Berlin, 12.02.01
I'm a bit curious - is anyone still reading this? Let me know. I really should do something a bit more ambitious, but there's a lot of things I should really do, and time/energy (the wretched time/energy continuum) is a bit of a rare commodity these days. I know, I've been saying that for the past year.
No recycled emails today. Annette is back in Berlin, so I needn't write to her, and Madeleine is home, so emails sent to anyone else are written one handed - very short and without capitalization or punctuation. I shall offer a brief proper message instead. I'm at work, obviously, if I'm capitalizing and punctuating.
One week ago I returned to the land of parenthood. The transition was reasonably smooth, though not perfectly so. No fault of Madeleine's, really. She had some problems getting back onto a reasonable sleep schedule after the trip - causing me to call her "Vampire Baby" or "The Undead" on several occasions - but has generally been in good spirits, by infant standards. Certainly not the ill-tempered gas bubble of months gone by. She does cute stuff, smiles, has almost learned to take her socks off with her gums, which is actually pretty funny - the basic baby routine.
Vita and Madeleine are getting along swimmingly. The cat seems pleased to have her back. And I have pictures to prove it!
"You're never too young to enjoy the pleasure of cat butt."
Madeleine's mother, on the other hand, has been a bit problematic. Well I suppose I've been problematic too, but I'm writing this from a purely selfish perspective so I'll just complain about my wife for a bit.
When I left Vancouver at the end of the December, the rest of the family stayed behind for five weeks. Annette had two job interviews (both went well, by the way, but we won't know the results for a few more weeks) and planned to write an article for a journal. She'd been approached to contribute a piece on prostitution to a special issue on sexuality in Nazi Germany. It's the sort of offer an academic doesn't turn down. Anyway, thanks to an overly optimistic interpretation of something she'd said to me a while back, I was rather under the impression that she'd finished a draft and needed only to make some revisions, a week's part-time scribbling at worst. Well, no, it turned out to be rather more work, with a fairly serious deadline. The only way this is going to happen is if I come home baby-sit every evening and both days on the weekend, while she hires baby-sitters on weekday afternoons. (Poor you, I hear the single mothers cry…) No more sports for Scott.
Now this doesn't sound too unreasonable, as the extra duties are ostensibly temporary, except that I have a race on the 17th and I really needed to do some training. At this point it's basically too late, I won't be able to go full tilt without completely destroying my back, I'll just skate it for fun. (It's the same thing I did last year, the 42 km race on the ice oval. 110 laps of the bloody track.) So in one sense the pressure is off, but of course this doesn't stop me from being bitter and petulant all the time, now does it? This is partly my fault: in the five weeks I had alone, I trained like a bastard for the first three (and was skating quite well towards the end) but then lost almost a week with the Six-Day race (uh, logically) and was sick immediately after. When Annette and Madeleine returned last Monday, I'd been training poorly for two weeks and was raring to hit the ice again. This, needless to say, was a source of friction between us.
Another source of friction, I suspect, is an entirely expected readjustment period as I once again spend great gobs of time with Madeleine. Here is my basic feeling about matters parental: I love my daughter dearly, I think she's very cute and funny and she does all manner of cool things, but after an hour or two, it really starts to look the same. Having taken care of her between feedings for most of the past weekend, what struck me about being with an infant full-time is not that it's nasty or unpleasant or stressful (though it can be - we are very lucky to have a pleasant, happy, healthy child) but that it is unbelievably monotonous. Staggeringly dull. She hasn't been sleeping much during the day, she needs constant attention, and after a point she doesn't provide a hell of a lot of stimulation in return. Eventually, if I can't sneak in a bit of reading or TV, I go mad from boredom, no matter how much I like the kid. She's just not that interesting, yet. I don't know how Annette or anyone else does it. No wonder parents' brains turn to mush. (Thank god I was able to demolish the first two Harry Potter books during her infrequent naps.)
Clearly, there are a few differences in parenting style that need to be worked on. We may not agree on certain things but we can build up a better level of trust than we currently enjoy. I am definitely more "callous" with Madeleine - I don't drop everything the second she howls, I finish what I'm doing and stroll over when I'm ready. If she is awake but content (i.e. not howling) I feel perfectly free to read or watch TV, I don't see the need to talk to her and make eye contact every waking second. I don't think I'm risking the same outcome as six years in a Romanian orphanage (though I'm no expert in these matters). We know of parents who try to implement very rigid sleep schedules, and whose kids cry for hours every night. While this seems unpleasant, I rather doubt that the children will grow up suffering deep-rooted psychological trauma. So a few extra minutes of noise from Maddy is not the end of the world. Annette, however, is a little more sensitive to her daughter's moods, a little less tolerant of baby rage. I think the heart of our disagreement, if you can call it that, lies here.
I'm not unhappy with my lot in life, I'm not (too) pessimistic about our future, I quite like the little beast, but Jesus, would I not want to do this again. I can't imagine why anyone would voluntarily do this a second time. The first time, fine, you didn't know what to expect, but anything beyond that and a person has to be very obsessed with kids, very fixated on certain ideas of what constitutes a family, or very, very easily amused. Because I for one would be bored out of my skull doing this twice. As I've said before, having my own hasn't exactly improved my low opinion of children, much as I like this one.
Soon, very soon, we have to sit down and talk about our schedules, our expectations, our priorities for the next year. I really want to race hard this year. I will need to be more efficient about my training, but at the end of the day it still means X number of hours away from home. (The club I'm with is thinking about forming an "elite" team, hopefully sponsored. This would require a commitment from me.) How big is X, and how do we negotiate? Annette wants to run as well. Positive: she's sympathetic to juggling sport and parenthood. Negative: she'll be busier too. We already had one summit meeting this weekend (see above) and another is surely on the way.
One piece of good news is that we have a Kitaplatz (a spot in day care) for March 1st. It's part-time, four to five hours three or four times a week, but that's all we need for Annette to have some writing and running time. It costs next to nothing, a few hundred marks each month at most. (This will all be sorted out by the seventeen different offices that Annette will have to visit before the paperwork is complete.) One advantage of living in the former East is the abundance of Kitas, many of which have been preserved from the DDR. The one she found today is quite big, in one of the massive Stalinist buildings just off Karl-Marx-Allee. This will, I think, ease the pressure considerably. And it's a hell of a lot cheaper than baby-sitters. As an added bonus, our baby will be taught the virtues of Socialism!
Good lord, it's time to go home already. End of message.
