22 posts tagged “love”

OOOOH, Emily Yoffe has brought the noise! 

Yeah, she made the outrageous claim that kids do better in a household with two married parents, preferably their natural ones (but, sure, adopted ones can stand in just fine and so can responsible and caring stepparents--that's my commentary, I guess, since I don't think she really addresses it, but given the fact that her article is so focused on the economic benefits of two-parent households, it would make sense).  I know, I know!  She's so utterly Victorian!  To even suggest that women might oughtn't (Too much time in Arkansas.  Just deal with the double modal.) conceive of children with someone who ain't going to be around come time to buy diapers!  It's so oppressive!

Or, I guess, that's what Broadsheet thinks.  But, meh.  They get a big meh and even a snort of contempt because they (where "they" equals Tracy Clark-Flory) present no actual evidence or data to counter anything Yoffe wrote.  Nothing.

The thing that bothered me most about Yoffe's piece wasn't the thesis of it or her focus on the economic indicators, because those are important.  But I thought she ignored one of the most brutal problems with kids born out of wedlock:  Not only are these kids almost certainly going to grow up poorer and with less parental involvement (duh), they are vastly more likely to be victims of child abuse.  Kids raised by two parents other than their own natural or adoptive parents are at increased risk of being abused, but that number increases higher for kids who have no father figure around at all, except maybe (and possibly worst of all) a string of boyfriends.

There are a lot of possible reasons for this, and you can peruse the Internet at your leisure to find hypotheses galore, although a lot of them have to do with economic stress and are thus related to the poverty argument, but there are other possibilities as well.  It is a fact that most fatal child abuse is perpetrated by the biological mother and most sexual abuse of children is perpetrated by a male who is not the biological father. 

There are a host of other worrisome statistics.  Kids who grow up without their fathers are more likely--in some cases, vastly more likely--to engage in all kinds of risky behavior, end up dropping out of school, end up on drugs, in prison, etc.  Most rapists grew up in fatherless households.

I have seen some research suggesting that two adoptive, committed parents of the same sex (yeah, I'm talking about the gays.  Yesterday I mentioned the Latins.  Today it's the gays.) are equally effective at preventing most of these bad outcomes (I'd say becoming a rapist is a bad outcome, wouldn't you?), leading some to suggest that perhaps it is the mere presence of two loving people who are absolutely committed to the child's best interests.  However, the research is somewhat limited due to a) that type of family being relatively rare and b) the fact that most of the gay couples who adopt/give birth are well educated and of above-average income, confounding comparison with most children born out of wedlock.  That being said, I will continue my support for gay adoptive parents--I don't know, but I have a gut feeling that the more loving and stable adoptive homes that exist for kids, the better off we all are.

It is of grave concern to me that feminism seems to care very little about what is good for kids (or men) because they are so focused on what is "good" for women.  Feminism will continue to ignore the data that kids do much better in a stable home with two parents because it suggests that women should, oh, at least consider how their choices are going to affect others.  And we can't have that.  Or at least Tracy Clark-Flory can't.  The commenters on that piece are a bit more reasonable about it.  No one--not even me or Emily Yoffe--is suggesting that women should marry men who are clearly unable to act responsibly toward both the mother and child and obviously not abusive men or men who have violent rages and make the house feel unsafe and constantly stressful.  Yoffe and I would venture to suggest, though, that perhaps women should GET ON THE FUCKING PILL before they allow themselves to get knocked up by these guys.  But, of course, we shouldn't get all judgey and preachy at women (and men, sure) who are totally fucking their kids over because it's, like, a woman's right to do what she pleases.

Every time some new report comes out that links some behavior in the mother with some outcome in the kid, every damn feminist website screams, "OH MY GOD, THEY ALWAYS BLAME THE MOM."  Well, sometimes, maybe it's the mom's fault, eh?  It's less about blaming the woman, I think, than about finding out what's best for kids, but the constant focus on the woman, the woman, always the woman, means that we can't find out what risk factors there might be for childhood obesity, for example.  Because if it's linked to working mothers, as it has been, the feminists will fucking shriek.  Similarly, there will be a shrill outcry if it is suggested that wymmins are animals and share any qualities with other female animals, including, of course, the dreaded maternal instinct.  We don't have instincts!  We went to college! 

I know, I know.  I'm hopelessly conservative and out of date.  But I warned you:  I care fuck-all about "progress" if progress means throwing kids under the bus.  I also famously hate the type of diseased individualism we have taken to celebrating in this country--hey, man, whatever you want to do as long as it makes you happy.  Feh.  As Kant said, doing your duty first makes you worthy of happiness and 'duty' implies the existence of some type of relationship.

Now, maybe I'm just engaging in pointless handwringing.  God knows, that's what Tracy Clark-Flory would say, right?  Maybe all of those differences between single-parent households and two-parent households can be explained simply by the poverty.  I don't really see how you can ferret out the differences between differences caused solely by poverty and those related to the presence of parents, because in so many cases it is precisely the loss of the one parent that causes the poverty.  So, is the loss of the parent causing the poverty, and then the poverty causes the other problems?  Or is the absence of the parent causing all of it, proximally?  And what are we to make of the fact that biological fathers who live with their children are, compared to single mothers and unrelated men, less likely to abuse their children?  And, by the way, comparisons to Scandi-fuckin-navia don't really hold up; there are so many cultural differences between the US and Sweden that it's way too hard to control for all the variables.  It is certainly possible that with their system that has come close, or so I hear, to eliminating child poverty in their countries also eliminate or nearly eliminate the social difficulties of single-parent households.  Anyway, eliminating child poverty is a worthy goal even if it doesn't, but it's too hard to say. 

Furthermore, comparisons with the animal world are not helpful here since there are no other animals that I can think of who require several years of care before they become independent of their parents.  Also, no other animal young are expected to learn language, to learn to be civilized and ethical, etc.  Human children take much more effort and care and time than any other animal young, so far as I know.  Correct me if I'm wrong--is there some rare bird in the Upper Orinoco that has young who now require 12 years of schooling before they are ready to the leave the nest?

I'm going to go ahead, since it's late and I'm tired, and go way out on a limb here.  I have, as some of you know, a special interest in sociopathy.  Of the sociopaths I have personally known, all of them came from fatherless homes (and some of them from motherless homes, too, i.e., they had been abandoned by both parents).  It makes a certain amount of sense since, while there is probably a biological component for the antisocial personality disorders, it is thought that they can be prevented in early childhood through certain parenting techniques--parenting techniques that are often more doable in a two-parent household.  I would suggest--and some others have, too--that single-parent households are more likely to push kids who already have the biological component to become sociopaths and that two-parent households have a higher likelihood of preventing it.  Incidentally, the rapists mentioned above are more likely to be psychopaths than sociopaths, though they both lie at various places on the antisocial spectrum.

I was just thinking about this the other day, how in this country we put children in their own beds as soon as we can get them to sleep there.  We have a host of experts telling us how to fight the baby's natural instinct to cry like hell when they are left to sleep by themselves; we have to send the message, of course, that in this life, kiddo, you're on your own.  I think attachment parenting gets some stuff wrong, too, but how can we expect kids to grow up feeling part of a deeply loving relationship, feeling that other people's feelings matter, feeling connected to other people when we ignore the kid's needs from infancy.  Not all the kid's needs, yeah, just the need to feel safe with his parents while he sleeps.  I figure that as human emotions and relationships have evolved, sleeping was probably a dangerous time.  A lot of predators are nocturnal, and a baby left alone in a crib all night would have been easy prey.  It seems at least plausible to me that we evolved to prefer sleeping with our loved ones (and this is still how it's done in many places) because it was safer.  (We had our kid sleep in his own bed in our room--our bed when he was very young was too damned fluffy to be safe for an infant--but we got up with him every time he cried.  He now sleeps in his own bed in his own room without any trouble, but if he wakes up in the middle of the night and needs us, we let him sleep with us.  To me it is more important that he know that we are always there with him and for him than to promote a very false independence.  He's 3, man, he is not independent, although he does go potty all by himself.  woot!)  It isn't just the sleeping thing.  I know parents who don't think twice about keeping their baby essentially confined all day long--in cribs, playpens, high chairs, car seats--forcing the baby to conform to the adult's schedule and needs and utterly ignoring the need the baby has to play, move, rest, eat when hungry, etc.  Not to mention that the kid is basically alone most of these times, experiencing the world without the touch, voice, smell of a loved one.  Working parents have come out and admitted in national magazines that they don't enjoy and cannot force themselves to enjoy playing with their kids, so they work instead and hire out the play, as if the kids won't get the message.  But to kids, "love" isn't a word or a feeling--it's an action.  They don't think you love them because you say it, because the word itself doesn't mean much to a 2-year-old.  They learn what it means by associating it with actions and with time spent (the currency of love is time).  A child whose parents are there, making that child their first (not only, but first) time and energy commitment, obviously enjoying the time spent and actively joining the child in their engagement with the world--that child knows it is loved and is lovable, and that child conversely learns to do love to others.  "Do love" is an odd construction, I know, but we adults have come to think of "love" as just a feeling, not an action.  I accepted that without thinking about it until I met T who doesn't like to say "I love you" but is always sure to act in such a way that he doesn't need to; he gives me the time and energy that are love.  We give that to each other, and we give that to our son. 

Love is an action.  The currency of love is time.  Do your duty by your spouse and kids.  Take responsibility--yeah, of course, fathers that goes for you, too, but fathers have less reproductive choice here, having no birth control pill and no say in the abortion question--for the life you create. 

I'm too tired to proofread this now, and tomorrow is my darling son's birthday, not to mention the community Easter egg hunt, and I have a ladybug-shaped cake to frost (coconut cake, and man, it is some fabulous cake--Martha Stewart's recipe, even!) and presents to wrap and gather and blah blah.  Ha.  It's 4:00 a.m.  Awesome.  So, if there are places I should have edited, grant me a modicum of latitude, I beg of you. 

Oh, finally, don't get all up in my face with cohabitation being as good as marriage.  In America, at least, cohabitations are much more likely to break up than marriages are.  In their first 5 years, 20% of marriages will break up, but 40% of cohabitations will; in the next 5 years, the numbers jump to 40% for marriages and 60% for cohabitations.  So, in terms of commitment and stability, they aren't equivalent to marriage. 

Son:  I am eating the jelly beans.

Me:  Oh, is it good?

Son:  looking at me seriously  Are they good?  ...letting me consider my mistake...Yes, they are.

Touche, kiddo.  Not even 3 and already a pedant.  This warms the cockles of me very heart, lad.

I mentioned previously that I had just read Michael Pollan's wonderful book, The Omnivore's Dilemma (why haven't you read it yet??  Janette gets toffee!  the rest of you get scorn!), and now I am reading the captivating Barbara Kingsolver book, Animal Vegetable Miracle.  Well, I just read half of it in one sitting.  There will be much more said about both of these books, as time goes along, but the main thing about the Kingsolver book is I just keep thinking over and over again, "Yes, this is how I want to live.  This is it."  To be completely honest, the book has made me laugh and sigh and weep just a tiny bit at her descriptions of how good good food is and how much it means to our lives.

Anyway, one thing both books have in common is that they take up the question of whether it is elitist to recommend eating organic and sustainably raised food.  Many people have apparently decided that it is, because organic food tends to cost more at the grocery store, and it is presumed that this makes it unaffordable to anyone who makes less money than Michael Pollan (for the record, I have no idea at all how much money he makes).

Both books assert that every consumer-citizen is subsidizing the industrial food chain through taxes.  The Kingsolver book comes up with some figure, something like $725 a year from each household goes to subsidizing this horrifying, petroleum-guzzling "food" industry.  They both say that those hidden costs actually make a standard industrial diet comparable to an organic, sustainable one.  That is absolutely true.  Our society as a whole is paying a huge cost--larger, if we count all the damage to the environment and the public health--to keep the shitty tomatoes coming.  The only problem with telling people this, people who do not think that they can afford organic, is that you are asking them to pay the higher price of organic foods in the market while continuing to pay the taxes that subsidize the other.  This makes organic food at this time yet more expensive, because it's not like you can opt out of paying that portion of your taxes (how nice if we could write in and say, "Well, I buy organic food, so I'm not paying this percent of my taxes that would go to ConAgra"). 

Both authors also point out that Americans on average spend only around 10% of their incomes on food.  I am unclear if that figure includes eating out, or if that's only groceries, but this still seems absurdly low to me.  My household spends a good deal more on food--probably 20-25% of our income.  Partly that is because our income is lower than average; the same amount of grocery bill in dollar terms will obviously be a higher percentage of a lower income.  Part of that, though, is that we willfully select the best quality foods we can possibly manage.  If we're going to buy syrup (I make a lot of fruit syrups from berries and such that we use on pancakes, so we don't always buy syrup), for example, it will only and always be real maple, not that weirdly viscous corn syrup-based crap.  Managing our grocery budget is sometimes complicated and requires a good deal of attention on my part, but I am not willing to cook up unidentifiable industrial products and call it dinner.

Anyway, this is all just to say that I don't think it's elitist to eat organic.  I cannot understand the mentality of people who are unwilling to spend money on food.  The quality or lack thereof of your food is one of the most vital pieces of life, in the most fundamental of ways.  It isn't even just the nutrients and phytochemicals and whatever else they find in spinach these days--and it isn't even avoiding pathogens like E. coli either, although that, too. Food is about caring and connections and nature and health.  How is it even possible that we've allowed ourselves to get this way?  The mind boggles.

Life's too short to stuff a mushroom?  Fuck that.  Life's too short not to. 

I wonder...if I cut our grocery budget to 10% of our income, what would we eat?  What kind of horrors would we be forced to ingest?  With that extra money, I could go buy myself a digital camera for sure.  But then every time I sat down to dinner with my husband and son, I would be telling them and myself that I care more about buying shit than I do about our health and enjoyment (for we are food lovers, all of us).  I would die a little.

I think that if you're in a lower (not the lowest, because then you quite probably cannot afford organic) spot on the economic totem pole than Michael Pollan is, you do have to be a bit smarter about how you afford good food.  I cannot walk into a grocery store and just buy whatever I please. Instead, I have to plan and scheme.  I bought assloads of food, especially locally grown fruit, at the farmer's market this summer and froze it or otherwise preserved it.  Now, I can easily have perfectly ripe peaches in January, and I don't really feel guilty about it.  As you all know, we gardened (and next year it will be even bigger and better!  I am so dying to get started.  We've been sitting around drooling over seed catalogs, planning.  Cardoons!  Jerusalem artichokes!  Sesame!  We can grow it all!) and preserved that food, so that we are still eating our own backyard zucchini in some form nearly every day.  We hunt and fish and while that would not be sustainable if every American decided to start doing it, it is at current rates, and that is some good eats (not to mention nutritious--wild meat is substantially lacking in marbling, it's true, but marbling will kill you).  Not all of these systems are open to all people, but more people have access to them than realize they do (farmer's markets are increasingly available, and very many communities have garden plots you can rent for the season; in the communities where I have done so, this has been highly underused).  More people also have access to foraged foods than they realize, but there is an unwillingness to look for that food source. 

Anyway, all I'm trying to say is that, no, I don't think it's elitist to eat organic and urge others to do as much as possible.  It's really, ultimately the most nonelitist thing you could do, as it gives some money and power back to farmers rather than consolidating it in the hands of CEOs and bureaucrats. 

I do want to add that these two books were very much making me feel bad about the maple syrup and other nonlocal, nonorganic stuff, but Kingsolver or her husband pointed out that even if American households just switched to eating some stupidly low percentage of their diet from local sources it would save some ridiculously huge amount of petroleum every year.  I feel much better now, as our diet contains a larger percentage than that of locally grown foods, many of which involved no petroleum whatsoever, as they came from our yard.  It's like when you read about how replacing just one light bulb with one of those CFLs makes you akin to Mother Teresa; suddenly you're all, "My whole house is full of CFLs, so possibly I'm not an evil monster ruining the earth.  Good to know."

Now, back to the seed catalogs.  Anyone know anything about cardoons?  We're serious about growing some, but we've never eaten them before or even seen them before, though goodness knows we're familiar with thistles.  Also, next year, T wants to keep chickens.  In the front yard.  Ha.

There is an interesting opinion piece on marriage and the government in the NY Times today, but I think it's a bit misguided or something.  I don't think she's exactly wrong that maybe the government shouldn't be involved in marriage, but I don't think it's going to solve the problems that she thinks it will.

First of all, she notes that a couple married for a few short months has legal standing (in terms of Social Security, for example) where a couple who has lovingly cohabited for 19 years does not.  True.  On the other hand, the cohabiting couple has surely known that and has still chosen not to sign the legal papers, so (unless they are prohibted from getting married due to homosexuality or some --is there any other reason two unmarried people are prohibted from marrying anymore?  none that I can think of) this is kind of part of the decision they're making not to sign the papers.  I don't necessarily think it's right that they don't have automatic rights of survivorship and all that, but at the same time, how else would a government determine who is qualified to receive the Social Security and so forth?  Signing the papers, registering the marriage, signals to the government that this is the person your Social Security should go to. 

Ooh, how romantic I make a marriage sound!  "Listen, darling.  You're the only man that I'd like, in the event of my untimely demise, to have rights of survivorship and inheritance.  It's because I love you so much that I offer to you my Social Security checks."

Anyway, it's unclear to me, were marriage to be a fully private affair, how you would signal to the government that this guy, and totally not the 100 other guys you've dated or cohabited with in your life, is the guy.  You would still have to register the marriage with the government, as far as I can tell.  But a civil ceremony doesn't do much more than that now.  For the most part, the weddings are private affairs, just with some official paperwork.  She wants couples to decide which relationships they want to foist the legal protections and obligations onto, without any government interference.  Am I missing something, or isn't that already the case (except for homosexuals, admittedly)? 

True, to get married you "apply" for a marriage "license."  Unless you or your partner is either already married to someone else or both of you are of the same sex, though, you're unlikely to get turned down.  The government isn't choosing, like some picky father, who is good enough for you or who you ought to marry.  They're just filing paperwork.

So, how would it change if you didn't have to file any paperwork, if the government were totally removed from the marriage process?  Would they just not give Social Security to partners at all?  My guess is that you would have to have some kind of proof that you weren't just the last person the deceased happened to date, that there was some more commitment going on there...so how would you prove it?  The marriage certificate, of course--but, um, not a government one?  I find this all totally confusing.

I just don't see any way around it.  And having gone through the immigration process, I can tell you a few things:  No immigration officer around is going to be pleased with this "private" thing.  They want to know that you're married, and most Americans do, too.  Also, we had to "prove" we had a "real" marriage to the immigration people (in the US--not in Japan.  The Japanese don't care), and it isn't easy to prove that a marriage is real even with a marriage certificate.  "Well, we have a joint bank account, both our names are on the title of the car, and WE HAVE A CHILD TOGETHER.  Does that satisfy?"  (Answer:  Yes, so long as T was never a Nazi and has never been a prostitute.  What a circus, this immigration thing). 

I guess I think, except for homosexuals whose right to get married (or civilly unionized or whatever the fuck) I fully support, we already ARE giving people a right to "decide if they want the legal protections and obligations of a committed relationship."  If you choose to cohabit and not marry, that's your business, but you have made a de facto decision that you do not want the legal protections, etc.  Cohabitors would probably say otherwise, but if you decide you do want those nifty legal protections, you could decide to go and get them.  Just sayin.

For the record, my husband and I consider ourselves as having been married since 2003, even though we didn't sign the legal paperwork until 2005, and we may never have signed the paperwork if it weren't for the hairy immigration and bicultural-son issues.  Unless I'm missing some vital piece of the argument, I don't see how governments would manage issues like immigration without some kind of formal registration of marriage...um, something like the sytem we have now.

As most people already know, I am susceptible to Black Rages.  I get them from my father.  I also get my temper from my father, but Rage and anger are not the same thing.  I know a lot of people who get angry; I know very few people who get the rages, and I know even fewer who get the Emanations.  What the hell am I talking about?

Anger and flares of temper can be brought on by so many things, all the usual things you think of when you get angry.  Everyone gets angry, although some of us much more than others.  I have a certain amount of control over this at this point in my life, and I don't get angry as much as I used to.  Sometimes my husband thinks something is going to set me off, but I just laugh at it instead.  I like to think of that as a "healthy" response. 

But the Rages are not something I can really control, and it's hard to say when they're going to come or what might set them off.  Crappy drivers, immigration forms, my son's misbehavior--these are not things that will provoke real Rage.  Rage comes from some dark, cavernous corner of my soul and overtakes me with little warning.  The blackness of it, the blackest of emotions, admits no light, no levity.  I do not talk much when I am under its influence.  Instead, I emanate.  If you were ever in a room with me when this was going on, you'd know exactly what I'm talking about.  Visible, tangible waves of pure hatred radiate outward from me, and no one escapes.  Sometimes it makes me feel like a character in a Stephen King novel, maybe the Firestarter or something.  The Emanation has frightened adults who were unprepared for it.  I'd hate to see what it does to kids.

When we first found out we were having a baby, I told my husband that no matter what, he had to protect the baby from the Rage.  He knows the Rages well and can often see them coming.  I wasn't so much afraid that I would hurt our son as that it would just scare the hell out of him.  I thought no amount of love for him would break through the black and stop the emanations, and I couldn't live with the thought that sometimes my son would think I hated him. 

I was wrong.  Love is stronger than rage.  My love for him is the strongest emotion I have ever known, much stronger than anger and hatred.  The rages still come once in a while, but I manage them and control them, at least until I get him out of the way (safely--like, by taking him to my mom's house or putting him down for his nap or something).  He hasn't met the emanations.  He doesn't yet know rage and hatred, and I hope to keep it that way.

I wonder if controlling the rage is what's making the migraines worse, though?

People have sometimes wondered how I can feel sorry for abusive parents, even those who have killed their children.  I do feel sorry for them, but that should not be taken to imply that I don't want them strung up by their heels and forcibly sterilized, because I do.  I can't think of a punishment harsh enough for child abusers, but forcible sterilization should be a given--what are we doing letting them have more kids?  Anyway.  I do also feel sorry for them, because apparently they don't have this love.  And you have to wonder, if they don't feel this love, this love that is stronger than any other emotion, what kind of sad, miserable lives must they have?  Not any kind of life I'd want, that's for damn sure. 

Lately, in conversations with friends, it has become something of a running joke that whomever they're talking about, I always say, "Yeah, I used to date a guy like that."  I have aimed in my dating life, or so it seems, for much variety, and I believe that is why this keeps happening.  But I thought, for curiosity's sake, I would post here a catalogue of sorts, a reckoning of all the men/boys I've dated.  I am going to try to keep this in chronological order, and I will try to remember everyone.  Surely I haven't forgotten any of them. 

The alternate title for this post could be something like, "Narcissism Ahoy."  I know.  But no one is forcing you to read it.

Please, though, if you do read it, remember that not all (or even most) of these were sexual relationships.  Most of these guys I only dated a few times, because I typically know what I'm looking for and NOT looking for and rush to judgment without even giving them a chance.  Also, several of these relationships were long distance and conducted primarily via either phone or Internet or some combination.  I still count them.

And by the way, this post is dedicated to Mister Lokii, may he never get jaded about sex.  Ahem.

Here we go, starting with the first guy I dated:

• Raphael.  I was 13; he was about the same age.  He was black and therefore somewhat nervous around my father, a giant white man with a sword collection.  He was terrifically fun, and it made for a nice summer romance.  The things I most remember about him are that he liked to be called Ralph instead of Raphael (Ralph was my dad's name, too!) and that he once said to me, when some rap song came on the radio:  "I can't stand this.  This is like Uncle Tom music for white people."  When I asked him what kind of music the cool, 14-year-old black kids were listening to, he cranked up the Isaac Hayes.  Mmmmm, yeah.  My kind of man.
• Barry.  I was a freshman in high school; I guess Barry must have been a junior.  We met at an FFA convention, and he went to a different school.  He was best friends with the guy my best friend was dating.  When I first met Barry, I was wearing my pajamas.  Sexy!  Barry was a bullrider, and we mostly saw each other at FFA events and kept in touch the rest of the time by phone and mail.  One time I saw him, his hand had been stepped on by a bull and totally crushed, but still he didn't stop bullriding.  Anyway, he joined the Navy after high school and sent me strange gifts from his various ports of call.  We drifted apart more than actually breaking up.  He was a good man, though.
• Jeff.  Jeff was Canadian.  I met him at a high school hockey tournament that Wendy's was sponsoring.  I worked at Wendy's at the time (senior year of high school) and I dressed up as Wendy for the promotional activities, so when I met Jeff I was actually in costume.  He was from Calgary, Alberta, and so stereotypically Canadian in so many ways.  Hockey player?  Check!  Says "aboot"?  Check!  Puts non-tomato-based condiments on French fries?  Check!  Calls people "hosers"?  Check!  He was totally adorable, and I adored him.  But the distance thing was trying. 
• John.  Heeeeee.  Oh, what was I thinking?  John was 30; I was 17.  He was on parole.  I think he had been in prison for stealing a car or something.  Before he stole the car, he had been a hobo, riding the rails and all that.  He was a freaky pseudo-hippie who would say things out of the blue like, "What was the meaning of Gene Simmons' tongue?"  As if I cared.  He was tall and good looking, very Nordic (and very tall--like 6' 7").  Our friends called us Sven and Greta because we were so fair.  But, God, seriously, what was I thinking?  This one completely crashed and burned--big surprise.
• Sean.  Ah, my sweet Sean.  Freshman year in college; Sean was a junior and from Louisiana.  Always with the older men.  Sean was double majoring in philosophy and mathematics, and he was a major computer geek.  He is the one who introduced me to the system of bulletin boards that would eventually become the World Wide Web.  He is also the one who introduced me to LSD and a number of other fun things.  I wrote about him before.  We broke up because he was congenitally unable to keep it in his pants, and the last girl he cheated on me with, he married.  Bleh.
• Rafael.  Yes, two boys named Raf/phael, and they both preferred to be called Ralph, which I can't understand at all.  He was Texan of Spanish origin.  His family was extremely rich.  He claimed to be descended from the Count of Medellin, Spain, but who knows?   Who cared?  His eyes were black and liquid, and his red, red lips started quivering every time he looked at me.  When a handsome fellow with a nice car and all the money in the world quivers every time he looks at you, so little else matters.  You hold the keys to the universe already.
• Kevin.  I still have extremely pleasant dreams about Kevin.  Kevin was tall, dark, and handsome.  He could recite Rexroth poems from memory, and he would stare into my eyes deeply, with his liquid brown eyes shining at me, and do so.  This was at the end of my freshman year of college.  I really have no idea how old Kevin was, but I think he had probably finished college a year or two before I met him.  His degree was in physics.  He was putting his degree to good use by hitchhiking around the country, seducing young women like myself with Leonard Cohen songs and Beat poetry.  And I totally fell for it.  We spent long, languid days together just walking around, talking.  The last time I saw him, he asked me if I wanted to marry him.  I said sure, although not in a very serious way, because surely he was joking.  The next day he up and left, apparently hitchhiking himself off to a Buddhist monastery in California. 
• Stretch.  Yeah, well, his real name was Jeremy or something, but everyone called him Stretch.  He was from Seattle and in a grunge band and used to hang out with all those guys (Kurt Cobain and so forth).  He was very, very tall, as you might have guessed from the nickname.  He asked me, while I was in Seattle once, how to get to the Space Needle--I was all, "Jeez, I don't know.  I'm from Montana."  He was such a funny guy and could make all manner of barnyard noises to entertain me.  He was a bass player and otherwise only marginally employed.  He asked me on several occasions when I was going to move in with him and start having his children.  Like any smart woman, though, I decided to hold out for someone with slightly less marginal employment.
• Joe.  Joe.  Joe.  I went totally crazy for Joe.  I met him at one of these damn poetry circles one time.  Itchy Dawg was there, too, of course.  Joe was so beautiful you couldn't believe he was real and not a Michaelangelo statue.  He had the kind of male beauty that makes grown women weep.  He was also probably insane.  He was half Vietnamese and half American; his father had been a soldier in the Vietnam War.  Joe asked me to marry him the very night we met, with great fervor, and I said yes, and then after a few dates, I realized that he was probably more insane than I could actually cope with, and then he drifted off.  Beautiful man.  When I think of him anymore, mainly I just hope that he's OK. 
• Paul.  Oh, dear.  He was my best friend's boyfriend.  Yikes.  In all fairness, nothing happened between us until she had already suspected something was about to happen and broke up with both of us.  But, still, there was always that frisson.  He was several years older than me.  I suppose I was 19.  He was in the Air Force, a Captain, and he spent many nights down in the missile silos.  He was blonde and strikingly handsome.  He was also bisexual, not that it mattered.  He also didn't like kissing, and I don't believe we ever did kiss.  He loved me, I'm pretty sure, but he wouldn't admit it.  We tried breaking up a couple of times, due to his issues, but I would always end up back at his apartment, making him some soup, and he would stare at me that way, and--well, then, and what can you do?  You can't fight a look like that.  Anyway, Paul was notable for having an excellent ear for music, getting me interested in classical music, and for buying cheap boxed wine which we would then spend all night drinking and arguing about Jung and Aristotle.  I've missed him much through the years.  It was also notable that Paul liked my singing.
• Craig.  Married this one, when I was 20 and he 21.  He was an artist, extremely creative, extremely talented, but sadly lacking a certain amount of self-discipline and initiative.  He was also very moody and temperamental and prone to outbursts and harboring revenge fantasies against any and all who had done him wrong.  I've written some about him before, and I don't want to say too much.  We were married 6 years, so obviously I loved him.  But in the end, it's hard to remember sometimes, hard to even remember what it was like to live with him unless I focus really hard. 
• Ryusuke.  Ooooh, HOTTTT.  He was utterly delicious, and I worked my best voodoo magic to get him to go out with me.  But, man, crash and burn.  We were never, ever meant to be involved as anything other than friends, and it was traumatic for all concerned parties.  He was a Japanese exchange student from Sophia University.  He was cosmopolitan and suave.  He had many girlfriends simultaneously.  The sign he was ready to stop dating was when he told me, "I just can't date someone who can't pronounce my name."  That RY sound in Japanese is hard, dammit.  Later, when we were still in the awkward stages of maybe trying to be friends, but then again, maybe we're still too freaking traumatized by that trainwreck we made by dating, he became my student when I had to take over teaching a friend's class.  Dramatically awkward.  Anyway, we did manage to become friends.  And then he died in a car accident, and his head was swollen like a melon, and there was an open casket funeral, and it was all horrible, and I wept like a baby. 
• EDIT:  Jeehoon.  Damn, how did I forget about him?  I used to eat at this Korean restaurant in Seattle sometimes, and this one time I was the only person there, and I started talking with my waiter.  Soon, he was bringing me unidentifiable side dish after unidentifiable side dish and teaching me how to eat them.  They were delicious, and he was bored, and we got to talking.  One thing led to another, as they say, and we ended up going out a few times.  He was Korean, of course, and a photographer.  Actually, he later sent me a link to his website, and he was really a good photographer, and I hear he's doing pretty well at that now. 
• Yan-yan.  I already posted about him at length.  Filipino, met in a chat room, from New Jersey.  Blah, blah, blah.
• Vince.  Another chat room find.  He was from Singapore but living somewhere in the Giant Terminator State (California).  He was a software programmer or something equally geeky and had that Asian geek-ness that I find so totally hot.  He taught me a lot about Singapore, including interesting facts about Singaporean English.  I still have a book he gave me.  He was a nice guy but very confused about what he wanted.  Also, there were stamina issues.  You all may find this hard to believe, but I'm a girl who requires a lot of stamina.
• Alex.  Oooh, Alex was another guy from a chat room, another Filipino, and another beautiful man.  In Alex's case, the natural beauty had been enhanced by many, many tattoos and several scars from gunshot wounds and knives.  The kind of guy your mother warned you about.  Despite his obvious history of violence and gangs and all of that, he was an extremely sweet, loving, soft-spoken sort of guy, and I loved hanging out with him.  He was, as they say, very good to me.  That it would never work out was made evident when he announced that he wanted 8 more children (for a total of 9, as he already had a beautiful little girl).  He also did street racing, just like in The Fast and the Furious or whatever that movie was called, and he had nice cars.  I have no idea what he worked as, but he must have made a lot of money because he was apparently supporting half the Seattle Filipino community. 
• Yoshi.  Not the one from the Festiva road trip.  He was a computer programmer from San Francisco.  We also met in chat.  He was a bit older than I was, Japanese-American, and very serious.  He was endemically serious.  He was a devout Buddhist and frequently accused me of not being serious enough.  So, um, OK.  He broke up with me very abruptly the day after giving me my Christmas present, a beautiful set of pearl earrings.  It was he I had gone to see in Kawasaki, the night my Japanese adventure began. 
• Pramod.  Another one whose name I couldn't pronounce well.  Pramod was Nepalese.  I met him in Kabukicho, and we danced and laughed and had a merry time.  It wasn't until later that I realized that he was kind, articulate, and thoughtful.  He spoke some English, and we both spoke a little Japanese, but there were language barrier issues, which I suppose is why we drifted.  Well, that, and there was no chemistry.  I don't know what such a smart guy was doing working in Japan, because as a foreigner I doubt he had a very good job. 
• Finally, T.  Married this one, too, and how we met and all that has been well documented.  Haven't dated anyone else since.  Odd, I know.

Hmmm.  I hope I haven't forgotten anyone.  I'm purposely not counting Akifumi, as I'm not sure we ever really dated.  I'm also not counting anyone I only dated once.  If we counted all those wankers, this list would be far too long.  Like the dude who took me to Roppongi for dinner and dancing, gave me a pretty little necklace, and then spent the entire night not talking to me.  Weirdo.

I suppose I also dated this Chinese guy a few times.  But, sadly, I cannot remember much of anything about him, including his name.  I have a picture of him from our first date, drinking milk tea in a cafe, and he's laughing with his straw hanging out of his mouth.  But name?  Nothing.  EDIT:  I have just remembered that he was a tout in Kabukicho, and that's how I met him.  God help me.  I remember because our dates were very short because he always had to get back to work.  Like he was working his way up the tout ladder. 

What are your deal breakers in a relationship?

This would have been a totally different list before I married and then divorced my first husband.  I think my first list, way back when, would have been easier to write.

Basically, they are these things:

1.  Lying.  That's obvious, I suppose.  My first husband didn't lie to me, at least not intentionally.  But it is a deal-breaker.

2.  Incurable seriousness.  This is not something I would have thought about before I married --we need a nickname for him, since he's going to be coming up a lot in this post.  Let's call husband #1 "H", OK?  Before I married H, I don't guess I thought there was such a thing as incurable seriousness.  I can be a serious person at times, and I dislike people who can never be serious, so I wouldn't have thought too much seriousness would get to be a problem.  It does.  H was incapable of just relaxing and enjoying something.  We used to fight--or, at least, he used to fight--every Wednesday because I used to go to sgazzetti's house to watch South Park and drink gin and be silly.  I actually take both South Park and gin fairly seriously, but to H, they were both wastes of time and energy, and he heckled me relentlessly about it.  He also couldn't see how I could let myself enjoy movies like Legally Blonde or how I could go out drinking with superficial friends with whom I had little in common, intellectually, and enjoy myself.  I tried to convince him that life did not always require gravity, but his idea of loosening up was to listen to Camper van Beethoven and discuss the melodic structures or the political significance of Joe Stalin's Cadillac.  Oh, man.  I can still feel my eyes rolling.  As mentioned, inability to ever be serious is also a deal-breaker, but this one took on particular significance for me after 6 years in Camp Gravity. 

3.  Wild mood swings.  I have them--boy, do I.  I am one moody, depression-prone, crazy woman.  I found out the hard way that two people who are both erratic and unstable should not live together.  This wasn't H's fault of course--I can't fault him when I'm just as guilty.  T, my husband now, is the flattest sea, the safest harbor, the most unshakable, unflappable, and utterly predictable person (mood-wise) I've ever known.  I don't quite know how he puts up with my moods, but his calm works wonders on me.  H exacerbated my moodiness (and I, his); T mitigates it.  Aaaah.  Much better.

4.  Paranoia and vengeance fantasies; still harboring a grudge against your girlfriend from high school.  I don't think more needs to be said about this one.  H had this in spades.

5.  Facial hair.  Sorry.  I'm not crazy about chest and arm hair, either, although I'll put up with some, as long as we're not talking Tom Selleck.  I cannot kiss you if you have facial hair.  I'm sorry, but it's the truth.  I think this is one reason why I enjoy Japanese men so much. 

6.  Smoking probably would be a deal-breaker, too, as I don't like the smell, but I could put up with occasional social smoking.  One boyfriend, Sean, used to smoke only when he was doing freaky computer things--he would program for hours at a stretch, and then he smoked, and it was fine.  Of course, I did not live with him, so I didn't have to put up with the smell all the time.  I really hate that smell.

7.  Wearing aftershave or cologne.  I like a natural-smelling man.  Clean, but natural.  Also, if it takes you longer to do your hair than it does for me to do mine, consider the deal endangered.

8.  When traveling, being unable to enjoy the journey qua journey and instead being totally focused on the destination and how soon we will get there.  H did this.  We couldn't, while traveling, spot some bizarre roadside attraction and stop and enjoy ourselves.  No.  We had to keep going, getting to our destination in a minimum amount of time.  It was only once the destination was reached that H could begin enjoying himself.  This was particularly shitty while hiking and backpacking, as I would be stopping to take pictures, smell flowers, check out tiny bugs, or whatever, and he would just keep going, getting way far ahead of me and then getting all impatient and grumpy about it.  Inevitably, he also had the bear spray when he was a mile ahead of me.  I just don't see the point of hiking if you're not going to enjoy the scenery along the way.  I think I also became progressively more poky, just to irritate him.  Yeah, our relationship was that healthy.

9.  Sexual incompatibility.  It's not that my preferences are the right ones, but they are the ones that make me happy, and we will never be happy together if we can't agree on this.  I don't think we need to get into specifics here, but let's say that we need to have a fundamental accord regarding frequency, amount and mechanics of foreplay, acceptable locations, acceptable and preferred positions, acceptable accoutrements, intensity of lighting, and location and appropriate manipulations of erogenous zones.  I think all couples need this, and I think that an unwillingness to face this fact is responsible for many relationships failing.  Oh, I'm not saying that I want or need to change someone else's sexual habits and preferences; not at all.  The point is that if our basic proclivities are naturally out of alignment, there is no real future for the relationship, no matter how clean-shaven and clean-smelling you are.  I will admit--and I realize this makes me a dirty, sinning whore--that I would have never married a man I had not slept with first, to make sure of these things.

Before I committed to more than, erm, occasional stays in love hotels with my current husband, I tested him out for all of these things.  He passed, easily.  He has been demonstrably and obnoxiously honest with me from the very start.  He is serious when appropriate, but when we're watching kung fu movies or something, he feels no need whatsoever to dissect our Gaze upon The Other, in Edward Said fashion.  He carries no grudges and never cares at all about revenge; he is like the man Nietzsche talks about who cannot forgive because he always forgets.  You can do T wrong a million ways, and he may not continue to like you, but he will totally forget what it is exactly that you've done.  He is also just generally forgiving of human foibles, much more than I am.  He has an absolute minimum of body hair (legs, underarms, etc.) and none at all--EVER--on his face.  He does shave his face, but it takes approximately 1 minute twice a week.  He does not smoke or otherwise offend with unnatural odors, and he is truly excellent to travel with. 

This is not to say that T is perfect:  He shuffles around the house in his slippers, making noises that really irritate me.  He chews on toothpicks like an old man.  He refuses to cut his hair more than a couple times a year (I don't generally like long hair on men, and especially not on him).  He will happily go months without washing his jeans, and he complains bitterly when his jeans are stiff from having just been washed.  He has virtually no sense of taste, and therefore my cooking might as well be dog food for all he knows.  He does not care about music much at all, besides just having background noise, so sometimes I get in the car and find the station set on the Mexican station or Rush Limbaugh or something otherwise intolerable.  He speaks an ungrammatical idiolect of Japanese and is passing these idiosyncracies on to our son; he is also forgetting how to write kanji.  He was born in 1980. 

As a sidenote, I am finding it interesting that many people are putting "cheating" in their lists.  I guess I can understand why, but it's not a deal-breaker for me.  Lying about it would be, and I would suppose that a long-term affair could be a deal-breaker, although it is utterly impossible for me to imagine T even talking to--or, really, even noticing--another woman, let alone carrying on with her for months or years.  I don't really see why a one-night stand or similarly short-term and limited adultery would be so serious, though.  We're all human and capable of making grievous mistakes and hurting each other and all of that.  I think the whole idea if you love someone is that you would forgive them these errors and they would forgive yours.  What's the point, exactly, of saying that you love someone forever and ever--unless they make a mistake? 

P.S.  If you doubt my assurance that T does not notice other women (let alone speak to them), you will have to meet him and watch a movie with him or go to a place where there are lots of girls to figure this out.  For example, we'll be out somewhere, and I'll notice a pretty girl and remark upon her beauty or the fine shape of her ass or something, and he'll have to look because he did not see her and then he'll say something like, "really?  yeah, she's OK, I guess."  It's all very anticlimactic.  He has watched movies with gorgeous, half-naked women in them and decided instead to watch a TV show about gold panning.  He can see a woman wearing outrageous, revealing clothing and either ignore it totally or remark only upon the clothing.  For the first couple of years we were together, I assumed it was all a ruse--or that he was a closeted homosexual.  Neither is true, however.  He just finds most women totally uninteresting. 

Why did he/does he find me interesting?  Well, according to him, he first took a liking to me because I seemed a bit crazy, more than a little unusual, and unafraid.  He stays with me because he has decided I don't just seem that way--I am that way, and it makes his life more interesting than it would be without me.  That and NSFW NSFW NSFW.  Um, oh yeah, and I'm pretty, too *shrug*.

Tell us about an event that changed your life forever.
Submitted by Miss Scotch.

Well, most events do, really.  When you get down to it, even the tiniest event pushes you inexorably on to one of two or more forks in the road, and you can't ever really go back.  But I assume the author of this question does not want to know that I have just recently decided to drink a glass of water instead of another cup of tea, so I'll try to find something more illuminating.

There have been several, I suppose, of the earth-shattering sorts of events:

1. Going to the stupid college in Texas.
2. The arrest.
3. The first marriage (and then divorce).
4. The move to Japan.
5. Meeting my current husband.
6. The miscarriage.
7. The birth of my son.

The highlighted ones have already been covered elsewhere.  The decision to go to the stupid college in Texas changed my life significantly but was not particularly interesting in and of itself.  I suppose the only interesting thing about that decision is that I conspicuously wanted to stop being poor.  I had started to hate being poor, and so I chose to make myself stand out as being extra, extra conspicuously poor by going (on scholarship) to a very rich college.  Bloody hell, I was miserable there.  No offense to my teachers, some of whom were really excellent (Dan Swensen, I salute you!).

Ah, the arrest.  That was also in Texas, because Texas sucks.  Except Austin.  Austin is like a little piece of Canada, if Canada was hot and humid, in the middle of Macholand.  I hate Texas.  Anyway, the arrest.  Let's make a long story short:  I got set up by a narc (narcs, incidentally, have a special circle of hell reserved just for them, and it resembles Texas a great deal).  If it wasn't a drug case, it would have been a pretty clear case of entrapment.  But, um, in Texas, there are no such things as civil rights, so "entrapment" doesn't matter.  My crime:  I drove to San Antonio (an hour away) to pick up a package for a friend of a friend (who had, unbeknownst to my friend, been busted a short time ago and turned narc).  The package had, according to the narc on the night of the delivery, an ounce-and-a-half of marijuana in it; it was supposed to have, according to the narc, two ounces, and he accused me of stealing some of it.  I had not stolen any of it.  I was more partial, truth to be told, to strong hallucinogenics--Mary Jane can suck it.  Anyway, he later kept calling me and asking me to hook him up with some acid and whatnot, but I'm not quite that stupid.  Not quite.  So, I got arrested for "delivery of marijuana" (in the amount of one ounce--??  I think I know what happened to the other half-ounce, and the Texas coppers must have been curious why it took $200 to buy an ounce of MJ).  That, my friends, is a third-degree felony.  And, thus, my lifelong dream of being the female John Marshall was, in one fell swoop, denied.  Ah, sweet justice.  Because you know you would never want someone like me on the Supreme Court.  We felons will just let all hell break loose.  Whatever.  The upside:  I lost my scholarship and had to find a different university, one that ended up suiting me a lot better.  I also wrote about the narc here.

The first marriage:  This is going to sound crazy, but I can hardly remember it.  It's like I left him and just washed my hands of it, as if it had never happened.  It did, of course, and it has left me with a paranoia of men who like jazz just a little too much.  The divorce, of course, left me free for moving to Japan, though.

Moving to Japan was only half my idea.  I was in a bad situation.  I had lost the motivation to finish my thesis.  I had no money--I mean, really, none.  I was living in my car and trying to finish my MA, but I just didn't care anymore, and anyway, it's hard to care when you're freezing your ass off in a Festiva every night.  There was Akifumi in Japan, but he still had his girlfriend.  I was getting more and more interested in Japan and my Japanese students, and I had several good friends living in Japan (all former students).  But the main thing was that I just had no good future here in the States.  The hole was too big to get out of here, especially because my only job was working as a cook/dishwasher/all-around slave in a Vietnamese restaurant, run by an affable-yet-dictatorial Chinese lady (she had been married to a Vietnamese man, who died at some point, and she made the best Vietnamese food I have yet tasted--and I've been to Vietnam).  I didn't make much money at all, not nearly enough to pull myself out of my hole.  So, a friend started encouraging me to go to Japan.  Finally I applied for some jobs on Ohayo Sensei, found one in a dream location, right at the foot of Mt. Fuji (oh, Fujisan!  How I miss you!  Everyday I long for you!), and put in my two weeks at the Vietnamese place.  I missed the Chinese-Vietnamese family a lot, but I finally had some money and a sense of tangible freedom.  I have written more about my first year here and here.  Perhaps I will write more about that sense of freedom later on.

The birth of my son.  That's really the one, isn't it?  The earth-shattering one.  I look back on my life before that, and I barely even recognize it anymore.  It didn't just change the course of my life; it changed me, fundamentally.

The birth itself was memorable for being so awful and yet so wonderful.  Rarely have I been happier to suffer so much.  I don't mean the kind of suffering you're thinking of.  I didn't actually find labor all that bad....except for the fucking baby monitors.  Let me first say that, of course, the health and wellbeing of my child was first and foremost in my mind at all times.  Let me also add that I had studied childbirth the way I study everything in my life:  Methodically.  I had read enough to know that I wanted no drugs if it could be helped, that I wanted to be in control of the situation (actually, your body is in control, but I wanted to be able to consciously respond to my body), and I did all this yoga to help prepare me for it.  I knew the force of gravity could help.  I knew how to change positions to aid in the labor.  Blah blah blah.

If you get squeamish about parts of girly anatomy, stop reading now.  Words like "cervix" appear below.

What you know and what you want is NOTHING in the face of being told by a doctor and a hospital staff that X is what you must do for your child.  NOTHING. 

It started badly.  I was overdue by a day or so, and they palpated me and thought my son was about 8 pounds or a little more (he was 8 pounds 9 ounces at birth, so they were right).  They thought that was big enough.  My cervix was dilated 2 cm.  They wanted to induce labor.

I didn't want that at all.  I figured, "Hey, 2 cm!  He'll come when he's ready."  But they were pretty adamant, and I felt overwhelmed.  So, I went into the hospital.  I had a midwife and an attending OB/GYN.  I entered the hospital in the evening and things were alright.  They gave me the crap to induce the labor and told me I probably wouldn't get a lot of contractions, so I could sleep.  Sounded good. 

Turns out the contractions weren't the problem.  The baby monitors were.  Because they were inducing, they needed to monitor his heartbeat, so they hooked me up to this machine.  Basically, this machine read his pulse tones via a strap around my middle.  But it turned out he was in an odd position, so they couldn't get the readings easily.  I had to get in this weird, supine, semi-fetal position for the readings to show up on the strip.  They said they would only do it for 20 minutes every 4 hours or so.  Completely untrue.  They left me like that for hours, and I had no idea if it was OK to turn over or go pee or anything.  I had no serious contractions, and yet it was the most uncomfortable night of my life.  My husband slept like a rock on the daybed next to me.  I got not a wink.  Not a wink.

Next morning:  Doctor and midwife came in, making a lot of concerned shuffling.  They thought I look tired.  Doctor commented that it's not good to be tired already, so early in the game.  I agreed.  They strapped me up to the monitors again and left me.  Again. 

Now, if you've ever been in a lot of pain, you might know that changing position can be quite helpful.  For some types of pain, walking around is soothing.  I found that walking around was extremely helpful in easing the discomfort of the contractions, yet I was denied this simple thing for about 80% of my labor.  Finally, my mom called them in and told them they just had to stop it. 

By that time, though, the game was already up.  I had had no sleep.  I had been forced to lie in increasingly uncomfortable positions for long, long hours.  I had no relief from the pain of the contractions, and they were growing insistent.  I was becoming distraught.  Because they wouldn't let me up out of bed, gravity could not help and my yoga couldn't help either; the baby was refusing to descend.  The midwife said, "Well, you're 10 cm dilated, but the baby's still in Denver."  I was in no mood for her clever jokes.  I wanted to hit all of them, run away from the hospital, walk around, breathe, and let gravity and my body do what they were supposed to do.  And yet I could not.

Finally, after 36 hours of basically being in bed (since the time they induced) and no sleep and not even a bit of comfort, with contractions coming strong and fast (and still unable to change position!), they gave me some...I don't know...heroin or something.  Felt like heroin.  Made me seriously dopey and completely out of touch with and out of control of my body.  Sure, I didn't hurt anymore, but I was just more tired and equally unable to move around.  And I thought I was failing.  I was failing my child.  I didn't want him to come into the world high on heroin!  That wasn't how it was supposed to go at all.  Although, I guess if you're going to bring a child into this world, might as well get him started on the H right away.

In the end, of course, they had to do a C-section.  See, after all the miracles of modern medicine they had already used on me, birth still could not occur.  My baby was still in Denver and refusing to head south.  I was so out of it from lack of sleep and heroin (yes, I know it wasn't heroin, but just let me tell it) and pain and rampaging hormones, that I couldn't have made an informed decision at that point.  Not at all. 

But at least it was promising an end to the torture.  The chance to someday get out of bed was dangled in front of me, and I grabbed at it.

An hour or so later, I had a stunning (and loud!) baby boy and a severe case of hypothermia.  They kept bringing the warmed blankets, and I kept shivering.  And so for my entire first night of motherhood, I again could not sleep, because I was either shivering too hard or being interrupted just as I dozed off to have my blood pressure and temp checked yet again.  The second night I was in the hospital, I again could not sleep because I was in severe pain and, again, being constantly interrupted by helpful nurses.  The third night, I got minimal sleep because the baby, my gorgeous son, decided to scream for the duration.

That was probably because he was slowly dehydrating to death.  This hospital was populated by pro-breastfeeding nurses, which is nice.  I sincerely wanted to breastfeed, yet my son did not.  He made his anti-breastfeeding opinions clear from day 1.  I would hold him to my breast, and he would stiffen like an 8-pound torpedo, his lips hard and metallic.  They would not latch.  The breastfeeding mentor or whatever the hell she was called--who had mildewy breath, by the way--would poke and prod at my breasts and put my nipple between his torpedo lips, and yet he would not suck. 

The pediatrician came in daily, and on the third day, he said:  Your son is dying from dehydration.  He has to get some milk.  He has lost too much weight; he is jaundiced.  I will talk to the nurses.  This boy needs some formula.  (He also said that I should not feel bad about it, that some kids just don't breastfeed.  Tell that to the tyrannical nurses!)

The fucking insane nurses wanted me to feed him, my starving boy, formula from a syringe (sans needle) to prevent the dreaded "nipple confusion."  I wanted to hit them very hard.  Do you know how long it takes to get 2 ounces of formula into a starving, crying baby from a syringe?  Hours.  Hours that the two of you could be sleeping if someone would just wise up and give you a bottle.  But I did it.  And then I tried pumping to stimulate lactation.  I fed him the little drips and drops of milk I pumped, also from a syringe.

I got marked as a potential candidate for post-partum depression because a nurse walked in after one feeding session and found me sobbing.  I was sobbing because my son was very ill.  I was sobbing because I was in a great deal of pain and more tired than I had ever thought possible.  I was sobbing because my hormones were still awry.  I was sobbing because, more than anything, I felt like I was failing him over and over again in my basic inability to feed him.  He needed so little, and I was not doing a good job at giving him the one thing he needed most right then.  I was not depressed.  I was tired and frustrated and terrified.

Finally, he rebounded, and we were allowed out of our prison.  I have never been so happy as the day I finally left the hospital with my son, healthy and sound.  He never did take to the breast well, and shortly after we left the hospital, I was found to have a rather serious infection.  I kept telling everyone I was infected, and they didn't believe me because the outer incision looked fine.  Never mind that I was draining gallons of fluid from it.  Someone did, at last, think to check the internal incision and found a thriving colony of intelligent life forms there, of at least two different species.  I was put on massive antibiotics.  I could no longer breastfeed.  (And one of the most angering moments of my maternal career was when a woman I had just met asked me, "Why didn't you pump it and dump it out all that time?  Then maybe he could have breastfed again."  Um, because, I was very ill.  I needed to sleep at some point, and already most of my day was taken up with feeding him.  If I had pumped as well, my day would have been pretty much a never-ending saga of dairy production.)  He did actually breastfeed a little more once the antibiotics were out of my system; once he was getting enough nutrition and fluids elsewhere, he relaxed about breastfeeding substantially.  But my son came out hungry, and he is now tall and strong and robustly healthy. 

Mmmm.  My son.  That certainly did change my life.  All for the better. 

Well, tomorrow is the fifth anniversary of my first date with my husband.  No, he doesn't remember.  Every year on the first Sunday in April (I don't know the actual date--I could look it up, but the "first Sunday in April" seems fine to me) I go up to him and tell him it's our first-date anniversary.  And he says, "Sou ka ne? [Is that right?]" without a hint of being interested.  And he goes about his business.  So, I sigh and tell him again, because men are so dense.  And he looks at me and says, "Mada aishiteimasu yo. [I still love you.]"  And then he goes about his business.

In the spirit of the occasion, here are some things I love about my husband:

He's mysterious.  The man is laconic to say the least.  When I was in graduate school, we learned about a language--I think it was Malagasy--in which the pragmatics of conversation are such that you do not reveal any more than is directly asked.  The theory is that because new information is relatively rare, and thus precious, you release it only drip by drop so that it can be fully appreciated and dissected.  So, it might take all day to find out, for example, the price of rice in China or that your neighbor is sleeping with the goats.  My husband acts exactly like this, like every piece of information that he has on a given subject--say, the fence we are building to keep the dogs out of the vegetable garden--is a delicate morsel that needs to be fully digested before he gives another.  Actually, he would never give another except that I hound him mercilessly.  He just always assumes I know what he's talking about, I guess.  But I don't.  I never have a freakin' clue what he's talking about.  And thus our conversations are inordinately long and complicated, full of pregnant pauses and vexation.  I love it.  My husband is also mysterious in that, being laconic, he sometimes just does things without telling me or discussing it at all, and often, I have no idea what he's doing.  It's like a game.  Just the other day, he apparently started building another fence (!!) across a different part of our yard.  We had actually discussed putting a fence there, although I didn't think we had decided to go ahead with it, and his current design is quite unique.  But everyday it's like a new adventure, trying to figure him out.

He's absurdly manly.  Seriously, it's like the dude never heard of postmodernism.  Actually, he hasn't.  I mean, of course, that he is manly in a traditional sense, without any irony about it at all.  He fishes and hunts.  He loves to dig holes.  He putters in his garage and saves all of our coffee cans to put his hodgepodge of screws and nuts and nails into.  He squints into the sun to determine our geographic position and the current time and temperature.  And it's so awesome.  I'm a giddy schoolgirl in the face of such manliness.

But he is also the most polite, gentle, even tempered, generous person.  He rarely gets angry.  He used to speak such polite Japanese to me (he never said "ore" or even "boku" for example--always "watashi" for a long time) that I thought he might be gay? or a transvestite? or ......?  He still speaks to me politely.  It's hard to explain without going in to some Japanese grammar, but he doesn't use the young, tough guy Japanese to me.  He talks more manly to our son.  And he is so generous that I aspire to be more like him.

He is a terrific father.  And when I first got pregnant totally on accident and he was only 23 and still just a PFC in the Self-Defense Force, the first thing he did was express his commitment to me and to the child.  Now that we have a child, he spends so much time with him with such patience and grace.  Sometimes I watch them playing together in the yard and see how much they love each other, and it makes me cry just a little.  Just a little.

He's dead honest and kinda boring.  The first time I met him, when we were making strained "conversation" via phraseboooks, I asked him what his hobbies were, and he said, "Nothing.  I don't have any.  Except walking around aimlessly [bura bura]."  That is the reply of an honest (and boring) man.  Men don't say things like that unless they're more concerned with being honest than getting into your pants.  There have been so many times through the years when he said exactly the wrong thing, but because it was the honest thing, I respected him and felt respected by him.  He lived in Osaka when he was 18 (he just up and left home and moved to Osaka to be on his own, which takes some guts in Japan), and I asked him what he did for fun there, what his life was like there.  He said on his days off he would just walk down to Osaka Castle, look at it (from the outside--he never once paid to go in it), then turn around and walk back home--a 3 hour stroll.  He would still be doing that had I not come along.

And he loves me.  That's nothing to sneeze at, there.  He says he loves me mainly because I'm crazy.  His word.  He says he never knows what I'm going to do or say next or what kind of mood I might be in, so it makes his boring life more interesting and exciting.  He also thinks I'm gorgeous.  Also his word.  And that is also nothing to sneeze at.

Five years, and still crazy in love.

Shit!  It just occurred to me:  Last Sunday was the first Sunday in April.  Damned April Fool.  See?  Now it's all ruined.

And so, with the onset of April, we are approaching the time of low fidelity for me, the time when in some protracted way, my heart is not with my husband alone but torn between two men.  This time does not last past April 15.  By that time, the decision has been made one way or another, and the would-be usurper's birthday has passed, and I go on with my life--yes, happily, even.

April 15 is Akifumi's birthday.  Every year I have to decide if I'm going to send him a birthday card or not.  This shouldn't be a major decision, but it is.  It is because I have to understand that most likely sending a card will hurt him more than not sending one will.  I do not wish to hurt him, and yet I want to send a card and maybe even a present.

Because Akifumi loves me.  Or he did.  And he said it was forever.  And I love him.  Present tense.  And I will forever.

This isn't good.  I am married to someone other than Akifumi.  The thing is that it was a split second decision on Fate's part to make it happen that way and not the other--the other destiny in which I am happily married to Akifumi and probably living in Kumamoto and eating tonkotsu ramen every freakin day.

Majide.

Roughly what happened is this--although I am not altogether clear on some of the chronology because things happened incognito at times and at an intermittently frenzied pace:  Akifumi was my student one bright summer in the Montana.  I was teaching these intensive summer ESL programs for Japanese university students.  They came over for a few weeks, and we allegedly taught them English for long, exhausting hours each day and also took them on "cultural" activities (horseback riding, river rafting, etc.).  He was perhaps 19.  I was married (my first husband), albeit unhappily, and perhaps 26.  For some reason, probably because he had outlandish hair, I remembered his name more quickly than I did most of the other students; the other students would therefore ooh and aah (rather mature of them) when I said his name.  It became a running joke that he was my boy, even among the other instructors.  We were almost, but not quite, treated as a little couple.  We spent a great deal of time together, along with his best friends (there were 3 others--whose names are escaping me except for one named Yusuke, and I only remember that because we called him Yusukebe, and "sukebe" means, hmm, like a lech or a pervert).  We developed a close bond, a genuine affection.  Although I was already initiating the process of leaving my husband, I had not yet, and this limited my vision of what my relationship with Akifumi was.

And then there was the last night before they left.  We had a party for them which involved unfortunate amounts of Budweiser.  It was a very fun party.  At the party, all my students--no, actually, only the boys--signed a soccer ball for me.  They had played soccer with it the whole four weeks they had been in my charge, and so they thought it a good memento.  While most of them wrote something along the lines of "I (heart) U," Akifumi wrote in Japanese, in hiragana to be exact.  I couldn't read it at the time.  I had my friend--not a student, but he had played soccer with my students and thus was at the party--Ryusuke translate.  Akifumi had written (and I'm sorry I can't reproduce the hiragana on this computer) "ai shiteru yo" which sort of translates to "I love you."  I blew it off when Ryusuke told me because that's what all of them wrote.  But Ryusuke said, "No, he means it."  I asked him how he knew, and he said first of all he just knew from how Akifumi acts but also he wrote it in Japanese, and "we don't usually say that casually in Japan.  If you say 'ai' you mean love, not how Americans talk." 

Later I kissed Akifumi.  Mouths closed.  Not quite on the lips.  Or he kissed me.  I'm not sure.  We both thought it would never happen again.

The next morning he went back to Kumamoto, to his girlfriend and family and his blessed tonkotsu ramen.

A couple weeks later, I got my own apartment and started divorcing my husband.  He started telling people I had cheated on him with a student.  He was not literally correct--I don't think a peck on the cheek under normal circumstances constitues cheating.  And I didn't yet know how much I loved Akifumi.  I thought it was infatuation that would pass.

Time passed.  I went out with Ryusuke, of all people.  I decided to go to Japan to visit some of my former students, including those from Kumamoto.  When I called Akifumi, I found myself on the receiving end of an invitation to a homestay.  I accepted, despite how terrible I felt for feeling terrible that he was still with his girlfriend.

I never met her, although I went to his college with him and hung out on his campus and ate (tonkotsu ramen!) with him.  I stayed at his house for three days.  I loved his family, and they were incredibly gracious to me, despite the fact that the uni almost made me vomit and despite the fact that I didn't know I was supposed to leave the water in the tub after my bath.  There came a point, on my second night, when Akifumi and I were sitting in his sister's room (where I was staying) and silently staring at each other.  And then he nodded.  Twice.  Just nodded.  And I no