autumnmoon's Open Salon Blog

The Vegetable Exchange

Sun, 5 Apr 2009 21:04:08 -0400

Last week on a very busy day--- my husband had customer visits he was handling by himself and I was running from factory to factory doing simultaneous interpreting for our QA Management consultant--- I had run out of carrots.

I’ve been drinking freshly juiced carrot juice, suggested by a doctor who wants to fix my digestion problems without resorting to Western Medicine (I’m all for that.) It does help, but the jury’s still out on whether or not it’ll do the job by itself. Anyway, I had run out of carrots and asked my bitch of a housekeeper (story for another day) to ask my neighbor if she had any of the organic carrots left (we had been sharing a bag). If not, then she would need to buy some.

That night at 10:00 PM I came back and found in the sink waiting for me five of the most sorry carrots I have ever seen this side of a compost heap. Shriveled, darkened, punky in spots and where they weren’t punky they would bend right over and then slowly straighten again when you let go. I scraped one and then abandoned the lot, and the next morning didn’t have the carrot juice. I didn’t even bother saying anything to the housekeeper.

That day I ran between our factories, interpreting, exhorting our shop supervisors and managers to get behind the program and get on board for real change. I practiced all my marketing and presentation and communication skills, in two languages, trying to build up steam in everyone for what will be a long process of change in the way our facilities work.

I had been fretting, feeling my stomach going back to its old ways all day, and finally between the last seminar and a karaoke evening with the consultant (there was no dinner that night!), I managed to steal 20 minutes and buy some organic carrots. While I was at the vegetable stand I saw some simply wonderful organic pickling cucumbers. My husband loves those at breakfast—he eats them raw--- and they’re pretty rare in Southern China. I got them. Then when I got home at 10:00 that night, in the sink I found a bag of carrots.

My husband came in right after I did, and he stood in the kitchen door watching me peeling carrots and said, do you like the carrots?

He had stopped at a market between meetings and dinner with customers, and had bought carrots for me.

It had been a hard 3 weeks of work for me and I was way tired and stressed, and I just dropped the peeler and hugged him. Then I showed him the cucumbers. He smiled slowly and said, “We did a Vegetable Exchange.”

This is the man I’m married to. I’m the luckiest woman in the world.

Baby daughter

Sun, 29 Mar 2009 19:03:15 -0400

Sometimes I want a baby in a vague way, sort of like an old hockey injury that aches when it rains. Sometimes I want a baby in a sharp and immediate way, like a knife between the ribs.

I can’t have one myself. Something is wrong with me, and I also have antibodies to my husband’s sperm. I went through the infertility tests and one IVF cycle (done in China, without anesthesia) and the cycle was not successful. The antibody issue came up after that, and they couldn’t resolve it here in China so the doctor suggested that I not try IVF again (at least not here).

After that unsuccessful IVF round, I went through stages of anger, depression.

My husband even bought me a special chair to sit in when I was getting ready for the IVF run and I though it was so cute --- he was nesting! I used to dream that I was sitting in that chair, heavily pregnant… I could literally feel the round hardness of my huge stomach, with the baby moving inside--- it was so real--- and there would be such an upwelling of love and peace that I’d wake up in tears.

Then after I lost the embryos and quit IVF, I spent a period of time being angry at myself, and angry whenever I’d see a pregnant woman on the street. Especially if she looked tired or complain-y, I always wanted to shout at her, DO YOU KNOW HOW LUCKY YOU ARE?

The US Consulate in Guangzhou used to process all the adoptions from China to the US, and there would be “tour groups” of US citizens staying at a local hotel while they finished up the 10 days of in-country paperwork and bonded with their new baby or child. Our corporate account used to be at that hotel so I’d be there a lot, having dinner with customers or checking them in or out of the hotel. I spent a lot of evenings with customers in the hotel restaurant while at the next table would be an American couple or family with a newly adopted Chinese baby in their arms or in a stroller by the table. It was hard to hold back the tears, especially when I’d see the baby snuggling with its new parents. I’m a little teary even now and this was all of 10 years ago.

I am still resentful when I look at the battery of suitability and readiness proofs an adopting couple has to go through before they can qualify--- it is so unfair--- if only I had a set of working equipment on board I could have a baby without reams of documentation and home studies and waiting. If they don’t require all those documents for people to conceive a baby, why do they make it so hard to adopt one?

I always imagined myself with a baby girl. Not that little boys aren’t wonderful, but whenever I have dreamed of having a child it was always a girl. I used to dream all the time that I didn’t work outside, that I stayed home with my little girl, that I would buy her clothes and give her baths… things every mother does, and I hope they don’t take it for granted.

So as of now I still don’t have a daughter, and at nearly 39 I have gotten used to it. I don’t know if I ever will have one by adoption or not, but I do know that if I found myself pregnant after all these years (sometimes it happens!) I would be the happiest person on earth.

Shall We Dance?

Sat, 21 Mar 2009 08:03:13 -0400

In the middle of yoga today I was doing the Bound-Ankle Pose and it reminded me of my years of ballet lessons when I was a kid, because the ballet teacher used to ask us to get in the same exact position while watching TV, to improve our “turnout.” Turnout when she said it meant the ability to open your hips to the side and stick your leg out that way. My turnout consistently sucked, but I did a lot of Bound-Angle Pose while watching CHiPS and Bad News Bears, way before I even knew it by that name.

I had ballet classes on Saturdays for 10 years, starting when I was 4 years old. I missed my first end-of-year recital because I’d had Scarlet Fever, but made the next one when we were all sailors. We had a dance we did wearing spangled costumes, sailor hats and some of us had mops. I got to have a mop and that was the best ballet year I ever had. My mom had a photo with me in the front row kneeling on one knee with mop in hand and a shining smile on my face, but I think the photo got ruined in a flood when the woodchuck chewed through her water line.

Ballet went downhill after the sailor year. I’m not entirely sure why: there was nothing bad about the location (the local VFW hall for a while, then another commercial building later on). Except at the VFW hall, you couldn’t open the doors on the long side of the studio because there was no porch and a straight drop down about 10 feet to the ground. I opened a door once and got yelled at. Between the classes they would play Queen and The Bee Gees on the record player and I absolutely loved it. Sometimes they would pour out little paper cups of orange soda after class, and ballet was the ONLY place I ever got orange soda to drink as a child.

My ballet teacher had four daughters. They all suited up in leotards and tights every single Saturday and I never questioned that at all, though now when I look back I can’t imagine they were having a great time helping their mother run her business. One and Two were way older than I was. One was in College, which is unbelievably far away when you’re 10, and Two was in High School and then got In Trouble, and she suddenly disappeared from the ballet school and I never saw her again. Four was my age but only the Popular Girls were allowed to talk to her. I wasn’t one of them.

Three was another story. Three wore the leotard and tights but Didn’t Want To Be There. She was way beyond cool. About 5 years older than me, dark eye makeup, short blonde hair, athletic, perfect. Freckles on her nose and she wore a black leather jacket over her leotard when I was 10 and she was 15. It was a boyfriend jacket. I actually saw her out behind the building once, ballet toe shoes, pink tights, black leotard and black leather jacket, smoking a cigarette, and I watched without breathing till I was dizzy. I wanted to be her so badly.

I always felt so isolated in those ballet classes: they were much worse than school. At least in school I had a few friends to talk to. I went to those classes every Saturday for nearly 10 years and never made a single friend. I hated every Saturday but my dad thought that little girls should take ballet and piano (yes, I had piano too and hated it about as much) and so I did.

Up till I was 14. At 14 I had one of those straight, skinny late-blooming girl bodies. I was a little taller than I had been at 12 but that was it. My best friend from grade school got her period when she was 11 and had a bra already then, and boys followed her everywhere she went. I had a bra too, but I didn’t need one. Boys never followed me anywhere unless they wanted me to help with their homework. So I was feeling this whole 14-straight-as-a-stick thing acutely, and this ballet teacher had a group of men come through the school to review her classes. I have no idea whether she was trying to get a bank loan or renew her lease or what, but she made us all line up and then she was walking down the line of us like it was a cadet review, with these men in tow. I didn’t want to be there, felt very exposed in my leotard and was acutely conscious that I didn’t look like the other girls my age (no bra, and nothing to put in it anyway). She was chattering about this girl or that girl as she passed them, and as she came by me, she raked me up and down with her eyes and finished her sentence “and some of us wish we had something that we don’t.”

I stared at my heeled tap shoes (yes, I had tap lessons too, and that I was actually sort of good at) and felt myself shaking all over. There was black at the edges of my vision and I thought I was going to pass out. Class ended and I got my jacket and bag and walked right out of the studio in my tights and tap shoes (a big no-no) and got in my mother’s car. We drove home and when I had changed my clothes my heart was still pounding so hard my head spun. I went to the kitchen and told my mother that I was not going to a dance class ever again and she couldn’t make me.

Mom didn’t say a word in reply, and I never went to a dance class again. I have no idea how she explained it to my father.

Yoga brought all that up, the way memories sometimes come up during meditation--- the horrible humiliation, and the way something had just snapped in my head that day. Everything looked different and the decision was simple. No punishment my parents could mete out was worth that. It was really just a fact: I was not going to a class ever again and my mother couldn’t make me.

But I also remembered Three. I’m smiling now as I think of her, and I hope that wherever she is, she is well and happy.

What A Girl Wants

Fri, 6 Mar 2009 22:03:46 -0500

I’ve been thinking about this: why do many women (me included) like romance novels? Vampire romance novels? Pirate romance novels? Regencies? What is it with this incredibly formulaic genre that sells so well?

I started looking at the formula with a writer’s eye, and the common theme seems to be that the guy in these novels sees the heroine and just can’t look away. He can’t get enough of her. He always does what she wants and is all about her needs. There can be different settings and different plot elements--- sometimes the guy has fangs and sometimes not, ha ha… but his behavior is basically the same.

That is attractive to many of us (and I confess I do read romance novels, even while shaking my head and saying to myself, you already know how it ends!!) but I think it’s also dangerous when people confuse the fantasy with real life.

Because that guy in the novel just doesn’t exist in real life. Real live men are complex human beings and have their own needs to be met, no matter how charming they are on a date or how great the outside package looks.

And while the hero in the novel is invariably handsome (or at least “rugged”) and well-built, characteristics like that have NOTHING to do with whether a person is a good fit for us in real life. If women get too hooked on the fantasy, it can cloud their choices in the real world and cause them to have unrealistic expectations of their partners. I know because I’ve been there and done that, and then stopped what I was doing and everything got better.

Should these things come with a warning label?

My Blackcat

Mon, 2 Mar 2009 04:03:24 -0500

Have you ever had a companion animal that made you believe in reincarnation? Or hope for the truth of it, at least. I had a rescue cat that I cleverly called Blackcat to differentiate him from my other cat Whitecat, and he was nearly human. Whitecat is a good cat, don’t get me wrong, but Blackcat was something more.

He came home with me from the factory as a half-grown kitten because he had a broken leg. He was gorgeous, long black fur on top and white fur on the underbelly and legs, bright yellow lantern eyes and a black smudge nose at the end of his white face blaze.

As an aside: we have cats at our factory because my husband rescues them from restaurants. He just hates to see cats in cages at restaurants and when he is able to, he buys them (by the kilo) and brings them back to the factory. The conversation at the restaurant usually goes something like, “How do you want it dressed?” “Oh, don’t worry, I know how to do it myself. Just put him in this box.” My husband gets strange looks, because he doesn’t really seem like the kind of person who knows how to dress a cat, but he pays in cash so they sell him the cat. These cats lead a wonderful existence: they eat cat food all day at the factory, and watch mice. Blackcat and Whitecat were both born at the factory from rescue cats.

So Blackcat had a broken leg. It was a bad break, near the joint, and he had pins put in it and two surgeries plus IVs and other medications to fix his leg. His leg was stiff and he didn’t really use the joint but he could walk OK. It doomed him to be my housecat forever, though, because he couldn’t fight or climb properly with that leg.

He was such a character. He had a way of looking right through you—each glance was worth many words. He had an extensive listening vocabulary, in both Chinese and English, and was usually quite obedient (or if not, it was certainly because he chose not to be.) He was alpha cat and cleaned Whitecat’s clock once a month or so, just so everyone understood the pecking order in the house. He would sit on my lap and Whitecat would creep up along the top of the sofa and extend a foot to come down to my lap too, and Blackcat would just turn his head and look. ‘Nuff said. Sometimes Whitecat would be on my lap and Blackcat would come over, chase Whitecat away, and then leave. He didn’t want lap time but didn’t want Whitecat to get any either.

So we had a great 18 months or so like this. Then Blackcat quit eating. I took him to the vet. They did x-rays, fed him stomach medicines, gave IV antibiotics, palpated and poked, all to no avail. The antibiotics (which were in 2 or 3 day doses) would seem to help a bit, and then he’d relapse. He got thinner and thinner. His fur got bad. He’d be hungry and try to eat, wolfing his food down, but then he’d sort of gack and choke, spit and hiss and actually run from the food dish as if it had stung him. I described this behavior to the vet again and again, and finally (MONTHS of this starving—antibiotic—slight improvement—decline cycle later) he did it in front of the vet. So the vet started palpating his neck area and found swollen glands. We did batteries of blood tests looking for cancer and liver problems, and found high white counts, plus the results you’d find in a semi-starved cat.

Meanwhile Blackcat was getting sick and tired of all the vet attention and was getting wilder and harder to control at the clinic. One day the vet was face-to-face with him and had just palpated his neck glands (which probably was uncomfortable.) Blackcat spit in his face and the vet saw a flash of red. He asked if we could anesthetize the cat to look in his mouth.
The problem was giant canker sores on the inside of his mouth, both sides. I have never seen anything like that in my life: they were the size of my pinky finger from the tip to the first joint and one was leaking blood. So, now we knew why the short antibiotic bursts helped and why Blackcat would spit and run from his food dish. Eating anything was torture with that in his mouth.

So, he had heavy courses of antibiotics over the next 6 months to try to get rid of those sores. And it worked, for a while--- the sores went way down and Blackcat was eating and gaining weight, and his old playful character was coming back. But then the whole thing turned around and he didn’t eat right again, started occasional throwing up, fur was not good, and that time it wasn’t canker sores. We were right back to having a seriously sick cat and not knowing what to do.

He was painfully thin and would jump into my lap while I sat at the breakfast table, though he knew that was against the rules. In those last couple of months I let him, cherishing the contact. He would burrow under my shirt and bury his head against my stomach and just breathe there. I adjusted my work hours to give him more lap time in the morning—it was something I looked forward to as well.

So most mornings I would sit at the table till my legs were numb, with a cold cup of coffee and this rail-thin, dry-furred miserable little animal curled up against me, and I would cry, and think about the big questions. Had I done Blackcat a disservice saving him when his leg was broken as a kitten? He would have died in short order if I’d left him be. It seemed he’d spent half his life in the damned vet clinic, and for what?

It’s so true that all of our days on this planet are numbered, whether human or feline… everything I did to try to interfere in the big pattern, to change things, to give him a good life, was for nothing. And then I would get angry: It was as if Jesus, Buddha and Mohammed all had his name on a list, and what could I do. Blackcat didn’t deserve this. No one does.

I took him in again finally when he started throwing up and stopped eating and drinking. The vet saw that his ears were yellowed and started him on liver support (all those antibiotics for the leg, and then for the cankers, had destroyed his liver.) After a day of that the vet told me it was time, that Blackcat was just suffering and we couldn’t help him any more. So I said goodbye to him and held his head in my hands. He buried his nose in my wrist and breathed in my scent, and they ran the drug in. And he was gone.

I believe in reincarnation, and I hope that Blackcat gets a better roll of the dice next time. Maybe he’ll make the leap to human next time and get born to a wonderful family, or if not, get to be a healthy and happy cat and live to a ripe old age. He deserves that.