitcase came off the belt with a huge freaking tear in it. Huge! The skycap said that we needed to go to the airlines baggage office to file a claim. The problem was (and there is always a problem) that we were in Terminal A West and the baggage claim office is in Terminal B/C.
Now here’s where things get really stupid. And for this portion of the disaster, we need a map. Here is a map of the Philadelphia International Airport: Map of Philadelphia Airport
Let’s continue. We are so tired, so totally spent that we decide to follow the skycap without question. Big mistake. First he says, “let’s go up to the airline people at the counter in Terminal A to see if they will take the report.” He assures us that they have done this before for others to save them the trip to Terminal B and C baggage claim. This means that we have to go upstairs, walk back over the bridge to the departures section of Terminal A East. (Follow your map, folks) Guess what? The sista-girls at the counter tell us, “uh-uh, you’ve got to go to Terminal B.”
But the skycap decides that no, he’s going to go down to Terminal A East baggage claim and see if there is someone there who can take the claim. So we walk back over the bridge, take the elevator back down and go out Terminal A West baggage claim to Terminal A East baggage claim (this is all while toting Jubby in the GoGo Kidz/car seat thing). The guy at information in Terminal A East says, “oh no, you have to go down to Terminal B & C.”
OK, I’m thinking to myself, let’s just walk down the street to Terminal B and get this done. But no, the skycap stops me. “We have to go to Terminal B on the other side,” he says.
I’m like, “Huh? Terminal B baggage claim is down the street here.”
“No ma’am,” he assures me, “Terminal B is back across the bridge on the other side back where we came from.”
Now I’ve got to segue here. As you know, I travel so much that PHL is my second office. I know that Terminal B baggage claim is down the street a little way down from where we stood in Terminal A East’s baggage claim. But I’m so damn tired and confused and wishing I was home that I didn’t even put up a fight. I just grabbed Jubby’s carrier and followed behind the guy pushing all our luggage on that giant cart.
We went back up and over and then down to Terminal B departures where the skycap encountered other skycaps. And what did they tell him? “Oh buddy, you’ve got to go back over to Terminal B baggage claim over on the other side!”
You know I must have been exhausted because all I could muster was a quiet, “See, I did say that.”
We then went back upstairs to Terminal A East (instead of Terminal B for some insane reason), crossed over the bridge, went down the elevator and then out the door of Terminal A East baggage claim. From there we walked about 7 miles…OK, 3 long blocks to Terminal B baggage claim. Finally we arrived at the airline baggage office.
Thirty minutes later we were loading the car with AdoringHusband’s cardboard suitcases (since the baggage office took his damaged one), getting Jubby settled into her car seat (quite easily since she was way tired by now), and setting off for home.
And there you have it everyone, one easy-peasy vacation with a toddler. Can’t wait for the next trip!
’m having a hard time writing about Tuesday. It was such an historic day that I really want to do it justice. But my thoughts are all over the place and I’m not sure that I’ll be able to express them coherently.
I haven’t blogged much about the election, mostly because I felt that despite anything I might have said, some people would have assumed that I supported Barack Obama because he is a black man. As much as it annoys me, there are some who seem to believe that we black people are a relatively simpleminded lot…well either simpleminded or tribal in our mindset in that if you dangled any black candidate in front of us, be they Barack Obama, Jesse Jackson, Sean P. Diddy Combs, Kanye West or even Ray Ray from down the block, we will support them simply because of the color of their skin. Now perhaps there are some of us who behave in this manner (behavior after the 1st OJ verdict did follow a “rally round the skin color” phenomenon), but I submit that there may have been as many people who voted against Mr. Obama because of his skin color. But despite such singleminded (and nonsensical) reasons some people may have used to make the decision of which candidate they supported, I do not count myself among the singleminded or simpleminded.
There are things I see in Mr. Obama that appeal to me that have nothing to do with the color of his skin, the fact that he’s married to a black woman and has black children. They have to do with his keen intellect, his equanimity and his reputation for being a consensus builder…a uniter. From where I sit and what I know of him, he is not a person who seems to play a game of cronyism or politics as usual.
This country is in a god-awful mess and right now we need somebody with major brainpower to help us even begin to fix this problem. Somewhere during my lifetime it became fashionable to want the leader of one of the most powerful nations in the world to be the good ol’ boy you’d knock back a few with rather than the smartest person we can find willing to do the job. All I know is I respect intellect. I respect people who think and consider and not that damnable stubbornness we’ve been subjected to for the past 8 years that makes some unwilling to recognize that if the path that we’re on leads to failure and crisis, perhaps we should find another freaking path! I could go on but I won’t because I don’t want this post to be solely a paean to President-Elect Obama. I also want to spend a few words on how this historic day affected me.
History was made Tuesday night. And what I knew about being a black person in America changed in a way I neither expected nor anticipated. But for this to really resonate, I have to go way, way back…to a time when dinosaurs roams the earth: my childhood.
I grew up in the late 60s and 70s, long before CDs, ATM machines, and ubiquitous personal computers. I missed the Emmett Till and was too young to appreciate the significance of the Black Power Movement. I did know that my mom, dad, aunt and godparents had broken barriers by graduating from medical school at a time when it was not that common for blacks to go to college, much less have a graduate degree. So I knew that there were worlds open to me if I studied hard and proved that I was smart, skilled and nothing like Jimmie JJ Walker from Good Times. When the guidance counselor (a sista, mind you) looked at me incredulously after I told her that I wanted to go to Yale. “You want to go to Yale?” she said with utter disbelief and derision…until I reviewed my transfer transcript from Le Lycee Francais de Los Angeles with her. The smirk melted from her face and threatened to appear on mine, but I kept myself in check. And later when I recounted the encounter for my mom who almost had to be restrained from visiting down a stream of invective on the sista the next day, I knew that I had the credentials to get places in this world. Even still, there were still ceilings I knew could not be broken.
You know those reruns of Leave it to Beaver where the father tells the Beav, “You could grow up to be President.” And the Beav is all like, yeah, wow! These were not words that we ever heard as children. In many black families such wishful (and fanciful) predictions were either never uttered or were told as lies, with the parent knowing that the likelihood of their brown child’s becoming President of the United States was as likely as the child’s being able to walk directly to the moon wearing flip-flops. There were certain ceilings for little children with nappy hair and dark skin. Becoming President of the United States was a ceiling through which we would never break…or so we though.
When I became a teenager and used to ponder deep thoughts, I used to ask myself which would come first? A white woman as POTUS or a black man? A black woman was just not even something that could enter my thoughts without having my head explode. At the time, I believed a white woman would be elected before a black man since racism would be more virulent than sexism. Now as an aging egalitarian feminist, I have a better sense of the fallacies inherent in that prediction. The female schizophrenia of wanting parity except when it involves motherhood and the dissolution of gender roles make women our own worst enemies. We hinder ourselves because we accept and tolerate our own sexism. I can now see that America in theory was more likely to accept a person of another shade with a penis than a white person without a penis as their POTUS, that is unless the white person without the penis is so menopausal as to be essentially sexless (meaning genderless and not without having nookie) like Maggie Thatcher. But that is a discussion for me to take on another day.
Back to last night…my little brother called me from California as the election turned in Obama’s favor. I was surprised to hear from him as we do not speak all that often. He was positively giddy; I was, in turn, giddy. It was as if we were children together again back in that house in Ladera Heights. My god, what this all means!
We spoke of our children and how now, because of this evening, Athena, Erik, and Zara could be told with honesty and sincerity that they could grow up to be POTUS. The ceiling that we had lived with and understood as our limit…our outer achievement boundary based on nothing more than the skin color we had been born with had been removed by Barack Obama. Our children had no more ceiling! There were no words.
I want to be completely honest with you here: I did not believe that in my lifetime a black person would be elected to the office of President of the United States of America. Tuesday was the day I thought I would never, ever, ever see. Even throughout this election cycle, I didn’t dare hope that he might be elected. And then when I started to hope, I still felt that a la Chris Rock’s riff about it, that somehow, someway people would find a way to change the rules so that even if Mr. Obama did win, he wouldn’t really be allowed to be President. That is the paranoia and pessimism that I carry in my heart. But there it was on every network including the dreaded Fox News Network, results were called in favor of President-Elect Barack Hussein Obama.
Tears began stinging my eyes and a huge lump formed in my throat. All I could do was repeat helplessly to AdoringHusband, “I never thought I’d see this day.” As he held me while I cried my happy tears, I thought of my mother, my grandparents, and those others who had not lived to see this amazing day. Who would have believed it? I, the pessimist, most definitely did not. But Mr. Obama showed us what hope can do.
And then there is a new or renewed feeling of belonging that came with this beautiful Tuesday. When Mr. Obama took the stage in Chicago’s Grant Park and spoke to us all as Americans it was as if I suddenly belonged in this country again. Now I know I’ve spent a bit of time talking about the profound impact that our electing a black POTUS had on me but now I want to shift gears. The feeling of belonging again has nothing to do with the issue of race. It had to do with another of the major draws of the Obama campaign: unity. Within the campaign Mr. Obama had the goal of uniting us all despite our differences under one United States of America. For so long during these past horrific eight years, I felt as if I wasn’t really an American, at least not the type of American that GW Sock Puppet Bush, our current POTUS, tends to consider his version of what an American should be. Let me explain this a little better.
A long time ago in my former life as a teendoc, I gave a presentation at Abington Hospital for parents about how to talk to their teens about sexual issues. The talk was very well received, but there was one letter of complaint sent to the president of Abington Hospital. The letter writer, a woman from an abstinence only organization complained that I had not enough time (all of my time) giving parents information about how to teach abstinence. I ended up crafting a beautifully measured reply to her letter about adolescents, sexuality and the challenges of puberty in the 90s. The president of Abington completely approved of my words and the letter was sent. A few days later, she, surprisingly, suggested that we meet for lunch to discuss the topic further. It was my first experience as a full-grown professional adult having civil discourse with someone whose views were diametrically opposed to mine.
We met at one of my favorite West Philly spots, The White Dog Cafe. We held off on the deep dive into our respective positions until our food arrived. Her position was one that I had heard many times before: abstinence until marriage is the only viable standard for a teenager to be held to, and, as such, no other contraceptive or STI education should be offered because this would give the teen the belief that if they couldn’t attain the highest standard (abstinence) then they could make do with 2nd or 3rd best (condoms and birth control). She felt that talking about contraception and STI education was giving them permission to not strive for complete abstinence until marriage.
And I, for my part, attempted to explain to her why that approach was so problematic for me. As a physician, I have neither the right nor the heart to only care for and respect those teenagers who hold to one standard of behavior. Her position, to me, felt like I would be saying to the teen, “if you’re good enough to do what I feel you should do then I will care for you and treat you with respect as my patient. But if you do not meet this standard, then while I might treat your infections and pregnancies, I will not give you respect or compassion because you are not behaving in a way that I approve of. I will judge you as being ‘less than.’” Both as a doctor and as a human being, that type of approach is unconscionable. I have no right to sit in judgment of anyone. I open my arms and my heart to all my patients whether they are the epitome of virginity or they are sex workers struggling to find a place to sleep. I do not hold one person, one standard, or one set of actions to be of such great value that I would turn away those who were not able to or willing to meet that standard. That is anathema to my ethos.
She looked at me and tut-tutted over my ignorance. We concluded our lunch and neither of us were any further swayed to the other’s position, but at least the dialogue had been had…FWIW.
I share this experience with you to frame what I have felt like during the past eight years of Sock Puppet’s Presidency. The Sock Puppet and his conservative base have given out vibes just like that abstinence lady I had lunch with. If I met a certain standard, behaved a certain way, and looked a certain way, then I could be considered a real American. If that isn’t the politics of division, what is? Come on! We’ve got these, these…people saying that liberals hate real Americans and that we should begin investigations of anti-American sentiment of people in congress. McCarthy anyone?
And what happens if I don’t fall in line with what these loons believe a real American should be? What if I happen to believe that we have not yet crossed into being the land ruled Christian theocracy or if I believe that women have the right to choose what to do with their bodies or I believe that gay people have as much of a right to marriage as anyone else (if Britney Spears isn’t singlehandedly ruining the institution, I do not see how gay people will “ruin” traditional marriage…from where I sit, with the divorce rate at 50%, traditional marriage is on life support as it is), well any and all of those positions will put me in the other category. I was not included when the Sock Puppet spoke to America. He spoke to and cared only about his base, the people who thought like him and met his standards…just like abstinence lady only gave the time of day to the kids who met her standards in her program. If not, they were on their own. So here for 8 years we’ve had the real Americans and the others, like me. And we felt ourselves grow even more fragmented as a people.
But last night… last night was something incredible (I need a better word). Last night President-Elect Obama spoke to the United States of America: all of us, old and young, straight and gay, black, white, brown, yellow, and all the mixtures in between. The beauty was that we did not have to agree on all things or meet one standard or one belief system in order for us to love this country and be a part of these United States of America. We all belong. We are all included. That is what Barack Obama the uniter has wrought. We are all Americans. We need to stop focusing on that which divides us but instead focus on what connects us even if we have different faiths, different skin colors, different sexual orientations or different languages, we can all love this country and want to rescue it from the ruin where it is heading. That is what I saw last night on the faces of everyone as they celebrated in Chicago and New York and Philadelphia and all the other places I watched before I went to sleep. It was inclusion, it was love of country, and it was hope.
pologies, apologies, apologies, my dear friends and patient readers. It was not my intent to make this story go on three times longer than the actual vacation. Unfortunately, there is much going on in real life that distracts me from recounting this saga. Not the least of which is the 7200 layoffs going on in our place of employment. Yes, I am pretty damn wigged out, but right now, lets talk about something else.
When I left off in part 2, I was just being vomited upon by my dear daughter in the restaurant. This happened not once, not twice, but perhaps three or four times by the time AdoringHusband returned with his desserts. I tried to catch the vomitus in my napkin, but the child seemed to think that I was secretly trying to smother her with it every time I brought it near her face and pitched a fit. As such, there was more vomit on me than in the napkin.
The minute he got to the table, I looked at him and said, “We’ve got to go.”
“What?” He asked, “Is Zara really tired?”
I gave him a look that said, is there a moron in front of me? “Zara just started vomiting! Didn’t you happen to notice that I’m sitting here covered in vomit?”
He blathered about not being able to see me and oh my god is she OK as we gathered up the now crying Zara and took her back to our room. Now here’s where it gets really difficult being both a pediatrician and a mom. On one hand you know what to do for a simple case of the pukes, but on the other hand you start to run through all the what ifs. What if she gets worse? What if she starts spiking fevers? What if she gets dehydrated and needs an IV? What if this is the beginning of something much worse? What if what if what if? It does set your mind aspinnin’. And then you have AdoringHusband there looking at you expecting you to handle this. He’s like, this is your show. What do we do. So the onus is on you to, as they say, act like you know. I had to stop tripping and think.
OK, let’s do a quick assessment. Fever? No. Rash? No. Appearance? Alert and appropriate. Likelihood of badness: minimal. My goal: maintain hydration until whatever the hell this is either resolves or declares itself. And oh shit, we’re on vacation.
I got Zara cleaned up and into her pajamas. Of course tonight, she goes immediately to sleep. It figures. But when I checked on her maybe 1 to 2 hours later, she was still sleeping, but had thrown up all over herself and the bed. I have no idea why didn’t hear anything. What is this silent vomiting?
Her bed looked like some abstract painting with tomato red blotches dotting the white sheets. Yet she looked so peaceful. So here’s the decision point. Do you leave your child sleeping peacefully in vomit or do you wake her up and piss her off to clean her? I chose the latter option. Ms. Zara was not happy.
She wakes up retching but is bringing up nothing but a small bit of liquid. I get her some water in her sippy cup and give her a few swallows. It stays down for all of 30 seconds. This means I have to give her less. So now I have to go in to mean mommy mode and not give her as much as she wants. Ugh. I let her have one sip and take the cup away. Zara is (not happy) cubed. She cries and then she retches. This of course freaked out AdoringHusband who does not like to see his little one upset. He then decides to give her her sippy cup and let her drink heavily. I glare at him.
“If she’s going to throw up anyway we might as well give her what she wants,” he says with all the authority of someone who got their medical degree from Google University. I continue to glare. Within 30 seconds she really throws up. And then she begins wailing loudly. He looks stricken. Ah chillax, I tell myself, stop glaring and start explaining what you’re doing. I then gave him a minicourse on the management of the vomiting child, letting him know that the main goal is to let the stomach rest and give the smallest amount of fluid that you can give that she’s able to keep down to prevent dehydration. And if even sips don’t stay down, then we let her keep sipping and drinking because dehydration is what will make us need to go to the hospital. The look on his face becomes so pained that I just reached out to him and said, “This is going to be a tough night.”
We get her cleaned up, throw towels over her dirty sheets in the bed and get her settled back into sleep. AdoringHusband goes to sleep as well but despite my fatigue I am unable to truly lose consciousness. It’s just as well because just about every hour I hear Zara start to retch and cry. And I launch myself over to her with a towel saying “let Mommy get the nasty vomit, Sweetie.” Somewhere around three or four in the morning there is no real vomit any more, but she just has dry heaves. Now she’s crying because she’s thirsty. And this wakes (finally) AdoringHusband.
I gave her a sip of water and tried to get her to eat one of those bland French cracker/cookies tasteless things that they had in the restaurant, but I don’t know what the problem was with those biscuits but girlfriend was having none of it. Even dying of hunger and thirst that was NOT acceptable. We finally settled on piece of banana and another sip of water. Each minifeed was followed by a 15 minute wait (with Zizi caterwauling the entire time). Happily everything stayed down. We turned the corner. By 6 AM there was no more vomiting, no more crying, and all of us finally fell asleep.
We managed to drag ourselves out of bed a few hours later. My head felt as if somebody had taken my brain and put it in a blender with some yogurt to make a smoothie. The good news was that Zara seemed to be fully recovered. Unfortunately, we didn’t dare take her to the morning session of Baby Club Med, not that we had awakened in time to do so, because we needed to see that we didn’t have a repeat performance of The Exorcist. But by the time for the afternoon session check in, we had resolved that she would go to Baby Club Med and we would spend the afternoon passed out in the sun.
She was not happy being left with her GOs for the afternoon but I can tell you that her parents felt like dancing a jig. We put on our bathing suits, went to the bar and got some nice drinky drinks, and lay out by the pool and finally began to have a vacation.
Here was Zara at Baby Club Med:
And here were her parents later that evening:
I know that I should have felt more guilt about Zizi’s being sad, but I tell you, the GOs LOVED her and fawned over her so much. And I knew that there was going to be some adjustment as she got used to them. But it did get better.
I was so determined for AdoringHusband and me to have some couples time that I signed Zara up for pajama club the next evening where she would be watched from 7:30 to 11:30 PM so that we could have an evening to ourselves. I made a reservation for a couples’ serenity spa package as our evening activity.
I think we were so giddy at having a dinner that didn’t involve entertaining Mercurial the fickle little dwarf that we had drinks before dinner and a whole bottle of wine with dinner that we arrived for our couple’s spa session at 9:30 nicely toasted. The first attendant for our spa treatments did not speak much English and we had some issues of communication mostly because I don’t think my brain translates very well when I’m inebriated… and I know AdoringHusband’s brain does not translate well period.
She gave us plush bathrobes and tiny little packages of paper things that at some point we were supposed to use to cover our genitals. That much I discerned, but first we were to completely undress for the spa bath. AdoringHusband and I walked into the candlelit room where more drinks awaited us and said, “whoa,” simultaneously. Two people were supposed to fit into that tub?! What became abundantly clear as AdoringHusband and I attempted to maneuver ourselves into this bathtub together was that either the French or Portuguese people who designed this tub were very, very, very small or we were clearly hugely fat Americans because good lord it was a tight fit. Water started to slosh over the sides, so we had to let some out. All we could do is laugh, while our attendant looked embarrassed. I don’t know if her embarrassment was just about being there or at witnessing such fat, obviously crazy, naked people.
AdoringHusband then decided to make up a new song that he would use for most of our two-hour spa session to regale all our attendants. It went something like this:
Je suis trop gros (I am too fat)
Je suis la lune (I am the moon)
Of course every time he launched into this ditty, it would prompt me to start apologizing to the attendants for his foolishness and hissing at him to tais-toi, alors!. And of course he would not listen to me because he knew that his singing embarrasses the hell out of me. If I could have blushed, I would have.
A new set of attendants ventured into the tub room to invite us over to the area for our next treatment. With great difficulty, we were able to pry ourselves out of the little tub and were ushered into the adjoining room for our massage and skin treatments. Yet, horror of horrors, our attendants discovered that we had neglected to put on the paper genital coverings that were in the tiny plastic packages we were given initially. Oh right! So we went back into the tub room while AdoringHusband continued to add new verses to his song that included bits about covering nut sacks and other madness and returned to have what would have been a great spa treatment except for the continued singing of Je Suis La Lune.
But the absolute best part of the night was when they put on some sort of mud or seaweed treatment and then told us to go into the shower to rinse it off. After the rinsing we were given another tiny plastic bag of genital covers. I managed to do well with getting mine on without any problem. However, AdoringHusband was not quite so fortunate.
“Shit, I broke it!” He exclaimed loudly, “I need another one.” Now this little g-string looking thing should not be so difficult for an adult to put on. His attendant went and found another one for him. The next thing you know, once again he is exclaiming, “shit, it broke again!” At this point, I’m laughing so hard that I am kneeling on the floor in the shower. The attendant then comes back with yet another tiny package. A few seconds later we get another, “shit! This one broke too!”
By now, my paper genital covers are almost no good because I nearly wet myself from laughing so hard. AdoringHusband doesn’t know whether to continue with his too fat riffs or to start with the Y-chromosome boasting like, my balls are too big to fit in this paper sack gambit. Me, I can’t even breathe I am laughing so hard. Finally, the attendant admonishes him saying this is her last one so don’t break it. And I know those two ladies are out there saying to themselves, if these are Americans, I want no part of them! I finally get enough oxygen in my lungs to tell him that instead of trying to put it on like he does underwear, perhaps he should gently step into both legs and pull it on slowly so that it doesn’t break. This seems to work.
During the last part of the treatment where we received a massage and skin conditioning service, AdoringHusband did finally shut the fuck up and I mellowed out so much that when 11 o’clock came, I wanted them to just put a blanket on me and leave me right there so that I could sleep. Instead, we managed to drag on our clothes and get on over to the Baby Club building where we liberated a sleeping Zara.
The next day, after dropping Zara in prison Baby Club, we decided to take a little excursion to Old Town Albufeira. This was a touristy, open section of the town with shops and restaurants that happened to be filled with Brits. We bought a few souvenirs, had a very leisurely lunch (mostly due to the very slow European service), and found a store where we could buy some of Melissa’s suggested Vinho Verde. We returned refreshed, singing the praises of Baby Med, carrying a packed 1/2 case of Vinho Verde to take with us on the plane.
On Friday, our last full day in Portugal, we decided to go down to the beach. AdoringHusband was being a little wiggy about the ocean (It’ll be cold!) so we ended up saving this mini-excursion for the last day. We ventured down the long stairway and made our way to an open area near the rock face. Zara looked so intrigued by everything she saw, from the beach umbrellas, to the abundant sand, to the ocean itself. We walked her down to where the waves lapped up near our feet. Initially she was a little unsure about this whole wave/water deal. Mommy waded into the water a little bit to show her that it was all good. It didn’t take her long to start digging getting splashed by the waves. Yet her overprotective father was doing his usual hovering, fearful that perhaps a sea monster was going to come and drag her out to sea.
You know that hackneyed and overused gushing that parents so often have to share about how wonderful it is to experience something through a child’s eyes? Before becoming a parent, you hear it so much that you begin to want to drive an icepick through your skull every time the words start to come out of someone’s mouth. But icepick or no, I’ve got to add to the annoying chorus. Watching her experience the wonder of the ocean, the feel of the sand, and the thrill of being somewhere new and different was so enormous for me. Everything started to feel okay. The stress, the tension, the oh-my-god-what-next feelings just melted right away there on that beach. Despite everything we had gone through, seeing her there in front of me, runny nose, sandy faced, made it all worthwhile. We were a family on vacation in Portugal and our daughter was experiencing and loving the ocean for the first time. How utterly amazing was that?
I’d found my calm. I’d reached a state of peace. This was what I needed.
And then it all went to shit the next day as we headed back to the US…
y boss is such a sweetie. Whenever we’re in meetings and someone makes a statement that is so confused, addle-headed, or just plain out there, instead of responding with a “what the hell are you talking about?!” he does the nice thing and takes the onus on himself for the lack of understanding and asks, “what am I missing here?” It’s such a considerate act that keeps the other person from getting pissy and defensive. And for this post, I plan to steal his technique.
(It’s listed for boys, but we don’t follow no stinkin’ gender rules!)
h heaven…just the day before I was all chillaxed on the beach. Now it was time to pack up, turn around, and go back home. Suck much?
’m having a hard time writing about Tuesday. It was such an historic day that I really want to do it justice. But my thoughts are all over the place and I’m not sure that I’ll be able to express them coherently.
or some Halloween cuteness!!!
