Taken for granted 2

The delightful equality between me and my wife. The pleasure in strength I enjoy by being joined emotionally, physically and mentally with this incredible woman. In another time and place my circumstances, education and experience would not have fitted me to appreciate her, and I would have wandered through life blind to the qualities of people who are female. Brought up in a more masculine country where the divisions between genders was more emphasized and when the anxieties of sharing labors and concerns of a woman's state were more acute, I would have been excluded from and cheated out of a stream of experiences, thoughts and relationships that in this world I find sustaining and precious.

"In common law, wives had no rights over their children or to matrimonial property. This was because 'in marriage, husband and wife are one person, andthat person is the husband', as Sir William Blackstone deftly explained, glossing 'the very being, orlegal existence, of thewoman is suspended during marriage.'" From "English Society in the Eighteenth Century," by Roy Porter.

Things I take for granted

Feeding the girls with plentiful supplies of formula on hand, plenty of food to supply us with our daily needs. Easy access to stores stocked with baby care items like bottles, nipples, blankets, disposable diapers.

"A baby could only cry about its hunger, but mothers like me had to gry to do something abou tit. It's really hard to bear your child's sobs, when you have nothing to give him." Chieko Hashimoto, Japanese civilian recalling life during the War, when civilians starved on a diet of 1,680 calories a day. Quoted in "Retribution," by Max Hastings.

re-entering blogosphere

one immediate impact of having triplets is that i have given up capitalization most of the time. they are releasing my inner e.e. cummings, I guess.

disrupted sleep is an attack on the foundation of our self. i think i know a little bit about it from past experience. interestingly, currently luciana and i are in a permanent state of sleep-deprivation, which varies day to day from minor to moderate to occasionally major. but in many ways it has proved much more tolerable than anticipated. everyone was predicting for months that this time with newborns would be dreadful. quite to opposite. there is much that delights, much that provokes meditation and peace, and much that brings me close to the Great Simplicity. in the nursery there is no clock, and there is no room or time for worries about anything beyond finishing a bottle, adjusting a sleeve around a tiny hand, fluffing up little hairs on a little head, and watching eyes open and begin to track around the periphery of your face for the first time, the tenth time, the hundredth time. isn't it funny how we find that any activity appears to be intentional. evelyn thrusts her hands about, and they come to rest on her bottle, and it looks like she's trying to hold it for herself. how pleasant these midnight fantasies can be.

luciana has been recovering very well from her surgery. she seems to me very healthy and energetic, and also quite anxious about handling the babies and taking care of them, which is a surprise. she's already raised for of these little packages. but something about their prematurity and precariousness, perhaps, and something to do with the huge hormonal tides rushing in and out of her body, has her -- not unhinged, but swinging pretty wildly on her hinges at times. she wants to sleep on the floor in their room, wants to take care of the 24 hours a day, leaps up from the table in alarm if one of them fusses in the nursery. we have been talking about it. apparently i have a higher tolerance for the sound of fussing babies and crying babies, and i'm willing to sit a bit and wait to see if the fussy girl will settle herself down. (they often do). during the long pregnancy we had both agreed that one problem would be my anxious and irritated reaction to the sound of babies' crying. she predicted, and i agreed, that i would need to take a lot of time out from the girls because we both anticipated me finding their cries like nails on chalkboard. but not at all. i can listen to a crying girl and patiently suss out if this is hunger, crampiness, irritation, waking up, falling aslseep or any of the other variations on consciousness that the girls currently can muster. doesn't seem to bother me. last night i was feeding cecilia and jessie began wailing three feet away from my ear, and I calmly helped cecilia finish her bottle, wrapped her back in her blanket and tucked her in, then turn to ms. jessie and took her up to feed. well, it helps to be 54 years old, I guess.

my daughter continues to suffer and writhe about the situation, and can't seem to find a way to make herself comfortable. as far as the babies are concerned, she can't stand them and can't stand to be around them, so she has discontinued her every other weekend stay at my house. this means i have to go into town on Friday nights to take her to dinner in order to have some ongoing contact. she can be quite unpleasant. a lot of it is 'thirteen-ism.' some if it has to do with her adoption, her feelings of being abandoned (or stolen away) at birth, and her envy of these little babies who have a biological family willing and able to keep them. and some of it has to do with her mother's ceaseless envious and hateful complaining about her ex-husband, his indifference to her needs and wishes, his arrogance to go and start another family -- which she interprets to her children as my indifference to their needs and wishes and my wish to abandon them and forget about them. there's nothing that can be done about her. i think that she has been getting worse the past two years, and currently she seems quite crazy. i keep my distance, mail the child support checks on time, and try to see the kids when i can.

Immediate feedback from the universe

Five minutes after I wrote the last post, at 9 am sharp, the phone rang.

It was Dr. Whitman. He's a pediatrician in Framingham. I called his office last Thursday, based on a referral from the staff at Floating, where he trained. I asked if he had openings and they said he would call us. And he did. Already has reviewed notes from the Floating staff and has checked in with the staff at MetroWest, knows the girls' names and their situation. Wanted to know if I had questions, laid out the plan for the next few weeks.

What can we conclude from this?

That there are no atheists in foxholes, and no radicals with newborns.

My gratitude

I have written about my gratitude to the doctors & nurses at the Floating Hospital, and also my gratitude to the dentist & endodontist who rescued my tooth a few weeks ago, and also the neurologist who diagnosed and treated my facial pain.

I mentioned this gratitude to a number of people, and generally got this reaction: well, that's what those folks do. They are doing what they do for a living.

So I was intrigued by an article in the NY Times today by Dan Bilefsky about how Roumanians must bribe their doctors & nurses in order to receive standard medical care. The main case featured concerns a couple, Alina and Ionut Lungu, who failed to provide a large enough bribe to her obstetrician. Feeling snubbed, he didn't bother to come to the hospital when she went into labor. There were complications, and Alina's son was born with brain damage. Nothing can be done.

Bilefsky reports that the entire medical system is corrupted, and doctors, nurses, & orderlies all respond only to bribes in order to provide their services. He traces this back to Soviet-era practices that "the medical profession here had been denigrated under Communist leaders who made workers in factories the country's heroes."

Our social system is a human creation. All human creations are temporary and fragile, depending on incalculable relationships between people, memory and practices. Reflections like this lead one, like Edmund Burke, to seek a "conservative" approach to social planning. But our society is hurtling forward, relationships are changing and multiplexing. It may be that in ten years we don't "go to the doctor" but meet a medical provider in Second Life.

How will we preserve the integrity of relationships that we take for granted here? The integrity that made it possible for us to have three little girls, premature & tiny, and know that they would recieve wonderful, loving, expert, life-preserving care?

Snow, thaw, snow

Now we're in March. It snowed 12 inches last Monday. This weekend there was a thaw, and all the snow melted away. Birds were chirping etc. Today it is snowing again, we're supposed to get four inches by the end of the day. March alternations will proceed.

Luciana and I are continuing to reconnect. It's not that difficult.

We are both, I think, finding that we have experienced a lot of loneliness and that we continue to experience loneliness. Maybe this is part of having babies in your fifties. There are people who are interested, there are people who are (somewhat) involved, but everyone has a center to their lives and everyone must pursue their own interests and work out their own purposes.

We have been sharing interests and purposes for five years (come May 15th) and we still do.

Somehow, having the triplets would change that, we imagined. I don't think this was ever an explicit wish or fantasy. One of those background assumptions which now has been tried in the heat of reality. It melted away, fast.

Okay. No problem. We get it.

Snow, thaw, snow. Alterations in conditions. Back and forth. Living on the pendulum. If we are here, that predicts that soon we will be there. If we are there, that predicts that soon we will be back here.

The loneliness of the long-distance father

What has struck me over the past four or five days, since the girls' advent, is the loneliness of a person's life. Normally this loneliness is not so palpable. We have our routines that cover it up, and we have a general sense of the lack-of-significance of daily life, which numbs it. We have access to our small and large addictions, which also numb the loneliness quite effectively. Working, watching television, facebooking, chatting on the phone, cursing rush-hour traffic, shopping for essentials and impulse buying all are good curbs against loneliness.

But when life jumps a level, and everything is fraught with significance, and every day is full of important news, then loneliness can be felt because the power of our small addictions and our daily routines is broken up.

No one can feel what you are going through. I watch my wife, and I know that know one can really know what she has gone through the past month, the past week. Perhaps talking about it helps, but when life is too busy to allow for the calm connecting conversation, and when the demands of life are too intense to allow for the pleasant happy eye-contacts, and when there is more going on than a person can stand and no one can let down their burden without crying and there is no time for crying and no one to cry with, then the partnership of marriage is temporarily denied to us as well and we are alone. In it together, and in it alone.

So I have struggled the last several days with this loneliness. At times, not all the time, but at times and intensely. To keep hearing echo in my head the phrase, No one gives a shit about you and no one cares about what you have to deal with, to keep hearing it and tolerating this is not fun. I hear it and I recognize the feeling and I say, Yes this is a feeling but it is an artifact of my life and not a fact of my existence. It's the way I am feeling and doesn't tell me much about my reality. And I put it on the shelf and try to keep moving.

It does seem true, however, that everyone I see is caught up in their own life, and the intensity of their concerns, self-aware or not, dominate them and control them. I can see them passing close by and recognize the distance between us. What is important to me is not even noticed by them, and what is important for them may not be recognized by me. If I see it, I still can't value it the way they do.

Tolerating loneliness is part of the challenge of family life. To know you are lonely is simple. To appreciate that everyone is lonely is complex. To tolerate our lonelinesses and to keep trying to understand what I do and what everyone else does in the grip of our loneliness is the journey of life.

Cecilia

And finally, after patiently waiting for friends and family to have their visits, the co-directors of this project were able to meet and discuss the last name without committee. Grandmother was involved as honorary co-director. We went through several names, spent time looking through a computer for an exhaustive list of names prepared three months ago (couldn't find it), ambivalated for awhile between two names, looked up the Latin meanings and read biographies of the eponymous saints and decided up on Cecilia. A noble Roman lady converted with her husband and his brother to the Christian faith, and tortured by other noble Romans because that's how humans treat humans. First they boiled her alive - that didn't persuade her. Then an executioner tried to cut off her head. After three attempts failed to convince her of the error of her ways, the executioner ran off (to San Francisco where he started a band called Heavens to Murgatroyd, experienced a brief bout of popularity at the Fillmore West, and then married the drummer, moved up to Sonoma and learned how to grow grapes). Getting her head nearly hacked off really slowed Cecelia down - for three days she lay around with family and friends, opening and closing her eyes. Some say she was singing a song. After three days she died and went to heaven. Then she became the patron saint of musicians.

Somehow all these hagiographies begin to sound like songs by Leonard Cohen or Bob Dylan. Mabye that's where they got their material. Nice Jewish boys raiding the hagiography index. Makes sense.

At any rate, we like the name - it didn't come to us easily like Evelyn did (I woke up one morning about a month ago and said "Evelyn." Not out of a dream, just out of my mouth.) It didn't come from family like Jessie (a shout-out and tribute to my sweet maternal grandmother who cooked lunch for me every Sunday during my many college years). But it did come finally, and now we have three girls with three names.

That's a beginning.

Oh, by the way, I have posted a picture of Cecilia's foot because she is wearing a CPAP mask and no girl wants her picture posted wearing a CPAP mask. It makes you look like a space invader.