Darais Days

As I pulled into the DMV parking lot, I had a nagging feeling that something wasn’t right. I glanced over at the seat next to me to go over my documents once more. Marriage license, check. New social security card, check. Passport, birth certificate, temple marriage certificate, old driver’s license, and every other official document I thought might mitigate the unpredictable turns of Chicago bureaucracy–check, check, check, check, and check. What was missing?

Then it hit me. To get a new driver’s license, I need a new picture! I glanced in the rear view mirror and recoiled in horror. I had not washed my hair in days, and the yolk colored shirt I had worn to bed the night before did nothing for my pregnancy-impaired complexion. I had left the house in my pj pants (a habit I had not indulged in since college days) because earlier that week I had literally busted through my jeans.

I was aghast. Months before when I realized I would need a new driver’s license to match my new married name, I had eagerly anticipated the opportunity to do a picture re-take. I remember resolving to spare no pains in coiffing myself for the event; I had not prepared for my last picture at all and have had to live with the aesthetically offensive consequences ever since. This was supposed to be my day to shine!

And yet, and yet. I did not want to drive all the way home. After all, it had already taken me months to getting around to the chore. I also driven out of my way to go to my favorite DMV located in the heart of the South Side. It is a gem of a place filled with bureaucrats who speak in perpetually placating tones, free parking spaces, and great people watching opportunities. Because this DMV is located in a crime-ridden and highly segregated area, it also boasts a noticeable dearth of white people. It reminds me, in pleasant ways, of my short-lived teaching career in an equally segregated school not far from the facility.

With a sigh, I heaved myself out of the car and waddled into the DMV, all the while resigned to photographic doom. Soon, however, my frustrated feelings gave way to a sense of peace. There is something about being caught in the ineluctable grasp of government inefficiency (think four counters, two hours of waiting, and ten government officials later) that lulls you into a state of quiet quiescence. As much as you would like to speed up the process, you can’t. It’s you against the Department of Motor Vehicles, and, like it or not, you will sit where they tell you to sit until, hours later, some merciful bureaucrat decides to call your name. I wasn’t the only one who decided to take my wait quietly; in fact, a sense of quiet resignation pervaded the entire facility, which, inefficient though it was, ran relatively calmly.

My only hurried movements occurred while waiting at counter number three (cashier), when I remembered that I carried earrings in my purse just for emergencies such as this. I crammed the earrings in and patted my eyebrows into place with my fingers, and then proceeded to take a seat in yet another waiting room.

It was at that moment that I spotted her. She was tall, perfectly coiffed, and arrayed in shiny black boots and an outfit that showed off her killer figure; if we weren’t both waiting to have our pictures taken, I would have thought she was on her way to preform onstage as one of Beyonce’s back-up singers. When she sat down a couple rows away, I stared. “Man,” I thought to myself, “that is the way to go. She obviously remembered that this process involves a picture, and wow is she prepared!” I looked down wistfully at my shabby appearance and realized that even if I had taken the time, the end product wouldn’t be the same. After all, how do you hide the fact that you look like a hippopotamus?

Then I heard her talking to the woman next to her, and to my delight, she started explaining why she looked so stunning. “My last picture was terrible!” she exclaimed, settling into her seat and shaking her beautiful curls vigorously. “I was pregnant and puffy, and nobody even recognizes me in the picture! I came here just to have my photo redone–I just couldn’t take it anymore.”

I rejoiced. There was hope for me, after all! At one point, this gorgeous woman had also been–in her very own words, “pregnant and puffy,” and she too had suffered the consequences in her driver’s license picture.

I zipped up my red sweater, pulled my hair out of my face, and smiled hopefully into the camera. Someday, post-pregnant me will do this again.

I love fresh air and have been known to keep my windows open in the dead of Chicago winters. Naturally, it did not even occur to me to close the windows this early in the game–even though the night temperatures have been doing precarious dips into the 40’s and 30’s. I have also  scrupulously turned off as many of our radiators as I can so that this quirk doesn’t turn into our condo into an energy sink.

The other morning, Abe tentatively asked me when I intended to close the windows. I responded vaguely that I’d be open to discussion sometime around February. “What about November?” he asked pleadingly. “We’ll see,” I responded. Truthfully, my strategy was to keep saying “we’ll see” all winter long and then appear open to compromise when the nice Spring air wafts invitingly into our home. (I learned the “we’ll see” trick from my mom, who almost always substitutes “no” with that more diplomatic sounding phrase.)

Last night when Abe got home from his late night inspections, he was shivering. I assumed it was because he just stepped in from the cold, but as I was puttering in the kitchen, I turned around and saw that he had donned his ski hat!

After I did my share of laughing, my heart softened, and I closed our bedroom windows. The kitchen and living room are still open to the wonderfully brisk air, though, but I figure as long as I keep feeding Abe warm food, maybe he won’t notice.

 

After I closed the windows, I asked for help opening a jar of saurkraut that I purchased at Hyde Park Produce yesterday. I have not had much luck with their jars; the last time I bought some jarred Borscht (Abe’s favorite food–no joke), neither of us could open it and we relegated it to food storage. Same story with the saurkraut. “Man,” Abe exclaimed, as he put down the unopenable jar, “if we ever need our food storage, people will discover our bodies next to these two jars. They’ll think we’re dead AND incompetent!”

Abe sent me the same shot in an email before we were dating, and he titled it, “wish you were here.” That was a great clue!

Last night I found out the truth about my husband. It scared me.

It started out with a very pleasant dinner at the house of my mother-in-law, Karin. We were chatting easily about pets and Utah restaurants when the conversation turned to the subject of babies. I inquired about Karin’s experience with her pregnancies and children. “The pregnancies were fine,” she said, “but afterward it was really hard.” She went on to explain that two out of her three children were collicky (the chances of having a collicky baby are one in ten), and that Abe, her first child, never slept for more than twenty minutes at a time. At that point, my heart dropped.

“That first year I was insane,” she said. “He would cry and cry, and finally when he went to sleep I would start to relax, but then he would wake up twenty minutes later and start crying again. I thought I had given birth to a monster!” She was so busy trying to calm Abe down that she didn’t even notice she was pregnant with her second child until four months into her second pregnancy. She only noticed she was pregnant when a neighbor helpfully pointed out that she looked pregnant and insisted she take a test. When she went to the doctor’s, she discovered she’d already sailed through the first trimester and had less than six months to go before launch.

The good news is, her second baby, Jere, was a breeze. He obviously didn’t cause much trouble in utero, and, in the words of Abe’s youngest brother, David, Jere was “an angel” ex-utero as well. That settles it, I thought. If we have a boy, we’re going to find a way to fit “Jeremiah” into his name. I am not interested in spending a year sleeping a mere twenty minutes at a time, so hopefully our baby will disregard the fussy-baby genes he inherited from his father and opt to live up to his name instead.

When I accused Abe of being a bad baby later that night, he had nothing to say for himself. “Hey, I’ve been a stress case since the minute I left the womb,” he said. “I was probably freaked out at the lack of order in the universe and missed my warm amniotic sac. I’ve never done well with change, so I’m sure I was freaked out by earth life.” That’s true. Abe loves order and is slightly obsessed with creating systems to organize his world. Recently he took a practice GRE, and one of the passages he encountered was about how Greeks are pained by chaos and have a well-documented obsession with imposing systems of order on the universe. (That’s why they made so many mathematical discoveries.) Darais is a Greek name (Abe’s grandfather immigrated from Greece), and when Abe read that essay, he felt like he had engaged in an enlightened form of self-discovery.

But I am scared. Up until last night, I had been praying that our children would turn out just like Abe, but now I’m not so sure. Maybe I need to get more specific with God: I would like to place an order for an easy baby who sleeps for hours at a time. Any musical, artistic, or theatrical inclinations would also be a plus. Please discuss these matters soon with my future baby. Thank-you so much for your time and attention to this matter. Sincerely, one of your many freaked-out moms to be.

I know two posts in one day is kind of excessive, but I am so exhausted right now that doing anything which requires verticality is simply out of the question. This is the craziest week I have had in a long time! First, I went to Springfield and back in about 26 hours. When I got home, I discovered a wedding picture surrounded by sticky notes with Abe’s favorite memories of our time together on the coffee table (I love my husband!):

My grandma is moving, and I came back from Springfield laden with many of her unwanted items. My favorite is one of the very first pieces of baby furniture I have acquired thus far: a time out chair. (My poor baby. I haven’t even bought so much as a diaper, but instead am welcoming him/her into a world rife with opportunities to earn time outs.) The chair is  black and looks rather Puritanical in cut. I might, with time, mellow out and paint the chair a less scary color. Or who knows? If my kids get really bad, I might go the other way and ask an artistic friend to paint some flames licking the legs of the chair.

In any case, I should probably buy some diapers too.

Speaking of scary stuff, I also acquired some new witches for my witch collection. I started collecting witches in Rome’s Piazza Navona at Christmastime. In Italy, the Christmas witch is known as “La Befana,” “La Vecchia,” or “La Strega,” and she gives gifts to children on Epiphany Eve. Here are some of my witches:

Aren’t they fun?

Today and tomorrow I will be cleaning and cooking like a madwoman to prepare for the arrival of my dear friend, Kristin, and her lovely family. I am also dog-sitting, so I woke at 3:30am to walk the dog in order to be on time to support my mom at a going-away breakfast some of her friends had for her. Tomorrow after I teach piano, my mom gets officially set apart as a missionary, and then on Thursday, after picking Kristin up from the airport and giving her a speedy tour of our neighborhood and home, I will depart for Utah with my mom and brother to drop my mom off at the MTC (Missionary Training Center). So much excitement for one little week! But the most exciting thing is that I think I just heard Abe’s car–and that means I now have someone home to help me clean. Yay!

(Abe and I stand by one of the scarecrows in the Arboretum.)

Abe has been meaning to get to the Morton Arboretum for a looooooong time, and we finally went this weekend. The weather was beautiful, and apparently, we weren’t the only ones with the idea. The car lines to enter the Arboretum reminded me of a traffic jam on the 405 in L.A., but once we got through them, we had a great time. Abe got a little excited by all the trees, as you can see here.

My back prevented me from expressing enthusiasm in a similar fashion, so I chose to enjoy the arboretum by planting myself solidly against a sturdy tree trunk.

After a while, I decided to sprawl on the ground. The view was great! All blue skies and colorful leaves.

When we got tired of reclining in the shadows of various trees, we grabbed a quick bite to eat and then headed into Abe’s office so he could get some work done. I occupied myself by making Halloween invitations for the four-year old “sunbeams”we teach in church.

We are so excited for the party! I can’t wait to post pictures of all the cute kids in their costumes. The party is October 29, so check back in if you want some cute overload in your life.

I began this blog hoping it would inspire me to take more pictures. To my dismay, the only graphics to adorn my poor little project have been stolen from the internet or provided by our wedding photographer. So, in attempt to fix this sorry state of affairs, I have finally taken some pictures!

Here is a picture of my current belly:

You can see that my butt wants to get a ying/yang thing going. Very discouraging.

I also took a picture of my kitchen because it’s one of my happy spots. I would love to have you over for dinner!

If you came over for dinner, we could maybe have some curried carrot soup, courtesy of a recipe provided by our friends, Dan and Preethi Harbuck. (They made us a wonderful cookbook for our wedding! We love it.)

I also took a picture of the magazines I subscribe to. I hate opening the mailbox because it is usually filled with nasty things like bills and City of Chicago parking ticket notices. In order to motivate myself to check the mail, I subscribe to these:

The crazy thing is, I read all of my magazines, cover to cover. I love them! I even have a wish list. In a perfect world, I would also subscribe to The New Yorker and (may its canceled pages rest in peace) Gourmet. (Tear.) But Abe has promised me exciting things! Soon I am to be the recipient of The Wall Street Journal and FOUR investment magazines. I wonder if he’s trying to tell me something about my money management skills…

And finally, I took a picture of Abe’s planner.

Why, you might ask? Well, Abe is a lover of planning. He started weekly planning sessions with his family at the age of twelve, and some of his favorite childhood memories are of going to the Franklin Covey store with his dad for his yearly planner. He still spends hours every Sunday planning his week, and then, for fun, he will replan his week during weekdays. I am not a planner, but I have been feeling unproductive lately. Abe’s solution? Plan! So, this Sunday, we planned. According to my new hourly planner, I am currently job hunting. Hmmm.

There. I think that redeems this blog from its former paucity of pictures. Wouldn’t you agree?

Not too much to write about today, except for the fact that I love Fall. Last night I dreamed I was in a pumpkin patch picking pie pumpkins. I woke up craving pumpkin pie, but instead I opened the fridge and proceeded to consume way too much leftover pear-apple crisp. I am now in bed with a stomachache. It really hurts, especially when all I really wanted in the first place was a piece of gastrointestinally-friendly pumpkin pie.

But my love for Fall remains intact. So far this season that love has manifested itself primarily in my stomach. For example, I have eaten over 40 apples since the weather changed. I have baked one pie and one crisp, and every Saturday at the Farmer’s Market I eye the Concord Grapes and contemplate making a grape pie.

Have you ever made a grape pie? During another employment-free period of my life, I found myself filling an entire week with grape pies. The thing about a grape pie is you have to peel and seed every single grape that goes into the pie. Let me repeat: you peel and seed EVERY grape that goes into the pie. It is a project reserved almost exclusively for the unemployed. But the end result is so yummy. In my recipe book, The Pie and Pastry Bible, the author writes that she knew one of her ex-husband’s students had a crush on him when the student baked him a grape pie.

My days to bake a grape pie might be limited, though, since I am now more earnestly looking for a job. (And by earnestly, I mean I applied to a grand total of TWO jobs this morning.) I had the chance to do a little nannying for a great family earlier this week, and the experience reminded me how good it feels to work doing something you feel good at.

I never felt good at being a teacher, although with more experience perhaps I might eventually feel like I could reach the point of competence. But since that point would take several years and I only have a couple months to work with, I figure might as well get better at something more realistic. Here’s hoping someone in Hyde Park wants a pregnant, part-time nanny to come over and bake their kids some pie.

Yesterday occasioned my first major meltdown in months. Poor Abe got home after a long day, and then he stayed up past midnight while I sobbed and snorted out my tale of woe. These days I’m perpetually out of breath anyway, but crying fits of hysteria translate into sentences that take a full five minutes to complete. I’m sure Abe had no idea what I was talking about until thirty minutes into the conversation, but he just held me and listened as if what I was saying made perfect sense.

Here’s why I was crying: My mom’s mission call came yesterday. She got assigned to the mission of her dreams, the Church and Family History Library Mission at church headquarters, for 18 months. She leaves on October 18, which seems so soon. While I am happy for my mother and completely support her decision to do something she has always wanted to do, I am terrified to bring a child into the world without her help. Just the thought of it fills me with something that feels a lot like panic.

Before I type myself into meltdown #2, let me share a few thoughts I had in the temple that have helped me through this present situation. I went to the temple feeling a little grumpy at God for inspiring my mom to go on a mission at such an inconvenient time, but while I was there I found myself looking at a picture of Mary and Joseph on their way to Bethlehem. Mary is pregnant and sitting on a donkey, and she’s looking down at her belly while Joseph leads the donkey in the direction of Bethlehem.

It occurred to me that Mary must have contemplated the fact that none of her family would be around when her baby was born. She had to give birth in a stable (or cave) with only the support of Joseph, her brand new husband. I don’t even know if she had the help of a midwife, although I hope someone in Bethlehem was compassionate enough to go find her one. She probably missed the support of her family terribly, but God helped her through her ordeal. She ended up having to raise her baby for the first few years in the entirely foreign land of Egypt–just imagine the lack of a support network there–but again, the Lord was with her. She trusted in him, and He did not let her down.

I do not wish to compare myself to Mary in any other way but this: I believe that if I trust in God, just as she trusted in God, He will supply my needs. He will be my support, a more than sufficient stand-in while my mother is gone.

Sometimes I feel a lot like Peter walking on the water towards Christ. When my eyes and thoughts are centered on God, I feel full of faith that He will get me through. But then, sometimes (as in last night), I shift focus to the raging water around me–in this case, the thought of having my first child without the immediate advice and help of my mom–and I feel my faith falter.

Abe told me last night that I’m stronger than I think I am, and that everything will be okay. I do think that if I could just learn to keep my thoughts always focused on God, then perhaps I really could be stronger than I currently am. In the meantime, though, I’m going to have to give Him something to work with, so I’ve decided to boost my confidence by researching babies. I checked out my first book on the topic from the library this morning. It touts itself as “the ultimate guide to understanding, caring for, and raising your new baby…trusted by over 16 million parents around the world.” I’m hoping it will help calm down these awful waves.

…I wonder how long the insomnia will continue?

Secretly, very secretly, I suspect I am lazy. Currently, I am 100% employment-free, and this fact only underscores my suspicions. Oh, I have lots of excuses and in emergency situations have been known to account for my time in semi-credible terms, but deep down, I know the truth. I love having nothing to do.

Under normal circumstances, this would be a source of tension in a marriage. Somehow, though, I lucked out. Not only was Abe completely supportive when I told him last spring that I needed to leave my job (it did help that I got paid through the summer–thank-you, Chicago Public Schools!) but he continues to be almost alarmingly angelic about the current situation.

On his own workday, he will often get up at 4:15 and return home approximately 12 hours later. (Sometimes, as on Monday, that number stretches up to 15 or 16.) He works hard. Really hard. And when he comes home, his work continues as I regale him with tales from the pregnancy front. My head hurts, my back went out, we’re out of toilet paper (sorry, the baby’s still sitting on my bladder) and oh, by the way, even though I napped three times I’m still exhausted so what do you think about ordering pizza tonight? And in return I get hugs, sympathy, and affirmative answers to all of my unreasonable requests. It is sick.

The other day we were in the car and I was moaning about how much I wanted Dairy Queen, and Abe turned to me and said, “You know, your life is really hard.” I stopped moaning and eyed him cautiously. Was he finally going to call me out? I was almost wishing he would when he dashed my nascent hopes by saying–in all earnestness–“No, I mean, think about it. You are a die hard sweets fanatic and foodie who is desperately trying to go vegan. I never thought about it before, but your life is one continuously painful battleground!” He looked at me with admiration gleaming in his big eyes and said, “I just want you to know how much I love you.”

Uhm. Really? I stay at home all day napping and eating while you go out and work twice as hard to pay back my school loans, and that’s what you have to say to me?

That’s when I decided I need to get a job. But here’s the problem. I don’t want a real job. (RE: first paragraph on laziness.) When my mom asked what jobs sound fun to me, here’s the list I came up with: greeter at professional functions, grocery store cashier, mattress tester, organic farm hand, and–this one’s slightly better–piano teacher. At the end of the day, all I really want is to become is a better wife than I currently am and, eventually, be a good stay-at-home mom who bakes awesome vegan cookies. But in the interim between now and when baby is born, I should probably do something more with my life than eat and sleep. Wow, that sounds intimidating. Maybe I should go take a nap.