True dat

Okay, my husband did his homework and picked his nickname. Double True, but I'll call him DT for short. And no, I don't think I understand what he's getting at.

I do know that thinking of him as Double True is making that the old Spandeau Ballet song, "True" go through my head, so there will need to be apologizing (from him to me, natch) in the QoD house tonight.

Introducing...

I am feeling the need for pseudonyms.

It feels a bit awkward, writing about "my 4-year-old daughter" and "my infant son" all the time, so I have decided to take the plunge and name my family. Of course, it's been awkward for my kids at daycare already, as they're the only ones without names, so this is a bonus all around. I've been putting off doing this, though, because it's just so final. But here we go. Since PK (Pseudonymous Kid) was already taken, I give you... WonderGirl and Rocco.

Of course, my husband also needs a name, but I'll let him pick it and update you later.

I've also noticed that, although I intended this blog to be about a mixture of school and parenting, the parenting part is taking over the school part. After careful consideration (don't laugh), I believe that is because parenting is more universally understood and therefore much easier to describe. Graduate school, especially a very open-ended PhD program with a nontraditional advisory relationship... not so much.

In an effort to make it more likely that I will write about school, I'm also going to name my advisors. I'm in an odd situation of working in a field that's a bit of an offshoot from my actual department. Therefore, I have one advisor in my department, but who doesn't know my subject matter, one advisor from a different department in my subject area and one advisor from an outside agency. They are:

Dr. Heroic, in my department. Protects me from rabid dogs and people trying to usurp authorship, sees it as her role to support women in graduate school. Has no idea what I'm doing.

Dr. Nice, my true subject-matter advisor. Younger than I am (let us never speak of this again), still learning how to advise a student, very well-meaning, collaborates heavily with:

Dr. Brilliant, who came on as an advisor late, and I'm still not sure how it happened. Adjunct in my department, seems like a nice guy, but doesn't get that I actually have to think through issues and take time to do things. He apparently has no such constraints.

All this naming is tiring. I need chocolate.

Now I am the master

My advisor may have won round one but I've come back strong. After I fired off two content-filled missives yesterday (on a weekend!), rife with results and pink with future possibilities, my advisor emailed me tonight with approval and one further thought. He wrote at 9:20pm; I replied at 9:43pm.

Round two to Ruth.

Hopefully this makes up for the fact that I'm taking the kids to the zoo in the morning and won't be at school until afternoon.

Dear Mr. or Ms. Clothing Manufacturer,

Since you apparently have so many extra pockets floating around your assembly facility that you are forced to either sew them into infant clothing or throw them away, do you think, perhaps, you could PUT A POCKET IN A PAIR OF WOMEN'S PANTS?

I just feel silly asking my 8-month-old to carry my keys.

Yours truly,
Ruth

Why I wrote the previous post

Obviously, with my two children, I am not the stereotype of a woman who has problems conceiving or staying pregnant. I have often wished that those of us who know how those things feel had some sort of aura, or gang sign, or secret handshake so that we could recognize each other easily. Before I had my son, that wish grew out of my need to remember that I wasn't alone, that other people had miscarriages and still had healthy babies later. Now, it's different. I am acutely aware that almost anyone I see could be dealing with infertility or loss, and I have no desire to play the role of the clueless fertile, or the mom with two kids who has no idea how it feels.

Twice today, though, that has happened.

My daughter's preschool teacher, a dynamic woman who is 35 and about to get married, told me that she has fibroids and "every time" she's conceived, the fibroids grow aggressively and she loses the baby. She won't be able to have children and is looking at a hysterectomy sooner rather than later. I was reminded again (though perhaps "reminded" is the wrong word to use when something is rarely far from your thoughts) how over-the-moon lucky I was to have a healthy baby before our nightmares started. People who have miscarriages before having a healthy child are forced to mourn the loss of a specific pregnancy and, at the same time, confront the fear that they will never know how it feels to be a parent to a living child.

The second incident was when we went to one of our favorite restaurants for dinner tonight. The last time we had seen one particular server was several months ago, when he held our baby and told us that his wife was pregnant and he needed practice. He had been so earnest and excited and, well, cute. Tonight, he was startled to see how much our son had grown, and when we asked how much longer his wife had to go, he smiled a little and said, "She couldn't go through with it." I have no idea if that means that she miscarried or had an abortion. We were both effusive in telling him we were sorry, but I knew that he had no idea that we had any clue what he might have been feeling. He played with our son an amazing amount for someone who had dealt with either of those situations. I felt completely helpless and awkward, which I never expected to feel in such a situation.

I often think that when my kids are older, I'd like to find ways to help support families who have suffered miscarriages. One of our hospitals has a perinatal loss department that helped me quite a bit, and I'd like to go thorugh their training. Experiences like the ones I had today make me wonder, though, if I should. I have rarely felt so impotent and so obviously mom-ish. I have a strange fear of someone changing the secret handshake and not telling me.

My first perhaps-overly-personal post

Bear with me, I'm about to write about something which I have promised myself I won't hide, but which can be difficult for me to discuss. This may not be graceful. (This is, of course, in stark contrast to my usual writing. Oh, humor me.)

I am, technically, a recurrent miscarrier. Actually, the medical term is "habitual aborter," or "hab ab" when you just don't have the time to really sock someone. My first pregnancy was my daughter and it couldn't have been more textbook. There was the little matter of not getting pregnant for over a year, then the Clomid, but that worked the first cycle. We were fortunate enough to have a perfect little baby - a girl with all ten fingers and toes, whose growth matched percentiles throughout my pregnancy, whose head didn't have disturbing proportions, whose amniotic fluid was lush and plentiful. I didn't even know to appreciate most of those things at the time. (The ten fingers and toes I did get. Insert inbreeding joke here.)

I was naive.

When we were ready for a second child, we tried again for a year and were thrilled when I got pregnant without using Clomid - how lucky! How miraculous! We were like everybody else! That pregnancy was my daughter, Celeste. For 16 weeks we thought everything was fine. For another week we knew it probably wasn't. I miscarried her naturally at home, early on a Friday
morning that I feel fairly sure will not fade for me in any significant way. We found out later that Celeste had triploidy - 69 chromosomes instead of the usual 46. I still feel strangely proud of her for making it 17 weeks with what had to have been an unusually confused host of cells making up her tiny body.

I got pregnant again the very first time I ovulated. Now we really were lucky, we thought - this would help heal the shock of losing Celeste, and it was only fair that after having a second-trimester loss, we would get pregnant again quickly. (Fair! Ha! Apparently naivete does not go gently into that good night.) At my 8-week checkup, the same ultrasound tech who had given us the first hint of bad news before seemed truly relieved to see us again so soon. It didn't take any specialized ultrasound experience to see the completely still, silent embryo on the screen, though. The baby was a boy, this time with trisomy 4.

I decided to consult a specialist. At the first visit, after hearing that I had had two close chromosomal losses, my RE told me that we'd never have another healthy baby if we didn't do IVF with PGD. (If the only acronym in the previous sentence familiar to you is IVF, count yourself lucky and go hug your kids.) We knew we didn't want to go down that path. I convinced the doctor to do a slightly-more-agressive-than-normal Clomid cycle (read: my husband had to give me a shot) and we were again struck by good lightning, in the form of my son who is upstairs sleeping peacefully as I write this. He was monitored so closely - I always win the "how many ultrasounds did you have?" contest - and I never fully relaxed, but everything ended well. We have two beautiful children, just like we'd hoped, and I have the freedom of knowing I should never have to do twice-weekly blood draws again in the pursuit of a child.

Things I Have Accomplished As Of 9:30am EDT:

• Folded two (two!) fitted sheets in a manner demonstrably different from wadding them up.

• Successfully moved my infant over the sink mid-vomiting process so that my shirt was saved. Sadly, his onesie was a loss.

• Took a 30 minute nap after my normal wake-up time. (Thanks, love!)

• Had my smug, self-congratulatory grad-student self smacked down. Yes, I may have sent a thoughtful and thorough email to my advisor at 10:35pm last night, showing that although I was home with a sick child yesterday and didn't work during the day, I still Care and still Want to Succeed in Graduate School, even if it means Going to Sleep Late. However, he sent an email back at 10:58pm, so I don't Win.

• Almost finished my first cup of coffee. Yikes! Where are my priorities?

Home is where the boarding pass says

My father and his wife came to visit this weekend. They live in the Northeast, in a small town - okay, outside a small town - two hours from the nearest airport. We don't see them enough, and when they do come visit, he adheres strictly to the old Southern doctrine that both fish and houseguests start to smell after three days. Our visit usually feel rushed and a bit forced, especially in contrast to my mother-in-law's visits, which are more like mini-colonizations. But that's another blog post.

In any case, my dad grew up in yet another small town, a little over 100 miles from where I live. This weekend we went back to visit. We stopped by the house his parents built, where they raised their four sons and then lived until they died. The woman who lives there now (who used to live just down the street) invited us in to look around, apologizing for the mess, which apparently meant there was a speck of dust somewhere. It was eerie to wander through the rooms again where I'd spent so much time on visits growing up. We went through the breakfast room where we played pre-Atari bowling video games, past the space for the ping-pong table (house rules that if the ball touched the support pole in the basement, it was still playable), through the bedroom where we discovered my dad's old notebooks in which he scored every Red Sox game on the radio when he was growing up, when his admiration for Ted Williams was cemented.

My grandparents were both born in that town and both died in that town. We went past the house where my dad was born, which was less than three blocks from his parents' first house, across the street from the church they helped found and down the hill from the elementary school. Their furniture store was two blocks away and the house they built was less than a mile in the other direction. My grandfather died in his 90's from injuries received in a car accident at an intersection in the same part of town. My grandmother died of heart failure less than three weeks later - no one was surprised, and the same friend who sang "I Won't Have to Cross Jordan Alone" at Pop's funeral sang it again at hers.

My grandfather dropped out of school around 8th grade. My grandmother went to college but left after a year because she was homesick. Their sons all went on to earn PhDs, then they all moved away. My grandmother never got over that. Even as a kid, I thought it was strange and that she should have expected her sons to grow up and grow apart from her. Now that my husband and I are flying distance from all of our family and I've had to explain to my daughter that her grandmother doesn't live on an airplane, I think I get where my grandmother was coming from. She was provincial and fairly narrow, but that made it natural for her to understand something that too many people don't appreciate now. Visiting for three days just isn't the same.