I lift up heart, eyes

I first noticed it on our flight to San Antonio. Abigail was sitting on my lap, and we were reading a story together, and then she glanced up at me through her lashes and I saw the smallest, faintest little pale grey patches on the white part of her right eye. Upon closer examination, I spotted a smaller patch in her left eye. They were barely a shade or two darker than the white, but still clearly visible, and I wondered how long they had been there and how I had missed them before.

I pointed them out to Dan, and we exchanged worried looks, and as soon as we got home from San Antonio I made an appointment with one of the doctors at our family care practice (Abby’s usual doctor is out on maternity leave). The doctor said her eyes looked fine, and she wasn’t worried, but she referred us to the pediatric eye specialists just to be sure.

That appointment was two days ago. We were seen by several doctors and a couple of medical students in training, and Abby was asked to identify animals and shapes and colors on a screen across the room — like an adult eye exam, but with pictures instead of letters. Then they dilated her pupils and the “big doctor” came in to examine her.

She used some big long scary words but essentially told us that right now, it’s not problematic at all; the tiny grey patches aren’t interfering with her vision, and they are basically like freckles. We’ll watch them to make sure they don’t change or grow or darken or gain texture, and she wants to see Abigail every six months for this reason. She explained that this condition is not at all common in children of white parents — and if Dan and I were both white, she might be more concerned — but apparently it is occasionally seen in ethnic or mixed-race kids. Then she added (hilariously), “That’s not a racist comment,” as if either of us thought it was. I was just grateful to have some kind of explanation — oh, okay, pigment, good to know. Although Dan did see fit to joke as we left, “See, our interracial marriage resulted in freckles on Abby’s eyes. And that’s why miscegenation is of the Satan.”

So Abigail is fine and her eyes are fine, and we are relieved that we had it checked out. Of course, we’re not thrilled that she has the grey spots at all, and they aren’t likely to go away. If they get worse — the doctor says there is a very slim chance of that ever happening, but it may — she might have to have them removed at some point. That is very scary to think about. She’s just so pretty, and she has such beautiful eyes, and I hate to think of something being really wrong with them, now or ever (apart from the obvious bad vision she will have someday — Dan and I both have terrible vision, so odds are good she will need glasses, too).

Of all the many changes in my life that motherhood has wrought, the constant, heightened sense of worry is one with which I struggle most. Let’s face it, I was already a horrible worrywart; I didn’t really need to become even more neurotic and obsessive about it. And yet I have, somehow. I was glad to receive the doctor’s assurances that Abby’s eyes are alright, but I still can’t stop fretting over what could happen. And if I wasn’t worrying about that, I know I’d worry about something else. Since becoming her mama, I know my heart doesn’t really reside in my own body anymore, and that vulnerability is something to which I am still adjusting.

All Hallows’ Eve

We borrowed an adorable lamb costume from our goddaughter Madeline, which I intended to have Abby wear for Halloween, but then I remembered that I had my old dirndl — sent to me by my aunt when she was stationed in Heidelberg years ago — and I had never tried it on Abigail. Sentimentality plus an extremely warm Halloween night sealed the deal; the dirndl seemed like a far more comfortable option in the 80-degree weather. Abigail could have stepped right out of The Sound of Music.

We met Abby’s friend Olivia and her parents Leslie and John for a quick dinner — Abigail freaked us out by biting down so hard she broke the little plastic spoon we had (stupidly) given her for her yogurt, and I am still not entirely sure she didn’t swallow part of it. But, uh, she appears to be fine. After dinner, Abby and Livy had fun trick-or-treating in Leslie and John’s neighborhood. They were the cutest!

She went to bed an hour past bedtime, which worked out perfectly with Daylight Savings. I’m not sure she really understood the big deal with treat-or-treating, but she got a little taste of it, anyway (if not a taste of the actual candy, which I convinced her were just small, brightly-wrapped toys), and I’m sure she’ll be ready and rarin’ to go next Halloween!

Mind your manners

Abigail has been 20 months old for a few days now, and somehow that just sounds so much older than 19 months. It sounds treacherously, impossibly close to 24 months, at which point we’ll stop measuring her age in months, I guess, and switch to…years? Years, as in plural, as in more than one? I’m sorry, I know that over-the-top sentimentality might be the very worst thing about mommyblogs, but that is seriously too much for me, you guys. She seems so old these days, talking all the time (she almost never signs anymore), repeating every word I say, making up songs, building forts, memorizing poems, creating spontaneous beat poetry while banging her drum or a handy piece of furniture, flirting shamelessly with the boys next door… Many of her baby words are disappearing, replaced by…the actual words? What? Augh, I am pathetic, I know, but seriously WHERE DID MY LITTLE TINY INFANT ABBY GO.

I have two excellent bits of news on the daughter front. The first is that I have succeeded in teaching her something approaching good manners: I have convinced her to say “please” when she wants something. Sometimes I have to prompt her, asking (in an annoying fashion that reminds me of my grandmother) “What do you say?” — but she hops to, and immediately says please (“pease,” actually). She also says “thank you,” though in Abby-speak it sounds more like “geek you.” My not-even-two-year-old is calling me a geek. Well, it probably won’t be the last time.

At any rate, I have found that having a child who says “please” all the time vastly improves my mood. My patience with her is not so quickly worn down by constant requests for “more, more, more”; instead it is “Mama, pease” and “geek you, Mama.” What do you know, Miss Manners was on to something! “Please” is the greatest word in the English language!

The second piece of good news is that my babysitter is back — hey na, hey na, my babysitter’s back. This has also greatly improved my quality of life. She’s only here for six hours a week, which I realize is less than a single workday, and yet it has made all the difference in the world. Abigail calls her “Rissa” (a shortening of her name, Marissa) and clearly wishes we would adopt her and make the situation permanent. It’s good for Abby to get the occasional break from me, and it’s good for my sanity to get a couple of hours uninterrupted worktime.

Best of all, Marissa is good enough with Abby to put her down at night — twice now Dan and I have escaped the house before bedtime, once for a quick dinner date, and once to see Yo-Yo Ma perform over an hour away. Both times we came home to a quiet house and a peacefully sleeping baby. Someone alert the Vatican; I think we have a miracle.

In other news, I am still blogging at Irene’s Daughters about Glee and the Ole Miss fight song and, from time to time, things that actually matter. We don’t have so many readers yet; I like to think of ours as the little blog that could. So far, the most hits we’ve ever had in a single day was 310, thanks to a kind repost/link from the fabulous Stuff White People Do blog. I know that a heated discussion about racism is probably, well, not quite the thing for most of you, but if you are ever curious, please stop on by. We rant a bit sometimes, but we try to be nice about it.

Godcousins!

We are back from our SECOND! trip! in two weeks! with our baby! – and on this, the coldest weekend of the fall thus far, our heating unit is out of commission. Of course. Welcome home. I’ll return to posting at my poor neglected blog(s) once the heat has been restored at Casa Abigail. Perpetual anticipation is good for the soul, and I’m sure the lack of heat is good for my character.

sisters, sisters

I totally hit the sister jackpot with Cindy, you guys. She is fantastic. And really, I am not saying that just because we didn’t grow up together and I never had to fight her for the curling iron or whatever.

PSA: new group blog

…But YES another blog!

Irene’s Daughters – women exploring race relations, systemic racism, and prejudice

I am one of three contributors (so far!) at Irene’s Daughters, and I must admit, I’m not entirely sure what I’m doing. But this new blog is an outlet for issues that have been very much on my mind for, oh, the last twenty-eight years, give or take, and I also find it helpful and encouraging to talk about these things with people who are way, way smarter than I am.

Maybe it’s not your thing. But on the off chance it is, please check in from time to time, and by all means join in the discussion. We have a lot to learn from each other.

(LJ peeps! I set up a feed here if you want the posts to go to your friends’ page, but I am not sure the feed actually works. Hmmm.)

she must have angels on her shoulders

I was frying an egg over-easy for breakfast this morning, and as usual when I am cooking, Abby insisted on being held up in order to “help help help.” Dan picked her up so she could see, and she pointed at the egg yolk in the pan and said “Circle. Low!” (yellow). Nineteen months old, and she knows all her colors except orange. Here, for the interested, is the Abigail Color Translator, in order of colors learned:

boo = blue
purple = purple
low = yellow
gro = green
reh = red
pakoo = pink
bow = brown
back = black
wit = white

She just learned the word “circle” earlier this week, though sometimes when she sees it she calls it “bubble.” She’s known “heart” and “star” for weeks now, and is familiarizing herself with triangles, but shows little interest in learning the more traditional shapes. Whenever I draw a square or rectangle for her, she just looks at me like, Mom, why should I care about those boring shapes? As if I’ll ever need to know them!

I really haven’t pushed her to memorize anything; she has an unbelievable memory. She knows – well, basically every animal that appears in every one of her books. I mean, she knows completely random ones, like porcupines and hedgehogs. I haven’t taught her any letters yet, because I am a bad slacker-ass mother, but she does know the difference between having “one” of something, and having “twooo!”

I’ve started pausing every now and then when I read her books, just to test her, and more often than not she can fill in the missing word. If I tell her what something is just once, she will remember it forever. And she gets hung up on the funniest things – like saying “calicooo” every time she sees Eliza, because last weekend she learned that Liza is a calico kitty; or telling me about the duckie band-aid the nurse put on her leg after she got her flu shot three weeks ago; or going through her illustrated children’s Bible and pointing out, I am not kidding, all the grapes. (Turns out there are a lot of grapes in the Bible.)

She has the most adorable little voice, and if I could record it, I would – unfortunately, I never have any luck getting her talking on video, because as soon as I bring out the little Flip camera, she wants to grab it and watch old movies of herself I’ve never deleted. I wish I could get her on video. Someday soon, when she leaves baby talk behind, I want to be able to remember how funny and sweet she sounded when she was just learning to talk about her world. As much as I am looking forward to real, long heart-to-hearts, I know I will miss her little toddler voice – the way I miss the baby coos she used to make as an infant – when she grows up and no longer calls grapes “gowadees,” or says “walkoo!” when she wants to go for a walk outside, or whispers the word “mouse,” or shouts the word “fly!”

Tonight, about an hour before her bedtime, I was sitting on the stairs with the front door open, watching a brief but awesome thunderstorm outside. Abby, who had been coloring and singing herself a wordless song, came over and sat beside me, took my hand, and put her head in my lap. “Hug, Mama,” she said, and kissed my fingertips. Such a sweet little girl, and loads of fun these days, too, and she is growing up so quickly I cannot stand it.

in lieu of a real update, 18-month portraits!

Abigail continues to be a hoot and a half – chasing the cat, learning colors, memorizing EVERYTHING like a scary little toddler robot – and we continue to love our portrait photographer, Nan, who manages to take (free!) pretty pictures even when the subject is fussy and/or teething.

I know my Abby-blogging has been a bit light lately; the truth is, it has something to do with being way less hormonal these days than I was, oh, three months postpartum. But she is doing so many new and fascinating things, and we’re just enjoying her so much. I want to write about her so I don’t forget these moments. I just have to find some more time in the day!

yes, you can…think and parent at the same time.

I should have linked to this a couple of days ago, before President Obama’s health care address made everyone forget entirely about his excellent back-to-school speech, but a friend of mine over at the new and fabulous Moms in the Lobby posted the best rebuttal I have yet seen to the “indoctrination” parenting crowd. An excerpt:

I want to believe that our President (regardless of who he, or perhaps one day if we gain some sense, she, is) is at the very least thinking about the interests of the American people when he makes decisions about what he will put forward for their consideration. I want to believe that he takes the responsibility of his office seriously and that he is even more serious about the stewardship of that office when it comes to our kids. I want to believe that all of us, blue, red, green, and plaid, can allow ourselves and our children the opportunity to hear the man out before we brand him a Nazi or a communist (two ideologies that have very little in common, yet are interchangeably used when slamming Obama).

For all these parents worried about what their children are learning today, think about what they are learning from us as we engage in this type of rhetoric. Are they learning about democracy? Are they learning about what true tyranny looks like? No. They are learning that if you yell loud enough, you might make the news.

Read the whole thing here. And if you’re a mom, by all means add Moms in the Lobby to your reading list – it’s a winner.

for my daughter’s sake.

Making good on my promise to be even more annoying – why blog at all if you’re not going to be a little militant about something? – I will now recommend that you all read this article, which my good friend Tope shared with me last week.

Newsweek is not my favorite news magazine, but this article was, I thought, one of the most interesting I have ever read about young children and how they notice and perceive racial differences. The article begins with the work of Dr. Brigitte Vittrupp at the University of Texas in Austin, who recruited a hundred Caucasian families with a child aged 5-7 to participate in a study on children and racial perceptions. Dr. Vittrupp wanted to know whether viewing multiculturally-themed videos would have a positive effect on the racial attitudes of children:

Vittrup sent a third of the families home with multiculturally themed videos for a week…

[A] second group of families got the videos, and Vittrup told these parents to use them as the jumping-off point for a discussion about interracial friendship. She provided a checklist of points to make, echoing the shows’ themes…

The last third were also given the checklist of topics, but no videos. These parents were to discuss racial equality on their own, every night for five nights.

At this point, something interesting happened. Five families in the last group abruptly quit the study. Two directly told Vittrup, “We don’t want to have these conversations with our child. We don’t want to point out skin color.”

Vittrup was taken aback—these families volunteered knowing full well it was a study of children’s racial attitudes. Yet once they were aware that the study required talking openly about race, they started dropping out.

(Headdesk moment number one.)

The article goes on to point out the fact that this study took place in liberal Austin, where “every parent was a welcoming multiculturalist, embracing diversity.” But that was only until these same well-intentioned, progressive white parents learned that they’d actually have to talk to their kids about race in a meaningful way – in other words, not as a construct, something to be swept under the rug because it makes everybody feel uncomfortable, but as something real that shapes a person’s experiences and provides one (if not the only) basis for his or her identity.

As the Newsweek article points out, the parents in Vittrup’s study “wanted their children to grow up colorblind. But Vittrup’s first test…revealed they weren’t colorblind at all. Asked how many white people are mean, these children commonly answered, ‘Almost none.’ Asked how many blacks are mean, many answered, ‘Some,’ or ‘A lot.’ Even kids who attended diverse schools answered the questions this way.”

(Headdesk moment number two.)

What a shock, never talking to your children about the reality of racial differences does not always produce universally accepting, colorblind kids!

Children were certainly not colorblind when I was going to school, despite the fact that we had few, uh, “colors” to look at, other than neverending variations on pale. My classmates would notice my “funny-shaped” eyes and black hair and ask why they were “different” (doubly puzzling, I am sure, because my parents were white). When I was in first grade, a boy said to our teacher, “There are white people and black people. Is that a little black girl?” He was pointing at me. This boy got to the first grade without knowing the difference between an Asian and an African-American, and he was definitely not alone.

A few years later, another boy called me a “chink” and a “Chinee” and pulled his eyes into slits to make fun of mine. When his mother found out, she was embarrassed, of course: “We didn’t raise you to care about what color someone is,” she told him. I found this statement rather – “misguided” would be a kind word for it – because, first of all, it wasn’t my “color” he “cared about,” it was my Asian features. And secondly, she seemed most bothered by the fact that her son had noticed I was “different” at all, rather than concerned by his chosen method of doing so.

I think a lot of parents just think that when it comes to not being racially challenged, it just goes without saying that their kids will be fine, since, after all, we are so evolved these days. Less said, the better, right? The article highlighted this telling statistic: A 2007 study in the Journal of Marriage and Family found that out of 17,000 families with kindergartners, nonwhite parents are about three times more likely to discuss race than white parents; 75 percent of the latter never, or almost never, talk about race.

(Headdesk moment number three, for those of you keeping score at home.)

Perhaps kindergarten sounds a little young to start talking to your kids about race and cultural diversity. Personally, I think it’s probably a year or two late. Even very young children will notice race, after all (which is why my daughter’s favorite relative is her aunt Cindy, the only one of the entire bunch who looks like me), and you can’t fault them for doing so. It’s only natural to notice. And yet many parents seem to expect their children to grow up just magically knowing how to approach issues of race, while giving them little to no guidance. Their education on the subject is limited to “race doesn’t matter,” the subliminal (or in some cases, overt) message being that it’s wrong or shameful to even notice race at all.

Most of us wouldn’t send a child off to take his driver’s license test if we had never taken him out on the roads to practice – how would he know what to do? Why would we expect our children to grow up free of racial prejudice, unburdened by our country’s troubled history of race relations, able to discuss the issue with any degree of comfort whatsoever, if we go out of our way to avoid all meaningful conversations about race?

For so many of us raised by well-meaning white parents – and I would include my own parents in that group – the ability to think honestly and talk meaningfully about these issues was never openly demonstrated or encouraged. It was a huge, gaping void in our education and our development as members of this society (and, in my case, a serious hindrance to the development of my own racial pride and identity). As if our lack of education were not enough, too many of us have filled that void with…nothing. We owe it to our children – I owe it to my daughter, not to mention all the people she will meet one day in school, at work, and throughout her life – to do better.