I’m seven months pregnant and digging deeper into the storage bin of maternity clothes each week. Today I pulled out “the $12 pants” and thought of this story, written about a week before my second child was born (originally posted on my MySpace blog).

Monday, April 16, 2007

My mass and/or girth reached some sort of critical point on Friday and suddenly I could not pull on my maternity pants.  Fearing this might happen, I had purchased a pair of larger pants from the JC Penny catalog earlier in the week.  I wore them on Friday and Saturday.  Happily, they allowed blood flow to my legs while seated (a nice change).  Unhappily, they were huge, off-white and ugly.  I needed to go shopping.

I live a few miles from the shopping Mecca of East Pierce County.  This street has everything, including a sex toy shop, but for some baffling reason does not have a maternity clothing store.  I haven’t been able to find a metaphysical store either, although a co-worker says she saw one near the Best Buy.  I’m not sure she knows the difference between a metaphysical shop (where one can buy candles and tarot cards) and a head shop (where one can buy Grateful Dead stickers and things “to put your weed in, man”).  To be fair, they both sell incense and bumper stickers railing against the President.  But I digress.

Last night I traveled to the Motherhood Maternity outlet in the SuperMall.  I told the young clerk who greeted me (I later learned she was the new store manager) that I had about three weeks left (wishful thinking), had outgrown all my pants, and needed the cheapest pants and/or skirts they had.  “Cheap” is what Motherhood Maternity does best and I was at their outlet store, for Pete’s sake, but apparently my choice of words offended her.  She wrinkled her nose and said, “If it’s cheap you want, I can’t help you.  Try the clearance and “as-is” racks over there.  See what you can find.”  She waved her hand at the corner of the store and left me alone.

Luckily another clerk, a tough-looking older woman, had overheard us and wanted to help.  “What size are you, Dear?” she asked.

“Lar . . . um, extra large, now.  I had a thigh explosion,” I over-explained.

There was a beat where neither of us spoke and I almost saw the words, “The baby’s not in your thighs, Dear,” flit across her face, but she just shrugged and said, “That happens.”

She helped me find a $5 skirt and two pair of pants ($12 and $13 each).  She also suggested some other items –ah, upselling, I know you well—and in the end I left happy if a little poorer than planned.  I’m wearing the $12 pants now.  It’s so nice to have blood in my legs without feeling like a complete fashion catastrophe.

I’m pregnant and right now I’m also sick, so I nap a lot. This afternoon I dreamt that I had to collect everyone’s retirement incentive responses via Facebook.

The first problem with this is that I deleted my Facebook account several months ago, because I hate it. I have enough trouble keeping up with my real social obligations without feeling guilty for not tending other people’s virtual gardens or sending them enough clever bumper stickers.

The second problem with this is . . . NOOOO, DON’T MAKE ME WORK THROUGH FACEBOOK!!! . . . . Ahem.

Anyway, I woke up amused by the idea of creating a “Human Resources” Facebook account with spying eyes as the avatar and then sending friend requests to all of the employees at my organization, just to see what they would do. Mwha ha ha! Catbert hits Web 2.0.

Ahhh, I’ll save that one for the “someday” list. It has possibilities.

In the car on the way to work this morning, while I was freaking out my lifelong tendency to take on too much (there are new, shiny things I’d like to do), I said, “. . . and I’ll never accomplish anything and we’ll die in abject poverty and shame.”

Smoothly and without blinking, my husband said, “Technically it won’t be abject poverty. We are above the poverty line.”

That’s my guy.

Yesterday I dusted off the Footloose soundtrack. After an ‘80s flashback afternoon, I drove home from work with “Let’s Hear it for the Boy” cranked up and on repeat.

The summer I was 11 years old I made up a cheerleading/dance routine to that song on my Dad’s front lawn. I put my older sister’s stereo speakers on the windowsill facing outwards and blasted Denise Williams over and over. (The neighbors recall that summer fondly, I’m sure.)

I’ve always known the lyrics, but yesterday I listened to them with an adult’s perspective. When I was 11 I didn’t really get that the song was about a guy who’s so talented in the bedroom nothing else matters. Lyrics like:
“. . . what he does he does so well
makes me wanna yell
let’s hear it for the boy
let’s give the boy a hand . . .”
take my mind to a different place at 36 than they did at 11.

Realizing this, I suddenly thought of “Annie,” my high school boyfriend’s mother. Her son and I never had sex, though that was due to our mutual fear of the Lord’s wrath, not a lack of hormones or desire. To us Annie seemed unnecessarily concerned with sex: overly cautious, prudish, even paranoid.

One day as my boyfriend was listening to Depeche Mode’s “Just Can’t Get Enough,” Annie turned to him and said, “It’s about SEX, isn’t it?!” When he told me this later, we both shook our heads and laughed. If she wanted to hear a Depeche song about sex, we could think of several more obvious selections. Silly woman. The song was about the rush of new love; how you think about a person all the time and can’t get enough of them. We knew about that from recent firsthand experience. (Silly, virginal teenagers.)

Nineteen years later, I can suddenly see where Annie was coming from. I feel as though a tiny crack has opened in the curtains that shielded her world view from me. Prude or not, as the mother of seven she was clearly a sexually-active adult. She knew what she was talking about and she had only her 17-year-old son’s word that her worries were unnecessary.

The Lord’s wrath doesn’t come up much in my household now. When my oldest son is 17, if he has a steady girlfriend they will likely be having sex. Thankfully I have a few more years before that thought starts keeping me up at night. But very soon I’ll probably object to one of his musical selections and I won’t be able to explain why. Silly parent.

I've got a ton of pictures to catch you up on my garden. First, a shot from May 31:

Next, a comparison shot from June 13:

Also on June 13 I found this guy in my garden:
Free-range triceratops are one of the many hazards that come with raising small boys.

Today (June 23), my garden looked like this, an amazing change from the first photo I posted here:

. . . and we have our teeny, tiny first fruits:
Cayenne pepper

Bell pepper

Strawberry (the first to turn red before being eaten by slugs)

Finally, I'll leave you with some crazy peas, crazily and inexpertly staked:

Someone on TV mentioned “brunch” and my husband and I started reminiscing about the last time we went to brunch, a million years ago when we were newly engaged. His parents were visiting from Chicago and treated us to Sunday brunch at Salty’s on Alki. It was fabulous.

“The best part was the mimosas,” I said, remembering the illicit thrill of being tipsy at 10 in the morning in a fancy restaurant with my future in-laws.

“We were young,” I went on, “childless . . . thinner. Ah, our brunch days.”

“Like our salad days, only tastier,” my husband said. “Our salad days, with eggs. And bacon.”

At work I team-teach a course called Prepare Training.* It’s a great course, I truly enjoy teaching it, and yes, I think you should have it at your workplace.** One of the messages of the course is when bad stuff happens around you, don't let it inside. If it does get in, then you need to get rid of it appropriately. The phrase from the materials is something like, “Find positive ways to release stored negative energy.” Stress relief, baby.

When I teach this I mean every word I say. I’ve just been terrible – awful – about living it. I release stored negative energy through food: I stuff my face, I bake, or both. (One does naturally lead to the other.) I gained 20 pounds the first year I was at my job.

I’ve been saying for years that I need to find a better way to deal with stress. (Medication comes to mind, but really, that shouldn’t be necessary. The day I medicate myself in order to deal with my job should be the day I start looking for a new job.) I used to jog, I took a class in Shamanic journeying, and all my pre-parenthood life I could count on escaping with a good book, but those haven’t been realistic options for me for a while.

I’m blogging about this not to whine, but to say that I think I’ve finally found it. I started vegetable gardening a month ago and I love it. I can do it with my kids (with collateral seedling damage, but that’s OK); I can do it after work and on weekends, as much or as little as I like. Gardening is interesting, I don’t have to be in great shape, and I get positive feedback when my plants grow. I get to be outside and I’m not staring at a screen of any kind. I even like weeding. Just writing about it makes me feel good.

So it’s early, I realize that, and my garden is very much an experiment. Here’s a picture of it taken on May 9th. (The fence is old and sad-looking.) I’ll post more pictures as the summer progresses. If I don’t grow anything my family can eat I will be disappointed, but right now I think that’s OK. The stress relief alone is worth the effort.

As of today I'm growing: corn, peas, strawberries, cucumbers, jalapeno peppers, Cayenne peppers, sage, spearmint, rosemary, cilantro, basil, tomatoes (3 kinds), green bell peppers, beans, lettuce, Walla-Walla onions, carrots, cauliflower, and a sunflower my son brought home from school.

—– 

*The official name of the course is the “Crisis Prevention Institute’s Prepare Training Foundation Course” and I’m officially a “Certified Instructor.”

**I’m only certified to teach for my employer, so this is in no way an attempt to get work. If you’d like the course at your workplace (and you totally need it), then contact CPI and grow your own Certified Instructor. (Like Sea Monkeys, only a lot more expensive.)

My two-year-old doesn’t talk much. One of the few words he says (besides “this,” he’ll “this” you till the cows come home) is “done.” “Are you done?” I’ll ask after dinner. He’ll smile from his high chair and with a firm, single nod, say, “Done.”

I could have used some of that decisiveness with my novel. I’ve spent the past nine months telling myself and others that it was almost done. Nearly done. So close to complete. Any day now, really. Every time I went back to it there would be one small thing to fix. A detail I’d left out, a rough spot to smooth. What color were that character’s eyes again? I would tweak the little things, maybe add a page or two more, and think, “Is it done?”

It’s not done. Last week I finally accepted it. (I’m working on “embracing the fact,” let’s not go that far.) Two early readers (Jim Butcher calls them “beta readers,” is that a common term?) gave me very similar feedback that convinced me I had a lot of work left to do. Some of what they told me could be classified as tweaking or smoothing, but there was one big thing: 

I’ve suspected that since September. It’s a short book. I considered adding some scenes in the middle to give it more action, or a subplot to make it longer, but when I started to do that it felt like padding. Everything that needed to be in the middle was already there. The problem is that the “middle” is closer to the end of the first act of a three act play. What I thought was a cliffhanger ending is (according to my beta readers) abrupt and dissatisfying. Let’s call it the end of Act 2.

I could have avoided a lot of wasted time and mental drama if I had known what “done” looked like in the first place. If I had sent the book to my beta readers back in October, or just been able to see the thing more clearly on my own, I wouldn’t have spent time fiddling with a manuscript that was half-finished. I wouldn’t have bought a domain name before I had anything to sell, for crying out loud.

The main reason I started this blog in January was that I thought I’d be shopping my manuscript to agents very soon and I needed some sort of presence on the web. A home base besides Twitter. I’m not trying to be a blogger — good thing, since I post about twice a month and have no apparent theme — I’m trying to be an Author. (Like Architect and Librarian, it must be capitalized.)

I am an author: I wrote something. I’ve written a lot of things, actually, I just haven’t finished any of them. Yet.

A friend (with no sympathy for whiners or hungry commuters who ask to stop for donuts on the way to work) sent this to me. I must say, I think the Army's on the right track.

(Go ahead and click, it's a single-page .pdf)
Download Hurt Feelings Report

This morning amid the lingering #amazonfail discussion on Twitter came the question of whether or not one should boycott Amazon.com. I responded that the only company I can be bothered to boycott is Wal-Mart, which I’ve been doing for about eight years. (One boycott is enough, right? How socially responsible do you expect me to be?)

I know that Wal-Mart doesn’t miss my former bi-weekly Dr. Pepper and Benadryl purchases, but that’s not the point. The point is that I have one less thing to feel guilty about. I’ve got unpaid bills, a never-opened box of baby gift thank-you cards, broken vows, overdue library books, white privilege, and 42 other things in the knapsack on my back. I don’t need Wal-Mart in there too.

A Twitter friend said (as people often do when the subject comes up) that she couldn’t boycott them because they had such great prices. I understand that. I also know it’s a fun store. I shopped there for years because my friend and I had a hell of a good time frolicking in the aisles while we saved money. (One trip we wasted an entire disposable camera taking pictures of each other.) Sure, I’d heard bad things about Wal-Mart; that they drove small businesses under, and forced record labels to censor CDs, but I could buy my CDs somewhere else and they had Benadryl for $3.97 a box. C’mon!

Then I got my first job as a Human Resources Manager. As a newly-minted professional, I subscribed to several HR email newsletters. Not a week went by, not a week! –excuse me for a moment while I channel Brodie– when I didn’t read about another lawsuit by Wal-Mart employees against the company. Sure, any employer can get sued, whether they deserve it or not, and sure, an employer the size of Wal-Mart is going to have a proportionately larger number of suits, but after a while I thought, “These people can’t all be wrong. There has to be something here.”

I eventually decided that I could not in good conscience give my money to a company that treated its employees that poorly. This CampusProgress article, even though it was written in 2005 and I started my boycott in 2001, gives a good feel for Wal-Mart’s legal issues at the time.

My boycott by now is a comforting habit. I did shop there once about a year and a half ago as an experiment to lower our grocery bill, but it just felt wrong being in the store. (And wouldn’t you know it, someone from work called my cell while I was there, asking to meet me where I was.) I’ve been thinking about it off and on today: what can I say about why I boycott Wal-Mart? How are things there in 2009?

A quick Google search tonight found three interesting things: an October ’08 article in the Montreal Gazette accusing Wal-Mart of closing a store (again) because the employees there organized, a January Bloomberg Politics Law podcast about 63 class-action wage & hour lawsuits entitled, "Wal-Mart Employee Settlements May Cost $640 Million," and a February Boing Boing post by Charles Platt about his experience working there. (His summary: “Not so bad!” Summary of the comments: “You’re an idiot, Mr. Platt.”)

Then there's always this map, which disturbs me no matter how many times I see it and looks like it should belong to the CDC. Yeah. I think I’ll keep my comforting habit for a little while longer.