Retired Waif

(Mnemosyne, Goddess of Memory)

Yesterday I got an email from my favorite professor.  Among other questions, I’d asked him if he could intercede with the dean to make sure I had appropriately dropped a course with him that I’d registered for.  Yes, I could have done this myself, back when I dropped the course.  I didn’t because, like much of what’s been going on right now, the whole thing was too depressing to look at straight-on.

The course was called “The Monastic Experience” and was basically the sort of thing I’d been hoping someone would teach for a while.  It also included a study trip to France, where we’d visit Cluny and the Taize community and generally soak up European monasticism.  I reiterate, not only is this basically at the center of everything I study, but the idea of a short trip to France was really appealing–I’m about to have this baby, and who knows when I’ll make such a trip on my own again.  Implicit in that reasoning is an aknowledgement of the extent to which my mobility has been limited already, and the impossibility of knowing how much worse things are going to get, and how soon.  Well, a nasty little fever hit about three weeks before the trip and I suddenly found myself unable to walk one evening.  I have no idea why I confess this to the world at large, considering that I’ve been unable to share the incident with my friends or family (if my husband hadn’t been there, I wouldn’t have told him either), but suffice to say it was scary enough that I cancelled the trip to France and withdrew from the course on monasticism.  But not formally.  Couldn’t quite make that little walk over the the dean’s office, for reasons that had nothing to do with the heavy doors and shitty elevators in the faux-Gothic building where the offices are and everything to do with the fact that I’m not really ready to sit down and have that particular conversation right now.

So, my professor emailed me to let me know I’d been withdrawn from the class, but the the dean wanted to see me to talk about things…”he is very supportive of you, as I hope you know.”  I know this dean and like him.  He’s actually also my neighbor, more or less, and I know he’d be helpful.  And still.  I’m really just not ready to sit down with him and actually go through the MS issues and how they’re affecting me academically–because I don’t want to discuss it.  I haven’t done that with anyone, rather I’ve carefully kept things appearing as a series of isolated incidents, flakiness, pregnancy malaise, and general smoke and mirrors.  I Am. Not. Ready. to sit down and actually explain the past year to anyone.

But I don’t think I really have a choice anymore.

Last September, I sat in my neurologist’s office and basically begged him to treat my cognitive symptoms.  Adderal, I said.  Ritalin.  An Alzheimer’s drug.  Something?

But you’re trying to get pregnant, he said.  We’ll have to talk about it later.  In a year or so.  It’s a possibility, sure, but not now.

And so I pretty much tried to put things out of my mind, which should be lot easier for someone having memory issues than it’s proved to be.  I tried to smile my way through last semester and keep up with my reading.  I got pregnant just in time to be violently ill for both midterms and finals.  I visited professors in their office hours.  I tried to balance asking for special treatment with being sweetly brave and asserting that I could do things that, I was becoming fairly certain, I might not ever be able to do again.  And I told the dean, and my professors, a little bit about the fatigue and a little bit about the right-side weakness, and didn’t mention the rest of it.  Last semester may have been a wash.  It’s one of the things the dean wants to see me about.  But I don’t have the financial ability or the stamina to take an additional year to graduate, so I’m not ready to have that conversation yet.

I’m tremendously sorry for having turned into such a crap student, but I’m also a bit angry as well.  I’m angry with myself for making “looking well” such a priority that it’s gotten in the way of actually doing well.  An example:  75% of the time, my right hand isn’t working well enough to take notes.  I once mentioned to a professor that it would be very helpful to record the class, and would he mind?  He seemed put off by the idea, and sort of said something like “it isn’t necessary,” and well… I was embarrassed, and I haven’t brought it up again with anyone else.  In fact, what do I do?  A very sneaky little maneuver in which I use my left hand to curl the fingers of my right hand around the pencil, and then rest my pencil-holding right arm on a stack of last year’s notes.  So that it looks like I’m doing something, and am not a useless peice of firewood taking up space.

This Tuesday, we had our first Really Nice Warm Day.  And, as is common in big institutional buildings, the climate control hadn’t really caught up with the weather.  The classrooms were hot.  Very hot.  I wasn’t bundled up, but I wasn’t in shorts and a tank top with an ice pack either.  And so, by the middle of my third class, I was in the midst of a major flare-up that went into 24 hours of pain and then 48 more hours of sleeping and eating rice straight out of the rice cooker.  And I forgot everything that happened that Tuesday, including that I was supposed to bring in work on Friday.

So seriously, tell me disability-services office, or dean, or husband, or well-meaning friends, how the fuck I’m supposed the react when I’m being asked about these assignments and cannot, will not bring myself to say anything more than the most literal truth, that being simply “I forgot.”

I forgot.  Like I was late to your class twice last week because I forgot where it was.  Like I forgot your name, when I was trying to email you.  This was my first symptom, the very first thing that got me telling my husband something was really wrong.  It’s been easy to hide the forgetting behind the weakness and the pain, to dismiss it as “a pregnant thing,” or to pretend it wasn’t happening.

Somehow, I’m going to have to fix things at school.  I’m going to have to do this in spite of the fact that I can’t fit into desks very well, that I don’t know where to begin with resolving the issues from last semester, and that if one more person gives me grief about taking the elevator from the first to the second floor I’m going to punch them in the neck with my good arm.

But I do not know how to begin explaining the memory issues.  I’m just so afraid that that will be the moment that they look at me and begin to write me off.  That that will be the end.

Yes, feel free to yell at me. Loudly and often.

But dang, is this what I’m missing by not having a TV? America’s Next Top Models dolled up as cadavers?

Of course, none of them quite measure up to the fairest of them all …

But it is sweet to watch them try.

Edited late to add:  I’ve read some of the outraged commentary these photos are provoking around the blogosphere.  Eh.  I can’t personally get worked up on this one, sorry.  It’s America’s Next Top Model, people… now it’s objectifying women?

…will be a haze of writing, reading and generally getting caught up in my classes. I doubt I’ll post anything here. If I do post anything here, feel free to yell at me. Loudly and meanly.

Despite the fact that I am wearing wicked-cool Virgin Mary earring from the dollar store, this is not a happy photo. The glazed look represents my sudden realization of the backlog of schoolwork I have to complete.

Since the last post I made probably should come with some sort of explanation about the complicated religious/academic situation I’ve ended up in, I’m going to try to put together something over the next few weeks. Bear in mind, with all the writing I’ve done about religion over the past few years, I’ve never really set down anything in writing to imply anything about my own beliefs. I have a lot invested in remaining fairly non-committal as far as that goes.

So, I’ve been invited to join a national honor society for excellence in the study of theology. I’m fairly thrilled for many reasons, not the least of which is the body-blow my academic career has been dealt by illness and now pregnancy. I haven’t exactly been a top student this year, and I’m more hoping to graduate on schedule than to do it in a particularly distinguished way. That isn’t really the only thing that makes the timing of all of this a little strange, though.

See, I haven’t really had the most uncomplicated relationship with theology as a discipline, and despite the fact that it’s “what I do” I’m hardly as committed as, for instance, my husband is to modern political history. In fact, I was originally a “religious studies” major, and the reason I switched had much more to do with a desire to do more primary-text-based work and less anthropological/sociological observation. Will I go on to do further graduate work in Christian theology? Probably not exclusively, no. Will it be Roman Catholic theology? Almost certainly not.

But I wonder whether all of this has as much to do with academics as it does with how deeply the Buddhist/Christian dichotomy has become entrenched in the identity politics of my marriage. Although I have no real desire to let my own fractured religious identity dictate what I do academically, things would have been a great deal easier if I’d ended up at a university with more resources for studying Eastern religion. Or maybe, when the what will I write my thesis on question so quickly becomes the will I agree to having the child baptized question, maybe it really is time to draw some boundaries.

“Ironically, it is OK for a doctor to find the smell of human tissue when using the Bovie appealing but it is not OK for a woman to express that she was horrified by it.”

I have to admit, Cesarean-Art is not a site I’d suggest that any other (meaning any sane, non-morbid) pregnant woman visit. It is, however, extremely beautiful, as well as very disturbing. Go and look, even if you’re not pregnant and have no plans of becoming so, or getting anyone that way. The ceasarian rate in the U.S. is topping a highly unneccessary 40%, and Foucault would have a field day with many of the standard rituals surrounding the procedure.

For those who will ask, I did not have a c-section with my first child, although I did, for a period of time, have an enormous nurse standing over my bed while I was in labor, chanting in some bizarre sing-song “you’re not gonna have this baby this way, you’re gonna have to have a c-section.”

There are a lot of reasons we’ve decided we’ve decided we’re not gonna have this baby in the hospital, but the chanting nurse is right up there.

I doubt that very many women can say that they got their old body back during pregnancy. Certainly nothing of the kind happened to me the first time around; by this point in my last pregnancy I’d gained something close to forty pounds and chopped off all my hair. Although I was ten years younger, I can’t pretend I looked terribly good while with child. This time, oddly, I’m kind of pleased by how I look.

I wasn’t expecting much. I got pregnant shortly after stopping a major course of prednisone, which had put an alarming amount of weight on me. I didn’t really recognize the person I saw in the mirror, and it was frightening. I fully expected an enormous pregnancy weight gain that would never really come off, followed by a post-partum and MS-related inability to do any real working out to leave me moaning over pictures of my former self. Instead, over the past month, I’ve somehow gone back to looking much like I always used to, except of course I look like I’m carrying a pillow under my dress.

Apparently, the steroid weight will drop off, pregnant or not. I’ve actually only gained about four or five pounds this pregnancy, something that worried me until my doctor explained that a twenty-five-pound chemically-induced weight gain in the months before conception probably had to be taken into account.

All this is a very roundabout way of saying that when I finally let my husband take some of the dreaded “belly shots” of late pregnancy, I was actually pleasantly surprised.

Of course, lest we get too full of ourselves while the growing child is nicely covered with a scarf, a straight-on view might tell a different story–may I remind you that there is an entire child in there (who, I just discovered today, already has fingernails).

I literally have not allowed pictures of me to be taken for nearly a year, other than the few full-face closeups I’ve taken with my new camera this past week. Can I be a girl for a moment, please? It’s awfully nice to have cheekbones again.

From what I’ve discussed with the doctor, some form of physical therapy will begin about six months after I give birth, once I get through the early phase of heightened risk of relapse. Since I plan on nursing, I’m going to be more or less limited to gamma globulin infusions to lower that risk, and anything that raises core temperature would be a bad idea. Still, as I come up on a year post-diagnosis, I suddenly find myself thinking about the things I can do rather than those I can’t. And so swimming will probably replace running and I may be able to start iaido or another solitary weapon form. It’s just a matter of getting over a certain amount of wounded pride. I spent most of my early twenties being attractively frail, and the discovery of strength a few years ago was fairly life-altering. Of course, so was the panic, when that strength inexplicably disappeared along with balance and energy.

In a strange way, I think pregnancy has been a good body-reclaiming tool. It’s given me a sort of languidness instead of a bone-deep lassitude, and a shape that makes sense (Pregnant Woman rather than Steroid Balloon). I’ve also regained a sex drive, which helps. They say that each pregnancy irrevocably changes your body; I’m just hoping that this change might take me more easily through the transition of figuring out what, exactly, my body can and can’t do.

(Pieter Aertsen, “Scenes from the Life of an Unidentified Bishop-Saint”)

I find the case of former archbiship Emmanuel Milingo, who was recently excommunicated from the Roman Catholic Church after reuniting with his wife, to be particularly interesting–the involvement of Rev. Sun Myung Moon lends a strange twist to the story. Now Peter Manseau, author of “Vows” and “Killing the Buddha,” has an article on Milingo in the Washington Post.

Favorite Quote: “Masculine pride becomes very strong after 70 years,” Milingo said. The archbishop seemed bemused by his newfound domesticity. He let out a hooting laugh, as if all at once he had come to understand the punch line of every marriage joke he’d ever heard. “My horns,” he said, “have been cut a bit.”

Tomorrow I’m doing several things I very rarely do, namely: getting up early, taking the subway, and going to Brooklyn. The first two are fairly recent developments, but I’ve sort of avoided Brooklyn for the past few years. I’m susceptible to serious nostalgia attacks at the best of times, and for some reason the ones brought about by Brooklyn are particularly painful… maybe because I can’t make any real claim to being from there, like I can with lower Manhattan or Southern California or even San Francisco, where I got my first real bank account and my first real apartment and ran off with my first almost-real husband. I just lived in Brooklyn for brief periods because I had to, or because someone else did.

When I was a teenager, I lived in Brooklyn Heights with my mother and little sister, and was vaguely embarrassed by the place. After all, I was from the Village, which is where my friends and I hung out, and having to catch the train home seemed like such a stigma that I took to walking home over the bridge, usually with whichever boy had been paying me the most attention that evening. Endless cigarettes would be smoked at the Happy Days diner on Montague, and we’d say good bye in front of the doorman. Sometimes, as I got older, I wouldn’t make it home.

I spent a lot of time with several semi-fascinating young men who lived in Brooklyn, in areas that ranged from Park Slope to Canarsie to that Gowanus/Boerum Hill/No-Man’s-Land-Next-to-the-Wyckoff Projects area that has gotten so pricey. I never went near Williamsburg; nobody I knew did. At first the people I met from there were a bit older and arty, and then they became rich out-of-towners. Either way, it was a bit outside of my orbit, somehow.

A native New Yorker, I’d never set foot in Williamsburg until I was invited there on a date at the age of 27. It was late 2003, and I had been spending a few years bemusedly watching the hipster thing mushroom out over the city, but it was still vaguely intimidating. Although dressing for the date was easy enough (dressing for anything back in the days when I lived on a diet of aikido and Marlboros was pretty much a snap) I got hung up on the choice of overcoat. Freezing cold day mandated ankle-length puffy down monstrosity, but this was my first time visiting Williamsburg, and so somehow I decided it would be a Good Idea to pull out my great-grandmother’s late-60s leather coat–the one with the wide lapels, belt, and horn buttons. I cringe looking back on it.

Of course, I nearly froze to death walking to the train, and trying to find the cavernous Thai restaurant where I was meeting the guy, and of course I spent the whole time berating myself for displaying such hipster-wannabe behavior to such a middle-school degree. And, of course, as soon as we sat down in the restaurant I had to tell the first-date guy the whole story of the coat and the self-loathing, and something about the wry self-absorption of immediately making it into the Cool Coat Story made the self-hatred burn just that much brighter, and finally I had to get drunk. Which I couldn’t even do respectably, like a person, but instead ordered a succession of pomegranate mojitos because by this point I had worked up quite a little comedy routine about how I wanted the full experience of the Enormous Hipster Thai Restaurant, and naturally that included the mojitos.

(Despite all this, the date was almost a complete success, and would have been if we’d seen each other again. Unfortunately, I flaked on our second date, the guy went to India, and by the time he got back I’d met my husband and entered that whirlwind experience. Still, my unconscionable behavior aside, the date stands out as Perfect First Date, complete with dessert-sharing, a few hours in a dive bar, and some kissing under a streetlamp. The guy, I say from a safely-married vantage point, was awesome. Cute, funny, disarming, and he had a Cambodia Story. If he somehow reads this, I’ve put in enough identifying details that he’d probably recognize himself… hey, listen. That was the best date ever. I totally liked you. I just didn’t email you back because I just didn’t email you back. I don’t know why.)

My husband lived in Brooklyn as a 19-year-old, first with that girlfriend and then with that other girlfriend (the one who died). So he’s worse than I am, and has a lost-youth story about every fucking fire hydrant we pass, and then I have to one-up him with my own stories (because I know dead people too) and it just gets ridiculous.

So, yeah. I blame Brooklyn, a little bit, for turning me into a pretentious nostalgia-whore the second I set foot within its borders. Today is an innocuous trip to Carroll Gardens to meet a birth doula, and possibly coffee with my cousin. We’ll see.

(Brooklyn photos by Manjit Kaur, 5/18/2005)

I have just deleted a far-too-long post about ER woes. Suffice to say, the broken elbow is currently “resting” out of a splint and awaiting orthopedist attention, and I more or less don’t have a “good” arm right now.