in the matrix

So I started making this decision matrix yesterday... it ended up being more a stream-of-consciousness plot of boxes and arrows than an actual decision matrix, but the determining question emerged: "Can we have a similar lifestyle less expensively somewhere else?"

You see, if we decide to have another child we can't stay here. Which is too bad, because we both like where we live. In fact, I've lived in this apartment longer than any other home I've had in my entire life, so you can see why I might be a little bit attached to it. But I was a single person when I bought it and while it adapted to accommodate two, and then three, without a problem, I think trying to shoehorn four people into this space won't be good for anybody.

So where do we look for a new home? I've lived in NYC for 16 years. My husband has been here over 20. Our first inclination was to look for someplace in another Brooklyn neighborhood where we could expand a little but still attend our current church, visit our friends and Steve could still have a reasonable commute to work. It is becoming quickly apparent, however, that this isn't a viable option. We can't afford anything worth relocating to. We're getting priced out of our own borough.

So then we have to consider moving out of New York. It would be terrific to live in a state with lower taxes... but my husband would have to find another job, and where should we look for a job and a house? It would be a disaster to find out that we've moved to a community where we have nothing in common with anyone! So I'm going to describe a little bit about us and ask for suggestions.

My husband and I are both entering our 40s (well, he's already there, and I'll be 40 this year). We have one 22-month old son and are entertaining the idea of a second child, so in a way we're a young family, even if that's not in terms of years. We've been spoiled by years of living in NYC where when you need to pick up milk or sodas or a sandwich there's a deli on the corner of your block, and if you don't feel like cooking dinner you can always walk to a terrific restaurant. One thing about New York, you can find ANYTHING here. And chances are it isn't even far from where you live.

We do not own a car and haven't for 20 years between us, but I expect that'll change if we move out of the city. We both have valid driver's licenses, even if we only use them once or twice a year... but we still want a stroller- and bike-friendly community. We're moderate-to-liberal Christians (Episcopalians). My husband is a vestry member and I sing in the parish choir. For two years before my son was born I coordinated the silent auction for the parish winter fair (I don't miss doing that, though!), I'm a member of the altar guild and I am preparing for Stephen Ministry training. I just agreed to serve my third term on the board of directors of our co-op. We're political moderates and don't vote a party line.

I don't believe in travel-sports. I want to encourage my children to pursue their interests but I don't want to encourage hyper-competitiveness. I want to raise them in an environment where I can nurture their creativity, imagination and inquisitiveness. I don't want them to grow up in a place where the only activities for kids to do on weekends are going to the movies and cruising the mega-mall. Or getting drunk or high, God forbid. I don't want to sound like a hypocrite, because I tried pot a few times when I was young, but I didn't like it and I don't want to take the chance that my children might. I want good schools, with motivating teachers, a multi-cultural student body and plenty of (supervised) extracurricular opportunites -- sports, clubs, stuff like that.

So what do you think? Are we looking for a 21st-century Grover's Corners? Or are we just still in the matrix?

I forgot to take the cat to the vet

I was supposed to take the cat to the vet today for her rabies shot. I knew she had an appointment today. I had every intention of getting her there on time. I even wore a skirt with cats on it today. You would think I could have remembered.

But I was in the middle of drafting up a concept drawing for the re-tile project in our bathroom, and when I finished it, it was 4:00. Oops. The appointment was at three.

I hate it when I do stuff like this. When I was a business person, I never missed an appointment. I slept through a date once, but that's another story... anyway, it makes me feel like I'm not real anymore, somehow. Real people don't forget important stuff. Or do they?

But I was on a roll. With my son out with the sitter, I sat down and made a decision flow-chart this morning: things we have to decide in regard to "have a baby, sell the apartment..." etc. I identified categories in our cash flow that we need to budget better. I was making so much progress that I decided to draw the schematic for the bathroom tile installation, which is supposed to happen while we're on vacation in August. I have no idea what time it was when I started that project, but I know where I ended up. In the doghouse.

I used to draw for a living. It wasn't much of a living, but it was a sort of total-immersion occupation. You took the dimensions on a rough sketch, put your favorite music on, and turned the sketches into really detailed draftings. CAD sort of put an end to all that. I tried to learn to draw with a computer, but it wasn't as craftsmanship-like. Click and snap. Select and drag. Besides, it took me three times as long to draw a line with the computer as it did to pick up a pencil and do it. And more and more it wasn't my job to draw it anyway, so the only drawings I do these days are for projects in my own home. The building super has to replace a section of pipe in the wall of our bathroom that's deteriorated, and he told us he'd need to replace sheetrock and would retile for us if we chose the tile. He wants to do it while we're away because it will take our bathroom out of commission for while during the job. (And since we only have one, that could be a problem...) So we selected some new tile at Lowes. Since we won't be here to answer questions, I drew up what we want it to look like. There's a chair rail and a diagonal mosaic strip crowning 4x4 porcelain field tiles. Anyway, I was really into it, and I was crooning along to Emmylou Harris, and all of a sudden it was 4:00. Just like that. Seems like a metaphor for life, at least recently.

But at least I didn't forget to have children.

one vote for another baby

My son finally fell asleep for his nap, after thirty minutes of howling, "ya-yoo, ya-yoo, ya-yoo..." This is something he says when he's upset. We have no idea what he means.

Thank you for the vote of confidence, Tristan! That was really nice of you. I hope when my son is grown he thinks of his father and me the way you think of your dad. U.S. Father's Day is Sunday -- remember to tell him!

second-time-around jitters

My husband and I had lunch with a friend yesteday. We showed him pictures of our son (that we carry around in our wallets like good Stepford parents) and he talked about his two kids, ages three and five. At the end of the meal, he told us that they're expecting their third on January 1st and that they're a little nervous about it. We can relate.

Steve and I have been talking for a while about whether we should attempt to have a second child. I'm assuming that it would work... I mean, it wasn't that hard to make the first one... but making a child isn't the part we're worried about!

I've gone over the pros and cons in my head numerous times. There are a whole bunch of cons, and only one major pro, but the fact is that the pro, another person to join our family and share our love, balances the cons easily. But that doesn't make the jitters go away.

I know that I would survive the hormone-swing crankiness, the loss of appetite, the five months of unending heartburn and three months of sleeplessness -- before delivery -- and the swollen feet and ankles. And I'd eventually adjust to the exhaustion, and fight my way through the breastfeeding again, and deal with losing my hair (hopefully it would grow back the second time). But what really scares me is that there might not be enough of me to go around when we have more than one.

I made a choice to stay home with my son. And I like to think that I was smart enough to realize that by hiring Miriam I was giving him some additional opportunities and an alternative type of attention that he wouldn't have gotten otherwise (but it was my husband's idea -- I might not have done it if it weren't for him). So I'm really pleased with the way he's growing and developing and learning to express himself, and I would like to believe that the reason he's doing so well is because he feels secure and gets lots of individualized attention from us, his caregivers. And I'm afraid of short-changing a second child, and by extension my first too, because suddenly the demand for attention is twice as high but you only have half as much to give.

This is probably a big load of b.s. Lots of people have multiple kids and their children don't turn out maladjusted just because there were a lot of them. I guess what I'm really afraid of is turning into the kind of mother my mother was. She fed us, and clothed us, and taught us to read and celebrated our birthdays, but I don't remember ever feeling like she was really interested in us. I know she loved us, and she still does, but I don't remember her ever saying "I love you." I got the impression that she kept all the little drawings and stuff that we made her as kids because she thought it was expected, not because she felt any particular affection for them (when we had children of our own, she gave them all back). Yeah, I admit it. I have issues with my parents. Yeah, I've been in therapy. And although it probably won't happen, I would like to prevent my children from having issues about me.

If something is worth doing it's worth doing right. Especially when the something is raising children. And I'm so scared I'd screw it up that I'll make myself crazy and feel guilty about wanting to sleep when the children are awake 24 hours a day and consider every can of Spaghetti-os I serve a black mark on my record. And I haven't even gotten as far as "play-dates" yet!

Our friend says you grow into parenting like everything else. You learn when you have more than one that each parent has responsiblity for one child, all the time. You forget that there was ever a time when you were not tired, since you don't remember what that feels like anyway. And the joy of having multiple kids multiplies with them. But I'm still on the fence.

Twins run in both our families.

ancestry

While we were up in Massachusetts visiting my husband's family last weekend, my mother-in-law gave us a painting. Actually, she gave it to us for Christmas last year, but we hadn't claimed it before now.

It's a painting of one of my husband's ancestors, painted circa 1830 to judge from the clothing. The man's name is Herman LeRoy. I asked my husband, "So how are you related to Herman LeRoy?" I know that in his family a number of male children were christened "Herman LeRoy ______ " (including Steve's father) but who was this guy they were all named after? And Steve said, "I dunno."

I wasn't prepared to have people ask, "Who is that old guy hanging on your wall?" and have to respond with some version of "I dunno." So I googled him.

Google is an amazing thing. Yeah, I think it returned some 17,000 entries, only 50 of which I looked at, and only about 20 of which were relevant to our Herman LeRoy. But it told me who he was. (You're just dying to know, aren't you?)

Herman LeRoy was born in 1758 in New York, NY, and he became an owner of a LOT of land in New York state. There are streets named after him in Manhattan and New Rochelle, and there's a town named after him up in Genessee county (near Rochester, NY). He bought a tract of land up there known as the "Triangle Tract," we suspect because he anticipated the construction of the Erie Canal, but we don't know when the purchase occurred. I know the Erie Canal was completed in 1828, and Herman LeRoy didn't die until 1841, so he may have made a bundle if he owned part of the land that the canal was built on. It appears that his office owned deeds to over 800 parcels of land in that area alone. We discovered that he once owned part of what is now Pelham Bay park in the Bronx, and we figured out how my husband's family ended up in New York state when they were originally from Pennsylvania. Herman LeRoy's daughter married my husband's fifth-generation grandfather. When great-great-great etc grandfather Thomas died three years into their marriage, she moved back to Pelham with her two children (and a third in utero) and successive generations of my father's family were born in New York.

There's still a lot more research we could do on Herman LeRoy, after all, we're in New York City, where he lived and died, and we have some of the largest library collections in the U.S. But the fact that I found all this out via the internet really pleases me. We're going to see Herman LeRoy's burial place this evening. It's in St. Paul's Chapel churchyard in Manhattan. (You might know it because it was the church where the rescue workers at the World Trade Center site went to rest and find sanctuary.) We were glad to find out that we could visit the place where Herman LeRoy, our benefactor, is buried. It's nice to learn we had a benefactor all those years ago. And we hope that the Herman LeRoy in our painting is glad to be back in New York.

Now, if we go back another generation on another branch of my husband's family tree, you get to Thomas Jefferson. The one who wrote the Declaration of Independence and was the third president of the United States. His great-great granddaughter married my husband's great-grandfather. If you count in both directions that's seven generations.

In our front foyer we now have Herman LeRoy and Thomas Jefferson in a face-off across the room. I guess it's a darn good thing that I don't have any famous ancestors, because we wouldn't have any place to put them! (On my Dad's side of the family six generations back or something we are cousins of General Sam Houston, as in "remember the Alamo." But I don't have any genealogical charts or material to trace that link, and that's ok.)

another book review

This one has to be short because we're driving up to Boston this afternoon to visit my husband's family and I've got to dash it off while my son is napping and then finish packing.

Geek Love by Kathleen Dunn is a terrific, entertaining read. If you can accept the initial premise without squeamishness, you'll really enjoy this book. It's about the family dynamics of a truly unconventional family and the hubris that created them and eventually causes their destruction. The story is narrated, primarily, by one of the offspring of a carnival barker and a former aerialist. Olympia, like her siblings, is a freak. By design.

I read this book practically overnight because I wanted to finish it so I could loan it to my mother-in-law, but also because it was so hard to put down. We talk about stage mothers (among other types) who impose their own ambitions on their kids. This book is about the penultimate stage parents. The thing is, they're loving parents. I don't know if you can say "good." As a parent myself, and from my perspective of having once been a child, I don't know how you qualify a "good" parent. But if you have a loving parent, maybe that's the balance of the battle. This family unfortunately loses the battle and spirals off into disfunctionality. Many of us do. It's not a judgment.

Olympia takes a shot a redemption and you'll have to be the judge of whether or not she succeeds. In a kooky way I think she does. Her denouement is only fitting in the context of the story.

(The HTML editor is acting screwy today, so you'll have to take this post warts and all -- sorry everybody. I'll try and go back and fix it another time.)