“ZERO SALT”

I know it’s been quiet here, although that has not been due to lack of desire. I set aside writing time every week and then every week something intrudes, and I throw up my hands, deal with the intrusion, and then there is so little time left that it doesn’t feel worth it to try to make something happen either with my dissertation or my blog.

I’m definitely frustrated about that. VERY. So I’ve negotiated for a whole week of writing retreat at the beginning of June. I just worry that it’s too little, too late. My daughter just turned FIVE. She was born at the end of the second year of my grad program. I’ve been in this seven years. My cohort are beginning to graduate, one by one. Former students ten years younger than me are graduating from PhD programs. I feel so left behind.

And yet.

I do love the work I am doing.

I love job-sharing with my husband. We make a good team; we balance each other well in many ways. We enjoy spending time together, thinking and talking together, working through problems and issues together. This has been a good fit for us. It’s just that he’s at a stage in his career where he’s kind of on fire – getting calls from the UN to do feasibility studies, kind of thing. He’s been picking and choosing what he does but he’s doing as much as he can get away with (in terms of getting permission from our supervisor). This has meant a LOT of travel – on top of the travel he and I both do for our jobs here. He’s acted very surprised by how hard it’s been on me, but he doesn’t seem to understand that in Albania I was a SAHM with an almost-full-time nanny, whereas here when he’s gone I’m solo parenting AND covering both our jobs at work at the same time.

So.

I had a bit of a health crisis last week. It had been building up over time. I don’t know if you can make it out in the photo in my last post, but on the right-hand page is a list of personal goals for the year, and one of them is “achieve normal B.P.” (that is, blood pressure). When I got a full health work-up prior to moving to Colombia, my bp was normal. I even had an EKG – also normal. I was surprised, because I’d had high BP while in Albania and had been monitoring it somewhat, but hadn’t followed up with the clinic to get a prescription for something to lower it. Then after we moved here, I realized that I felt “off” enough that I checked it a couple times and it was high. Bogotá is, according to wikipedia, the 3rd-highest capital city in the world, at 8,600 feet. What I didn’t realize was that altitude affects blood pressure.

It’s also a wet, cool place. We’ve all been battling runny noses, coughs, and general respiratory illnesses since moving here last November. But one Friday afternoon a few weeks ago I developed a sore throat so bad I didn’t even want to eat, it hurt that much to swallow. I woke up all night long from the pain of swallowing my saliva in my sleep. That following Sunday we traveled to Guatemala for a week of meetings with our work counterparts from the Latin America region (I really enjoyed the meetings, apart from being sick, and from Oz having a fever for 4 nights and 3 days). Midweek my sore throat abated only to be replaced by a rattling chest cough. I was so exhausted and unwell on the trip back, it was all I could do not to cry in the airports.

So the last Monday in April I went to a walk-in clinic where I was diagnosed with bronchitis and put on a course of antibiotics. Little by little I was getting better… but then Gimli went on another work trip, 9 days away, and it was just too much. I started getting these awful headaches… and then the headache stuck, and wouldn’t go away. I was kind of freaking out, talked with Gimli on the phone, and he urged me to go back to the clinic and get checked out. I scrambled to find babysitters (our regular sitter was also out sick), went, and learned that my blood pressure was at 170/120.

No wonder I felt like crap.

The doctor wanted to hospitalize me immediately. I said I can’t, my husband is traveling and I have two small kids at home. He said ok, but had me come in for blood tests and an EKG at 7 a.m. the following morning. Thankfully one of the girls on our team said she could come over in the morning early and watch the kids. So that’s what I did. I got a prescription for a beta-blocker similar to what I was on when I was pregnant and had preeclampsia, and orders to rest and eat “ZERO SALT.”

The next day Gimli came home, and by evening my headache eased away.

Right now I’m feeling SO much better. I’m learning how to prepare “ZERO SALT” meals and snacks although I’m hungry a lot of the time, and the whole papaya I ate yesterday did a number on my digestive tract… but at the same time, I’m super excited! I’m really excited to learn how to do those nutrition-rich green juices people do, and to fill the kitchen with a cornucopia of fruits and vegetables. Yesterday I made a delicious tomato-based thing I used to do with garlic, onions, and fresh ginger root, adding in spinach too, and even without salt it was really yummy (over unsalted rice). I feel like I’m taking really positive, long-overdue steps towards being healthier.

I was talking just last week with my life coach about wanting to live in a way that I’m not in survival mode so much of the time. I feel like this little crisis has actually put me on a path towards that very thing.

Maybe not completely raw, but certainly medium rare

Page from my personal journal, March 29 2013

In no particular order

• Today was my first day since November for dissertation work. I slept 4.5 hours and checked e-mail.
• Tomorrow is my second. Hopefully I will actually look at something dissertation-related.
• My in-laws are here, hence child-care during the holidays!
• We are all snuffly, coughing, walking phlegm-spewers. 
• My children seem to grow more delightful and intractable in equal measure every day.
• It rained and hailed, apparently, while I was sleeping.
• How is it possible my tomboy daughter has developed a My LIttle Pony obsession, and now calls herself Pinky Pie?????

Inventory

This long-awaited landmark. I’ve been thinking about this date for two years or so now, wondering where in the world I’d be, wondering what I’d be doing. You’d think at this age I’d have some of those things figured out, settled.

I’m 40 today. I’ve been thinking of myself as 40 for a while, but at the same time holding the knowledge that this actual date, this actual birthday, feels like a really big deal. I don’t really have plans, other than lunch with my boss and wearing a purple scarf Gimli brought me back from Afghanistan. I’d kind of like to get a hair cut, and a nap would be nice if I could fit it in. I wonder if anyone will get me a cake?

There are silver strands in my hair that weren’t there a year ago.  My face is dark from the equatorial Andean sun, and the lines seem starker and clearer than they did just a few months ago. I’m still breastfeeding, although both my kids are in school. My weight seems to have stabilized at a level I feel comfortable with, for my age. I wear no makeup, no jewelry except for my wedding ring. I don’t shave anything (but I do tweeze my eyebrows).

Next Monday I’m doing a goal-setting exercise with my life coach (who continues to be awesome). I’m really looking forward to that. I ended up making new year’s resolutions of sorts last year at my birthday rather than January 1, so it feels apropos.

I find myself thinking over the past decade – all the twists and turns that took place in the last ten years. When I turned 30, I was working at an intercultural youth-serving organization in Virginia; I quit shortly after in order to do some work with my husband’s university, leading a group of 30 students on a semester-abroad program. That experience was so emotionally taxing that I went into a significant depression for about six months afterwards. I was also sad that at at 30 I hadn’t yet had a baby although we didn’t start trying until I was 32. Then came three years of experiencing infertility, in the midst of which I began and then quit yet another job at another youth-serving organization. I started grad school again, pursuing the PhD in Anthropology (that I’m still working on). I had two babies while in this program. then my husband quit his university job, we moved to Albania, and two years later took this joint position in Colombia, where we find ourselves now.

So in ten years I’ve been a social service program worker, unemployed writer, university instructor, grad student, infertile, pregnant, stay-at-home mom, and now I’m back in the field that dominated my 20s – international development worker.

I wonder what roles and revisions the next ten years will bring?

Bat-signal

Putting up the bat-signal for Laine at Anona-mom, who is experiencing serious and scary pregnancy complications. I know she would appreciate your prayers.

Raising kids cross-culturally

Here is something I’ve been thinking about a lot, from a few different angles: what it means to parent kids cross-culturally. It’s been really interesting having them in school; it pushes me in ways that I didn’t really have to deal with in Albania so much because they were at home, and our child care person was very open about negotiating cultural differences.

Now that they are immersed in a language they don’t yet speak, I’m also reminded of the migrant children I worked with in the US  – only now the tables are turned. I keep thinking about those little migrant kids, and the challenges they faced, and the strategies we used to help them adapt culturally and learn English, and I feel so much more deeply what all that meant to them and their families. I see how tired my kids are at the end of the morning, even more so when they are with their Spanish-speaking babysitter for the afternoon as well. I understand better what it means for them to have home be a refuge where they can speak English and make themselves understood.

And yet I feel ambivalent about that cultural divide as well, about the little bubble we create within the walls of our apartment, that is somehow separate and disassociated from the world around us. In, but not of, Colombia.

I also think about how the migrant kids were so subject to disapproval and judgment from teachers, sometimes due to factors that arose out of poverty (11 people living in a mobile home – out of necessity – and sharing one bathroom simply won’t shower as often as those who have greater access to hot water and privacy), sometimes due to differing understandings of how to show respect, or even just different expectations about the role of parents in relation to the school. A really great ethnography about these culturally-patterned differences is Con Respeto, a very readable yet theoretically rich examination of just this topic.

So, knowing what I know about middle-class urban Latino cultural patterns, I am not only anticipating but living some cultural disjunctures and thinking a lot about how to manage and negotiate them, particularly with respect to my children.

First has to do with cleanliness and general appearance. For most Latinos, this is vastly more important than for most US Americans. Some recent visitors here commented, “everyone is so dressed up!” US Americans tend overall to dress more casually than Colombians, even more so Bogotanos, and this extends to children as well as adults. The other little girls at our preschool come with hair carefully combed and braided. Their faces are perfectly clean, their clothes in good repair, their shoes are clean. In contrast, I bathe my kids once a week, and I never brush or comb Illyria’s hair at all (instead, I pour on tons of conditioner when I do wash it, so at least it´s free of tangles). Oz’s shoes are scribbled all over with green marker, yet I let him wear them to school. A Colombian mother with any other option would not.

And I don’t push the issue. And that right there is another huge cultural difference. Although we do set boundaries for our kids, and we do discipline then, we allow them far, far greater autonomy than most Latino parents ever would. We negotiate, where our Bogotano counterparts would command. So right now I’m feeling like a slacker mom with the dirty, unkempt – and occasionally rude – kids.

Respect for authority is shown in other ways too. And I’m more Latina in this than my US American husband is. For example, when we heard that Illyria had shoved her teacher one day, Gimli was all “Go Illyria! Stick it to The Man!” Whereas I was horrified (and the teacher was NOT amused). I remember as a college student being likewise horrified when my peers would mock certain professors behind their backs, giving them humorous but gently ridiculing nicknames. This felt so disrespectful to me, but I think it goes along with a democratizing attitude in a way. So it’s been a little bit of a conundrum how to approach this issue – I want my kids to have an appropriate level of respect for authority, but what is “appropriate” and how it is manifested varies from one context to another…

Recently I read this post by Jen at Here We Go Again, about where we invest our parenting energy. I confess I got all depressed feeling like the laziest parent ever – I don’t do organic foods, or cloth diapering, or homeschooling, and I do the bare minimum when it comes to personal hygiene and appearance. But then I realized that what I do put my parenting energy into is this nomadic life we lead, raising my children cross-culturally, learning multiple languages and contextual contingency of cultural rules.

I remember as a child, around 8 or 9 years old, walking into a room where my parents were meeting with a group of Quechua men all sitting around in a circle. “Saluda!” my mom hissed at me – “Greet them!” But I didn’t know what I was supposed to do or say and I just stood there mute and hid my face. I knew that the rules were different for different groups of people, and I wasn’t sure which rules applied in this situation. Should I shake hands? Kiss cheeks? Did I have to greet each one individually, or could I get away with a group hello? I didn’t know, so I did nothing, and felt the shame of embarrassing my mother.

I know I can’t protect my children from ever experiencing such embarrassment, and I know that with our life choices we are deliberately putting them into situations where they will. At least I can remember what it was like for me, and hopefully help them navigate this life more gracefully than I did. And I believe the tools they’ll gain through this process will benefit them for the rest of their lives.

and happy, too

To follow up on that heavy post, we also had a moment of celebration in the household last night and again this morning as Oz used the potty for me, twice! I sent him to school in underpants… his choice… which is the major breakthrough. Last Friday, the aide asked me to send along underpants and extra changes of clothes because she said he seemed very interested in using the potty like the other boys in his group, so she wanted to start him on the potty. So I did, and Monday through Wednesday the aide and our afternoon babysitter worked with him so well that Wednesday, he was dry all day, AND did #2 in the potty! I was too wrung out to follow through very well in the evenings, but I was home with them yesterday afternoon so kept pushing it gently and we had success I’m very excited. I would not have started him yet if it hadn’t been for the support of his other caregivers. I felt like he was ready, in terms of maturity, I just didn’t have it in me to enact the discipline of it (in the sense of structure and boundaries and consistency, not in the sense of punishment). But now I feel like he’s taking ownership of the process, holding it even when he has a diaper on. This will be a nice surprise for Dada when gets back Sunday night

Tired

Beyond tired. Cried three times in 24 hours, twice over silly things. The other time, I was in the middle of interpreting a presentation (Spanish to English) for a group of Canadian pastors whom we are hosting for what our organization calls a “learning tour.” Part of what they are learning about here is the complicity of Canadian mining companies in widespread land grabs throughout Colombia, contributing to the displacement of hundreds of thousands of people. The mining companies take advantage of the armed conflict between guerrillas, paramilitaries, and the actual Colombian military (which are ALL hand in glove with the narcotrafficants) to move into depopulated areas, and it is just incredibly complicated and messy. Anyway. We were visiting one of our partner organizations that works mostly in advocacy with communities that are under threat and trying to hold on to or reclaim their agricultural land, and they began describing the phenomenon of ” false positives” – something that began happening a few years ago when the previous administration began offering cash incentives to soldiers for killing guerrillas. These are mostly 18-year-olds, people… someone shaved their heads and shoved automatic weapons into their hands and told them they are heroes if they rack up a body count. So they did. Thousands of civilians were killed, dressed in combat fatigues, and dumped into common graves.

I was chugging along with the interpretation, but suddenly the mental image – mass graves of young men’s bodies, none of whom were actually guerrillas (and even if they had been, were still their mother’s sons) – slammed into me and I couldn’t go on. I choked. Someone else in the group was able to take over for a few minutes while I composed myself (and I was profoundly embarrassed), and then I was able to go on.

I’m not sure why it affected me so much, this is something I knew about, I knew this all had happened – there’s something different about having to say it out loud. It made me think about a book I’d read by a journalist who covered the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa, in which she recounts the secondary trauma experienced by interpreters at the TRC – interpreting the stories of the victims in the first person deeply traumatized the people who were hearing and repeating the stories.

This was such a small sliver of what that must have been like. And obviously nothing compared to living it – displacement, massacres, threats. But I think it’s important to somehow stay connected. I need to remember why I’m here. That our work here is about supporting processes of healing and reconciliation in the middle of all this violence.

Release

Day 5 of solo parenting, and of steering this ship solo at work too – Gimli and I are sharing directorship of this branch of the  church-based social service agency we work for and it’s definitely daunting to be at the helm without him.

In terms of the parenting part of it, the day-to-day has been fine but the nights are long and fractured and I’m feeling it.

A few weeks ago I was at a meeting, a circle of pastors holding one another up to the light, and in an opportunity for sharing about surrender and promises in our lives I was hit with a flood of emotion as I realized my need in the moment to release my children into that light. I confess that I cried, then and there, but that since that moment it’s been easier to let them go each morning, and I think they feel that too – somehow they have found their way to go with greater freedom and ease.

This morning the kids went to school in bright blue sweatsuits trimmed in yellow, the school logo embroidered on the front and their names embroidered on the inside of each pocket. They wore brand new rain boots – hers were ladybugs, his were Spiderman – and in their little backpacks were rain ponchos (Cars and Winnie the Pooh), change of clothes, crocs. In her pocket was a rubber ant she chose as her security object for their farm field trip today. I almost died from the cuteness.

Last night Oz sang to me in Spanish, to my thorough delight, a song about a green horse that rides a bike and wears glasses. Then he told me what it means in English. The two of them were playing ‘school,’ rolling playdough snakes and pretending to play miniature guitars.

I fall asleep sandwiched between them, waking every 2-3 hours when Oz talks through a dream or kicks me or asks to nurse. Sometimes I have a hard time falling asleep again, my brain squirreling through thought-nuts, burying and un-burying them to try to hide them somewhere else. Personnel issues. Budgets. A thousand little problems.

Right now I’m going to see if I can squeeze in a nap between meetings.

Panic

I’m having a moment. It will pass. So I’m just coming into this space to metaphorically run around like a chicken with my head cut off (have you ever actually seen one? I have… very weird sight…) because it’s just been decided that Gimli will be going to Afghanistan for 2 weeks, leaving next Tuesday night.

He’s squeezing the trip in between two short, in-country trips that I have scheduled. So we’re going to be ships passing in the night from February 18 until March 12 (my birthday… #40…. I’ve been nurturing all these dreams about how to spend my 40th birthday, and it turns out I’m going to spend it traveling with a group of Mennonite pastors – but that’s another story).

I’m having a freak-out moment right this minute. I don’t want him to go. And yet I told him he can. I’m letting him go. And yes, he did ask for my permission…

I know how much this means to him. I know that he needs these periodic trips in order to feel alive. I know how close to the core of his self-identity and feeling of place in this world these things are. I didn’t have the heart to tell him no.

We’re used to him being gone… we’re used to his traveling… but I don’t want him to leave. I’m not totally sure why it feels different this time – perhaps the new context, new responsibilities on my plate, the kids being in school and how tender that process has been for me and for them…

I think I need to create a plan for myself, for my own self-care, for a safety net, support network. One of the things I’ve really enjoyed here has been working within a close-knit, caring team – a lot of what I do is look after their needs; now it’s time to go to them with mine.