I dropped the boys off at Heather’s office at 3:30 and drove to the airport. Boarded a commuter jet – what land is this where we have jet airplanes for commuting – and hopped to Cincinnati. The sunset at 26,000 feet was gorgeous, the man next to me moved to another seat and we both had more room. The clouds spread out like a blanket covering, warming, protecting the earth; shrouding it. Pockets of lights below, patterns of cities and highways, a police car, traffic, a baseball diamond. Another city, people going home. There were two small kids traveling with their mother in front of me. My family is getting ready for bed right now.
When I landed I called home to catch the boys before they went to bed – but missed them. Grabbed a Quizno’s sub for dinner. A long time ago I saw a travelling salesman driving in front of me, he had shirts hanging on a bar that went across the back of his car. They filled the car from side to side. His wardrobe on the road, his home away from home; his car. Where does he eat every night? I carry my bag, sit down and plug in my phone to charge it.
The woman across the isle from me on the next regional jet worked on her laptop, spreadsheets and powerpoint decks. Patterns of keys clicking; a splash of red and blue. Another person working. Landed in Greenville to dense fog. It covers everything in a hazy mist. The plane ducked out of it and the lights of cars and buildings emerged.
There is a line at the National rental car; I bypass it to go straight to the garage. The attendant: Yes Sir, No Sir; his neatly combed hair cut in a typical southerner’s style, his moustache short; Leave Me Alone Sir. But I don’t blame him, it’s 9 PM on a Tuesday, he’s married, clearly a father; doesn’t want to be there any more than I do.
The tall skinny long-needle topped pine slipped by as I drove behind a semi down the highway. I catch H on the phone before she cleans up and goes to bed. It begins to really hit me now. The glow of enormous Southern strip malls lighted the sky and the haze around so I could have driven with the headlights off. I pass a Honda dealer, a BMW dealer and a Jaguar dealer. I pass an Olive Garden and a Boston Market. What land is this that has these things?
I check in at the Embassy Suites, a nice young lady greets me “Good evening, do you have a reservation?” One of my staff was looking for me earlier, but there is no way I am going to talk to them now. There are a number of tables in the hotel bar with people congregated around them. They are all looking around to see who else is around. I wonder if they see each other – they clearly see me as I walk by. I see a man sit down among them with his laptop and a powerpoint presentation running. My room is on the 9th floor.
***
On the mirror in our bedroom at home, Heather has tucked in a card with a MLK quote: “Everything that is done in the world is done by hope.” I believe this to be true. I believe this to be true for everyone, for everything they want, for everything they do. For everyone. I believe that hope connects us together in ways that we often ignore, or at least forget to notice.
I have not been gone 12 hours, but the realization of hope and appreciation is acute. Our future baby girl, our now baby boys, my wife, our house, our careers. It is all done by hope.
Thank you Heather for hanging in there and supporting me so much in all I do with work. It is done by hope.
And love.
Well, Braydon/”Papi” has left again for another “work trip” to “talk to the man” and “have many, many meetings.” This time he’s gone from this afternoon all the way until Friday. This is only 3 nights, but it feels daunting. The idea of holding down the fort (the twin-three-year-olds+all-household-everything+my-job-during-the-2nd-week-of-the-semester+boys’-school-drop-off-and-pick-up+being-pregnant ‘fort’) for that long feels like a lot. I know, I know, many people have it a lot worse than me. My dad used to travel a lot when my sister and I were little, leaving my mom alone with us in rural snowy New Hampshire for days at a time. I don’t know how she did it. And now I think about families like my friends the Double Lucky family, who have young twins and two careers, one of which requires extensive international travel. Honestly, I cannot imagine how Cindy and Ed stay sane with the travel situation. I highly respect them for it. Not to mention single-parent-families. Seriously. Now they are truly the unsung heroes out there, really. I feel ridiculous complaining when I think of stuff like that. Nonetheless, here I am. It is just not easy to hold down the J-M fort alone.
Anyhoo… A little snippet from today (mainly for Braydon cuz I know you’ll just love to hear this B…)
So, this afternoon Braydon picked up the boys from school so he could spend some time with them before he left for his trip. At 3:30 he dropped them off with me at my office on campus on his way to the airport. The boys love coming to my office. And I love having them come. I have a big jar filled with lollipops in my office. Originally (long before K & O were on the scene) the lollipops were for students who were in my office for meetings with me. Students still love to get a lollipop from my office, but K & O are definitely the biggest fans now. They bound up the stairs of Price Hall and run to my office. They spring into my arms then go straight for the lollipop jar. Today was no exception. Have I mentioned 😉 they are very routine-oriented kids. So this is their “Mommy’s Office” routine: after they get their lollipops unwrapped and into their mouths they walk through the hallways of Price looking for faculty offices with open doors. Any open door they find they walk right in and chat with whichever professor is in there. My colleagues genuinely seem to love this little ritual (K & O don’t come often enough to make it a nuisance). K & O shake the professors hands (even ones they know well), chit chat with them, explore their offices, and check out their computers/books/nik-naks. Then they move on to the next open-door-office. Their favorite person to visit is our department coordinator, Erica, who greets them with big hugs. They love her. Any students who happen to be around Price are just a bonus. K & O will high-five with them, jump into their arms, act crazy with them, and generally just brighten the mood of the entire Lehigh University Sociology and Anthropology Department. They run around making everyone laugh for a little while, and it is a breath of fresh air (two breaths of fresh air), to say the least. The next part of our ritual is to go next door to Grace Hall. I blogged about Grace Hall another time in this post. The boys need to go there every time they visit my office on campus. On the first floor of Grace Hall there are beautiful hardwood-floor basketball courts. Today was awesome for K & O because we just so happened to walk into Grace Hall in the midst of… none other than… men’s intramural basketball!!! There were about 30-40 students in there. Some were playing pick up b-ball, some were just shooting hoops, and some seemed to just sort of be there hanging out. K & O watched, wide eyed, for about 5 minutes. Then slowly they started inching their way into the midst of things. From what I could tell the guys were all cool with it, so I let it happen. Slowly but surely, K & O got themselves out onto the courts and into the action. Soon enough they each had a basketball and were running around with the “big, big guys!!!” K & O were dribbling the ball and trying to shoot it. The “big, big guys” were very impressed and very taken with the ‘two little guys.’ Next thing I know K & O are being held up high, all the way to the hoop rims, to throw the balls in. The “big, big guys” were gathering around them, and for small spurts of time they’d all be actually playing together. It was quite a sight: all these cool, tall, male college students running around with two tiny guys in the midst of it. I sat on the first row of the bleachers and just watched with a huge smile on my face the entire time. From time to time K & O would look over to me and smile so wide that I swear it was ear-to-ear. At one point, when Owen had been held up high and actually got the ball into the hoop, he shouted over to me, “Mommy, you need to say ‘Yay Owen!’!!!” It was all very, very cute. We stayed for over 30 minutes. Then I felt that it was probably time to let the “big, big guys” play by themselves. The only way I got K & O out of there was by bribing them with elevator rides. Grace Hall has an elevator, and I let them ride up and down in it, pushing all the buttons themselves, several times before we left to head home. Driving home I was thinking about how Braydon would have gotten such a kick out of seeing the whole Grace Hall basketball scene unfold. And I was thinking about how in moments like those it really does seem like my precious boys have somehow come out of the darkness of their beginnings to lead such very charmed lives. At least for now. And my hope and my goal is to keep it that way for them for as long as humanly possible (preferably, forever).
Happy MLK Day from the Johnson-McCormick Family Blog.
It is because of guys like that, that we can have families like ours.***
A Hypothetical Question For You:O.k., so, hypothetically, you’ve got twin three year old boys who are definitely “boys’ boys” (i.e., they love a good truck, they make motor noises all day long, they’re loud and rowdy and obnoxious most of the time, they run –not walk– everywhere, they can hit balls [with golf clubs, baseball bats, rackets of any kind, or just plain use their hands/feet/heads/butts] for hours on end, they are big fans of extreme sports, they can’t help themselves from peeing all over the bathroom or dropping food all over the floor, they could not care less about any of the items of clothing on their bodies at any given time, they detest any form of shopping, and there’s nothing they enjoy more than ‘playing airplanes’). In other words, they are stereotypical boys in many ways. But, hypothetically speaking, these boys of yours also love their baby dolls, their tea set, their Fisher Price Kitchen, and their dollhouses too. They say their dolls are boys, but they still insist that they wear their pink doll clothes outfits instead of any other color ones, all the time. Imagine that hypothetically, the neighbors find it “odd” (they’ve told you so right to your face) that they regularly see your boys pushing their doll strollers around the driveway one minute then riding their trucks around the driveway the next minute. Even some close friends have confided in you that they’re not exactly “comfortable” with the gender bending that they see going on in your household. More than one person has outright asked you the question: “Do you think you’re taking this too far?” But, hypothetically, you feel confident in what you’re doing. Hypothetically, you’re a Sociologist, and you’ve read a lot of the literature on this stuff, and you know how important it is for boys to be on board too if any progress is going to be made regarding gender relations in the future. You remind yourself how *MESSED UP* it is that in 2008 little girls are generally encouraged to play with trucks and play sports and wear overalls, but that little boys are generally discouraged from playing with dolls and having their own kitchen sets and wearing dresses. You remind yourself of your values, of your beliefs about egalitarianism, of your devotion to raising your children to be anti-sexist. But still, hypothetically, you can’t help but notice that not many folks are raising their sons like you are (and you’re even part of a Waldorf school community where there is a hugely disproportionate number of self-identified “Liberal” families amongst the population). O.k., so now, hypothetically… you’re with your two sons in a craft store one day to buy supplies for one of their school projects. Hypothetically, you are walking down one of the aisles and your boys start jumping up and down when they spot a rack of pink tutus. Hypothetically, these children of yours have rarely asked you for anything in a store (you can probably count on one hand the total number of things they have ever asked for — ever — in their entire lives), but they are now pointing to the tutus asking “That!!! Please!!! Can we please have THAT?????” You’ve actually played through this hypothetical moment in your mind’s eye before, so it is now very strange that this is actually (hypothetically) happening in real life. Years ago, long before you ever had kids of your own, you and your husband used to talk about stuff like this — you’d play “The Hypothetical Game” — asking questions of each other and discussing your answers for hours (“What if your daughter wanted to get a large tattoo at age 12, would you let her???”/”What if your kid really wanted to go away to boarding school starting in 7th grade, would you support that???”/”What if your son wanted a pink tutu, would you get him one???”). Hypothetically, you can remember the actual discussion about the pink tutu. You can remember your husband being adamant that boys should most definitely be able to run around in pink tutus. You can remember that you yourself had played devil’s advocate — talking about socialization and risk of ostracization and the very real consequences of bucking the sexist system. But now, hypothetically, you are in the moment. You’re in the middle of the store. Your sons are looking up at you awaiting your answer. You look at the price tags. The pink tutus are on clearance. $3.99 each. Your boys ask again, excitedly and anxiously, “Please mommy?! So please?! Please can we have these????!?!!” So… what do you do?
P.S. The three photos above show you what my answer to the question is/was. 😉 ~HBJ
This pregnancy is bringing up lots of questions for the boys. We knew it would. Owen’s questions are mostly focused on Baby Sister… “How did she get in there?” “How will she get out of there?” “Will you pee on her when she’s getting born?” “Will it hurt her when she is getting born?” “How big will she be when she is born?” “What color will she be?” (note: he told us tonight at dinner: “I think she will be brown!”) Etc. These questions are hard to answer– as they surely are for any family experiencing a pregnancy with a young child already in the home. But Kyle’s questions are 100 times harder to answer. Kyle’s questions are mostly focused on his own (and Owen’s, since they are not separate in Ky Ky’s mind) experiences pre-birth, during birth, and after birth… “Was it dark in the special lady’s belly, was it so scary for me and Owen?” “Were we born in a hospital?” “Who caught me when I got born, did a doctor catch me and Owen?” “Why wasn’t I in your belly, why wasn’t Owen in your belly, why were we in another lady’s belly?” (he still rarely refers to his birthmother as “birthmother” and still consistently refers to her as “another lady” or “the special lady”) “Can I please see a picture from when I was born?” “Who took care of me when I was born?” “I needed you to take care of me, why didn’t you take care of me when I was born?” “Did you come to get me right away when I was born?” Etc. Kyle is a tough cookie. And his curiosity is intense. When we were planning to adopt and were in the process of adopting (and even right up until a few weeks ago), I knew it would be challenging to talk about all of these questions that would be raised for K & O. I have been thinking of these questions and brainstorming my answers for over four years now. But nothing, just nothing, can prepare you for what it is like when those huge brown eyes are peering straight into yours and those gorgeous little faces are seeking your answers. It is no longer intellectual when it is real– when the questions are coming from your own precious children. It feels massive. So massive that I can’t even explain it. It is surprising to me how often tears spring to my eyes immediately when I hear the questions. I thought I’d be o.k. with it all, and I am at peace with it, but I’m not o.k. with it. At least not emotionally. And oh Kyle. His questions just cut to the heart of it all. As is always his way. Tonight, as I was tucking him into bed he lifted his head off his pillow and in the darkness, with his eyes looking face-forward straight into mine, his mouth so close to my face that I could feel his warm sweet breath he whispered, “Mommy, where were you when I was born?”
This week was rough. Between the “sick” days for K & O, and the start of the semester for me, and Braydon’s usual over-the-top workload… it was just a long week. Because of a whole lot of events and deadlines and important lunch and dinner meetings, Thurs-Fri were incredibly long work days for me. Driving home from work this evening, at 5:30pm, I realized that in the past 48 hours I had spent exactly 2 hours with my boys. I go through lots of emotions during days like these. It is not so much guilt that I feel (at least at this point), it is just a sort of sickening pit in my stomach. I wish there was a way to have a serious, ambitious career and never have to put in the long days… but there just plain isn’t. Careers like this just simply don’t have ‘usual hours’ and there is no way around that. Luckily for me (and my conscience) my boys take it all in stride. This morning I outright asked them, “Are you mad at mommy for working so late last night?” (I had taught an early evening graduate seminar and afterward had to attend a dinner party on campus). Owen spoke up right away, totally genuinely and forthrightly: “No mommy, we’re not mad.” I turned to Kyle, “Ky Ky, how do you feel about it?” He looked me right in the eyes, “I’m not mad mommy!” Then they both came over to hug me. They are cheery and happy kids. I think they are sincere — I honestly think that they are comfortable the way things are. I can’t even explain how grateful I am for that. It is not easy, this dual-career-family/professor-mom gig. But it isn’t impossible either. And I feel indebted to all those women who came before me paving the way. If it is this hard now, I can’t even imagine what it was like 30 years ago — let alone 60 years ago. Families like ours have those women (and those people in their lives who supported them) to thank. And in reality, the way I look at it, all’s well that ends well. That’s true on the most micro –and the most macro– levels. Tonight we ended the week on a high note. We all stood around the stove as K & O made their favorite dinner: “Bunny Macaroni” (Annie’s Macaroni and Cheese). As they ate their mac-n-cheese, baby carrots, and cherry tomatoes the four of us sat at the table for almost an hour and talked together like four best friends. It felt like we were re-grouping. And it felt good. Even at the end of a rough week K & O are no worse for wear. They are happy, gracious, thriving boys full of energy and zest for life. That, to me, is just amazing. Nonetheless… I think all four of us feel the same way: TGIF. Have a great weekend y’all.
On the days when I don’t post you can just assume it is because my day is waaay too busy/hectic and I am waaaaaay too stressed/frazzled and our life is waaaaaay too chaotic/crazed to do it. Given that all of our days are hectic, frazzled, and crazed, you can just imagine what my non-posting days are like. Yeah, go ahead, just use your imagination. Your wildest imagination. Today was one of those days.
Monday night Kyle was seeming under the weather. We took his temperature and sure enough he was running a slight fever. He slept through the night fine, but was lethargic and repeatedly saying, “I’m sick” when he woke up Tuesday morning. He was running a fever. No way he was going to school. Owen was a crumbled crying mess the instant we suggested that he go to school without his brother. Then Kyle caught wind of it and he was a wreck over that prospect too. The two of them begged us — BEGGED US (with tears streaming down Owen’s cheeks and Kyle rubbing Owen’s back) — to please let Owen stay home too. Braydon and I ‘conferenced’ out of their earshot; “Some day they’re going to have to separate. But do we force it now? At age three? When one of them is sick?” We caved quickly. “O.k., you’re both staying home, for a quiet Sick Day at home.” Unfortunately, or fortunately as the case may be, Kyle was not sick enough to really be sick (i.e., he sure wasn’t acting sick). And Owen… well, Owen was never even remotely sick to begin with. A “quiet Sick Day at home”??? Yeah, right. It was a normal day at home (anything but quiet). Nonetheless, Sick Days — for any one (or more) of the four of us — send our barely-manageable life into a tailspin. If you are a dual-career couple with young children and complicated childcare arrangements and no extended family living anywhere even remotely near you, then you know exactly what I’m talking about. If you’re not, then all you need to do is ask someone like that and they’ll tell you: Sick Days send the whole house of cards tumbling to the ground. I feel like a juggler with all of my balls in the air. On Sick Days it feels like all the balls just drop, no matter how hard I try to keep them up. And then add that this is the first week of the Spring Semester for a Professor-Mom-Family… and that Professor-Mom is actually pregnant… and… well, the whole thing is just a mess. Kyle was bouncing off the walls when he woke up this morning, saying, “I’m all better! I’m not sick!” and very excited to go to school. No fever. We sent them both off and breathed a sigh of relief that we got off easy (just one Sick Day). But then at 10:00 a.m., the dreaded. School called to say Kyle was sick and we needed to come get him. Of course Owen insisted on coming home too. And we weren’t going to put up a fight in the middle of the Acorn Room. So home they came. They played and played and played all day. Again, nothing quiet about this “Sick Day.” They chased each other around the house screaming and tackling and wrestling, they played airplanes, they played dress up. We left them unsupervised in Kyle’s room for a few minutes and found that they had somehow gotten Kyle’s bedroom window open (like, fully open to the outside), and were spitting out the window watching their spit drop to the ground two floors below (talk about seriously dangerous; it scares the geebers out of us to think of how easily they could have fallen out of that window). At one point they jumped on the guest room beds for a full hour straight (remember that video Braydon did of them bed-jumping at the end of this past summer? Well, it was just like that). At lunchtime they ate their lunches that I had packed for them for school today. See photo above. Do either of these two look sick to you??? Hopefully we’ll get back on track tomorrow.
Ah. Blog Awards. Not sure what they really mean, exactly, but you gotta love ’em anyway. Especially when they’re from someone who you really like. And I
really, really like this blogger. One of my absolute favorite ‘blogger friends,’ Trish from
Twinchatter, has awarded me a
Blogging with a Purpose award!
Sorta like Trish, I’m not sure what my actual purpose in blogging ever was or is. But I like it that some people out there might think I have a purpose?!!! If truth be told, I feel like this blog of ours serves mainly
me: it has become such a therapeutic thing for me to be able to write here everyday. And I feel like I’m at least doing something in terms of preserving some snapshots of memories for my boys (and now future girl too). And the fringe benefit of it has turned out to be that I’ve made some actual real friends out there via the blogosphere. Friends who I seriously count as real friends (as hard as that may be for you non-bloggers to believe). So, it feels like the ‘purpose’ is all about me, me, me. But if our blog seems to serve other purposes as well (for folks who read it), then that is just the icing on the cake!
The guidelines for this award are:
1. Award 5 others who have not received the award
2. The awarded blogs must serve some purpose
3. Link back to original entry
4. Must post award banner on site and link it to
Novak’s site.
***
O.k., so in the spirit of ‘purposes’ that are all about me, me, me… 😉 I’m going to give this award to five blogs/bloggers who have specifically and personally served to help/inspire/uplift/motivate/educate/invigorate me, me, me. Each of these bloggers has done something specific and personal (most often ‘off-blog’) to help move me along forward in this crazy world we’re living in. They, like
Trish, are some of my ‘blogger friends’ — people who I’ve never actually ‘met’ (in person), but who have been
real friends to me nonetheless. I’m pretty sure that if I were to meet them in real life that they, like
Trish, would be friends I could sit with for hours chatting and laughing and crying. I read each of their blogs. And I learn from them. I hereby give the Blogging with a Purpose award to the following blogs (in nothing but alphabetical order):
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