Grant the Transplant

An American Abroad

[grantplant]

Eff a Rabbit

When is the best time to wean? At one year old, when baby is already going through extreme separation anxiety, sleep regression, and the massive growth spurt that will result in walking and saying her first words.

When is the best time for baby’s day care to close for their annual summer holiday? When baby is weaning, and mama’s hormonal exhaustion and emotional ambivalence about weaning is compounded by the two-week gauntlet of baby’s developmentally appropriate refusal to nap and need to be attached to mama at all times, in all places.

When is the best time for feeding the day care rabbits? During the day care’s summer break, naturally, when the weather is alternately scorching or storming; when you’re 6 feet tall and can’t fit into the hutch where their food and hay is kept; when your one year old is not quite walking and won’t let you out of her sight, even as you’re trying to squeeze into a rabbit hutch in 90-degree-heat; when the day care garden that is also entrusted to your decidedly black thumbs is alternately flooded and parched; when your Swiss German is not at all equal to the task of Swiss German rabbit maintenance; when the day care email is set to auto-reply and you have no means of consulting the other parents.

This has been our two weeks, and it has been hard. Hot, fraught, and with more than enough self-doubt and sweat for any one fortnight. We took a much-needed intermission last weekend and went to Turin, Italy, where we continued to sweat profusely, but did so with the aid of exquisite wine and pasta.

My short but stressful tenure as rabbit-and-vegetable-patch caretaker started when we returned from our also-short but obligations-free holiday. I recognize that my concerns surrounding the watering of plants and animals that are not my own may sound a little silly and make my world seem very small, but nailing this assignment meant a great deal to me.

Allow me to explain:

I stick out at Mira’s daycare. Pat and I are the only American parents, the only non-proficient speakers of any one of Switzerland’s four (four!) national languages, and—in my case alone–I react to the anxiety of being conspicuous and inadequate by sweating profusely. (Pat came with me on cupcake delivery day and can attest to the excessive perspiration. It sucks, and has the effect of making me even more stressed and self-conscious, which makes me sweat even harder.) I also happen to be one of the few (the only?) parents not dropping my kid off on the way to a workplace, and thus I don’t usually show up in workplace attire. Sometimes I am so fed up with looking like a hayseed that I’ll get up early and dress nicely and do my hair and makeup, so at least there is the illusion that I have somewhere important and respectable to be. But usually I am dressed like I’ll be sitting at my computer for the rest of the day, writing about how dumb I feel in my stay-at-home attire.

All of this is to say, projecting competence and confidence felt–and still feels– important to me when it comes to my standing within the day care ecosystem.

It appears that when the director asked for volunteers to feed the rabbits, she assumed that if you can rear a tiny human, you can probably manage two average-sized rabbits. I find this not to be the case, but I’ll be damned if I was going to let the staff and other parents smell my fear. I hadn’t fed a rabbit in fifteen or sixteen years and, seeing as I can hardly keep track of what I fed myself a day ago, I couldn’t remember what I fed that rabbit a decade and a half in the past. I asked the internet How to Feed A Rabbit, but, to my great consternation, the results directly contradicted Google’s translation of the laminated food list affixed to the rabbit hutch. That is, what I was able to commit to memory before my phone died.

After a false start in which I fed the rabbits only one time per day, I had a revelatory conversation with a fellow day care mom that set me to rights. The Monday that we’d returned from Italy was Swiss National Day. Stores were closed in observance of the holiday and our fridge was bare, so I’d taken inspiration from Peter Cottontail and nipped into the day care garden for some salad fixings. Even though the director had said we were welcome to take what we want (or… I think that’s what she said) I still felt like I’d been busted when I came to do my harvesting and saw that there was someone there with the rabbits. Embarrassment back-burnered, I took the opportunity to interrogate her on the finer points of “Hasen füttern,” and learned that (to the best of my understanding) the Hasen must be fed twice a day, morning and evening, with maximal hay, minimal pellets, fresh water, and an assortment of  fruits and vegetables with an emphasis on leafy greens. 

I hadn’t even realized there was a pellet bowl! Good to know. When my shift came around on Tuesday morning, I was dismayed to find the plastic container of pellets was empty, spawning fresh anxiety over whether I should buy more and, if so, which pellets are the right pellets? As it turns out, the grocery store offers one option—the kind with the rabbits on the bag–so I couldn’t agonize over which brand to buy.

All of this brought me back to the panic I felt near-constantly while running the pet sitting business after college. For more clothes-rending detail, read the book, but this scenario—minimal/obscure/outrageous instruction on how to keep delicate, unfamiliar, beloved, killable things alive—was just classic. The not-in-my-native-language aspect of the instructions is a first for me, though.

I don’t know if “F@#! a rabbit” is a common phrase or just something my mom says.  (My tentative Google search on this subject was not very helpful, and mostly just shocking, but suggests this is a mom-ism…) Nevertheless, this phrase came to mind a lot during my stint as gamekeeper of Chinderhuus Öpfelbaum. When smacking my head repeatedly on the beams of the hutch, or spilling the newly refreshed bowl of water all over myself when climbing through the child-sized door. When debating how much was too much pellet, and how much was enough hay. When trying to “cut” a cucumber from the garden into pieces with a sharp rock, and cutting myself instead. When pushing Mira back and forth in her stroller between the spigot and the sprinkler itself to gauge the distribution of water over the garden without soaking us both. When reading in WikiHow that collard greens and beet tops were A-OK, while corn hulls were potentially life-threatening, while my attempted translation of the posted instructions on the hutch indicated these greens were verboten, but corn cobs were a great treat if given very occasionally.

“Feed” for me truly became a four-letter word.

You probably aren’t surprised to learn that nothing died on my watch. The garden got a little parched, it’s true. One my last day of service, somebody else must have come along at some point between the morning and evening visit and turned on the sprinkler, which confirmed for me that I do indeed have two black thumbs (and that it would take hours–days, even—to fill a water bowl from sprinkler output alone. Don’t try. You’ll look like an ass, and get very wet, chasing those droplets back and forth). The rabbits survived my ineptitude and, dare I say, didn’t have too bad a time of it. If anything, they were over-served and under-exercised, which is an apt reflection of the person feeding them.

As much as I’d like to say that I am done with the volunteer rabbit maintenance, I’d already signed up to feed them again a week from Saturday. I see this as an opportunity for improvement, though. Who said, “Success is 90% preparation, 10% perspiration”? I might invert those quantities, but in the spirit of the adage, I have already laid out in my head the order in which I will tend to the  bunnies such that they are well-exercised, consume their hay before anything else, and get the appropriate serving size and variety of fruit and veg and mixture of grass and greens. I have a measuring cup and knife for cutting and portioning, and a pre-filled water bottle, negating any need to fuss with the faucet. My phone will be charged. This time, I will be ready. This time, I will get it right.

In a sort of epilogue to my time minding the rabbits, we had a new babysitter stay with Mira this past Sunday night. I found her (the babysitter) on a website called Babysitting 24. She has first aid training, worked as an au pair for two families, and speaks four languages (of which English, thankfully, is one). Of all the people that expressed interest in staying with Mira, she seemed like the most qualified. Still, whoever seems qualified enough? When she came, I was nervous and sweaty and talking too fast. Conscious of her need for time to absorb all the instructions and details I was throwing at her, I tried to slow down and be clear. While *I* know Mira is an easy baby and doesn’t require much, this woman had never met us, or Mira, or been to our home, so everything that was coming out of my mouth was 100% new to her. And, I realized, I was saying it all in her non-native language. “I’ll write it down,” I assured her, and I knew as I said it that 1) it all should have been written down in advance (rookie mistake) and 2) no matter how detailed the list I left for her, it would still be written in English.

Giving the sitter such cursory instructions in not-her-native-language put me right back at the rabbit hutch, Google translating and cursing that responsibility, fearing I’d do some damage to a little life that had great value to someone. Many someones. Except in this scenario, Mira was the rabbits and the babysitter was me.

Pat and I were nervous as cats when we finally left for dinner. My empathy for the sitter was in overdrive, and my mom hormones were screaming to go back home and call the whole thing off. But we didn’t. We stayed on the train, and acknowledged that this is hard–to trust, to let go, to find anyone in the wide world we are calm (confident?!) about leaving her with. We had a lovely dinner, and got home a half-hour earlier than anticipated to a sleeping baby and a good, incident-free report.

Still, when drafting the Guide to Mira for future sitters, I’ll channel my inner rabbit-rookie and think about what anyone would need to know from a first-timer—and foreign-language—perspective. With careful planning and luck on our side, Mira, the rabbits, that garden, and my heart, will be amply provided for, with only a modicum of stress, sweat, or four-letter words.

[grantplant]

One-derful

Mira is one! I’ve been stewing over what I might say about this that isn’t patently obvious (it went too fast, it continues to go too fast, she is magnificent and I love her explosively) and largely failing to come up with anything adequate. I think part of my paralysis is due to reading back through my journals from the past year. As I feared, my nightly entries did little to capture her magic at every stage. My tendency was to recount what we—or she—did in a day: hilarious moments, accomplishments, napping/eating trends, challenges, firsts, and always the sentiments, “I am so tired,” and “I love her so much.” Contrary to my intentions, the vast majority of it is really boring, though these last twelve months have been anything but. And even as I tried to recount all the major moments and pay very close attention to the passage of time, that it wouldn’t bring me up short and remorseful, I still can’t pinpoint when her face lost its baby-roundness or she started having a noticeable will, or how it is that she went from helpless and unknowing to capable and clever.

To my dismay, I am finding that describing Mira and how I feel about her with words alone is like trying to explain how something tastes based on its color. Surely someone somewhere has been able to do this, to write of love and the beloved with shape and sound and texture and dimension enough that it and they are recreated or preserved on the page, but I seem unequal to the task.

My reflections on Year One (and my attempts to translate those reflections into words) have been further waylaid by the actual fact of celebrating this occasion. Pat took Friday off for her birthday, which was the best present she could have received. On Saturday we had the world’s lowest-key birthday party, with a smash-and-grab Pikachu cake that Mira preferred to daintily paw at until I cut her a slice. While neither day was in any way action-packed or particularly taxing (in fact, her naps were inordinately long, giving us ample down-time) we were all-the-way worn out by Sunday. So tired that I spent an hour wrapped in a towel because getting dressed seemed way hard. So tired that, once I did get dressed, I feel asleep fully clothed on top of the covers. I could barely conceive of baking cupcakes for Mira’s day care celebration. Trying to ice each zucchini muffin (gah, I know. I’ve become that mother) with recognizable cat faces at 10 o’clock at night felt like an insurmountable task. How many parents, I wondered, have cried over cupcake decorating for no good reason?

I’m attributing all of this—all of the “I can’t even…” from her birthday until now—to emotional exhaustion. A complete head-and-heart overwhelm. How are we already here? One year—one truly indescribable year—gone. Despite my vigilance, time got to me anyway.

Leading up to Mira’s birthday, I’ve been trying to fill out her baby book, not just with all of the milestones and observations logged in my journals, but those things I’ve been stashing away in her baby box: sonograms, her hospital bracelet, the footprint from her first day on the outside, photos from the baby shower. Yet another attempt on my part to catalogue every possible thing as insurance against forgetting. When Mira woke up from her afternoon nap on Friday, she was ready to play, while I was still trying to make my deadline and finish the baby book project. It wasn’t lost on me that I was distracted from recording details about my child by the actual child herself, clamoring for our attention.

This happened later that same day as I was decorating her birthday cake. Pat had run out for icing reinforcements. The kitchen counter was strewn with food coloring and various implements to make this lump of zucchini loaf (gaaaaaaah I know! Zucchini loaf?! Who am I?) look like Pikachu. While I was painstakingly using cream cheese to create a gleam in his circle-stamped chocolate eye, Mira didn’t give a hoot that his nose was off-center and his smile uneven. She just wanted some Mom.

I imagine photographers struggle with this tension regularly: to commemorate or participate. To record or engage. Obviously I feel strongly that the documentation is important, but what if it interferes with the actual interactions that warrant the documentation in the first place?

And what if the documentation little reflects the reality you’re trying to capture, as with my journals?

I have been in a year-long panic over how to remember her sounds and smells, the look on her face when she tries a new food or falls asleep, the feeling of her hair in my face or the way she walks behind her push-toy, all stiff-legged and herky jerky. The inimitable sounds she makes with her mouth as she baby babbles, imitating our speech and intonation in her own singular language. Thank god for videos. I’ve resisted the urge to just set up a camera that will record every moment of every day, that we truly have a way to travel through space and time at will, but that would be, well, excessive. What about saving a smell, though, or a touch? Upon which technology might I rely for that?

I understand (and appreciate!) the biological imperative of forgetting pain. We know we had pain, but our brains erase the exact sensations we felt. Otherwise who might ever run another marathon or pay their taxes or submit to annual dental cleanings or, well, have another child? And is the price of that necessary forgetting, then, an inability to summon the precise sensations of the sublime? I know, of course, it happened, and I associate it all with the most perfect contentment, but the particulars are maddeningly blurred at the edges, like a beautiful dream that slowly evaporates over the course of a day.

My mom says, and I believe, that this is why people go on to have multiple kids. Not (only) because the mother has forgotten the unbelievably excruciating pain of giving birth, or both parents recall that they were sleep deprived but can’t still feel the specific sensory agony. They do it again to experience once more the spectacular, the ecstasy, that can’t otherwise be summoned.

No amount of photos or videos or journaling, no words or metaphors or blog post, can really do Mira justice. Anything I do or make of her outside of real-time is a simulacrum: bits and pieces, parts of the whole, fragments and outlines. And even if anything could save it all—the full five-sense experience of her—what use would it be for anyone but me or Pat, or maybe the grandparents, who, because of nature and instinct and survival, love her beyond all measure and reason. Through the eyes of another, she is something altogether different from who and what we see.

It’s a losing battle, these efforts to outmaneuver time and the limits of recollection, but it’s the only means we have of remembering what we can, however blurry the edges, however imperfect the impression. Even knowing that there’s nothing to hold of these cherished intangibles, I keep grasping at the fleeting and gossamer.

[grantplant]

For Love or Money

In all of the reading that we have done about the pregnancy and then the first year of baby’s life, one bit of advice I come back to often is making sure that you and your spouse are speaking the same language. That is to say, at the end of the day, when he comes home talking shop and I’m talking baby, that we find a way to hear each other and, also, to talk about something else; something shared.

This is neither automatic, nor is it always easy to do. But it’s something we had to learn to long before I became “primary caregiver” and Pat “primary (cough, sole) breadwinner.” I guess you could say we had some practice at this before we became parents.

Since we moved here in 2013 and I quit my job, work for me has been catch as catch can. Piecemeal. Gigs. Few and far between. Thus, for years, I have done my writing not quite as a hobby but not hardly as a job, either. Pat has ever been the busy worker bee, going out in the morning and coming home in the evening, rooted firmly in the professional sector, while I occupy the domestic one. He’s been talking meetings, projects, and deadlines, while I talk bills and maintenance, groceries and laundry.

Now, of course, the language of domesticity has broadened to encompass diapers and pumping, nap habits, drool, spitting up and standing up. Doctor’s appointments, medication, rashes, baby yoga, developmentally appropriate toys. Soon this language will include walking, talking, weaning.

The key to a multilingual marriage, I am finding, is never to compare. Nothing is more or less than, better or worse, harder or easier. Just different. Very, very different. If she’s sick and screamy and I haven’t eaten or showered or slept, or if I’m physically exhausted from chasing a mischievous toddler around our semi-baby-proofed home, and hauling her plus thirty pounds of groceries up our hill in ninety-degree heat, this is only different from the kind of mental exhaustion Pat might feel after a day of negotiating, problem-solving, presenting. Bread-winning.

Of course, I have had more than one daydream about taking a 9-5 in my field of expertise, and even interviewed for a job in pursuit of this fantasy. I ponder what it might feel like to wear presentable, non-stained clothes to an office with a desk that waits just for me. I’d be valued—paid, even—for the wisdom of my experience. I’d be consulted, met with, relied upon for things that have nothing to with a full dishwasher or clean clothes or toilet tissue.

Conversely, I know Pat has had his share of stay-at-home-dad reveries. Or, at least, visions of being home more. Being home for bedtime every night. Never missing a milestone or a first.

It wasn’t until Mira started going to daycare and I started doing some “real” work for real money that I gained greater facility with this language that Pat speaks: that of the working parent. Let me preface this by saying that I am beyond glad to be working, even if it is still very part-time, piecemeal, and catch as catch can. Gig-like and temporary. Even if I’m only pulling in one-one hundredth of what keeps this family ship afloat.

And yet, and yet.

When we had Mira, call it drinking the parent Kool-Aid, call it biology, call it what you will, but I think Pat and I both realized that in life, there’s her and then there is everything else. Her health, her needs, her sleep, her safety, her education, her life. Then ours. Our everything. It’s all secondary. In there, with all that other stuff of ours, is the work. Work that makes life possible, but work that has nothing to do with—in fact, that draws us away from—being with and focusing on Mira.

I am finding that it’s very difficult to care as much, to be as motivated, about work when it is so plainly not as important as the work of raising her. Now, maybe if I were a heart surgeon or the president or an undercover detective, I might feel differently about the impact of my efforts. But I’m not. I edit.

And when this editing spills over into the time she is home with me, when it distracts me and encroaches on time I’d otherwise devote to her, then I really feel the sting. The apathy. The resentment. And therein lies my insight.

Pat doesn’t have that luxury of only working when she is in care. He’s at it five days a week, like it or not. Saying goodbye to her every morning is nonnegotiable. Being away for nine-plus-hour days is the reality. Late meetings, early studies, it all pulls him away from what—who—he cares about most, and the things he’d always rather be doing, helping with, watching, marveling at.

Remember what I said about not comparing? That it’s never better or harder or easier? That’s bullshit. Given the choice of doing (anything, all things) for love or money, I’d go with love every time. But life can’t run on love alone, and Pat happens to be the only (extremely well-) employed one of us.

For that I am grateful. For that I am sorry. For that I am indebted.

Here’s what I know about language-learning: Before fluency, you can understand a language as a non-native speaker. Context helps. Maybe you can even speak proficiently, conversationally. But nuances get lost, and translations are imperfect. Answers don’t always match questions. Even with the purest intentions, misunderstandings happen. But, having dipped my toe into working while parenting, I am catching a lot more than I ever did before. When I listen now to this language Pat speaks, the shop talk, the stress, the exhaustion, what I’m hearing is all the things that keep him away, that subtract from his time with our girl, that take require his attention over that which matters to him beyond all the rest.

I will probably never be fluent; not in the language of the sole provider, not as long as we live here. Every day my comprehension is improving, though, and I have learned enough to know that these things he does, he doesn’t do for money. Yes, he’s paid, but he does it all out of the most magnificent and selfless of love there is.

So I don’t compare. The guilt, the unfairness, my love for him, would crush me. Instead I listen. Listen, and be thankful. And strive toward fluency.

[grantplant]

Vacation Mode

What were we thinking? Even for two fairly healthy, well-rested, childless humans, it was an ambitious itinerary:

Zurich, Switzerland to Chicago, Illinois by plane

Chicago to Des Moines, Iowa by car

Des Moines to Chicago by car

Chicago to Atlanta, Georgia by plane

Atlanta to Rosemary Beach, Florida by car

Rosemary Beach to Atlanta by car

At this point, Pat and I parted ways.

Pat’s itinerary went from Atlanta to San Francisco, California, and a week later, San Francisco to Zurich via London.

Mira and I traveled from Atlanta to Zurich via Frankfurt.

So you can see that attempting this three-week adventure abroad with a 10 month-old might be considered madness, but only if you didn’t know this ten-month old. She more than earned her Baby Traveler badge. And, for her troubles, she met countless family and friends on both Pat’s and my side of the family, went to a wedding, touched the ocean, met sand for the first time, familiarized herself with dogs, added four new states to her “been to” map and two more Swiss bibs and stuffed airplanes to her baby-flier collection, inspired a couple of saintly strangers (and one illness) to help us get back home without incident*, and completely undid any last vestiges of a good sleep schedule.

Mira and I returned from this vacation sans Dad, feeling very tired and out of sorts indeed. At least, I felt tired and out of sorts. I am just interpreting her inability to sleep at night for longer than 45 minutes at a stretch as such. Until Pat got back, her MO was to wake up crying every hour until I took her to bed with me, during which time she kept sleep just out of reach, alternately rolling, flailing, crying, and—in one super-unfortunate case—falling out of the bed, until morning came again.

We have been home now for as long as we were away. In that time, we’ve had two rounds of house guests, Mira got sick with a nasty upper respiratory infection, and our fridge stopped working.

When the repair guy came, you’ll be happy to know I didn’t kiss him on the mouth. This is in part because 1) he was extremely short, and the angle was all wrong, and 2) our fridge being out of commission, even for the six days it took to send a repairman, wasn’t so disastrous thanks to our second--or, as I think of it, baby--refrigerator. Baby not because it’s tiny (though it is, and all refrigerators here are) but because we bought it right before the baby came to accommodate all the pre-prepared food we stocked in anticipation of total-life paralysis. So, thanks, baby fridge. Aside from a few condiment casualties, you saved us a lot of food.

The interesting part (to me, at least) of this overlong fridge anecdote is what exactly was wrong with our fridge. I’d told the guy that the freezer worked, but the fridge was fully off and its light only turned on when the freezer door was open.

He pulled out his little calipers and a dial-looking thing, and in less than 10 minutes he had an answer.

Someone (me? Simba?) had pressed the vacation button.

The what?

The VACATION BUTTON. [pointing]

Well, son of a bitch. I thought maybe it made piña coladas or emitted spray tan, but I was always too afraid to press it. Now I know. The vacation button turns off the fridge. How could such a sublime-looking image represent something so utterly stupid?

Pat’s questions was, who needs a vacation button for their refrigerator?

Residents of energy-conscious countries the offer employees three weeks of vacation because, in addition to conserving energy, they promote a healthy work-life balance. They must not feel any attachment to their ketchup, pickles, butter, olives and Tibetan chili sauce.

Could the amount of energy saved by turning the fridge off really warrant the time and effort of completely emptying and cleaning the fridge, and the expense of wasting/replacing those non-perishable perishables?

My judgement is clouded. I’m still mourning the loss of that exquisitely spicy chili sauce.

But this story has a happy ending: Our fridge works again, and now we know what happens when you press the umbrella/toadstool. And this whole notion of a vacation button—specifically, the act of turning it off to make the fridge come back on—has been illustrative in other realms of life.

In an epilogue to my previous post, Cry, Baby, Cry, we’ve had to revisit sleep training. Whether we are attributing it to our lazy holiday approach to nighttime routines or jet lag or teething or upper respiratory infections or all of the above, Mira’s sleep habits had degraded to the point that she was only sleeping on one or the other of us. Which, I’ll tell you, feels good and snuggly with the baby breath and the tickly chick fur in your face and that wonderful smell and the snarfles and fat little fingers flicking you in the night. But it’s hell on pretty much all other aspects of life.

Exactly one week ago, we decided to retry the crying it out, but this time not going in every 4 to 6 minutes to reassure her, something which seemed to make her more upset rather than less. We just let her cry. And cried a little ourselves, as we’d been doing in inverse proportion to sleeping.

I am not kidding you for a second when I say that it worked. It worked so well, and so fast, it feels like a joke. I am actually pissed off by how effective this has been. She is now sleeping 13 hours at a stretch, and when we put her down at night or for naps, she cries only for as long as it takes us to walk back downstairs. By the time my feet hit the living room, all is quiet, and remains so until morning.

Oh.

Before, when nothing was working (especially not our brains) was it that we weren’t ready? Or was it that she wasn’t ready? Or, after a prolonged period of mutual unreadiness,  did we—parents and child—both reach readiness at the same time? I don’t know. I hate to think that had we just been braver for longer and let her cry more and harder that we’d all have been sleeping better and sooner. I’d rather blame jet lag, for this and any number of other ills.

Mind you, I have only had one week of enough rest after about seven months of too little, so I should really walk before I run. But suddenly, so many things seem possible. Pat and I have joined Weight Watchers (because seriously, scale, WTAF?), I went to the gym yesterday for the first time since before our trip, I’m setting better professional and personal writing boundaries, and I am *actually getting things done.*  On average, I’m also noticing fewer personal injuries, lost items, scheduling screw-ups, embarrassing interactions, and adult-onset tantrums.

Holy shit and hallelujah! Is this what sleep does?

I have heard that for every time zone you cross, expect a day of jet lag. Perhaps the length of the trip comes into play, too. For every day away, expect a day of getting back on schedule. Could the number of destinations factor? For each additional location, add a week of recovery time. Maybe this is a secret formula that three-week-holiday-taking Europeans don’t tell us long-weekends-only Americans. That and their cryptic energy-saving appliance-settings. Did somebody press my vacation button? And who unpressed it? (Simbaaaaa?)

We had plans to return to the US in July, two weeks from now. Three weeks of  family in three different destinations. As George W. said, “Fool me once, shame on... shame on you. Fool me can’t get fooled again.”

With that in mind, we’ll be here with both fridges full and flipped on, catching up on a half-year’s worth of sleep, and waiting just a hair longer before we push the vacation button again.

*Special shout-outs to:

Lufthansa desk lady, you told me the check-in desk was closed, computers off, for another two hours and there was no one in the baggage room, but proceeded to check me in, assign me a seat, *and* tag and take all of my luggage, all of which arrived intact at my final destination. I love you.

Gentleman in 28G, formerly of 20G, for volunteering your bulkhead seat so Mira could sleep in a bassinet and stop pulling on the hair of the passenger in 28F. When the flight attendant thanked you for your kindness, you said, “I am just being human.” I love you, too.

The stomach bug that struck mere days before our departure, taking down my mom, my aunt, our friend, and Pat, yet somehow avoiding me and Mira altogether. I owe you two days curled in the fetal position.

[grantplant]

Cry, baby, cry

William Shakespeare and James B. Grant both said, “All the world’s a stage.” Shakespeare was referring to the thing the players stand upon; JBG was referencing the stage as a synonym for a phase, and usually said it in reference to children. One of his other favorite sayings, up there with “small corrections,” was “This too shall pass.” And he really believed that. Nothing lasts forever because, indeed, everything is a stage, all things always progressing however slowly or quickly into their next evolution.

Depending on the context, this can be either a great relief or deeply discomfiting. When things are glorious and working like a well-oiled machine, enjoy it because it may not (probably won’t) last. When things are wretched, relax—it won’t be this way forever.

With regards to our little 10-month-old player, her current stage is sleepus interruptus, and has been for a while now. In the beginning of the end of her (and our) great sleeping, it was sickness, then it was rolling over, followed by sitting up, and now standing. I understand walking brings much of the same. Whatever new skill she is mastering, whatever the new phase or leap or growth spurt, it has meant that those near-silent nights of baby-snarfling all the way through to dawn are a distant memory. Sleep, we hardly knew ye!

I know I’ve said before, and I really meant, that Mira is not a crier. She just… didn’t do it. After a month of observing and interacting with her, the daycare asked me how they’d know she was unhappy, and I said, “She’ll cry.” She just wasn’t often unhappy.

Given the general lack of crying in all realms, “cry it out” at nighttime hasn’t really been in our parental lexicon. At the same time, though, we acknowledged that crying was actually a good thing, and something she should be doing to release the tensions of the day and as a means of communicating with us. In those rare instances where she did shed a tear or two, we didn’t exactly encourage it, but we did let her get it all the way out, and we certainly paid attention. (The first, and maybe most memorable, time she awoke crying, she’d vomited in her crib and was rolling around in it.)

Since then, the waking-and-crying in the night has happened so often and in so many different ways, for reasons we can occasionally pinpoint but just as often can’t possibly fathom, and it almost never involves vomiting on herself. It has now become the rule, instead of the exception.

So last week, for only the second time in our brief career as parents, we found ourselves so utterly exhausted and without answers that we stopped the spinning wheel of possible solutions on, you guessed it: crying it out. In addition to feeling like Pat and I were going to break if we didn’t start sleeping for more than three hours at a time, we were also thinking it might be useful for her to hone her self-soothing skills before out big-and-imminent international trip, which begins Thursday.

My mom told me that when she and my dad did cry-it-out with my sister, she remembers wanting to break a jar of granola over his head because it was so excruciating. Her anecdote made me wonder about the jar of granola. (Ah, the 70s. Did she also want to strangle him with the macrame hanging-plant holder?) Also, why my poor dad was on the receiving end of her aggression?

38 years after my dad almost got cerealed about the skull, I completely understood her murderous inclinations, born of complete helplessness and frustration. The most insidious thing about cry-it-out is once you start, you can’t cave or else you reward the crying. That knowledge alone was enough to make me want to wail right along with Mira.

That first night, we were spared too much agony—she only cried for 30 minutes, after which we drank martinis. (Did my parents eat granola after Mirrin finally fell to sleep?) It was early morning, after she’d nursed and wouldn’t go back to sleep that my resolve shattered. She had been crying off, but mostly on, for close to two hours when I finally scooped her up. She was asleep within minutes, arms wrapped tightly around my neck, and I renounced cry-it-out for good.

Out one side of their mouths, experts say, “Go with your gut; do what works for you,” while making very convincing arguments with ample supporting evidence that if you don’t mind the research, you’re gonna fuck your kid up six ways to Sunday.Or else they go back on their own wisdom, engaging in a terrible double-speak that feels like psychological torture. (Remember how we convinced you that Baby will break if she doesn’t nap exclusively in her crib? Well, ACTUALLY Baby needs to be adaptable and have the ability to sleep in a mop bucket should circumstances dictate. Remember when we said that Baby is resilient and flexible and hardy and you shouldn’t stress about inadvertently doing permanent damage to Him/Her because you’re a total newb? Here are One Million and One Surprising and Unavoidable Ways You Absolutely WILL Screw Your Kid Up. #1: Caving during cry it out.)

If listening to her cry herself to the point of gasping was a low low of the last ten months, then holding her tightly and ending those tears was definitely a high high. For an incurable codependent like myself, letting another soul feel anguish while knowing full well that I can end it—and how—is maybe the most agonizing thing I can conceive of. That, or being locked in a coffin full of spiders. So yeah, I was selfish and probably did irreversible damage and Pat and I have not slept through the night since.

You might say we are back at square one, except I don’t feel that way. In the wake of this failed sleep training (and god, I pray, not *because of it*) Mira has evolved into a stage of mild separation anxiety and more pronounced stranger danger. As such, she has been doing her fair share of crying during the daytime, too. This has highlighted for me that there are plenty of tears to be cried—healthy, expressive, tension-busting tears—over things I can’t fix or solve or banish or prevent (the falling! My heart.). So for those things I can cure with a cuddle, I’m gonna. Sorry, experts. Sorry, Mira. #momfail

Yesterday was Pat’s birthday, and we had a friend coming to stay with Mira while we went to dinner. Friday, we’d visited Pat’s new office and she’d wailed at each and every new person that spoke to her. We had friends for lunch on Saturday and she screamed almost nonstop the two hours they were here. So yeah, we weren’t feeling extra confident about going out and leaving her. We got her to sleep, though, and left detailed instructions in the event (the inevitability, really) she woke. Then caught an Uber, and more or less resigned ourselves to getting a call and coming right back home.

Three hours later, we were home after an incredible meal and the report was: Mira squawked on two separate occasions but both times she feel back to sleep on her own. No crying, no stranger danger, zero trauma.

Of course, she proceeded to wake up as soon as we climbed into our bed, and a further three times after that. She woke this morning an hour earlier than usual and was super cranky until I dropped her at day care, where she turned on the smiles and went right to her carer with nary a whimper.

A few other old chestnuts come to mind:

You never know. It’s worth a shot. Never say never. You can sleep when you’re dead.

In the meantime, we’ll let her cry when she needs to, and we’ll console her when we can. Even at the expense of our own sleep. Given the choice, I’d obviously rather cry myself than make her cry unnecessarily. And while I’m crying, I’ll try to remember that this is only a stage. Nothing lasts forever. This, too, shall pass. Everything will feel better in the morning. Everything feels better after a good night’s…. wait. Let’s roll that back.

It’s only a stage. Nothing lasts forever. This too shall pass.

[grantplant]

Tradition

I can’t read that word without hearing Tevye from Fiddler on the Roof. Come to think of it, there are a number of things I can’t read without singing Fiddler on the Roof. Mira’s book If I Were a Kitty, for example. (If I were a kit-ty/ meowmeowmeowmeowmeowmeowmeowmeowmeowmeowmeowmeowmeowmeowmeow/ All day long I’d meowmeowmeowmeowmeow/ If I were a kit-ty CAT/ Meow!)

Anyway, tradition. (Or traditiooooooon!)

Yesterday was Sechseläuten, the Zurich festival at which a snowman (the Böögg), packed with explosives, well, explodes, and winter is thus vanquished. Or that is the idea. The length of time it takes for the snowman’s head to combust is a predictor for the quality of summer we should expect. Quick and fiery = good summer, slow and smoldering = bad summer. Records show that yesterday, the snowman lost his head just shy of 10 minutes. As compared to 2016’s dismal 43 minutes and 34 seconds (it was raining), yesterday indicates a great summer ahead… except I’m looking at a snow forecast for the next three days. I guess using pyrotechnics—or rodents, for that matter—to predict weather is an inexact science.

This is our fifth year living in the Canton of Zurich, and the fifth time we haven’t attended Sechseläuten. How can this be, you may wonder. Someone has gone to the trouble of building a giant snowman, which they will blow to pieces, and we are too busy to go watch all of Zurich parade around in costume and on horseback while it burns? Sigh. I know. We have valid excuses for three of those five years (rain, travel, too pregnant to play) but, really, we should have witnessed this spectacle by now.

Just as we should’ve probably gone to Knabenschiessen, a shooting competition for 13 to 17 year olds.

Or Räbechilbi, the turnip festival in which everyone carves turnips in glorification of this root vegetable.

Neither have we been to an alphorn festival or heard professional yodelers which, after four and a half years, feels borderline criminal.

Though we have attended Swiss carnival, called Fasnacht (admittedly, by accident), skirted the edges of Street Parade, rode the ferris wheel and eaten Tibetan momo at Züri Fäscht,  travelled to a mountain village to see the cows descend for winter, visited a tractor festival, had a pint or three for Okoberfest, and watched fireworks countless times for Swiss National Day, only the fireworks have been a more-than-once event, and then only because they are all but unavoidable anywhere in the country. I could see them from my bed.

 So, yeah… we are…. not joiners. I am not terribly proud of this, but neither is this anything new. In almost nine years in the Bay Area, I never once went to Bay to Breakers, or Pride, or a Giants parade, or Halloween in the Castro when that was still a thing. I did other things, just not those things.

If I were to curl up on an analyst’s couch with you in an effort to diagnose this aversion to what some might call mandatory but I deem mostly missable, I’d probably recall my Freshman year at UGA. I won the football lottery—kind of a huge deal–and had a ticket to all the home games. The first time, a girl sitting next to me threw up on my feet until her boyfriend whipped off his cap and caught the rest. The last time, I had a panic attack in the bleachers from the crush of people, the noise, and the heat. I gave my remaining ticket to my best friend, so she was there for the Tennessee game when, after the Bulldogs won, fans inexplicably pulled down the goal post and paraded it through town. I wasn’t sorry to miss that.

That football season was pretty much the end of me and crowds. And me and noise, for that matter. Clapping and drums make me blinky, loud music makes my heart race, crowds make me panicky, and any combination therein makes me hyperventilate. Very, very cool. I have ever been hip.

Here in Switzerland, you might think, the circumstances are tamer. What if you’re in a crush of cows, say, and not frat boys? What if the music being amplified is, say, polka or alphorn or yodeling? Well friend, gunshots are loud, even when the shooter is a Swiss teenager. An exploding snowman is still an explosion. And Street Parade, by any country’s standards, is just foul. (That came closest of all to having a sorority sister barf down my leg. Never wear flip flops to Street Parade. Or a college football game. Or around cows. Just don’t.)

For Christmas, my mom got us this lovely book called Our Family Traditions.

As yet, it’s empty, but even as I ruminate on what won’t go in there, I am obviously thinking a lot about what will. So many family traditions, in both Pat’s and my families, revolve around food. And it’s early days in the life of Mira and our family as three. I hardly think pureed carrots or mashed banana are going to become a holiday custom of any kind. It’ll be at least another year before we bust out The Sound of Music for a nostalgic pre-Christmas viewing.

But neither are we sitting on our duffs waiting until she’s able to order from a menu before we try and make some Grant-Bowen family memories. She may not have had a first Halloween costume (I still regret this) but by God, she wore her ugly Christmas sweater to go pick out a tree.

Over Easter, Pat got a generous four-and-a-half day weekend so we rented a car, booked a hotel room, and set out for two nights in Interlaken. We have sworn to ourselves that we won’t leave this country without having seen its major cities and landmarks. To that end, we had a lovely afternoon exploring the mountain village of Murren at the base of the Jungfrau, which has long been on our list. By midnight that night, though, we were on the road, driving back to Zurich with a sick, screamy infant. She had cried so hard every time she woke in the hotel room that she was hicupping. (Gee, I wonder who she gets the hysterics from.) So we spent Easter at home in our pjs. Mira got an animatronic bunny and chick, Pat and I ate rack of lamb for dinner. That’s tradition enough for me.

Whatever worked on our weekend jaunt to London in January, or the two weeks we spent in California last November, we didn’t have that luck or mojo over Easter weekend. In two weeks’ time, we leave for an extended US tour spanning Chicago and Des Moines, Atlanta and the Florida panhandle. I am praying for a minimum of sickness and screaming, no hyperventilating, and drumming or gun shots only when strictly necessary. I will be wearing flip flops at times, but I will also be on my guard for overserved revelers and overwatered livestock alike.

Please wish us Godspeed, clean feet, and a full, hyperventilation-free book of family memories.

[grantplant]

They All Saw a Cat

Last week, I was innocently skimming through Emily Nussbaum’s New Yorker commentary on the Girls series finale. I stopped watching this show a while ago—I liked it, and much of the material in early seasons resonated with me, but to a point. That point, or points, were Adam, the whiplashiest character I’ve ever hate-love-hated, forcing himself on his girlfriend and then Hannah repeatedly assaulting her ear with a q-tip. But I digress. I’ve followed the cultural zeitgeist of the show and Lena Dunham herself, and I like Emily Nussbaum, so I read the review. (You can, too.)

Somewhere in the middle of the piece, in a parenthetical no less, Nussbaum asserts: (You can’t be a writer without being entitled: Why else would you think anyone wants to listen to you?)

Record scratch. Oh, god. Is that possibly possibly true? Or rather, are any of the components that make up this doozy of a declaration?  Because she’s saying 1) all writers are entitled, and 2) that the act of writing is synonymous with the belief that anyone wants to listen to us, and 3) that that unanimous and inherent entitlement is the reason why we believe that anyone wants to listen to us.

Before I put “Delete blog/set book(s) on fire” on my to-do list, I paused to think.

Couldn’t this (horrible! faulty!) logic be applied to anyone who ever created anything? A chef, or a painter, or, as my tech-minded husband said testily, “How about all the people in the world who feel sure that their app is the one that needs to be made?”

I admit, I spent five years of my life working at a nonprofit that encourages hundreds of thousands of people annually that they have a story (or perhaps dozens) to tell. This nonprofit has been likened more than once to a new breed of parent that believes and convinces their child that he or she is a special snowflake unlike any other, and is capable of—and dare I say it, entitled to--anything he or she sets his magical little mind to. (I am parent to a nine-month-old snowflake myself, and understand how terribly, seductively easy it is to adopt this mindset. No judgement here!)

I’m not now, nor was I ever, saying we’re all Pulitzer-quality yarn-spinners (Nussbaum actually is), but I genuinely do believe that we all have stories to tell that are unlike the stories that anyone else can tell. No one is exactly the same, and while that doesn’t imbue their differences with magic or the right to special treatment, it does add value to their perspective. This perspective allows each of us to experience, understand, live, and do everything differently from each other, and it also makes that uniqueness of experience unknowable to anyone else. That is, unless we decide to share it. And how do we share it, but by telling stories. That story could be painted, plated, coded, thrown on a wheel and fired in a kiln, or knit from dog hair into a dog sweater. Making something out of nothing is telling a story of some kind.

This storytelling isn’t new, btw. We are not talking about a tool for millennials to message each other disappearing videos, or broadcast their every location or opinion or achievement to the masses. People have been telling stories from the very beginning, with words and hieroglyphs and inventions and yes, novels and essays and, now, blogs and critiques and columns.

I am tickled by the thought that anyone ever looked at a cave painting drawn by one of our earliest ancestors and thought, “That entitled sonofabitch.” Maybe they did! Totally their right to feel that way, too.

As part of this snowflake-producing creative writing nonprofit, NaNoWriMo utilized the horrible, useful, sometime hilarious millennial tool for storytelling (and searching and archiving), the hashtag, specifically for a campaign called  #whyIwrite (about, you guessed it, why you/I/anyone writes). I did a quick search (thanks, hashtags!) and not a single person wrote “Because I am entitled.” (But then who, other than Emily Nussbaum, is that self-aware? I’m looking at you, caveman.) My quick-search also turned up what I and my cohorts had to say on the subject back in 2011.

“I write because so many things are better read than said. Misunderstandings are too easy in spoken communication; we talk so much and so fast and with so many interruptions! Writing is a haven where I may sit with a concept, clarifying here and editing there, until I can stand back and say, “Here. This is exactly what I mean.””

Reading this makes me realize, I guess, that I’ve gone and made a leap of my own. I am operating on the (possibly gross/horrible/faulty) logic that to write is to tell a story of some kind. And while my above answer does address why I *write* my stories instead of, for example, saying them out loud or painting them (can’t) or cooking them (sometimes I do that, too), or coding them (nope), it doesn’t ask or address exactly why I tell stories (aka create anything, written or otherwise) in the first place.

We’ll get to that in a sec, though.

Do you remember the study showing that by reading literary fiction, we humans’ emotional sensitivity is improved? The NYTimes characterized the findings thusly:

“…after reading literary fiction, as opposed to popular fiction or serious nonfiction, people performed better on tests measuring empathy, social perception and emotional intelligence — skills that come in especially handy when you are trying to read someone’s body language or gauge what they might be thinking.”

I don’t know what middling impact or nonimpact my nonserious nonfiction (as opposed to its serious counterparts, or literary or popular fiction) might have or not have but… this is #whyitellstories. My stories happen to be true stories, and they’re not always mine, and so I have no idea if any of it increases or promotes understanding in this often baffling and misunderstood world. If not this way, though, how else will we gain any insight into what’s happening elsewhere to other people of other belief systems and capabilities and ethnicities and everything else that makes up our own snowflakey identities?

I’m not writing to be read, or telling stories to be heard or listened to. The writing-down part is ultimately a selfish act; a putting together of disparate pieces to make something comprehensible in times of confusion. I am using the written word to make sense of, well, everything. So why do I share it? Why tell the story instead of logging it away, sussed but otherwise unconsumed? In the hopes that maybe I’m not alone in my wonderings or bafflement. That anyone else who ever felt confused or amazed or humbled or edified might see the way it happened over here, through this lens of experience, and might think that even though it was different for them, maybe it was also the same.

Even though I think hope Emily Nussbaum is wrong, there’s more than enough room for her opinion and perspective and… were we to meet over a Cinnabon or a tub of hummus, she may come to believe I am the wrong one, indeed the most entitled nonserious-nonfiction writer she ever did meet. We’re probably both right. And wrong. And there is plenty of room for both versions or some combination therein.

As I am often guilty of doing, because I ultimately believe that all of life can be explained by children’s books (which further reinforces my view on the value of storytellers, I guess) I will bring this back to a book that we, the Grant-Bowens, have been reading a lot. They All Saw A Cat is about a cat, as seen by a child, a dog, a flea, a bird, and a bat, among other animals, until, in the end, it sees itself. Each creature sees this cat differently, based on its size, perception, biology, and biases. The way the cat sees itself is the only way it could ever perceive itself in the world, unless that child, dog, flea, bird, bat, and anything else so inclined, shares the way *it* sees the cat. This not only changes the way the cat sees itself, but also the cat’s understanding of the way a child, dog, flea, bird, and bat sees things, too.

I used to think this should be required reading for all nonfiction writers, and then expanded it to all writers, period. Increasingly, I’m thinking it goes on the syllabus for life.

We all see the cat. But how do we see it? And more importantly, why do we see it as we do? If no one else pipes up to answer the question, we will only ever see it one way—our own way--and worse, never realize that there are other ways; ways we can’t even imagine.And they are all weird and surprising and beautiful, and they are all true.

The entitlement of the writer, or the solipsism a writer-free world. I know which I fear more. And so I hit ‘publish.’ Emily, send me your address and I’ll send you a book. It’s about a cat.

[grantplant]

Inside/Outside

This week, Mira is nine months old. I guess nine is a number pregnant (har) with significance, and I’m wrestling with the impossible-seeming reality that she’s been out for about as long as she was in.

She was a timely little lass, arriving two days after her due date. In fact, everything about her arrival was routine. I started contractions the evening of July 13, recording their strength and frequency throughout the night, calling into the doctor around 2 AM and then taking a cab to the hospital at 6 that morning. Boring, right?

The family room we requested was open, so the staff instructed us to settle in, nap, and try to eat something. I puked a lot, someone brought us lunch at 12, and by 2 I was in the tub in the birthing room. By 3, I was on the bed, hooked up to my short-release opiate (“the happy button,” they called it, and it was, for a short while at least).

At 7:49 that evening, after what felt like an eternity of pain and bellowing but was really only a few action-packed hours, out popped Mira, all according to the birthing plan. Granted, it was a simple one: Get her out, preferably without an epidural, and delay cord-cutting until she’d gotten the maximum benefit of the placenta. The rest was built in to their (the hospital’s) approach: baby stays on mama, no bathing, relaxed approach to taking weight and height. What didn’t go to plan was a burst blood vessel during delivery, and the somewhat extensive blood loss and stitching that happened immediately after Mira’s arrival. And I thought I was done with the pain and discomfort. But I had 7.7 pounds and 19 inches of Mira to behold, so I was well-distracted.

If I am this nostalgic about her entrance into our lives a mere nine months later, I can only imagine what I’m going to feel in nine or nineteen years! Hear me now: you don’t have to listen to my blubbering. Just pat my arm and walk away.

In the era of Mira, I have an all-new subset of favorite things. Where the saddest part of my day used to be saying goodbye to Pat when he left for work, and the gladdest part welcoming him back (gag, sorry… I love him), I have added to the sad list dropping Mira off at daycare (on those days that she goes), and the glad list collecting her again, as well as seeing her sleepy face first thing in the morning. Also on my list of favorites is reading to her before bedtime, and I daresay it’s a fave of hers, too. She’s really into Yummy Yucky (I think she likes the baby) and we’re digging deep into that whole series of opposites: Quiet Loud, Big Little, No No Yes Yes.

Someone told me that opposites have to be taught in context or else kids will confuse which is which. Near/Far, for example. I guess the way Grover did it on Sesame Street is the right way?

Otherwise, the two get conflated and baby/toddler/child can’t remember if near is called near or far, and far is called far or near. Same for above/below, front/back, inside/outside, and so on. (For my part, I swapped the meanings of by accident/on purpose when I was little, and I remember keenly how confused I was when I’d get in trouble after claiming I did something on purpose. Opposites, man. Tricky.)

I’m sure one day Mira and I will have the age old conversation about how she was once inside of me, and then she came out. She may ask what it was like then, when she was growing in my belly, and I’m glad I have a handful of mostly sunny, positive blog posts from that time to point her to. For all the journaling I do now, jotting daily milestones, challenges, dear moments and my impressions, I did very little writing for myself in those first nine months.

It’s not that my blog posts were at all dishonest, but they didn’t paint the whole picture. There was a significant period of time—mostly relegated to the first half of my pregnancy, when I was so sick and dispirited—that I felt sure we’d made a terrible mistake. I was too ashamed to put to paper everything in my head and heart: I wasn’t going to like being a mom, at least not right away; this was an aspirational journey and I’d know at the end of my life I made the right choice and it was all worth it. I just had to grin and bear the rest. I was surely going to suffer from postpartum depression. I think I was already depressed.

The latter four and a half months were a lot better. I stopped throwing up and started eating; winter ended and the sun came out; I could see, then feel, evidence of the baby inside; we found out, finally, that we were having a girl. It got better, but I don’t think I ever stopped feeling a low level dread born of deep uncertainty about what Pat and I had gotten ourselves into.

That is, until July 14, 2016 at 7:49 PM. Or maybe 7:50.

Unbeknownst to me, Pat and the midwife (who had become fast friends and mutual fans during my private trial) had been gaming how many more pushes until Mira was free of me and fully out in the world. I was on my hands and knees facing away from them, eyes closed, praying, bargaining, asking for help, begging for someone to get her out. The midwife had told Pat three more, but it only took two before I looked down and saw that heap of baby below me. Then I wailed. I remember thinking that I wasn’t even happy—not yet. Just relieved. It was over.

And then the switch flipped.

Inside/Outside. Before/After. Sad/Glad. Pain/Joy. Where there had been notions and expectations, deep uncertainty followed by the most incredible pain I ever hope to know, her arrival marked the start of a new reality. And this reality couldn’t be more different from the one I’d imagined.

If you know me, you know I hate being wrong. Almost as much as I hate spiders and bigotry. I’m so ashamed of how wrong I was about this. I’m so grateful that I was so wrong about this.

Wrong/Right. Sad/Happy. Endured/Treasured. Burden/Blessing. I give thanks for opposites, and living long enough (or being patient or foolish or lucky enough) to learn the difference between the two.