Distance

When I awoke Saturday morning to 30 some odd missed calls on Skype, I knew something was wrong. I placed some early morning phone calls back to the States to find that my Grandpa had passed away unexpectedly that afternoon. Under normal circumstances this loss would be devastating. However, this news was compounded by the fact that my parents had just arrived in Austria less than 24 hours before.

My heart sank. The ramifications of this news began to unfold in my head. I had to find my mom and put her in touch with her siblings. My parents would be leaving. I would be staying here... blows, every one.

When we signed up to come to Vienna, I often thought about how we would handle a family emergency, either here or back home. Unfortunately any "plan" we had discussed was always in the hypothetical and never given more than a peripheral thought. We would go there or they would come here. How naive we were to the logistics and expenses of making such a thing happen. Distance being the largest factor working against us, followed by babies and jobs.

My heart goes out to my poor parents. They spent more time in airports and on planes than they did enjoying the beauty of Europe (or their coveted time with their grandbaby.) This arrangement might be fine with some seasoned business traveler, jetting off for a day long meeting abroad, but this was their first time overseas. They were anxious and unsure leaving home. Now they had to turn around and endure the worst part about international travel over again. As of this evening, they are safely back in the U.S. However, the pain and awfulness of this whole ordeal is not over. Now the real work begins. My mom must make sense of this loss all while tackling the huge logistical issue of how to best care for her mother.

But right now I can't help but feel selfish. I want to be home. I want to share in the going over of stories and memories. I wish that I could cry and laugh in their company. I find myself unable to comprehend how to process all of this so far for those who share my common history.

This morning I woke up sad and angry at our living situation, but the rational part of me knew that staying indoors, under the covers, was not a constructive method to combat grief. We rode the train to the outskirts of the city and took bus up into the hills. It was a warm fall evening, crisp and filled with the smells of the season. Gabe, Jude, and I wandered through the vineyards as the sun began to set. With dusk, Vienna became illuminated below us in all directions, a stark contrast to the quite darkness of our path. We talked about my Grandfather.

He had called us less than a week ago to say hello and send along birthday wishes. Gabe and he had talked about how his people had come from the region. He closed the conversation with wishes of love for me and my family. While I will not be able to commune with my family over this loss, I feel that I have something very special in this phone call that I hold dearly as my means of moving forward during this time- a last connection, despite our distance.

3 Things

I've been in a bit of a funk for the last week or so. Nothing more than devoting too much of my headspace to the wrong things, but a low point nonetheless.

I wasn't until I uploaded my pictures for the last 10 days that I realized there are always "gem" moments to be found amidst all the gloom and doom of a rotten week.

Here are mine...

Discovering the abundance of "nut roll", a childhood delicacy from my Slovak Great Aunt.

Art Nouveau vignettes discovered as I explored the Secession Building

An impromptu reading stop on our way through the Museum Quarter

The sun is back out. We have resumed our daily park schedule. Jude and I have made some new friends in the form of a like-minded mama and son, the wife of a math colleague. Gabe and I are busy planning for my parents arrival in late October and a trip to Greece in November. There are many, many things now to keep one's spirits high. However, it is comforting to know that during those weeks when you struggle, happiness never really goes away. It just hides from time to time, on your digital camera.

Always Saving For Tomorrow

I find myself, momentarily, trying to explain my general happiness... maybe it is the quasi-vacation status of this whole adventure. I have no car, television, or cell phone to distract me from the moment. It might just be because I am getting a solid 7-8 hours of sleep now that Judah is no longer nursing at night (!!!!, but that will be for another post.) Whatever the reason, life just seems really, well, beautiful here in Vienna. That is not to say that this time isn't difficult. It has its momentary lows. My vocabulary is basically generated from and limited to Jude's toddler German books. On most of my travels, the conversation is focused on one of three central themes: trucks/things that go, foods/bananas, or barnyard animals. Meeting people is more difficult and connecting with those I love back home is harder as well.

But...

Did you know they put chocolate in their cereal here? And they don't make you feel bad by calling it "Choc-o-what have you". They give it the air of health and nutrition by calling it "Schoko Musli," which I think is completely acceptable for a grown woman to eat for breakfast (or dinner.) I joke, but it's more than the wealth of my three favorite food groups, chocolate, gummi, and booze that makes me love it here. I find so much of what Austrian society appears to value very appealing. The Viennese really know how to enjoy themselves. From sitting outside people watching, to making use of the common spaces and connecting with friends and family at cafes, it is a culture of action and interaction.

I find it all too easy at this point to segue into a critique of all that I think is backwards about the way we do things in the U.S. (and from my vantage point, there is a lot there), but it is so much more interesting to share the little nugget of insight I gleaned from the last month and the thoughts above. I remember reading an essay a few months back that somehow stayed with me. Basically, this author had been given an expensive bottle of perfume as a gift and beyond any sentimental attachment, she absolutely loved the way it smelled. She never wore it except on very special occasions, the logic being that if she used it on a daily basis, she would use it up and find herself unable to replace it. She went on to reflect on this attitude towards consumption and joy. The perfume was not rare or excessively difficult to obtain. In the age of the internet, she easily could have located and afforded to buy a new bottle once the first one had been used. However, she didn't. There was something that kept her from allowing herself to truly take in the thing that made her happy. The gist, we portion out our enjoyment of life into small, calculated doses, all too often sucking out the very happiness we are trying to preserve.

Maybe it is out Puritan roots, but I can't for the life of me figure out what we Americans are so afraid of when it comes to loving the living of life. Its crazy, but since I have been here, I have not seen a single drunk person, yet everywhere you go people are drinking beer and wine at cafes throughout the day. I have yet to see an obese person, but I have not seen a single gym and all they offer with their coffees is whole milk and real sugar. Its balance... its moderation... BUT most importantly (and this, I think is where so many of us get it wrong) it is the primacy of enjoyment. So, I pledged to myself to live the life of those around me for the short time we have here. Maybe we are on to something. We don't have tons of resources, but we can certainly squeeze in some nice yarn and a croissant and coffee for the park. Baby happy? Check. Mama happy? Check.

In truth, I know all of this will end. Our family will return to the States, to "real" life without palaces and century old churches towering over us as we lay in the grass. I assume that we will reclaim our car and connect up those cell phones...but does life need to be any less about the enjoyment of living? How does one replicate the "Vienna factor" in a less dramatic locale, say Miami, Florida or Anywhere, USA? Well, don't mete out fun like it is a life sentence. Life is too difficult and too short to restrict the pure joy that can be found by simply allowing yourself to take in the things that you want and crave in the world around you.

So, open that bottle of wine you've been saving, make pancakes for breakfast everyday for a week, take the walk to the place you enjoy most in your city... It's your day! Save the whales, save your money, but don't save the things that make you happiest in life for tomorrow.

The Post I've Been Wanting to Write For Weeks

Moves of any sort are rough. There are the three distinct phases, the build up, the move, and the wind down, and each phase carries with it its own indigenous stress.

Well the dust has settled and we have re-established the delicate, vital order that holds our little family together. Now it is time to give thanks.

About a month ago, my mom and I put together an impromptu Thanksgiving dinner. My brother completed his coursework for his B.A. and his favorite meal is, well, Thanksgiving. The act of eating Thanksgiving got me thinking about first, how happy I was to get a turkey dinner, even if it came with air conditioning and shorts in July. However, before the sedating effects of the tryptophan could set in, I began to think about how none of this great leap across the world could have been possible without the undying support and efforts of our loved ones.

It was a bewildering summer of what ifs and what nexts? But when I think about all the moments and experiences we were able to cram into the couple of months we had in Michigan, I have to say that Summer of 2010 is one of the best I can remember.

Sure we did a lot. We stood post to watch the S.S. Badger come into dock in the evening evening, we ate "our" first ice cream cone, we saw Elk, and deer, and beavers. I learned how to crochet, and play Mahjong, and bake bread. Jude learned how to moo, baa, and neigh. We parked it and beached it...

But by far, the best moments of our summer, were the ones spent with family and friends. I am taken aback by how many good people made the trek all the way up to Ludington to visit with us and show us how much we mean to them. For this I am thankful.

This summer will keep me warm well into the new year.

Medals and Badges

Before I knew it, I was in the game. Weeks into being a mom I found myself shoulder to shoulder in the toughest competition of my life-competitive parenting, mothers division. Who would have thought that with each report on the daily habits of this little 8 pound being, I would be judged for both my knowledge of mothering and my performance, form and execution...

Sometimes I wonder if this hyper-observation/ meta-analysis of my life tends to blow everything wildly out of proportion but I think that this depiction of mothering as ultra-competitive is kind. I mean my sister is reading a book called "Mommy Wars." Geeze. From what I've observed, mamaing is the new child-rearing. It's serious business, like playgroups for ladies in their first trimester serious or wait on the phone for 2 hours at 4am to sign up for swimming lessons for your 6 month old serious. Yet from right out of the gate, I was playing to medal.

I had never really merited recognition for the many starring roles I had played prior to landing the walk on part of, Jessica Kerr, mother of one. I deserved an honorable mention, at best, for my decade spanning performance as daughter/sister. I have to think that Gabe wished he had an understudy for the years I fell short in my role as the perfect wife. Jude didn't even know it yet, but this was my chance, his mom was destined to motherhood greatness.

fast-forward 1 year

Press-release: I have come to my senses and left competition in order to spend time with my family.

Instead of enumerating my many low points in this sham competition which offer little more than a few good laughs, I think it is much more interesting (and flattering) to meet me in my state of reform. I have realized that there are two catastrophic side effects to competition in motherhood. First, what is done in the name of spending time with and for their children, actually pulls mothers away from this amazing opportunity to participate in their lives. But most interesting to me is the pervasive anti-woman atmosphere that appears to be generated by the rivalry between unsure and defensive mothers struggling to make sense of this time of mind-blowing change and serious isolation.

It wasn't until my sister had her baby that I realized that I had taken up residence with the "sanctimommies" (my step-mother-in-law's brilliant term for the holier than thou mommy who lords her momcomplishments over her insecure sisters.) My baby was always held, my baby doesn't take a pacifier, we don't use an infant carrier...

I have to pause here, because there is nothing necessarily self-righteous about any of these choices in child-rearing. I stand by most of the choices we have made as sound parenting. However, the difference between a mother who, say exclusively breastfed her child and a nursing sanctimommy, is that the latter judges anyone who does not/ can not nurse as a fundamentally inferior mother.

Then my sister gave birth to her son at 33 weeks and I got a first row seat to a whole new world of pain and fear that is ever-present for parents trying to navigate how to make the best decisions for a fragile, pre-term infant. The entire mothering world-view I had constructed began to break down. It struck me that judgements I had passed just months before were now down right callous given these new circumstances. I sat with her as she was torn apart day and night for 3 weeks, waiting, unable to snuggle up close, let alone hold, her precious baby. She and her husband were on a rollercoaster involving foreign things like bradycardias and feeding tubes. While they knew that they were amazingly fortunate to have escaped many of the problems that plague premies, they were still faced with enduring a birth/ first weeks that so far from the norm.

I began to soften. And think.

Sitting around one afternoon a few weeks later, nursing our children, my sister remarked that life at our house now felt like a 70's commune. Naked babies, half-naked moms performing mundane tasks like eating breakfast while feeding the baby. She and I made up this goofy song about our shared time off work. We called it "Sister/ Sister Maternity Leave." The spirit of the song was meant to reassure our respective husbands that the idea of Kate and I on maternity leave together wouldn't be a toxic formula concocted with the net result of draining our families' bank accounts. Sure the verses about "laughing and nursing" and "lunching and learning" were created as a caricature of what women at home, raising children look like. But when I think about what something like this song might accomplish in the world, juxtaposed against the antagonism I was part and parcel in breeding, it doesn't appear so cliché.

Maybe what all of us mammas need is a metaphorical sister/sister maternity leave; the time to come together without fear of judgement. Perhaps then there would be more nursing mothers, more women confident to push through the struggles that this role certainly provides. Today, I think that being a mom just might be the case where most women deserve a ribbon for playing, especially if it comes in the form of support and encouragement from someone who has run the race before.