I've had the Mexico City blues since the last hairpin curve

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The above was Sophia's first venture into the world of typing.

Today I spent the morning blind. I had to get an eye exam that required me not to use contacts for the previous 24 hours (I hope 12 hours was sufficient), and Sophia has literally ripped apart my last three pairs of glasses, so they were not in working order. Luckily, all three pairs were purchased sometime in the mid-80's (when I was about five), so there was no long period of mourning or feeling of great waste to speak of. The weird part was being blind today. When I had to cross busy streets (with Sophia) and then later on downtown without her, on my way to the appointment, I would quickly grab one of my ugly broken old pairs of glasses out of my coat pocket and hold them up to my face to make sure I wasn't going to die. Needless to say, I was much more worried about people seeing me holding the ugly glasses to my face than I was about getting hit by a car.

Upon arrival at good old America's Best, the most ghetto joint to purchase glasses that I know of, and the only place I've proudly purchased eyewear for the last ten years, my crazy antics did not stop. Being blind made me feel like my behavior was even more abnormal than usual. I made strange, uncomfortable jokes to the people working at America's Best, and I smiled hugely at everyone I passed, since I didn't want them to think I was being a jerk and ignoring any friendly gestures they could have been giving me without my knowledge. But everyone seemed to like me more than usual, which was fun.

Yesterday I was talking to my mom about getting more used to being away from Sophia and she said that it was a natural thing to happen. Now, with full knowledge that there is a good chance my mom will read this, I want to question that statement. Is it true that it is natural to grow away from your babies? I was doing research on cultural issues surrounding obstacles to breastfeeding in our society last semester, and I read this one artilce about how in the US we have this pseudo-Christian idea that babies are born sinners. We think that they are innately evil. We use words like clingy, naughty, whiny, picky and fussy to describe perfectly normal baby behavior. For example, I remember getting back into bed after nursing Sophia at 3:30 this morning and muttering something about how she was "just being manipulative" because she creid a couple times when I tried to put her back in her crib. Because we are so individualistic we think that babies need their own rooms and cribs--that we need to teach them independence. In most developing countries babies sleep with their parents for years--giving babies a sense of community and fulfilling all their needs for closeness is valued more than teaching them to be able to "soothe themselves." In Thailand they sell huger than huge King-sized beds, because the whole family truly sleeps together. This particular article talked about a number of other interesting obstacles, including our need to be in control of time. We hate the idea that something (e.g. our offspring/ a helpless newborn) could demand our attention and care at any moment or for an indefinite period of time. The article pointed out how we even use the terminology "feeding on demand" to describe breastfeeding babies whenever they cry. The focus is on the word DEMAND. We negatively view the baby as demanding rather than hungry or in need of our loving touch. Sorry if this rant bored the heck out of you, it's just been interesting for me to realize how deeply these deeply embedded Western ideas have affected my own parenting.

The funny thing is that I remember a friend telling me about all this loony La Leche League stuff just two years ago (right before learning I was pregnant) and being absolutely traumatized by the ideas of sleeping with your baby, nursing past one-year-old, and feeding them whenever they cried, among other things.

Sometimes I realize with subtle amount of both horror and delight that my mind is always thinking about leaving. Moving. Whenever I buy something I think about how easy it will be to transport across a couple oceans and seas and whether or not I'll really need said item in the jungle. Like today, as I tried on some bright, funky glasses, I decided to nix them because they might stand out to much and not really fit in if I was living among poor people. Is that weird behavior? I also hate accumulating stuff, because it means we'll either have to get rid of it or lug it along with us at some point, neither of which sound very appealing. Stuff sucks. I wonder if I'll ever arrive somewhere and think, man, this is a nice home. I want to spend the rest of my life here. I wonder if I will ever not daydream about living somewhere else.

But time goes by so fast. I was planning an event for next fall a couple days ago. I've never planned events 10+ months in advance before--not even our wedding. It's just crazy how people think in terms of five or ten year increments now. We never used to think so long-term.

The nice thing about marriage and time is sharing with your partner. I like to imagine all the homes and vacations and good friends and master bedrooms and meals and suitcases and disappointments and fulfilled dreams and boat rides and trips to the park we will share. And I hope that Jordan and I get to share the experience of learning a few more languages together before we die. Maybe Swahili and a click language and Portuguese and Africanse (sp). Or Thai and Arabic and Urdu and Burmese. I don't know. But I love imagining being old and full of memories together--lounging with him on a front porch in the Tropics somewhere, bouncing around between several different languages to best communicate what we're trying to say and recall some crazy adventure we had. I mean, it's true that you can only say certain things in certain languages. And maybe some of our children will know some of the languages, but not others (because they weren't born yet when we learned them or maybe they had already moved out of the house when we lived in that particular place), so we will change our "secret" languages depending on which kids are around. Oh man. That will be great.

I've become increasingly more aware of how anything can happen at any time. Curb Your Enthusiasm has helped with this realization. Just taking the CTA today, a million unanticipated moments unfolded--from the annoying but scary guys who kept forcing the door open while the train was moving to the little girl who asked me to read her a book about giant worms (actually that didn't happen). You just never think about the stuff you don't expect--you have an idea of how your day or week will go, and then it goes all topsy-turvy and ends up someway entirely different. And you end up not even remembering your original mental layout. It's also cool when you're having a conversation to think about the fact that contrary to whatever you imagine, you actually don't know what the other person is going to say next. It could be anything.