Joanne Detore-Nakamura, Ph.D

SPECIAL DELIVERY:

1. Mother Knows Best or Why Tom Cruise Should Stay Off Sofas (July 2005)
2. Snakes and Snails, and All That Jazz (June 2005)
3. My Life Stood Still -- Like a Load of Laundry (March 2005)
4. Shedding My Extra Hyde (January 2005)
5. Beauty of the Hours (August 2004)
6. My Mother, Myself (May 2004)
7. My So-Called Boring Life (April 2004)
8. Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Aliens Among Us, And Extraterrestrial Superheroes (February 2004)
9. Girl Power (January 2004)
10. Diving Deep and Resurfacing (November 2003)
11. Dissertation Distress: A Room of One's Own With A Crib and a Computer (March 2003)

Mother Knows Best or Why Tom Cruise Should Stay Off Sofas

“Mommy, why’s that guy jumping on the couch? I bet he’s going to be in trouble!” my daughter said while we watched Tom Cruise attack Oprah’s sofa and then Oprah herself.

“Mmm…," was all I could manage as I watched a man a few years older than me recreate what it felt like to be fourteen again and in love for the first time when we didn’t know what kissing was, and we were simply giddy to imagine what sex must be like.

The Cruise acrobatics were a bit unnerving really. I wondered if the man had lost his mind, or perhaps had never been fourteen and experienced that sort of sheer lust before despite his two marriages. When I was fourteen, I got in trouble for the sort of PDA I’ve seen Cruise and Holmes engage in, but I was fourteen and too naïve to know that the people around me on the bus heading back from our freshmen class trip probably didn’t want to see my boyfriend and I play tonsil hockey all night. Lucky for the people around us, one of the nuns separated us. My boyfriend and I were totally self-absorbed. We never thought of other people. We were fourteen.

Since the Oprah show, I’ve grown sick of seeing Tom Cruise and all his PDAing, and I admit that I’m a bit miffed about his attack of Brooke Shields, a new mother. Cruise is ubiquitous and seems to act more and more oddly each time I see him. I have to wonder if this is some sort of manic period or a mid-life crisis. Either way, this theatrical tour de force is public and intentional. It’s in my face every where I go – at the supermarket check out, on the internet welcome page, and on the TV promotional commercials.

Just when I can’t seem to take it any more, my motherly instincts take hold. Somewhere Cruise’s got horrified kids looking on and asking their mother what the heck is up with Dad. Tom’s constant make-out sessions with his new squeeze, his jumping on couches and pumping his arms in a pseudo, wham-bam-thank-you-ma'am kind of gesture, must be the bane of his kids’ unhappy lunch hour at school. They must cringe.

Then there’s the rapidity of the whole relationship. In less time than it takes to get a new semester’s report card, Cruise’s kids have had to deal with the fact that the new girlfriend they just met is to become their new step-mom. At the rate he’s going, the wedding will take place next week, and a new adopted sibling will come along within the next month. Of course, any painful memories of this whole fiasco will have to be audited away and cleared so the Cruise kids will be good as new in no time. No harm, no foul.

Still there’s the whole Brooke Shields affair that I can’t seem to let go either. Brooke is a new mom who bravely battled postpartum depression, and apparently is Tom’s latest punching bag. Tom’s quick to say that he cares about Brooke. I’d sure hate to see if he had something against her. It’s not enough that he says that she’s “irresponsible” about telling people that Paxil helped her out of her postpartum depression so she didn’t commit suicide or injure her baby, but he also implies that her depression wasn’t so much a chemical imbalance as depression over the state of her career.

I guess that was Andrea Yates’s problem too. If she’d only taken her One-A-Day vitamins, things would be different for her and her now deceased children. As for Brooke, why can’t the man give the woman a break? She just had a baby and women’s bodies take at least a year to get back into shape and at least that long for hormones to re-balance themselves again.

Moreover, did it ever occur to him that motherhood is a career? That many mothers choose to stop working or work less in order to spend more time with their babies? Brooke was magnanimous though, offering Tom two tickets to her show, Chicago: one adult and one child.

Of course, other people’s children are Cruise’s concern too. Cruise has a great deal to say about psychiatry and ADHD. I even agree that some children are over-medicated in some instances and that there are natural remedies to help such as fish and grape seed oil, but to dismiss the entire field of psychiatry is really illogical. His argument seems to hinge on the history of psychiatry. It’s certainly no secret that psychiatry has had its fair share of strange and horrific practices like electro-shock therapy and that mental institutions were inhumane, but many professions began in the same dark ages.

Remember the practice of bleeding people? That turned out to be not so good for the patients. And remember that the dentist was also the barber way back when. If a man needed a shave, haircut, and a root canal, the dentist was one stop shopping. Heck, actors weren’t respected back in Shakespeare’s day either and women weren’t allowed to grace the stage. Every field has to start somewhere, but I’m not going to condemn a field because of its history. I live in the 21st century where many things have improved and evolved. I’m still going for my six month dental check-up and cleaning despite dentistry’s horrific past.

To condemn a field that has helped many more people than it has hurt, is really the travesty. Poor Andrea Yates’s children might have lived if she had had some good psychiatric care. I hope there aren’t other mothers dealing with postpartum depression who become embarrassed to seek medical help or think it misguided to take Paxil to stop suicidal thoughts because a guy having a midlife crisis tells them he’s got all the answers.

From what I’ve heard, Cruise’s answers are few and in fragmented sentences. Between the hype, the manic manipulation, the fits and starts, pregnant pauses, begging the question, and raising red herrings, Tom Cruise is simply an actor, not a doctor. From his biography, he’s a kid from everywhere and nowhere, who had a hard time fitting in because of his gift of dyslexia and who desperately wanted to rid himself of the embarrassment of that gift, of the anxiety of constantly moving, of the pain of the father who left him.

He stumbled upon what he believed was the answer in Scientology, the theory of a man who had some pain of his own, and who decided that the best way to handle the pain was to wipe the slate clean, to clear it all away. I’m glad it seems to have worked for him, but everyone is unique and there are many paths.

The path of life isn’t so easy—that’s what makes the journey so interesting. We’re not fourteen any more nor should we desire to be. We know that life leaves a mark. It’s the marks that distinguish us from the young. It’s the marks that season us, that make us more than we were not less. Integrating our experiences—good and bad--- into our present and making peace with our past is how we as human being become empathetic, the ability to understand how our behavior and words affect others.

As mothers, we know better than to relive our adolescence and tell another mother how to live her life, or demean her career choices. As mothers, we know how it feels, and it doesn’t feel good.

So here’s my advice for those of us over fourteen: “Stay off the sofa and may all your PDA’s be for your appointments, or in private.”

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Copyright 2005 Joanne Detore-Nakamura, Ph.D.

Joanne Detore-Nakamura, Ph.D. is enjoying her summer with her children and husband during her break from Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach, FL, where she is an Assistant Professor of Humanities and Communication. She's also finishing up her book, From Victim to Victor: the Friendship Plot in Contemporary Women's Fiction and Film, under contract with Mellen Publishing for a 2006 publication date, and she's catching up on all that laundry and housework.

Snakes and Snails, and All That Jazz

That's What Boys Are Made Of

I watch as my son picks up a tiny doll in a pink dress from the toy bin. What will he do with it, I wonder? Will he hug it? Kiss it? He shows it to me. "Oh, how nice," I say to him. Then he bites its head. My daughter, Emily, who is seven, sees him and rescues the doll, "No, no, Cheekie," her nickname for my husky son, Luke, now 13 months old. "Don't eat Sarah!"

Until I had a little boy, I thought that girls and boys were about the same. I'd studied gender theory for fifteen years. The experts mostly agreed that the way boys and girls turned out was more about nurture than nature. Mass media was really the cause of the destructiveness of boys, not some innate temperament. I'd watched as Emily defied some of the girl "rules" (See my "Girl Power" column) and thought that I'd figured it all out.

Then I had Luke.

Emily would stay in one spot for hours and play with the toys around her. She rarely ventured out on her own. Now that he's started to walk, Luke tears through the house like a boy on a mission –- of destruction. He's suddenly in the kitchen where my daughter is now eating her breakfast. He reaches up and grabs a piece of toast from her plate, laughs, and pops it in his mouth. "Cheekie!" my daughter yells in exasperation. "That was mine!"

Then he's in the family room where the dog is lying peacefully on the sofa. Buddy the dog lifts his head and eyes Luke suspiciously. I'm right behind him the boy now. I don't trust any dog with a baby, even a really nice one like ours. He reaches for Buddy and touches him on the stomach, gently.

"Oh, what a good boy, “I say. "That's it. Pet Buddy nicely."

In a lightening move, Luke grabs Buddy's leg and squeezes.

"Yelp!" Buddy protests, looks at me, and retreats to the bedroom, scurrying under the bed where he's safe.

"No, no Luke! No squeezing."

Luke shakes his head back and forth vigorously and squeals with delight as if mocking me.

I scoop him up and put him in his high chair for breakfast. I cut up pieces of banana, a few bits of a Gerber graduates breakfast bar, some Cheerios, and a tiny portion of scrambled egg. Unlike my daughter Emily, Luke will eat just about anything put in front of him, including the dog's Kibble if I let him. Luke grabs a piece of banana and shoves it into his mouth. Ah, this is going well, I think. I grab a cup of coffee, while Emily sits at the table watching Luke. After a few minutes, Luke has put the banana and scrambled egg in his hair.

"Mommy, he's gross," Emily says, looking at her banana-encrusted brother.

"Oh, you did the same thing," I tell her. "All babies do."

"I did THAT?" Emily asks in disbelief.

"Yup. I've got pictures to prove it," I tell her.

But suddenly surprising both us, there is a barbaric grunt, "Errrrr!" Luke, with his brow furrowed in a sort of Incredible Hulk grimace, takes all the breakfast bar bits in his tiny fist, and squeezes, "Errrr!" Then he laughs hysterically to himself.

"Oh, my gosh!" Emily says. "He looks mean!"

And so it goes.

My friend, Lisa, warned me about boys. She has three of them. "You wait until you have a boy, then we'll talk."

Well, that was the theory any way. We haven't had a complete conversation in over thirteen years -- the age of her oldest, son. I'd call her and throughout the conversation, I'd hear, "J.R., don't punch your brother!" Then we'd talk for a few more moments interrupted by a sudden, "Do NOT run your bikes over those flowers! I just planted them! Andrew!!!" Then, we'd get a few more words in until finally, "I've got to go. They are destroying the whole garden. Bye!" Dial tone.

That's sort of the way it's been. We gave up on the telephone years ago and now just e-mail each other.

Still, no little boy is all snakes, snails and puppy dog tails. Despite his penchant for destruction, Luke is more lover than fighter. Ever since he was born, Luke has sought the hugs and attention of anyone and everyone, especially women. When I was first able to walk to the nursery after my c-section, I tapped on the window and presented my I.D. number. I thought the nurses would go and retrieve my son from among the group of little glass bassinets, but then I realized that Luke was the baby in one of the nurse's arms.

"Oh, this one loves to be cuddled. He's a regular cuddle bug," she said. Reluctant to give him back, the nurse said, "Are you sure you don't need more rest? We really fell in love this one."

My daughter loves to cuddle too, but her hugs and kisses were reserved for immediate family only. My son is another story. He's a regular Casanova. I wouldn't have believed it unless I'd seen it for myself. Luke flirts. My husband and I took the kids to a local restaurant for dinner. We had a stash of Cheerios, toys, and other items to amuse the little guy. After ordering, I noticed that Luke was smiling and waving madly. I turned to see who he was waving at. Incredibly, the objects of his affection were two little girls ages one and three. The oldest one waved back reluctantly; the youngest one wanted nothing to do with him. Then the waitress came with our food. Luke bent his head to the side, smiled coyly, and I could have sworn, winked at her. "Isn't he the cutest!" the waitress remarked. My son cooed, smiled, winked, and waved at every female in the restaurant from the youngest to the oldest all night. Who needs toys?

"You'd better watch out," one older woman warned, "He's going to have all the girls!"

He seems destined to be the kind of guy voted to be class president. He's captivated by people and conversation. Of course at this point his vocabulary consists of mostly dolphin-like clicks and squeals, some jazz scats, and only about three human words. But what he lacks in vocabulary, he makes up for in nonverbal language like gesture and facial expression. He can slip you some skin, wave bye-bye, kiss and hug, nod for yes and no, clap, and flash a smile that puts Tom Cruise's to shame.

He seems on his way to becoming well-rounded too. He enjoys taking things apart and figuring out how things work. An old-fashioned door stopper in my office kept him occupied for ten minutes – up, down, up, down. In addition to his mechanical side, he's a lover of music. Play some music and he's dancing and singing along. He's a sweet little boy, too, despite his love of pulling hair, biting, and pinching people. He's my noble savage, in need of socialization, love, and guidance—not too unlike his sister . . .really.

Yet I can see with his every bang on the piano, every bite of a dolly's head, every mountaineer-like climb of the sofa, every wanderlust trek of the house, every baby Godzilla-yell, that life with this little guy will never be boring.

At the end of the day when I rock him to sleep in my arms and we sing lullabies to each other (his sounds more like a monk's chant- ah-h-h-h), he is still my beautiful little baby in need of all my love and guidance. I feel so incredibly lucky to have him after waiting so long to have him.

One thing I know for sure and what I've learned as a mother is to take it one child at a time. Just as the old nursery rhyme, "Sugar and spice and everything nice," doesn't describe every little girl, neither does "Snakes and snails and puppy dog's tails," describe every little boy. I've found that raising children is less like cooking, where we try to determine the right amount of this or that ingredient until we get it right. What happens if our soufflé doesn't rise and falls flat? Society is stuck with that one for life.

Instead, I've found that raising children is much more like making music. I'm glad that I waited to have children until I could solo. I had time to discover who I was, to know what my "bag" was, to have the opportunity to play my own "gig."

When we've got the theories down cold, we'll know how to break the rules when necessary. Children are like jazz compositions, with lots of variations on the theme and mostly improvisation. A couple of sour notes won't be so bad if we're able to pull it out in the end. I'm looking forward to some really "jamming riffs" and one "solid ride" with this one. He's already got scats that would make Ella jealous.

Yes, I'm ready for motherhood—for the mothering of little girls and of little boys -- and for all that jazz, the unexpected and unrehearsed beauty that is life.

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Copyright 2005 Joanne Detore-Nakamura, Ph.D.

Joanne Detore-Nakamura, Ph.D. is enjoying her summer with her children and husband during her break from Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach, FL, where she is an Assistant Professor of Humanities and Communication. She's also finishing up her book, From Victim to Victor: the Friendship Plot in Contemporary Women's Fiction and Film, under contract with Mellen Publishing for a 2006 publication date, and she's catching up on all that laundry and housework.

My Life Stood Still -- Like a Load of Laundry

It’s about 5:30 p.m. and since 7:30 a.m., I’ve been doing laundry.

I’ve gotten about six loads down and there seems to be about two or three left to wash and put away. Last Monday (a day off), I spent the whole day doing laundry too – another six loads. I’ve tried to do some laundry during the week, but it never seems to work out. The load that I started on Tuesday was still in the dryer and another wet load of towels was drying into stiff bunches in the washer when I rediscovered them this morning at 7:30 a.m.

I wonder if everyone else does this much laundry and if so, how they manage to get it all washed and put away. I seem to be ever in some stage of laundry. The laundry “room," which is really a pantry, coat closet, and laundry room all in one, is never really clear of laundry. I seem to have invested in a lot of laundry products too. I have at least three shelves filled with items for the dirty deed. There’s Spray in Wash, Totally Toddler, Dreft, Tide with Downey, Clorex, Woolite, Shout Color Catcher, Bounce Dryer Sheets, and a tub of Oxiclean.

I have a bit of a reputation in my family for my ability to get out any stain. At the moment, I’m working on two pairs of khaki uniform pants that have soaked in dirt on the knees. I’ve already laundered them once. Currently they are soaking while my bathroom rugs are drying in the dryer.

So in addition to my day job as a professor, I’m a successful laundress at night. No, make that unsuccessful because I don’t think I’ve ever really finished the laundry. Yes, my life is not the loaded gun of Emily Dickinson – she didn’t have kids or even a cat as I recall. No, my life stands more like a load of laundry – it’s not about going off half-cocked or about racing through life like a speeding bullet or about waiting to explode into action at a moment’s notice. My life is more like a cycle of laundry—it’s a lot of doing the same action over and over again.

I can’t imagine what life must have been like for our foremothers who lived before the dawn of Whirlpool. Virgina Woolf was right about Shakespeare’s “sister.” I wonder if she had to do a lot of laundry in addition to being discriminated against. Even with the equivalent of a room of one’s own and 500 pounds (my office at work), I still don’t get enough writing done to be the famous writer of my dreams. One of my colleagues at work has a maid who also provides child care for her son. She’s in administration, though. I can’t afford a maid. I fantasize about how wonderful that would be. Maybe on the weekends, I would be able to do more “fun stuff,” as my daughter whines.

Last weekend, I had to catch up on laundry while I also prepared for my new class on cross-cultural communication. I was at the computer so much that my daughter started to put homemade stickers on my body that said things like, “I should play with my daughter . . . I’m a bad mommy . . . Computer is off limits!” and the like. This was such a pathetic plea for my attention that I immediately thought that I was quite possibly the world’s worst mother.

I wanted to stop doing laundry. I wanted to stop working on my class, but what then? Then I’d be fired and then there would be no clean clothes. My daughter and I ended up striking a deal. I would work on Saturday and devote Sunday to her. I held up half of my bargain and ended up working and laundering until noon. Emily felt “gypped” because I owed her at least a half a day, so we made plans for the following week – this weekend.

Yesterday, Emily and I had a day of fun or that was the theory. We had our nails painted (a Christmas gift from my husband) at the local spa and then we went out to a high tea at our local tea house. The reviews from my daughter were mixed. She loved the tea, but wasn’t so thrilled with the time it took to get the mini-manicure. Today has been “no fun” at all because ”Computer Mommy” was back and when she’s not logging on, she’s slogging through laundry or taking care of the baby or grading papers.

How will this all turn out in the end, ten or twenty years from now? I’m not sure. I try awfully hard to balance my career and family but I’m not sure that I’m doing it so well. At least the reviews that I’m receiving at home these days tend to be more negative than the reviews I’ve gotten on Rate My Professor.com.

It’s not just Emily, either. I’ve gotten unfavorable reviews from my husband too who thinks I should be able to be a better housekeeper. I seem to remember that when I was single, my apartment used to be clean and tidy. I wouldn’t say that I was ever “white glove” clean, but I don’t remember ever being horrified at the thought of a neighbor or friend showing up at the door unannounced. Now, I am.

The house seems to stay tidy for only about an hour or less. There’s always something on the floor – dog toys, baby toys, elementary school toys. There are socks too that seem to end up in strange places –just one at a time—behind a pillow, under the couch, on a chair. That might explain why it’s so difficult to come up with a matched set after washing six loads.

There are always dishes too. For instance today, I have washed two loads of dishes in my dishwasher and emptied the dishwasher twice. Yet still there is a dish or two in the sink. I even cleaned out the entire bottom cupboard under the sink – washed it completely out and it is nice and tidy. I give it about a day or less. I washed the floors today too – vacuumed up all the hair (apparently Big Foot lives in our house – he just deposits hair though—I’ve never seen him but I think he might be a tall Asian guy) and washed the floors and rugs in all the bathrooms. Then I cleaned the sinks, mirrors, and toilets.

The sink and mirrors were dirty again in about an hour. My daughter likes to “produce” commercials in the bathroom that somehow involve splattering the mirror with toothpaste or soap; it’s hard to tell which products she’s selling.

In addition to those larger jobs, I cleaned up several impromptu spills and spit ups – one small, the other gigantic. I am ever amazed at the volume of fluid a baby can spit up. Changing him was easy, but I had to take apart the high chair to get that clean again. Thank goodness for Viva paper towels and Clorex wipes. Yes, I own a lot of cleaning solutions too even though it seems I can never get the house cleaned up enough.

Now it’s 7:38 p.m. and I’ve finished making four dinners—one for my husband and me, one for my daughter (a vegetarian), one for the baby, and one for the dog None of them were very difficult, just something that took time. Then, of course, there was the clean-up. I’ve scrubbed the counters and the stove top at least three times today. In between cleaning up the kitchen, I have put away two more loads of laundry and have two more “cooking”—sheets and towels in the washer, the 2nd of that type of loads, and a load of light colored clothes.

Of course, I’m trying to write this column amid shouts from daughter, “What are you doing? What is the emergency?! I’m sure you have some excuse!” Her reaction is her complete frustration to this ongoing drudgery. She created a list of “fun rules.” One of the rules is that I can only use my computer if it is an emergency and as far as Emily can see, this column does not qualify and so I must stop and conclude.

I’ve concluded that my life is about sorting life’s daily tasks into meaningful piles, about living large or extra large on the spin cycle, about knowing that as a mother I must continue my life -- one load at a time – of laundry, of dishes, of dirty baby diapers.

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Copyright 2005 Joanne Detore-Nakamura

Joanne Detore-Nakamura, Ph.D. is enjoying her life with her newborn son, Luke, her six-year-old daughter, Emily, and her husband, Eric. She works at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach, Florida, as an Assistant Professor of Humanities and Communication.

Shedding My Extra Hyde

Every year since I was a teen, I would vow to lose weight for my New Year's resolution. When this search for the newer, thinner me began, I probably weighed all of 100 lbs. If I were at that weight now, I would have to be hospitalized for malnourishment. Now I just want to be able to wear a sweater without worrying about back fat showing.

Yes, since I've had children, I have developed fat in places I didn't know fat could exist. In fact, I seem to be growing another me. I've got double of everything -- two chins, two butts, four breasts -- a sort of Jekyll and Hyde all in one body -- one in front and another in back. It's pretty damn scary.

I gave birth to the Hyde part of me sometime after my son was born. Like Jekyll, though, I seem to have amnesia about where and what my Hyde is doing. I only know she's there because I see the effects. Somehow, Godiva chocolate raspberry ice cream disappears in the dead of night. Halloween candy -- miniature Snickers, Mounds, and Butterfingers-- goes missing from my daughter's stash. Torn wrappers and dishes rimmed with ice cream residue litter a path from computer to kitchen -- and of course, there's the tell-tale extra pounds on my butt.

Like Hyde, my actions are not going unnoticed. I have my own Utterson, my own Enfield researching the case. I have Emily, my six-year-old daughter. Emily is a fan of Kim Possible and likes to use all sorts of detective gadgets to solve mysteries. So when "The Case of the Missing Three Musketeers Bar" ensued, she deduced who the culprit was by tracing the path of candy wrappers right to my computer chair.

"Moomous!"she says (a version of Mommy she's made up for me unrelated to a cow, I'm positive, I hope), "Did you eat my candy?"

This is a rhetorical question. She knows that I ate it. She knows that I probably ate well over half her bag of candy. It all started innocently enough. It started with the stress of the hurricanes. I measured the hurricane categories, not in numbers, but in bags of M & Ms and Hershey's kisses. Hurricane Charley was a quarter bagger, Hurricane Frances was a whole bagger, and Hurricane Jeanne was just a half bagger.

These hurricanes, and consequently, bags of candy were right on the heels of just giving birth at the end of April. I only had about six weeks to recover from a C-section, when in rolled the bad weather and in rolled the rolls around my middle. I stocked up on batteries, canned goods, flashlights, and chocolate, all of which laid dormant in my pantry.

Then the hurricanes struck in succession just as I had to go back to work from maternity leave. That was just too much stress and I coped by drowning my anxiety "about whether our roof would be ripped off and our home or lives devastated"-- amid candy and canned food, the first being much more satisfying. Thus began my transformation.

I thought I could control myself, keep a lid on my longing for the rich, dark cocoa powder confections, but my need was stronger than I realized. In no time at all, I found myself needing a new wardrobe -- this was the first sign that I wasn't alone. Of course, I could have worn my maternity clothes, but I had my pride. My Hyde was a bit of a fashionista too. I reasoned that I had to return to work looking professional.

To add to my stress, I was hand-selected to attend a high-powered conference with VIPs from my college. Ordinarily, I would have relished this great honor, but I found myself wishing they would have honored someone else, someone who wasn't just coming back from maternity leave with no wardrobe and an infant whom I would have to bring along to a hotel. Obviously, the mostly male assembly hadn't had to travel with an infant.

Luckily, my husband came along to help me with childcare and we packed up two suitcases -- one for the two adults and then one for Emily. Then we packed up our moving van full of stuff for the four-month-old -- his stroller, his special infant formula for his lactose intolerance, his bottles, his diapers, his wipes, his clothes (many tiny clothes), his blankets, his diaper rash ointment, his infant Tylenol (just in case), his tummy trouble medicine, his pacifiers, his burp pads, his washcloths, his bibs, and well, you get the picture. We weren't traveling light.

The only thing that we didn't bring was my son's pack-n-play, which we would later regret. The hotel promised us a crib. When it was delivered, the "full-size" crib turned out to be portable
death trap, with a thick, mushy mattress in which my son would have suffocated had I not stayed up most of the night watching him. Having no where else to put him, I put my son in the crib on his back and prayed that he wouldn't roll over. Luke woke up about every hour and so did I.

After a sleepless night, I was barely awake for the next morning's meeting. I coped with coffee and candy bars, hoping that all the sugar and caffeine would keep me awake. My husband, kids and I made a run for the local Wal-Mart after the meeting and bought a new pack-n-play, some portable crib sheets, and more soda and candy bars. The whole trip cost me a ton of money -- and two inches more on my waist.

My semester wore on this way -- hurricane, candy, work, pounds . . . hurricane, candy, work, pounds . . . hurricane, candy, work, pounds. Until finally hurricane season officially ended. Of course, I was well into my candy addiction by then.

Prior to the hurricanes, I had gotten my son to sleep through the night, a major coup. But after the hurricanes, Luke began to get up at 4:00 a.m., which was a bit too early for me, considering that I graded papers until midnight on most nights.

I was totally exhausted and the Hyde side of me was like a zombie. I had to fortify myself with Hershey's kisses. After a while, I didn't care what type of candy I got into. I'd even started to eat Sweet Tarts left over from Halloween, and those little Nerd candies. I had gone downhill-- from Godiva, to Dove, to Hershey, to Palmer, to Generic. Likewise, I had gone from a size 6 prior to pregnancy up to a 12, back down to an 8 after giving birth, and back up to a 10 after the hurricanes, where I am currently stuck in a holding pattern.

As I make my way into a new year, I want to rid myself of this candy fiend. I want to stop the madness, stop the lust for chocolate, but I feel powerless amid the lingering holiday goodies. The pastries and pies call to me. I must have my powder, my cocoa powder, or else I become a raving lunatic. Though I thought I could control myself, I realize that I am at its mercy. I am powerless. I have tried to stave it off with power bars, but the grit of them is too unsatisfying compared to the creamy center of a cordial cherry. I have tried to avert the tragic effects of my addiction with body shapers, but I have yet to find one that extends up to my neck.

And so this January I pledge to rid myself of my evil doppelganger. I will not be turned into the chunky monkey of my nightmare. No, I will slim fast and furious this new year as I make my milky way toward that newer, thinner me, revealing the sexy kit-kat trapped inside this $100,000 extreme-makeover-needing, new and improved star bursting out from inside of me.

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Copyright 2005 Joanne Detore-Nakamura

Beauty of the Hours

When I was a little girl in central New York, I could smell fall in the air. The mornings were a bit crisper toward the end of August. The oak and maple trees' leaves were tinged with the first show of red and orange.

When I moved to Florida in 1995, I mourned the loss of fall. Here fall comes without much natural fanfare. The air continues to heat up with the first break of sunrise to a sweltering 80 degrees by 7:00 a.m. The mostly perennial trees hold their leaves and color throughout the year.

Back in 1995, there were few ways for me to measure the change of the seasons and I felt out of sorts without natural cues to signal the passing of time. That all changed at the end of March in 1998, the month and year of my daughter, Emily's birth, the first time I became a mother.

Emily was born in spring, a time of renewal and growth. Unlike in New York, there were no crocuses popping up between patches of snow. There were no robins to usher in spring, building nests and laying eggs. There were few trees with tiny buds bursting from barren limbs. Instead, Florida was not green that year, but brown. There had been a terrible drought and instead of soggy earth from melting snow, I encountered the stifling choke of smoke-filled air from the many brush fires throughout our county. The sun beat down mercilessly. When I took Emily home from the hospital, I couldn't take her outside for the morning carriage rides I had envisioned. The air quality was that bad. Inside, time wore on without nature's cues. But I knew that time passed. I knew because I had my own little time clock -- my baby girl.

Before I had Emily, months seemed to melt into months, years into years as if I were on some continuous treadmill of time going no where. Suddenly when Emily was born, there wasn't enough time in the day. Sleep was elusive. Twenty four hours didn't seem enough time to get anything done. On my maternity leave, I had to finish my dissertation to be granted my Ph.D. I had spent five years before that time taking classes and working on my dissertation, but now I had no time left. It was now or never.

As I dusted off my notes and began to write, my girl grew and grew. Her tiny baby features began to take shape quicker than my dissertation did. When I had finally finished my 200 page work, my daughter was five months old and I had to go back to work. It was August 1998. I couldn't believe what five months looked like -- Emily was now a little person able to sit up and coo. All total, my Ph.D. had taken me almost eight years from the time I took my first course to the time I submitted my dissertation. In the same amount of time, I could have had an eight-year-old child. Instead, all I had to show for that time was 200 pages that would be dated and obsolete in a few years.
Motherhood changed my perception of time and with it, restructured the priorities in my life. I decided to resign from my job as a department chair and as soon as I was allowed, I decreased my length of contract from almost eleven months to nine, taking a huge pay cut. I knew that I couldn't be the kind of mother that I wanted to be with a stressful job like that and with so many responsibilities. Going back to work was the most difficult challenge that I had ever faced. Had I not been the primary breadwinner of our family, I probably would have stayed home. I hadn't expected that going back to work or more pointedly leaving the most important person in my life would have been so gut-wrenching. My child was only five months old. She was so vulnerable, so tiny, and so dependent upon me. More than that, I was her very world and she was mine.

Even though I was lucky enough to have my parents watch my daughter while I was at work, I cried on my way to work every morning for months. Some semesters when my students were not particularly diligent and really didn't want to be there, I would wonder what in the world I was doing in the classroom. Clearly my students didn't give a rip if I were there imparting the ways of crafting better essays. They'd rather be surfing at the beach. But at home, my little girl wanted me, needed me. At the end of the day, I doubted my students spent a minute thinking about me or their English class. But at home, my daughter spent her time wondering where I was.

Those were tough days. I only got through those days and those years when occasionally, a former student would send me an e-mail, stop by, or write me a thank you note about how I helped him get his first job or how I helped her write the essay that garnered her spot in the graduate school of her choice. I lived for that sort of feedback, the only thing that helped me see that I was touching the lives of many people.

As my daughter grew older, I measured my life using her as my yard stick. She grew into a beautiful, intelligent, and kind little girl. Although my parents had spent eight hours of the day with her, my Emily still saw me as her primary caregiver, the light of her life. I was the one that she wanted to be with more than anyone else. This quelled my fear that working would prevent us from bonding.

Having the summer off was my way of becoming a stay-at-home mother for three months. My frenzied lifestyle of grading papers from 9 p.m. until 2 a.m. and often waking at 5 a.m. to grade more papers before I got ready for work and before I fed and dressed the baby, ended. I adjusted to Emily's natural rhythms, waking when she did and leisurely drifting through the morning. We went on day trips to the local zoo, to the beach, or to the playground. When Emily got older, we'd go to high tea at a local English tea house in our fancy dresses and hats. Or sometimes we'd sit at home and make tea and scones, pretending to be Mrs. Mouse and Mrs. Rat (a take-off of Beatrix Potter, a favorite author).

As Emily approached school age and I took my current position at a university where health care was cheaper, the pay was better, and college for dependents was free, the summers became more like working vacations. I didn't have to teach or grade papers, but there was an expectation that I use the summer to write papers and publish scholarly articles or creative work. I enrolled Emily in a few short, week long summer camps. I dropped her off in the morning around 9 a.m. and picked her up around 11 a.m. This gave me a couple of hours to write without disruption, and it gave her time to spend with children her own age.

This summer was different; it was my maternity leave. I struggled to do it all and realized that I couldn't. Recovering from a c-section after delivering my second child was very difficult. I was so very sleep deprived. Because I had an older child at home who was very much awake during the day, I couldn't sleep when the baby slept. This meant that I averaged a few hours of sleep a night. Then there was the pain from my operation. Not only did the site of my c-section hurt tremendously, but I had internal bruising on my left side. My son was breech and stuck under my rib cage so the doctor and nurses had to pry him out. I also had a reaction to the spinal block, which in its aftermath caused intermittent but excruciating pain in my back.

Luckily my husband took two weeks off from work to stay home and help me and later my mother helped too, but my recovery was slower than I thought. I had planned to finish a college course over the summer. I had planned to finish editing a book. I had planned to rewrite some of my scholarly articles to send out for publication. I had planned to exercise and lose the baby weight. I had planned to bond with my baby and help my daughter with her reading. I had too many plans.

In the end, time ripped through all my plans. Having two children did not quicken time by two but exponentially squared time until it strode off like the speed of light. For the first six weeks of my recovery, my parents were kind enough to take my daughter Emily to and from kindergarten. Emily had a tough time adjusting to her new baby brother and having the routine of school helped. In addition to stealing the spotlight from her, Luke didn't do much. Emily had expected (despite the many books we read and talks we had) the baby to be more like a two-year-old -- conversant and ready to play.

"He just sits there," she said. "He doesn't even know how to hold a rattle," she said disappointedly.

Certainly like all newborns, Luke couldn't smile yet. He simply did what newborns do best -- eat, sleep, and poop -- not a very exciting repertoire for a six year-old to watch. As the sands of time gushed through the hour glass, Emily graduated from kindergarten and Luke graduated into a new larger size diaper. He became more interactive, able to smile and react to his sister, who was now more enamored with him.

So while my guilt piled up over unwritten articles and stomach flab not disappearing fast enough, I found myself totally in love with my new baby and in need of absolution. I never realized how much I had missed these precious baby times. I found myself just in awe of my sleeping infant or simply reeling with delight over a recent new cooing sound. My worry that I wouldn't be able to love my second child as much as my first evaporated in the operating room as soon as I saw Luke for the first time. I loved my little boy just as much as my daughter. A mother's love is that big.

As the weeks flew into months and my little boy grew bigger, I absolved myself from the guilt of unwritten papers. This was my time. I needed this time. My children needed this time. My family needed this time. I resigned from a committee that I knew would steal this precious time. I suspended my scholarly writing because sleep was more important to my recovery at this point. I wanted to make this time count.

My daughter grew weary of the baby routine and since I was feeling better, I enrolled her in a week-long art camp that she enjoyed fully. We broke up the routine by seeing movies every Friday, and going out for ice cream or for tea always with Luke in tow. On the weekends, my husband and I took the kids to a science center in the next city or miniature golfing at the local course. We helped Emily with her reading. I enrolled her in a five week reading program that met once a week for two hours. After some rough road with diaper rashes and allergies to formula, Luke was finally settling into a routine. With his 2 a.m.-5 a.m. colic gone, Luke became a happy baby. And three nights ago at exactly three months of age, Luke began sleeping through the night.

This summer I didn't write the great American novel. I didn't even write the great American essay. My essays still await revision in my computer files waiting while my children's growth and development wait for no one -- including me. My daughter starts back to school during the first week of August as a first grader and then I will no longer share in her every waking moment.

Unlike the first time that I returned from maternity leave, I now know how difficult it will be to hand over my baby to my mother when I go back to work. I also realize how incredibly lucky I am to have my parents to watch my little boy. I know that they love him as much as I do and will give him all the love and attention that I would. However, my time spent at work is time that I cannot spend with my baby and time that can never be recovered. I will miss many of his new smiles, his new reactions. I will miss his hugs and his kisses. Although I love teaching and enjoy my students, they can never compare with the unconditional love that a child gives to his mother or that a mother gives to her child. Perhaps earlier than some mothers, I realize that I will never be able to be with my child for every moment. Therefore, I try to be truly present every moment that I am with my children.

Being in the moment when I am with her is what has created such a strong bond between my daughter and me. I hope to create the same type of bond with my son. Although my time with my children matters tremendously, I must plan for the future as well. As a working mother, I ensure a roof over my children's heads, food in their stomachs, clothes on their backs and all those "extras" like health insurance, college, and a retirement that won't burden my children.

As this summer wanes and the fall enters, I walk along the beach with my daughter and carry my son in my arms, happily looking for shells. I savor these times and am reminded of a quote I once read by an anonymous writer, "Today is a smooth white seashell, hold it close and listen to the beauty of the hours."

These hours, the ones that I spend with my children, are the most precious of all and rush by all too quickly. I will hold them close and in my heart forever.

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Copyright 2004 Joanne Detore-Nakamura

Joanne Detore-Nakamura, Ph.D. is enjoying her summer with her newborn son, Luke, her six-year-old daughter, Emily, and her husband, Eric. She heads back to work in the fall at Embry-Ridde Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach, Florida, where she is an Assistant Professor of Humanities and Communication.

My Mother, Myself

The moment a child is born, the mother is also born. She never existed before. The woman existed, but the mother, never. A mother is something absolutely new. ~Rajneesh

When my mother was 38 years old, I was fifteen and a junior in high school. At 38 years old, I now have a six-year-old daughter and a week-old-son. My mother was a stay-at-home mother until I was in fifth grade when she began taking on part-time jobs to make ends meet. I have been a full-time, working mother since my daughter was six months old. My mother never had the opportunity to go to college, but she made certain that I would and I earned my Ph.D.

My mother and I have lived different lives, but they are intertwined. In fact, my mother makes my life possible in so many ways (other than the obvious), and I find myself unable to express my gratitude. We are mothers, and we share more than a common bond. I learned what being a mother was all about from my mother, Josie Detore.

According to psychologist, Dr. Daniel Stern and to philosopher, Rajneesh, motherhood creates a whole new person with a new set of values, priorities, and even emotions. I never really understood this phenomenon until I experienced it myself when I gave birth to my daughter, Emily. Because of our financial situation, I knew that I had to go back to work after my maternity leave. However, the more that I thought about it, the more I knew that I simply could not put my child in daycare. I cried plenty of tears and called my mother who was living in New York. She and my father were getting ready to retire, but Mom was also taking care of her ailing father and mother.

In fact, my mother lived a hectic life. She worked full-time as a receptionist and on her lunch hour, she picked up my grandfather from his nursing home to bring him home for the rest of the day. After work, Mom made dinner for my father, her mother, and her father. She’d drive the meals down to them and sit with my grandparents. Then, she’d head out for my grandfather’s nursing home in the next town at about 10:00 p.m. in rain, sleet, or snow. Somewhere in between, she’d find time to bring my grandmother to get her hair done, take my grandfather for ice cream or out for a fish fry, or anything else he wanted. She prepared meals ahead of time for my grandparents, cleaned their house, did the their laundry, and shopping. My grandfather had frequent bladder accidents and Mom dutifully cleaned them all. She did this for six years. Then, I called with a request, “Could you come to Florida and help me with babysitting?”

My father never liked Frankfort, NY, but my mother had lived there for most of her adult life and few people born in Frankfort ever left. Although her parents, brother, cousins, and friends lived in and around Frankfort, both my sister and I had moved to the same Florida town. I felt horrible for asking Mom to give up her life essentially, but I persisted each time thinking instead about my child going into the hands of strangers. Mom was rather reluctant at first. She didn’t want to leave her parents because she felt they needed her too, but her brother was there and the thought of her grandchild in the care of strangers was more than she could take.

My parents came for a visit in December and picked out a house to build from a new subdivision not far from the one we lived in. My mother’s heart wasn’t really into it, and she let my father make most of the decisions about the house. Then they came for Emily’s birth in March. Mom spent a week before delivery with me, helping me to clean the house, and then spent the next three weeks helping me take care of Emily. I was debilitated from a difficult birth and was thankful beyond words that my mother was there. My husband could only take off a few days because he had just started his new position.

Then in July, Mom and Dad moved their entire lives to Florida. When Emily was six months old, I started back to work with the fall semester teaching at the community college where I had been the department chair of the Communications Department. I had resigned from the department chair position when I went on maternity leave and began that term as a tenured, associate professor with no supervisory duties. I was glad to give up the chair position because I didn’t need the extra burden of being responsible for an entire department.

Even so, when I returned to work, I was exhausted. Emily still wasn’t sleeping through the night and I had over 100 student essays to grade weekly in addition to serving on committees and other duties like finishing my dissertation (see March 2003 issue). Mom was a godsend though. She and Dad would pick up Emily for me in the mornings and then even let me take a nap after work so that I could pick up Emily at 5:00 p.m. feeling refreshed. Many times, Mom made dinner too so that I wouldn’t have to worry about it. More importantly, my daughter had the best care. Grandma and Poppie loved her, bestowed kisses and hugs on her, spoiled her to no end.

My mother even found Emily playmates, by looking for children in the neighborhood when she rode her bike in the mornings. In addition to Emily’s socialization, Mom also helped Emily become kindergarten-ready. For six years, Mom was a teacher’s aide for kindergarten in New York State, one of her first full-time jobs after staying home with my sister and me. Mom would have been a great teacher. She has so much patience with little children and has a naturally effervescent personality that draws children in and commands their attention. She also has a big heart and easily falls in love with all the children in her charge.

Although I also taught Emily her colors, letters, and numbers, Mom spent more time with Emily during the day than I did and she created fun games with numbers. One day, I came home to find that Emily could add and subtract. I felt guilty that I had not been there for this milestone, but my mother reassured me that I spent quality time with Emily and that was what mattered most. However, I knew that my daughter would not be the wonderful little girl she is without my mother’s influence. Essentially, Emily was co-mothered by both of us.

Throughout the past nine months of my current pregnancy, my mother was like my guardian angel. She prepared meals for my family and me, helped with my daughter Emily by bringing her to school and/or picking her up when I could no longer do it, and even rubbed my tired swollen feet after work.

Most recently, she has been helping my husband and me this week as I recover from my c-section. When I had to take a late night trip to the ER because I turned blue, my husband called my mother at 1:30 a.m. and asked her to come over. There was no hesitation, and she was here in less than five minutes. She stayed until 5:00 a.m. when we returned. Then, she spent the rest of the morning helping me with the laundry, before going home to care for my grandmother (who is debilitated and who has lived with her for the past four years), and later traveled to my sister’s in Orlando to help her move into her new house. My mother seems to have more energy than anyone I know and is always happy to help us.

Although my relationship with my mother has not been without its challenges, most particularly in my twenties, we have a great relationship now. My life would not be as happy or as fulfilling if my mother was not in it. Mom has enriched the lives of my entire family and she has taught me how to love. She has also taught me that mothering is not easy. There are mistakes along the way. Now that I have my own children, I know that the mistakes we make are always made out of love for our children, the depth of which is unfathomable and boundless.

Josie Detore, my mother has shaped who I am today. When my career is over, when I can write no more, the love and time that I have devoted to my children will continue in them and count for more in the end. That is what good mothering is all about —knowing that we, mothers, continue as we recreate ourselves through the mothering of our daughters and of our sons.

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Copyright 2004 Joanne Detore-Nakamura, Ph.D.

My So-Called Boring Life

I wish I could say that I was unique or led an incredibly fascinating life, but I’d be lying. Yes, the truth is that I’m very ordinary and my life is relatively boring. I’m the mother of a six-year-old and the wife of a great husband. I work as a college professor, teach classes, and write professionally. I don’t get enough sleep, but what mother does?

The only unusual part of my life story has been my pregnancies. They have never been boring. I wish they were uneventful, but that’s not the way they turned out. I expected them to be like the rest of my life — smooth sailing on relatively calm waters. I really did.

The first time around my husband and I were having trouble conceiving. He had to have his sperm tested to see if he had lively swimmers. No trouble there. Then there was me. I had to go in for a procedure that would unblock my fallopian tubes. Before the procedure was done, I had to make sure that I had had my period and had to take pregnancy tests to be sure that I wasn’t pregnant. About a week before, I had a period so the doctor gave me antibiotics to take several days before the procedure to prevent infection. I also took about three at home pregnancy tests, all of which were negative. I was set to go.

The night before my fallopian tube cleaning, I had a dream that I was pregnant. This didn’t seem so unusual. After all, I was hoping to become pregnant and was ready for a procedure that might help. However, this dream was more like a premonition. It tugged at me and stayed with me all morning long into the early afternoon when my husband and I sat awaiting my turn in the medical center. Suddenly, it seemed as if there were neon signs screaming at me: “Tell your technician if you think or could be pregnant. Tell them! Tell them! “

And I thought, what do I tell them? “Oh, by the way, I had a weird dream last night that I was pregnant. Oh, yes. I took three home pregnancy tests and they were all negative, but well, I had this dream.”

I thought they would think that I’d lost my mind and would think that maybe I was better off not having children because I wasn’t playing with a full deck any how.

I sat on the examining table in my oversized paper napkin dress waiting for my doctor who was delivering another baby in another part of the hospital. In the meantime, a young woman came with my chart to ask some questions. She noticed my last name and said, “Hey, my sister had you for English.”

Oh, the horror! At least this was a female student. There is something horrific about one of your students seeing you naked and this was about as close. “I’ll tell her that I saw you,” she said brightly to which I could only respond, “Yeah.”

I waited and waited with my husband for the doctor to arrive and finally she appeared.

“I’m really sorry,” she said, “but I’ve got another emergency upstairs. Do you mind waiting a bit more?”

My husband had already taken the day off work and so had I so I didn’t mind waiting an hour or two more.

It would be easier than rescheduling. It was then that I felt pressed to tell her about my dream, risking the absurdity of it all.

"Dr. Kaufmann, I just thought that I’d mention that I had a really odd dream that I was pregnant. I took about three home pregnancy tests, but they were all negative. I don’t know,” I said sheepishly, “I just thought that I’d mention it.”

She looked at me, but not like I’d lost my mind. “Humph,” she said. “Well, sometimes mothers know things intuitively. How about we get a blood test? It will be back in about an hour and so will I.”

So that’s what happened. I had a blood test and my husband and I waited for another hour. Dr. Kaufman came back into the room and said, “Well, get dressed.”

“Is it too late to do the procedure?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said, “You don’t need it. You’re already pregnant. Congratulations!”

It turns out that if I had gone through with the procedure, the fetus would have been aborted. Perhaps mothers really do know things that ordinary mortals do not.

I ended up having to take a blood test every week until the fetus was at about eight weeks because I’d had unusual bleeding and low HCG levels. I also had to have an early ultrasound, which the doctor said suggested that I had actually miscarried a fraternal twin early on, which explained the “period” that I thought that I had.

Of course, I had my share of morning sickness after that and made the best of it at work. I found that ziplock bags were the best solution. I’d keep them in my car as I drove to work, puke in the bag in the parking lot, zip it up, pop some breath freshener, and go to my office to retrieve my toothbrush. It was a neat little system, more or less.

I didn’t have any real trouble with my first pregnancy until I grew some hemorrhoids the size of golf balls. They weren't your normal variety either. They became thrombus hemorrhoids, which meant that I had to have them surgically removed or else I would have bled to death during vaginal delivery. Because I was eight months pregnant, I was only given a local anesthetic and that wore off fairly quickly. The surgeon told me that he was so impressed with my pain threshold. He knew that the operation was incredibly painful, that I could feel most of it and yet, I didn’t cry out. To be truthful, the aftermath and recovery from that operation were worse than the delivery of the baby, but that’s really the subject of another column.

After three weeks of recovery from my hemorrhoid surgery and still working through it all, I had to be induced two weeks early. The baby was apparently getting big, maybe too big.

At 7 lbs. 15 oz, they were right. My girl got stuck. Medically, this is called shoulder dystocia, which occurs in less than 1% of all births according to some studies. My delivery was rather long and arduous with lots of ripping and stitches, the bulk of which I didn’t recover from for about three months. Up to this point, I really believed that, like several of my friends, I’d have the baby in 15 minutes and be able to walk around an
hour later. But this wasn’t the way it turned out.

Perhaps even worse than my situation was my daughter’s recovery. She had some bruising to her shoulder and her little head looked like one of the Cone Heads from Saturday Night Live. I kept feeling the urge to tell people that we were from France and plunked a hat on her most of the time. My daughter’s pediatrician kept hoping that her head would reshape into more of a bowling ball shape, but that just didn’t happen.

I spent the next seven months meeting weekly with a neonatal neurosurgeon at Arnold Palmer Children’s Hospital in Orlando, which was about an hour from our home. Having taken all of my vacation and sick leave on my unpaid maternity leave, I ended up having to schedule these appointments late in the afternoon on Fridays when I wouldn’t be missed as much. After X-rays CAT-Scans, the surgeon prescribed a specially made helmet that Emily had to wear 23-hours-a-day for about seven months. It was heavy and hot during those Florida days and nights, but the helmet did the trick. My daughter’s head is a lovely round shape, and we all survived.

I have friends who have had worse stories than me and some with better ones. One of my friends who is a CFO of a major corporation had her children in literally 15 minutes with no tearing. She is on child number three while I am ready to have child number two. It only took me about seven years to work up the nerve again.

This time I’m scheduled to have a c-section around the third week of April. The doctor told me that the baby, a boy this time, will likely be large. He’s breech and already weighs almost 7 lbs with about three weeks to go. I admit that I’m frightened out of my mind to have a c-section. I was never a fan of needles or knives, and I guess I’ll be confronting both. Still, the recovery time for me should be less than my vaginal recovery, and the baby is assured not to suffer the problems of shoulder dystocia, an odd-shaped head, or something more dire. I’ll let you know how it turns out.

In the meantime, I can’t wait to go back to my boring life, but I know that won’t be for a long, long while.
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Copyright 2004 Joanne Detore-Nakamura, Ph.D.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Aliens Among Us, and Extraterrestrial Superheroes

Tales of the Latter Stages of Pregnancy

During the seventh month of my first pregnancy, my husband and I went on a double date with a friend of mine from college and his wife. We were all sci-fi nuts and decided to see the new Alien Resurrection film. Naively I hadn’t thought twice about the film’s plot.

So there we were, chatting before the previews. Munching on popcorn; drinking soda. The loud music began during the previews and …. the baby woke up. My stomach began to move the popcorn box around. I tried to pretend that this was all together normal—people’s stomachs did this—they moved independently of their bodies. My childless friend and his wife weren’t so sure judging from their raised eyebrows.

I watched and enjoyed most of the film. Then came the part when the alien “baby” burst from Ripley’s stomach at the very same time that my “alien” decided to turn around and kick me. My stomach undulated, lurched, moved independent of me so much that my husband took a look and laughed. But I wasn’t laughing. I realized then as I hadn’t before—I was rented housing for an alien and the lease was almost up.

The host/parasite relationship is one that most people don’t want to think of when they think about pregnancy. I had flashbacks to a Star Trek episode in which a human is chosen to house or host an entity that looks much like a squirmy intestine. They have a symbiotic relationship and neither feels their individual needs are repressed although the personality of the host is consumed by the parasite. When many people think of pregnancy, they don’t think of a parasitic relationship. It’s unpleasant. After all, parasites aren’t normally attractive – you’ve got your fleas, your lice, your tapeworms—none very appealing and they are entities you’d rather be rid of with some medicine.

The cleaning woman in my building (who is childless) said to me the other day, “I always thought that being pregnancy was all flowers and sunshine.”

I guess it can be for some, like my mother. She contends that she felt the best when she was pregnant. Of course, she had her children in her twenties and seems to have forgotten all about her hemorrhoid problems. She was also plagued by gallbladder problems, which subsided only while she was pregnant. So perhaps it was true for her.

On the other hand, I’ll be forty in two years and have often thought of my pregnancies like a Dickens’s novel – it was the best of times; it was the worst of times. I was elated when I discovered that I was finally pregnant again and was so excited about the prospect of having a new life grow inside me. I had prayed for this to happen. Then reality set in or maybe it was “night” sickness, my version of morning sickness with this child. Then there was the swollen hands and feet, the migraines for which I could only take Tylenol, the acid reflux, the frequent urination, the dwindling repertoire of foods, and the hemorrhoids, about which I could write an entire essay. At least this time, it doesn’t seem like I’ll have to have them removed like I did during my eighth month of pregnancy last time. My point is that my body is no longer my own. It doesn’t do the things that it used to, and it does things now that I wish it wouldn’t and always at inopportune times. Still, things could be worse.

One of my friends had a weak cervix and was confined to bed rest for about six of her nine months. A woman from my Lamaze class got preeclampsia and had to be hospitalized. The worst case was my friend who was diagnosed with lung cancer during her pregnancy and had to delay her chemo and radiation until the day after the baby was born. While she was enduring radiation, her premature baby was clinging to life in an incubator. She’s still battling cancer, even after many operations and treatments.

Unlike these traumatic tales, I just have a hard time putting on my pantyhose in the morning and sleeping at night. My little “squirrel,” as I’ve nicknamed him, wakes up when I try to sleep and does his morning aerobic routine from 1-5 a.m. What’s a little sleep deprivation in the grand scheme of things? Like most mothers, I’ve grown accustomed to living on a few hours of sleep since I had my daughter. I figure that I haven’t had a full night’s rest in over six years.

Meanwhile, my husband has had many restful nights and gets to sleep in on most weekends when he’s not waking up early to tee off for golf. My daughter has just plain given up on trying to wake her father, who can actually sleep through a hurricane. Instead, it’s always mommy – dispenser of breakfast and hugs – who wakes up happily and dutifully to my daughter’s pleas at 6:30 a.m. Even the dog wakes me up when nature calls him in the wee hours of the morning. Buddy, the dog, knows that it’s futile to bark at inanimate objects like my husband in the middle of the night.


Yet when my husband is awake, he is better than many husbands. He’s a great cook and even helps clean-up around the house, jobs he can do much better than me, who has never been Julia Child or a white tornado of cleaning excellence. He also gives me the best back and foot rubs; it’s like dying and going to heaven after a day of standing on my feet and teaching.

Still, little has changed for him or will change for him when the new baby comes. There will be no recovery time for the mending of the caesarian incision; no cracked and bleeding nipples from breastfeeding; no late night feeding from which to become sleep deprived. There will be diapers and dishes, lunches and laundry for him. He will become the taxi service for my daughter – to school, to scouts, to dancing. The intensity of this activity will last about two weeks, and he’ll be back to work.

Meanwhile, I will pick up the pieces and try to assemble my new life. I’ll try to work the edges first, make the frame from what I learned the first time around. There will be children to dress and to feed; to take for walks; to take to school and to dancing; to rock to sleep. There will be articles to write; a book to finish; and even another graduate class to take with readings, tests, and papers over my summer “vacation,” which will also be my “maternity leave.”

I know it will take time and practice to work it all out, for the pieces to fit together seamlessly or at least as close as I can get them. And my parents will be there to help, for which I am ever so thankful.

I will have my body to myself then and will try to whittle it down to pre-pregnancy size, aided by breastfeeding, walks with my children, biking and swimming with them. But I know, like most mothers, that my mind will always be splintered. Although my personality won’t be totally repressed like the character on Star Trek, my needs and wants will be sublimated. The children’s best interest is my priority, as it should be. There will be all night vigils when the baby or my daughter is sick, when I keep a sleepy eye on my congested child to make sure his or her chest rises and falls or that fevers do not spike in the night without a battle to keep them down. There will be worries about the children when I’m at work, when a phone call will not be enough to “reach out and touch” them.

And for all the worries, the delayed or derailed desires, there is great joy — the depths to which I never realized were possible until I had a child. One of my childless friends asked me why I wanted to have another child with all the extra time it would take.

“I don’t know how you do it,” she said. “I have enough trouble teaching four classes, preparing for them, grading hundreds of papers, and doing research as it is, and I have only me to worry about.”
But she isn’t there to see my daughter’s face, when unrestrained joy at seeing me, her mother, rushes to her face when I pick her up from school. My colleague isn’t there to see my daughter’s “chicken dance,” a hilarious little show that she puts on with exaggerated slap-stick comedy that rivals SNL. She isn’t there to experience that feeling of pride when my daughter won a “best character and behavior” award at school, knowing that I had something to do with that. Along with my husband and my parents, who have been my daughter’s only long-term daycare except for preschool, I am raising a lovely human being who is kind, intelligent, and empathetic.

Yesterday when I picked up my daughter at school, she told me about how she saved a frog’s life. Some first grade boys wanted to kill it, she said.

“I yelled,” she said, surprised at her own activism. “I told the boys that they couldn’t kill one of God’s creatures and then I told the teacher,” she said very proudly. “I used my words, and I saved the frog.”

“I’m so proud of you, Emily,” I said. “You were the frog’s superhero.”

“Yeah,” she said, thoughtfully, “I guess I was, Mommy. I was a superhero . . .for real,” she added excitedly.
From the rearview mirror, I could see her beaming with pride as she sat in the backseat daydreaming, imagining herself a caped crusader, fighting to liberate frogs and other small creatures from certain death.

I believe in superheroes too. We do what we can to be good mothers (sharing a body, postponing trips to exotic spas in lieu of Disney World, or generally trading our desires for their best interest), knowing that it will pay off in the long run by raising wonderful, productive, and happy children who will become productive, functional adults. I’ll keep trading sleep for superheroes any day; it’s a small price to pay when you know that the world will be better off. We need our superheroes, now more than ever.

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Copyright 2004 Joanne Detore-Nakamura, Ph.D.

Girl Power

“From the end spring new beginnings” said Pliny and so we are at the end of another year, filled with our best intentions for keeping new year’s resolutions designed to tackle the holiday overeating, the overspending, the general overindulging in things too many to mention. Others of us also pledge to tackle the more personal part of life, pledging to be a better spouse, a better mother, a better person in general.

With the anticipated birth of my second child in the spring of 2004, this next year will mark a new beginning for me as well. I found out that I’m having a boy, apparently a very large boy, who will usher me into new territory— a c-section delivery, and later the life of boys. As a specialist in gender theory, I’ve read the textbooks, taught about the theory of gender, and even wrote about gender at length, communication patterns in particular. But raising my daughter proved that tiny humans do not follow the textbook exactly. I had much to learn.

With my first pregnancy, I had a dream that I would give birth to a beautiful little golden haired girl. When I had the ultrasound that confirmed that I was having a girl, I was not surprised at all. I was ready for it. After all, I had been a girl. I knew exactly what to expect, didn’t I?

Watching my daughter explore the world has given me the most extensive education of my life. When Emily was in preschool, her teachers were amazed when Emily was the only child to pick up the class pets, hermit crabs, without any fear. I wasn’t. I had watched Emily become spellbound by stag beetles, ants, worms, and other creepy crawlers while I filed away my disgust and fear so that she would not be influenced by me. I found myself fascinated by Emily’s intrigue and soon I felt differently too — not enough to pick up a wiggling Palmetto bug, whom she named, “Brownie,” but enough to watch Emily without feeling my own skin crawl.

Emily continued to amaze me day after day, year after year. When she was four, Emily presented me with a picture. Honestly, I didn’t know what it was – a circle with a smaller circle inside it with some dots in the smaller circle. I knew better than to announce my interpretation, so I asked her to “tell me all about it.”
“Well, it’s a virus, of course.”

“Oh,” I said, taken aback. “And it’s a very good virus too.”

“No, viruses are bad Mommy. They make people sick but they are microscopic. You can’t see them.”

I still have that drawing on my bulletin board in my office.

“She’s going to be a scientist,” her teachers remarked.

Despite my attempts to follow Emily’s lead in supporting her scientific curiosity, there was always mass media following closely on our heels, insisting that there were “girl toys” and “boy toys.” A trip through any toy store confirms this – the girl aisle is pink and purple while the boy aisle is gray and army green.

Advertisements reinforce gender coding as does society. Despite this, Emily had developed a real passion for Pokémon, fostered by my husband who often came home with a new batch of tiny figures almost every night. Together, they read about all the powers the little creatures possessed — their type, their species, and their path of evolution.

When Emily was about three, I found her in the living room with her 50 or so ¼ inch figures arranged in groupings according to their genus, species, and evolutionary stages. She engaged in imaginary play, enlisting Mommy and Daddy to “be them, be them” (the Pokémon characters). Emily even had Pokémon pajamas, but of course, I had to buy them in the boys’ section of the store. And she had a Pokémon themed birthday party.

Despite this deep passion for Pokémon, she declared, at age four, that she had decided to give them up. Suddenly, she would not watch the cartoons, wear the pajamas, or play with her figures. My husband and I just thought that she had moved on to the next new thing and didn’t think much of it until one Sunday morning. My husband was flipping through the television channels and passed a Pokémon cartoon. Emily started to cry. When we asked why, she said, “I really like Pokémon, but they are for boys and I can’t watch them.”

My husband and I asked her who said they were for boys. “They are in the boys’ part of the store,” she said and then there was a boy at preschool who had “set her straight.”

I felt crushed as I watched her little face fall from the disappointment and utter frustration that she felt. So this was how it began. It wasn’t about what girls could do; it was about what they couldn’t do. So we took little girls and carefully trained them, told them that they were incapable of playing with certain toys, of liking certain colors, and later of entering certain professions. Cultural conditioning was to blame for our low female enrollment at the technical university at which I taught. For a young woman to enroll at our 83% male technical university was extraordinary. Moreover, for the young woman to make it to graduation was a superhero endeavor. I came to respect and to appreciate the superwomen in my classes even more after watching cultural conditioning in action in the microcosm of my own family.

After explaining to Emily that girls could like anything they wanted to like and to be anything they wanted to be and reinforcing that idea every day, Emily seemed much more content. At five, she mixes “traditional” girl and boy modes of play. She is a girl who likes bugs and ballet equally. Raising a boy will undoubtedly bring other challenges for me and our family, and we’ll be ready to take them on too.

“Girls can do anything,” she declares, running around in a superhero cape, her right arm extended while flying through the air, shouting, “Girl Poooowerrrrrr!”

I only hope the world doesn’t disappoint her. But if it does, I know that I’ve done my best to prepare her to take on the world.

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Copyright 2004 Joanne Detore-Nakamura

Diving Deep and Resurfacing

“How was your summer?” colleagues asked me cheerfully over and over again during the first week back at my college teaching job. The summer didn’t go well for me personally, and I didn’t know how to respond to what was perhaps a rhetorical question.

Professionally, I had several poems accepted for publication in peer-reviewed journals; a paper presentation accepted for a conference; a poetry reading arranged at a national venue; and two book chapter proposals accepted. A book, Fractured Feminisms, in which I had a chapter on feminist pedagogy, was finally published in July.

In sharp contrast to my professional successes was my personal failure. I had had my first miscarriage. I tried not to think of it as “my failure,” but no matter how I tried not to punish myself, I kept reliving every last minute of the month or so, trying to detect the ways in which I was culpable.

My miscarriage bought me a ticket into a greater arena of women, a very uncomfortable place. I entered a dialogue with thousands of other women, including my mother and grandmother. I never believed that a “miscarriage” would happen to me. When it did, I realized how tenuous and fine the thread that connected life and death was.

This miscarriage was made all the sadder for my husband and me because we had tried to have another child, on and off, for the past three years—as soon as my daughter had turned two. At age 37, I planned my last effort so that my pregnancy would coincide with my academic year, more or less. I bought all the ovulation kits and kept careful track of my basal temperature.

After a missed period, I scheduled a blood test with my doctor, and she delivered the best news. We were expecting and I was due March 1st.

My husband brought home a huge bouquet of flowers and a toy surprise for our daughter to include her in the good news. My parents, who live close by, were elated as well.

But two weeks later, and after light then heavy spotting, I miscarried. The male doctor on call at the hospital tried to console me, telling me that his wife had a miscarriage too but later had given birth to four healthy children. “This isn’t your fault,” he said. “You did not cause this. You will have another.”

Maybe it was my Catholic guilt, but I felt that my miscarriage had to be my punishment for waiting so long between children. Perhaps I had missed my window of opportunity and my biological clock had just struck 12. Maybe, I struck out.

After my miscarriage, I sank into a funk, a depression from which I didn’t surface for more than a month. I started thinking about and understanding, for the first time, the struggle of the unnamed narrator of Margaret Atwood’s book, Surfacing, to cope with a lost child no matter how it had occurred. I understood the metaphor of submersion and how apt it was to describe this type of depression.

My professional and personal life seemed suspended. I could not motivate myself to get a proposal together to send to a book publisher, which was, ironically, about working mothers and childcare. My daughter caught me crying and urged me to “cheer up.” Thankfully, though, I had my mother close by.

For the first time, I talked with my mother about her own miscarriage. She said that she hadn’t wanted any more children after my sister and me, so she was a bit relieved when the doctor told her that she’d miscarried. Afterwards, she says she felt guilty and also blamed herself. She had been a class chaperone on my class trip when I was in the fourth grade and had spotted all that day. She hadn’t known she was pregnant at the time. Still, she wondered if there wasn’t something she could have done to prevent the miscarriage. Her doctor assured her that there wasn’t.

I also discovered that my grandmother had given birth to a stillborn baby. The doctor discovered that the baby had died in the womb during her eighth month. My grandmother had to wait to deliver her dead child. I couldn’t imagine how devastating that would have been – that whole month of waiting and knowing that there was nothing for which to look forward—no cooing infant to cuddle. My grandmother told me that she didn’t like to think about it and that soon after, she had gotten pregnant with her second child, a son. We held hands, cried and then hugged.

I surfaced partially from my funk, bought more ovulation kits, and in two months, I was pregnant again. This time I felt a growing distance, trying to protect myself from what could be another miscarriage. When I got the blood test results back, I braced myself for bad news. After some spotting, I went in for my first obstetrics’ appointment. My HCG hormone levels were much higher this time and things looked good for a while.

I went back to work hoping that the stressful beginning of the semester would not negatively impact the pregnancy. I had the added stress of my daughter, Emily, starting kindergarten. I didn’t expect this to be so monumental. Emily had attended preschool since she was three, but the struggle of getting her ready on time, with everything else, was more difficult. Moreover, Emily hated her new public school. It was overcrowded with almost 30 kindergarteners, an overwhelmed teacher without a full-time aide, and a lack of discipline. My very shy daughter, who loved school, cried every day at lunch and began to hate school. I scoured the neighboring cities for private schools, and interviewed principals and teachers, always with my mother, my faithful sidekick. Thankfully, I found a wonderful private school and decided that I would figure out how to pay for it later.

I was spending long work days on my feet, and worrying about my daughter. And I started spotting almost every day. I called my midwife and she told me to rest, to call in sick at work. Once the bleeding subsided, I returned to work. The following week, I had more spotting. It continued for four days. I went into work anyway, thinking that if I were having a miscarriage again, there was nothing that I could do to prevent it. Besides, I couldn’t afford to miss more days of work. My mother urged me to call my midwife again. The midwife scheduled an ultrasound right away — to see if the fetus was still viable.

I told my boss that I was pregnant. She was very understanding. In fact, she had sent me a beautiful bouquet of flowers when she learned that I had miscarried over the summer. She told me to leave work early and find substitutes for my classes. “This is more important,” she said.

I picked up my mother for support and headed for the doctor’s office. The waiting was excruciating. I watched women with huge bellies squeeze themselves into the waiting room chairs.

New mothers played raspberries and peek-a-boo with their precious newborns — while I waited to hear if my baby would ever be. When it was finally my turn, my mother and I followed the ultrasound technician down a narrow hallway to an examination room. I braced myself as the technician looked for the tiny fetus inside my uterus. I saw what looked like a tiny peanut, floating in a dark hollow space.

“There it is,” she said.

“Is it … all right?” I asked, afraid of the answer.

She zoomed in a flash of blinking white light. “There’s the heart. It’s beating.” She turned on a speaker and I heard the tiny swoosh of the heartbeat. “It’s a good, strong heartbeat,” she said.

She took some pictures of my little peanut, labeling the parts for me, which were indistinguishable to my untrained eye.

Afterwards, the doctor told me that the bleeding was caused by a low-lying placenta called placenta previa. The condition might correct itself in several months, but I needed to take it easy. Anything could cause bleeding – a bumpy ride in the car or even a bout of coughing.

During those summer months and into the first months of my pregnancy, I dove deep into depression over a miscarriage and again over the possibility of losing another child. I didn’t realize the depths to which I would fall or the amount of effort it would take to struggle back to the surface — were it not for the buoyancy of a new pregnancy.

Now, I look forward to my second trimester, appreciating more than before the sometimes difficult and treacherous journey that is motherhood.

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Copyright 2003 Joanne Detore-Nakamura, Ph.D.

Dissertation Distress: A Room of One's Own With A Crib and Computer

I sit at my computer, typing away, trying desperately to come up with good, solid lines and unique metaphors for an article that I'm working on, while my toddler sleeps soundly in the bed in the same room -- which is also the office.

I am afraid with every click of my keyboard, I might awaken her. My eyelids are heavy in need of sleep too, but I can't afford to nap. Once Emily wakes up, I will not have any time to myself. W e are tired from restless nights with nightmares filled with a loss of Mommy to business trips, not of the traditional monsters under the bed. Now with me home from my teaching job at a community college, I watch her as he sucks away earnestly on her binky, content that Mommy is where she should be. I have about one hour and fifteen minutes, give or take, to eek away at my latest short story.

When my two-year-old daughter, Emily, is awake, even checking e-mail is difficult. She climbs up on my lap or wedges herself into the back of my office chair, claiming to give me a neck massage in between "Peek-a-boo," her real game. When that doesn't work, she bounces on her bed, and makes another play for my attention.

"Mommy, let's be dinosaurs on the floor! Come on, Duckie (a dinosaur from Land Before Time)! I'm Little Foot," she pleads.

"In a minute, Em," I tell her, "give Mommy ten minutes and we'll play."

That seems to placate her temporarily, knowing that Mommy makes good on her promises. Even so, I feel guilt for my self-indulgence, and for my neglect of my daughter -- even if it is for ten minutes.

Virginia Woolf never had to contend with children who vied for her attention. Having a child was certainly my choice, but Woolf was only partially right when she determined that women writers needed a room of their own and 500 British pounds to write. Writing mothers also need time and freedom from guilt for that time away from our children. Even with her great insight into the human mind, Woolf could never quite understand how deep the guilt could run. I say that from experience.