This morning we woke to our first true snowfall of the winter. Three fluffy inches, pure delight, easy to brush off the sidewalks, great for snowballs, perfect for snow angels.

1. Just last week, in response to some emails I received, I was wondering where all the energy about motherhood and politics has gone. Then I found these two interesting articles.

The first appeared in the NY Times this Saturday, tucked away in the business section, which I must say, is one of my favorites for the way it mixes tradable, "did you hear" info (in the objective form of business news) with the personal lives of people doing business. I'm the sort who trained first as a musician, then as a professor of religion, and have friends who are involved in all sorts of excellent not-for-profit ventures. As a result, I've become interested as of late, and as a change, in what business is all about, and started a small business of my own last summer.  Where I live, reading the business pages is only slightly weirder than reading the sports pages, although these are becoming more popular in my house.

Anyhow, the article, A Breadwinner Rethinks Gender Roles, is honest in a lovely way. The author is a woman, a mother, and the breadwinner of our family. She writes in a non-ideological way about this as an identity shift, that even though she does it, and likes it right now, it's still an awkward concept, and one that's quite intimate too. "So when my husband asked me the other day," she writes, "'Did your concept of equality ever include supporting your family?' I had to admit that my answer was no. I wanted it to be yes...Yet I alternate between pride in our arrangement--and terror that I'll be the breadwinner forever."

It's rare to find work-and-parenting issues discussed with candor, and with a real acknowledgment of the ambivalence. There's lots of working mom books around now, and even a few I saw on Amazon about "comeback moms," mothers who want to come back into the workplace after being home with their kids. But there's very little writing like this: smart, emotional stuff that keeps it real. The article ends with the author's sense of loss when it's her husband who best comforts their fussy  4-month old, or knows where they keep the muffin tin, and with the sense of pressure that being the sole breadwinner brings: the chest-tightening, as she calls it, that comes when the pays their bills, or signs up for life insurance because, as she writes, "If I don't sign up for life insurance, nobody will. Because it's my job."

2.  For a shift in angle from all this, comes along Equally Shared Parenting, a new blog and a new favorite of mine. Don't want to feel all that pressure, don't want to feel totally stuck at home, here's a couple who are working hard at sharing the joint duties of home-and-child care and earning the paycheck. Mark and Amy live in the Boston suburbs. They present this manifesto on the gains of equal parenting:

• It is the next frontier of feminism.  First, we gave women the right to vote and work…now, let’s give them equality at home too.
• It is a path of balance for men.  Not all men want the burden of breadwinning to eclipse their chance to fully participate in their children’s lives.
• It is a double-win for kids - intimacy with both their parents.
• It is great for a good marriage - lots of togetherness and communication…and sex.
  

And then offer this commentary: "On the flip side, however, equal sharing takes guts.  Men have to give up the prestige of the overworked power career, and women have to let go of control in the home and with the kids.  It also requires compromise and massive amounts of communication and jack-of-all-trades competence."

Of course, my question is always, when two people each have part time jobs, healthcare insurance becomes the issue, since most healthcare is attached to fulltime jobs. I'd be interested in how Marc and Amy work this out.

Anway, when you need vision inspiration, head over to Equally Shared Parenting.

And 3, this morning's NY Times, frontpage, had this article on how politicians are feeling more comfortable showing their maternal roles. Was not able to finish the article before the baby woke and my day mothering began,  so I don't yet know if it included whether these politicians will feel the political ability and will to focus on policy issues that really help mothers, all mothers (ala MomsRising.org), but that's clearly the next step.

I'm wondering if others feel similarly, but blogging is fitting my life less these days. In its earlier days, the novelty kept me going. Checking for comments provided a charge, and those constant emails to my inbox from readers--people who now have become friends, boosted my day.

I also liked the way that blogging takes our lives and helps us make a story out of each day, each episode. When I was in super-blogging mode, I'd walk through the hours of my day seeking the story. I started experiencing ordinary events as part of a broader narrative, as the question "How might I blog about this?" became intuitive. One of the wonders of blogging, as we do it, is the turning of daily life into an essay, with a start-middle-and-finish, with meaning.

For the past few months, though, blogging has not worked its usual magic, and I think I've finally figured out why. I do struggle with the issue of privacy: protecting my husband's identity, and figuring out how to write about our family life--of which he is such an active part--while writing him out of the story. I am conscious of not telling tales of Samira's life in ways that would later embarrass her. But the privacy issue isn't the full explanation,  since despite it I find what to blog about, and in fact, having some limits on writing about my family ensures that I keep my mind on the world outside our four walls, even on cold wintry days, like yesterday where I literally never leave the coziness of my home.

This, I've realized, is the problem. My life these days is not a story. It's not an essay, and I don't have the mother-of-a-13-month-old energy to change that. My life, you see, is a list. Understanding this, I will blog in list form, with no attempt to forge a beginning-middle-end to life events. You know the classic complaint "I start to write and I end of composing a to-do list"? Well I'm giving in. Three cheers for the list.

1. The services coordinator for our city's Childlink forged bitter cold and snow flurries to come to our home and meet with us. That was Thursday. The baby was sleeping, which was fine since this, it turned out, was an initial home visit. He needed to ask me questions, and will return, he promises, on February 10, with a physical therapist and an occupational therapist, to evaluate the baby.

In the meantime, Amelia thinks the funnest thing on earth is to lift her arms to mid-height, thus indicating that what she wants is for someone to hold her hands while she walks up and down our main hallway.

It may turn it that she walks on her own and the doctor has jumped the gun on any real delay. Let's hope. My dream is that she starts walking, I call the doctor, who says she's fine, and cancel the request for intervention.

2. Samira is now playing basketball, which cracks me up because she is so short, and like everyone in our family has a long torso and short legs. I know nothing about basketball except a little tiny bit about college teams. I did my graduate work at Duke, as did my husband, so every March the TV in our house gets turned on to watch the NCAA finals. I will be learning more about basketball, and I'm looking in to getting tickets to see the Temple women's team play.

Here's the funniest, most wonderful part of it all: Samira's really good. She's short, but apparently there's a position called "point guard" (you can see my total ignorance now) where you don't need to be tall, you just need to be able to get the ball away from the other team, which Samira does with her twists and bobs, and by getting down around everyone's knees and pulling that ball into her hands. It's excellent fun to watch her. I'm of that generation of girls that just missed out on team sports. Complications and limits aside, girls sports are one of feminism's successes, and I'm glad that Samira is reaping the benefit. And having a damn good time.



Long live the list, and have a great day.

ps and no. 4:  My friend Michelle is writing about her current bout with cancer at her blog, Various Ramblings. Let's all head over and leave some comments and show our support.

I just had to. Hearing REM on the radio this morning (see the post below! ) made me so happy. I picked the baby up from her high chair, breakfast finished, and danced with her around the kitchen.

Several songs later, I put the baby down with some toys, pulled out the computer, and made an REM station on Pandora. Here it is, for any of you who need the smallest excuse to dance to music from your 20's. In the hours since, my work has been interrupted by memories of the Cat's Cradle in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where I didn't see REM, but I did see the many other bands who made the rounds of southern college towns in their shadow, including the ineffable, life-changing Flat Duo Jets.

It's back to work for me, now. The babysitter is here only for twenty minutes more. Enjoy.

This new year is starting with a terrible emotional bang, it's clamor conflicting with my usual, rhythmic conviction about January's post-holiday calm. We continue to work on getting appointments to learn what's going on with the baby. While we do that, we forge back and forth between knowing nothing's wrong, convinced our doctor is conservative and working on a just-in-case scenario (she herself said it wasn't urgent, right); that, and certainty that something is very wrong. Update: we found a way to get to the scheduling nurse at the Children's Hospital. That in itself shaved a few months waiting time. The nurse sent out the intake forms immediately and they arrived Saturday.

I had the strangest reaction filling them out. The reality of the baby's hard first year hit me. I thought I had taken it in, but the heaviness of it became more real. I filled line after line: Doctors who have seen your child; specialists who have seen your child; hospitalizations; medications taken regularly; medications your child has taken. diagnoses.

With Samira, these lines would have stayed blank. Instead, my hand hurt when I was done. My baby has her own pediatric urologist; how many of us ever have a urologist? She's on daily antibiotic. She took iron supplements. Thank goodness that through all of us she smiles, but I really started to worry. And to remember: the loss of muscle tone when she was sick. The few days I've forgotten to take my prenatal vitamins. I'm trying to stay away from guilt in the abstract, mother-guilt sense of things. At the same time, I can't help ask what specific things I can do to make her life better. We've cleaned out the living room to give the baby lots more room to move around. I'm making sure that she spends lots of time on that cleaned-out floor, that's instead of putting her in the backpack or sling and toting her around. If there's a chance that her development is slow due to lack of floor-opportunity, I'd love the chance to solve it this way.

So many filled line. And yet, I remind myself it could be worse. much worse, and that's not to sound pollyanish, nor to downplay the way lowgrade fear fills our days. It is to find a context, to appreciate our friends, our family, the big picture, that these are things that can be treated, fixed.

For now, it's Sunday morning. Samira is at a playdate, Rob is helping an old friend in distress. The baby is sleeping, a long morning nap because we kept her up late last night. I'm cooking food for the week: french toast and soft carrots for the baby, poached chicken to shred. Making a grocery list, putting washed clothing into the dryer, and listening to REM on the radio, which is strangely healing, reminding me of a time, several decades ago, when problems were abstract, and listening to a great album or spending a patch of late night hours at a club listening to a favorite band could make anything all better.

If there's anything that can claim the same emotional range as a few hours with a late-80's North Carolina or Athens band, it's the ups and downs of family life, the insane love and care I feel for these people, who, small and large, are mine, all mine.

And now, when I most want to wallow in jangly guitars and piano pedals, a little baby sends out a cry that she's awake.

Wasn’t I just blogging about how important the wish of good health has become in my life? Yes, I was, and hoping, too, that the health challenges of the last year were behind us.

Not so. On Thursday I took the kids to the doctor. My older daughter, we decided, with her consent, would be getting a second chicken pox booster. Chicken pox is spreading around her school, and others, too, in the neighborhood. It’s not just kids whose parents didn’t vaccinate them who are at risk. It turns out that the chicken pox is breaking through the vaccines, and the doctors are suggesting, as the school eventually did, that children get the booster shot, to be extra safe.

Let’s recall that I had the chicken pox in third grade and I still remember it. Of course, I remember it, in part, because I hated school that year, and got to stay home for three weeks. It was itchy, yes, but it came with some benefits.

I’m not always sure how I feel about vaccines. I’ve surprised myself by making more conventional decisions about my children’s health than I would have thought ahead of time. I go to a homeopathic doctor, but I take my girls to the regular old pediatrician’s office. For a time, the office had a nurse practitioner who was also trained homeopathically. She left to start her own office, though, and I stayed. I thought for a moment about not vaccinating; it all sounds so scary when you read the extremist articles about possible mercury poisoning from older-type vaccinations, or the claim that vaccines are linked with autism. In the end, it was scarier to think what would happen to my kids without vaccines, and that was my decision.

The baby was in for her annual checkup, which, silly me, I decided in advance, would be fine. Turns out, though, that the doctor is more than a little concerned that little Amelia isn’t crawling, or walking, or even pointing with gusto. Gross motor skill, apparently, is not her forte. She’s on the very, very slow end of normal, and the doctor, in her calm voice, wants us to get Amelia a full developmental evaluation. She thinks the other skills are fine, cognitively she seems okay, and she’s social, very much so, so the doctor is not worried about autism. Maybe the baby's failure to thrive at six months had a more lasting effect on her muscles. Maybe the muscle tone she lost back then put her behind a few months; she doesn’t seem to have the strength to crawl, or to support herself on her hands and knees. I keep repeating the phrase to myself: failure to thrive, failure to thrive. Six months later, perhaps I'm ready to feel the full import of it's metaphoric power.

Whatever it is, the doctor says to get it checked out. She gives us several phone numbers, one to Childlink, a city agency that provides services to kids, the other to Children’s Hospital.

I call the first and am told to leave a number, they’re busy helping other families, and will return our call later. I call the second, a well-regarded research hospital. The woman who answers tells me it will take a year to get an appointment.

That’s right. One year. In fact, they won’t even give me an appointment. They will only take my contact information and some facts about the baby, and the scheduler will call in a few months to set the date.

Something must be done. It’s not just calling for the appointment. As I told a friend at breakfast this morning, who nodded sagely, it’s calling everyone we know with medical connections and learning the real scoop on how to get an appointment sooner. It's all that extra work to figure out the system. Wish me well. We parents turn fierce when it comes to protecting our little ones, and heaven knows, someone is getting appointments in less than a year's time. We just have to figure out how.

Over the holidays, we went on a family vacation for the first time in years. I began in San Diego with the baby, though that part was work-related. The baby and I then drove to LA so I could meet an old and dear friend for dinner. The funny thing is, that when I went to rent a car, they gave me a Subaru Outback station wagon. It's as if just by asking for a carseat, they decided to give me a whole mom-mobile. I didn't mind too much, we have one at home and I'm used to driving it. I was amused.

From LA, Amelia and I flew to San Francisco, and that's where the fun began. We were met by her dad and her sister, who had arrived an hour before and had already procured the Ford Explorer that would be our home away from home for the next week. I'm not a big SUV lover, honestly, but we did have a fabulous time. We drive small and environmentally-better cars in daily life. My everyday auto's a Honda Civic with not too much room to spread one's legs, so it was a treat, a vacation-on-wheels, to drive a big huge--I guess I can't exactly call it a car--a big, huge, family-moving extravaganza. Of course, once we loaded our duffle bags and the much-needed pack-and-play and the baby backpack and the stroller, we were left wondering how we would ever have managed with a more sensible car.

We tooled around San Francisco for a few days, doing all those touristy things we'd never do while on business trips there, as my husband does often, or when I lived there, as I did as a young and raucous twenty-two-year old. We went to Alcatraz. We rode the cable cars up and down. We went to an exhibit about the Titanic. We dined ala Uncle Vito's, the Italian place across from our hotel, because in this city of such fabulous food and dining, the baby still fell asleep at 6 pm, and Uncle Vito's offered take-out. Samira had a blast, and we did too.

The next part of our trip was to Muir Woods and then to Inverness in West Marin County. We wanted to hike in Pt. Reyes, to take those three hundred steps down to the famed lighthouse (they seem like six hundred with a baby on one's back, and we saw many parents hauling toddlers back up the cliff). We thought we'd see a whale or two on their migration south. Although that didn't happen, we were happy enough to be in what has to be one of the most gorgeous spots on earth. The spiritual beauty of Pt. Reyes calmed all of us, it was very unexpected, and amazing, and profound.

Oops, an interruption I'm off now to catch the baby from her babysitter. I'll be back later with pictures.

Welcome back, or welcome to our new year! I for one am looking forward to the change. My last year saw too many loved ones become ill, friends, relatives, community members, that I'm sending out health wishes to everyone. This period in the year is one of my favorites. The fall is so hectic. School starts, and then there's Halloween, and then there's Thanksgiving, and then there's the super-crazed rush of the December holidays. Most years I can't wait for the last week in December. The energy shifts, and life is calm. People vacation, they stay home from work. January feels the same way for me, even though most of us head back to our jobs. Compared to the four-month rush unleashed in September, it's calm, unscheduled, and best of all, there's no narrative for January. It's not a festive month, there's no major holiday. There is a three-day weekend, MLK day, but it hasn't become overly commercialized yet, perhaps because it has been claimed as a day of service, not a day of shopping, banquets, or gift giving.

I begin January wanting to eat healthy foods. This doesn't last all that long, I'll admit, but it's the desire that counts, the sense of having had enough sweets, enough good wine, enough interesting food in all the social events of the last season, not too mention the past year. That's a feeling that I love: the sense of having enough. My friend Laura S often says that to say "I have enough" is one of the most radical personal acts we can name, these days, as we are so saturated with things. Right now, I have enough, and I like that. It's a good way to start the year.

I've also appreciated the trend of anti-resolution New Year's articles. Enough with the promises we make every year, break almost immediately, and consequently, feel bad about. No more plans to exercise more, eat better, and give more of oneself to the poor. These things will happen in the usual course of things, or they won't, but it's no use going through a formula, a ritual that turns empty fast. This idea has touched me. As we are immersed in things to acquire, we are also immersed in the self-help promise that we can always make ourselves better. This means we are constantly self-critical. After all, bettering oneself means you've turned a harsh eye and found your weak spots. Instead, let's catalogue what's good in our lives and our selves, and see where that positive step takes us.

My wish for the New Year--that people in my life stay healthier. 2006 was hellacious with bad health news, and it stepped up deeply in December. Each week brought several "this-is-bad-news" emails to my inbox, friends with cancer, relatives with cancer, friends' relatives with cancer. Good health to all. Odd, in my younger years I wouldn't have been caught dead wanting something so mundane as good health, or happiness, the traditional things we wish upon each other. I would have needed something fancier, more esoteric. Watching my baby in the hospital this summer, standing by my mother's hospital bed wishing her back to health this fall changed all that, seeing my father-in-law struggle to recover from a stroke, changed all that. 2006 showed me how vulnerable we are. It showed me how basics like health are the most important things we can have, and that everything pales beside.

So, health and happiness to all of us in the year to come.