I had such a bad dream last night. I can't even write or say what happened in it, but I hurt my baby in my dream.  And she didn't cry.  It is so horrible.  I've been thinking about this dream all day long.  I am pretty sure I had dreams like this with N when I had postpartum depression.  I don't think I have it now, but man, having a dream like this is fucked up.   

On some level, having a baby is really weird because she is so very vulnerable and it dredges up all kinds of fears.  I just have to take care of her because she is so precious, but it can be terrifying.  How little she is.  How she looks at me like I am all the world.    I start thinking about all the horrible people in the world who do bad things to kids.  

I'm sounding crazy.  I really am.  I'm OK, though.  Not doing anything strange.  No crying jags, I'm happy enough.  I love my little daughters.  

I took them to a farm today.  We went with the neighbor and her kids. Here's my N:


She's been letting me do letters with her.  We do three pages at a time out of a beginning phonics book.  She gets a marble in her jar for her work.  She seems to like it, especially the parts where she gets to cut and paste.  Some days she earns two or three marbles.  I am being a real teacher about it too- keeping track of her progress on a calendar.  She puts her finished work in a folder.  I want to incorporate some math too over the summer.  I only do as much as she feels like, but I do insist she follows directions.  There is no reason in the world why I can't teach her stuff like I would my former students.  I used to teach kindergarteners.  She normally hates being instructed.  It's a new thing for us.  

I pulled all of my ESL books out of the attic and lugged them down into the basement, where I had emptied a bookshelf for them.  It makes me feel good to see them all lined up again.  I haven't seen them all together since June 2008 right before I emptied out my high school classroom.  These books, which represent my career, have been in attics ever since.  Some of them are unhelpful crap that I picked out of teacher trash, and others real gems that have been photocopied or referred to again and again.  Now I intend to look through them.  I can use some of them to teach N reading this summer.  Others need to be recycled or passed on.  There are some I've have for years and never even read.  

Why do I want to do this now, when I no longer have a job and don't know when I will go back to work?  My mom is still in pain.  She is not ready to have hip replacement surgery although she knows she will need to have it done in the future.  If she decides to do it next year she will need at least six weeks of rehab.  Finding childcare after her surgery or when she feels weak will be hard.  I may take off next year.  Not because I want to, but because as I've written before, without free child care I will not make any money working.  

I liked the feeling of having a job.  But I am more strongly pulled toward my little daughters.  Especially R, who needs me so much right now.  I will, I must, go back to teaching one day.  

Just today, out in the yard watching the kids, one of the neighbors got off the phone and turned to my neighbor and asked her if she ever worked with bad people.  Immoral, bad people.  He didn't ask me this.  Because I don't work.  I just stay home and bake and shit.  (You see how I am a tad oversensitive.)

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I am teaching 5 month old R how to drink from a cup.  I think she will learn if I do it every day. She seems to want to.  It is ever so cute to see her trying.  Today I tasted a bit of my thawed breast milk and it tasted NASTY.  A little research tells me that the sour taste is from an enzyme called lipase.  If I want to avoid the bad taste I need to scald my milk before storing it.  This seems like a lot of work!  R drinks the thawed milk from the cup.  She didn't know what to do with the bottle because I waited too long before introducing it.  I don't think she is overly sensitive to the lipase, but I gotta say, once I took a swig of that milk today I had to dump the rest because it seemed horrible to feed R something so bad tasting.

So I'm going to go through all the frozen milk I have and then not store so much.  When it comes time for my belly dance performance I will express milk and just put it in the fridge.


 

Two days ago I read this article about Dubai in The Independent  and it is still bothering me.  It is about how the workers who built all the glittering towers and malls were tricked into slavery, forced to work in dangerous conditions and housed away from public view in squalid concrete flats.  Their employers take away their passports, and the families back home in their countries are indebted to money lenders who lent the men money to work in Dubai.  Many workers end up in debtor's prison or commit suicide.  

I was also this upset when I read Tomatoland and learned about similar conditions for tomato pickers here in America.  And in the news today, another mention of human trafficking in this area, in which young girls are forced into prostitution rings.  

When we were taught about slavery as kids in school, it was taught as if it was a bad thing that happened long ago and people don't do that now.  There is this myth that we have learned from our mistakes or are progressing towards a more just society.  But we aren't.  People still do horrible things.  All around the world.  The amount of misery is constant.

I must have made the right decision about work because I feel so stress-free right now.  I don't have to worry about R not taking a bottle, or crying when I leave her, or my mom being in pain.  And my mom is feeling better and better after her second cortisone shot.    She is even planning to go to the beach tomorrow.  So everyone wins, right?  I went in to work on Tuesday to clear off my desk and bring home my materials.  I have no idea if they will hire a sub to replace me.  I want to wait a little bit before I apply for the job next year just to make sure my  mom really is on the mend.  If she can't take care of R, I can't work because it makes no financial sense. 

Strange, though, not being employed any longer.  I liked saying I was a teacher.  I may put together a half hour lesson for N every day this summer...on science, art, reading, math, etc.  Today we planted seeds in little pots.  Beans, lettuce, carrots, dill, lavender and lovage.  

After I quit my job, I had to go to the dentist.  I took R with me.  She is such a good little baby, as long as she is with me.  When my dentist did my X-rays, we wheeled R's stroller out into the hall.  One of the other technicians kept an eye on her.  He got some good smiles out of her.  I overheard him say that babies her age can't see faces and when they smile at people they don't know they are smiling at the two angels on their shoulders.  When I was leaving I asked him about what he said to make sure I heard it right.  He repeated the angel thing, gesturing at his shoulders.  I found out he is from Algeria.  

So when I first heard this from him, it made me feel really great, to think of little R seeing angels.  Now, I don't really believe in angels.  Maybe ghosts.  And I think she can see faces, because when I showed her a board book with pictures of kids she focused intently on it.  But I wanted to find out more about this belief.

Since the guy is from Algeria, and 99% of Algerians are Muslim, perhaps he is talking about qareen.  قرين‎  Qareen literally means "constant companion".  It is a kind of ghost, or jinn, that everyone has.  Some think it can be guided to good, others that it is evil.  There are also kiraman katibin (كراماً كاتبين‎ "honourable scribes"), angels that sit on your shoulders recording your good and bad deeds.  The angel on the right shoulder (named Raqueeb) records the good deeds, and the one on the left (Atheed)  records the bad.  The nice catch is that Atheed waits a little bit before writing down the bad deed, so if the person sincerely repents, he won't write it down.  Many Muslims also believe that each person has two guardian angels; one in front and one behind.  That makes quite a crowd around every person!

I gather that in Christian medieval contexts, the two angels can sway a person to good or evil, but in the Islamic context they don't have power over the person, instead just record his deeds.  So if my little R is going to be seeing angels on people's shoulders I'd rather imagine them as diligent scribes than as wholesome angels and little devils.  

I asked the guy when he thought kids stopped seeing the angels and he said when they start talking.  Handy, that.

Dear S,

Unfortunately I will not be able to return to work this year.  Thank you for meeting with me on Friday.  My mother's situation has not improved over the weekend and she is meeting today with the doctor today to discuss possible surgery. I was due to return to work tomorrow.  I am sad that I cannot finish the work I started this year.  I will check the personnel listings every week and reapply for my position for 2012/2013 as soon as it is listed.  I will also come in to school tomorrow to return my keys.

Thank you for your understanding,
Warcat

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And now that it has come to this I feel sad.  It is so easy to quit a job.  Just a simple email, and now I am unemployed.  I suppose I should email the teachers I work with.  I wonder if my job will be reposted.  My principal was understanding.  She said she would tell personnel that I am a valued employee and she wants me back for next year.  But who knows?  She is so busy she may never get around to sending them that message.  Or she may decide not to repost my job and use the .2 allocation on someone else.  We'll see.   Perhaps I should have tried harder to have a plan B.  Could I have run out and asked my neighbor, as she was getting into her car to go to work, to do a nanny share?  So much second guessing.  What's done is done.  The email and voicemail have been sent. 

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Dear Teachers,

As you can see this year has not gone at all as planned. I was due to return to work tomorrow from the second half of my maternity leave.  Just last week my mom's hip started hurting and she has been in bed since, leaving the house only to go to doctor's appointments.  She had an MRI on Wednesday and meets with the doctor today to discuss possible surgery.  My mom was my childcare and I haven't been able to find a nanny for the next two months. 

I am really sad that I have not been able to finish the work I started with your wonderful students.  I do feel that the one-on-one ESOL instruction I was doing with them was helping them with their language skills.  It was a great experience to be able to tailor lessons to each child's level and pinpoint linguistic weaknesses.  Every kid learns language in such a different way.  And I miss their little personalities.

I intend to reapply for my job when it is listed, so I hope I will see you all again in the fall. 

Warcat

Nerve wracked.  I asked for a meeting with my principal today because I am due to return to work on Tuesday and my mom is having horrible hip problems and will find out Monday if she needs surgery.  She can barely walk and spends the day in bed.  This has only started this week.  I have no alternate child care lined up and am reluctant to find someone other than my mom because R remains as desperately attached to me as she was a month ago.  And I have not made much progress on the bottle feeding front.   So I think deep inside I don't want to return to work.  I feel cosmically guilty-  did I cause my mom's hip problems by wishing for a really good reason to take the rest of the year off?  Or is it a much more mundane failure on my part to not set up a plan B?  Realistically, though, could I have had a nanny on retainer, ready to start work three mornings a week should the need arise?  For only two months?  And what I would pay the nanny would use up all and more of my measly part time salary.  So, while I like working, I think I am going to have to go in today and quit.  Unless there is some other solution my principal  can accept- like me bringing R in to school (yuck because there was a head lice epidemic and those little kindergarteners get awfully sick) or doing report card database entry for the ESOL department.  There is also the question of whether she would hire me back next year.  She may post my job immediately and if she finds a replacement, then I'm probably out for next year.  

Of course, I am also worried about my mom.  I have made dinner for her twice this week.  She is lonely, frustrated, and angry at her body.  I should probably spend my mornings with her.

Remember I wrote about N always asking me to tell her stories?  And how I was going to try to be more patient and giving about it?  Well, I just couldn't come up with anything new, so I looked around for similar stories and I found the PERFECT series of books by Dorothy Edwards and illustrated by the wonderful Shirley Hughes.  The first is called My Naughty Little Sister.  There are at least five in the series.  They were written in the fifties, but aren't too antiquated.  I have to explain a few words, like knickers or larder, but the stories are funny.  The narrator is the older sister, but you never learn much about her.  The naughty little sister is just that, a naughty little sister who makes mistakes and gets into trouble.  So far the characters are just like my characters:
Naughty little sister = Messy Messy Princess
Bad Harry = Naughty Naughty Boy
Narrator = Neat and Tidy Princess

The first book did not have an equivalent for the Nice and Polite Boy or the Scary Scary Cat.  N loves these stories.  She still asks me to tell her stories, but now she'll agree to let me read these to her.

Sometimes my neighborhood is freakishly like a movie.  Truman Show?  Stepford Wives?  Not sure.  This morning K and I took the girls on a walk to the farmer's market.  On the way we saw one of the neighborhood men coming back from the market with a wife and a child not his own. And don't I sound gossipy?  The thing is, we think nothing of it, because this guy is the friendliest, most easy going guy.  But, as K and I discussed, K would never take a stroll up to the market with a neighbor's wife.  And not because anyone would wonder about cheating, but because we can't see how the situation would even present itself.  I guess maybe if I was walking there and I happened upon a neighbor walking there, I would walk with him.  So I don't know what kind of ridiculous antisocial pathologies K and I have.  Clearly we hate and distrust people.  

Then this evening the neighbor (another one) invited N to play with his daughter and their friend, so K took N out to play.  Soon all three dads were sitting in chairs having beers as the kids played.  See, I tell you, it's like a frickin' movie out here.  I was in the kitchen with the baby, cleaning up after our dinner of beer boiled bratwurst on buns.  (Really.) I went down to join the guys, but I got as far as saying hi to one of them (who offered me his chair), and they were talking about computers and work, and I just went back inside.   Here is the picture I took through the screen.



On Friday I talked with the wives about husbands going out after work and not being around to help with the kids.  This is not an issue with me.  I don't care if K goes out for a pint.  I only care when he goes out with someone fun, like my cousin.

For Easter all the neighbors met in the park across the street for an egg hunt.  Most of us had a beer or glass of wine in hand as well.  The kids ran around like crazy.  Occasionally a kind parent would play with them- pulling them up trees or organizing an egg and spoon race. I hate it when parents play with their kids.  I mean, twenty kids in a park on a sunny afternoon should need no help from adults in finding something to do, aside from the cursory hiding of eggs.  Although at the fourth of July, the kids turned into a stick wielding horde and N got pushed into deer poop.  

Still.

I like my friendly neighbors.  I suppose it would be weird and sad if we didn't hang out.  Our four streets form a closed circuit off MacArthur Blvd.  We can see into each other's backyards and houses.  

On days like this, when I'm holding the baby, feeling every bit the fifties housewife, I dream about traveling far far away with my old red backpack.  

Today we drove out to the Wat Lao Buddhavong temple in Catlett, Virginia to meet our friends M and S for the Laotian New Year's celebration.  The temple is the largest Buddhist temple in the metropolitan Washington, DC area, covering almost 60 acres.  They even had their own soccer field.  There is also a beautiful Buddha garden with a lake filled with lotus plants.  The temple was built in 1993 to preserve traditional Theravada Buddhist practice.  It has two big celebrations a year; New Year's and Fourth of July.  Today, in addition to religious services, there were three sports tournaments going on, a main stage with singing and dancing, and many stalls set up selling Laotian food, groceries, and goods.



In front of the temple were all these animal statues.  



We got a little cup of goldfish for N to release into this pond for good luck.  

N also really liked watching all these dancers in traditional costumes (Laotian, Khmer, Vietnamese, American, Japanese).



We ate some delicious food.  This is a banana leaf with sticky coconut rice inside.  We also had sausages, grilled chicken, sticky rice, green papaya salad, and sugar cane juice.  

In front of the temple there was a platform with many statues of Buddha.  People made donations to the temple and picked up little bundles of flowers and bottles of perfumed water with flower petals.  They kneeled in front of the platform and made their prayers and then offered the flowers on trays and carefully poured water over the Buddha statues to wash them.  The water symbolizes washing away bad things and starting the new year cleansed.  

We also went inside the temple with our friends.  They assured me it was OK, even though I am not a Buddhist.  The walls were decorated with illustrations of the Buddha's life. We paid our respects to a monk who tied "bay sri" strings around our wrists.  Even my 4 month old baby got one.  Here is mine:


We were there for about four hours. It was a really interesting day.  I think I liked seeing the temple and its grounds the most.  I was proud of N for tasting some new foods.  If I can't take her traveling around the world I can at least expose her to different international communities here at home.  I am thankful to my friends for inviting us and explaining stuff to us.