Tag: Marriage

Hamilton: A Musical & My Inspiration

I recently confessed to planning an entire trip to New York City around a preschooler. Housing, excursions, food…It was all for her. With the exception of Tuesday night. Because while our daily itinerary was planned around her, she was not the reason for the trip. Hamilton was the reason for trip. Ok, fine. My obsession with Hamilton was the reason for the trip.

You can explain Hamilton in one sentence. Hamilton is a new musical on Broadway about one of the Founding Fathers of the United States. You can explain Hamilton in a thousand sentences. And even a thousand sentences, based on the endless articles, tv interviews, books, upcoming documentary, and record breaking ticket sales, isn’t enough to fully convey the extraordinary phenomenon that is Hamilton. It is the hottest ticket in New York City and my personal inspiration for over a year.

I first heard about Hamilton from my parents in Atlanta. During our weekly Facetime, they mentioned watching a segment on CBS Sunday Morning about a new musical off-Broadway that I’d probably like given my love of theater and American history. It was about a founding father and used rap and hip hop music. They couldn’t remember the creator’s name during the conversation, but they knew he’d written both the score and the lyrics. I knew immediately who they had to be talking about. Lin-Manuel Miranda. I had the soundtrack to his first musical In the Heights. I’d watched his improvised Tony acceptance rap on YouTube a few times. I’d loved his guest spot on House.

I went on YouTube and found the Sunday Morning segment.

This segment was posted on YouTube on March 8, 2015, so my obsession with Hamilton has lasted fifteen months and is still going strong.

After watching the CBS report, I began hunting the internet for articles, clips, interviews, anything related to Hamilton. I’d manage to go a few weeks without typing “Hamilton Musical” into the search box. Just long enough for there to be new hits when I inevitably sent Google scouring again.

I’ve never been one to fangirl. I have loved movies and cheered in the stands for a favorite team. But I’ve never painted my entire face and worn a giant foam hat chanting in unison in below freezing temperatures. I’ve never spent six months salary on replica Storm Troopers costume and blaster. I’ve never loved anything enough to wait in line for more than one hour.

Until Hamilton.

In late September my husband asked what I wanted for our anniversary. “There’s only one thing I want. To see Hamilton on Broadway.” I said this with zero expectation it would happen. I answered honestly to let him off the hook from having to shop for a present I’d certainly appreciate but wouldn’t have desperately wanted. I’d accepted my contact with Hamilton would be through the cast album and YouTube videos. Planning a trip from Brazil to New York City with a four-year old just to see a musical was totally ridiculous.

A week later my husband said “Let’s do it. Let’s go to New York.”

I immediately called my parents. If there was a chance for this to work we’d need babysitters. I love my kid, but if she threw a tantrum in the middle of Act I, it would be a life threatening situation for her. Fortunately, my parents are always up for a trip north of the Mason-Dixon line.

I bought our Hamilton tickets on October 20, 2015 for May 24, 2016. I’d have to wait seven months, but I was able to buy the tickets directly from the box office at face value. At the time, I had no idea what a huge deal that would turn out to be. I must have been the last average person to get seats at face value. By the time I posted pictures of the event on Facebook, the most common response was some version of “How the hell did you get tickets?!”

With everything booked and paid for, the only thing left to do was cross my fingers and hope that on Tuesday, May 24, 2016, Lin-Manuel Miranda would be in excellent health and onstage. For as amazing as the musical seemed, seeing Miranda perform was equally important to me. He’d become an unwitting mentor to my fledgling writing career.

At the same time as Hamilton was debuting off-Broadway in early 2015, I quit my job as a teacher to devote myself to writing and publishing my first novel. I was anxious. I was antsy. I’d given myself two years to get an agent. I announced this to family and friends not realizing that two years is a laughably short time in the publishing world. Congressional cycles come faster than novel debuts. But I was ignorant of the alternate reality publishing exists in and worried that at 32 years old I was running out of time to build a career.

When I was at my highest levels of anxiety, I’d rewatch a segment on Hamilton done by MSNBC. (Seriously, I’ve watched hours of Hamilton content on YouTube.) Miranda is asked what advice he’d give his younger self, and he says “Life is long not short…To really get it right, you think ‘Oh my gosh, look at this amazing first draft’ then you realize what ten whacks at it can do to it.” In the same interview, Miranda reveals he spent one year writing “My Shot”. One year for one song.

This was a crucial lesson I hadn’t yet learned about creative genius. It doesn’t happen in the first draft. Oh, the foundation might be there. The roots of something amazing may have taken hold but what is considered great is never someone’s first draft. Great work requires patience. That was a revelation.

Suddenly all the advice about getting beta readers and critique partners and the moaning of authors on twitter about fourth and fifth drafts weren’t the words of struggling writers but the necessary practices of good writers. No book sitting on a shelf at a book store is a first draft.

Confession. I made it through high school with top grades and never wrote a second draft. I thought second drafts were for losers. Turns out I didn’t know everything at eighteen.

Because here’s Miranda, a Tony Award winner who can improvise a mind blowing acceptance speech in verse, saying it took him a year to write one song. Another article mentioned how he was tweaking lyrics right up until the recording of the cast album. The New York times talked about how he struggled to write the ending going through multiple versions. The book Hamilton: The Revolution is about the years of collaboration and work that went into Hamilton.

Those years paid off. Hamilton was the most amazing theater experience of my life. I was in tears before the opening number was over. It was epic because every detail was right. I remember the way the lights changed at a stomp of King George’s foot to fabulous comedic effect. I remember Jefferson’s truly spectacular purple ensemble for his grand entrance in Act II. The intensity with which Leslie Odom Jr. delivered every line. Miranda’s complete breakdown after Hamilton’s forgiven by his wife. The banjo in “Room Where it Happens”. God, I love that banjo. The ensemble member who traces the trajectory of that fatal bullet in slow motion. It was all perfect.

And that level of perfection takes patience. You can’t nail every detail at the same time. You have to tweak them one by one over the course of weeks, months, and years with constant feedback and help. I’m trying to keep that in mind when I grit my teeth at the prospect of reworking my first chapter for the tenth time. When I get feedback from an editor saying this is great just rework these parts, and I’m so very tempted to interpret this is “this is great” as “this is good enough” and be done with it. Patience is a challenge for me. Accepting that “life is long” and I do have years to get it right is very difficult for me.

Thankfully, I have Miranda and Hamilton for inspiration to remind me that good enough is not great. I can just listen to his words. Or read his book. Wear the t-shirt. Look at the poster. Drink from the mug. Or the water bottle…

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June 21, 2016
The Consequences of Going Gray

It’s been more than difficult finding time to write this post. My husband is away on a networking trip while Kiddo’s in the middle of summer vacation. That puts me on twenty-four hours a day parent duty. I’d probably be a little more frustrated if I didn’t know these networking trips of his were going to start tapering off.

You see my husband’s getting older, and in the spirit of honesty, it’s obvious. He’s getting more wrinkles and creases, but it’s the gray hair that’s really noticeable. My husband has black hair which has gone from lightly dusted to preserved cod salty in the last few years. Of course getting older isn’t a problem per se. He just could look a lot younger if he wanted to.

With all that gray hair, he’s not going to be tapped for any promotion. The quality of his work is going to become less obvious as people start focusing on his whiter hair. I’m sure the university he teaches for is going to want someone a little…fresher to represent them at conferences. I’m afraid it’s going to affect his student evaluations. Those undergrads are going to look at him and think his complete apathy about his appearance clearly indicates a certain indifference toward everything including class planning.

I’m also worried it’s going to affect his social life. He hasn’t said anything, but I think some of his friends have stopped calling. I feel terrible for him, but I can’t blame them. By not coloring his hair, he’s basically throwing his mortality in the face of everyone around him. Who wants to sit next to Mr. Death-is-Inevitable at the dinner party? That’s kind of a bummer.

Of course, it’s going to be harder to make new friends. Everyone says they don’t judge people by appearances, but let’s be honest. We all check a person’s roots before striking up a conversation.

I’ve made subtle comments about the gray hoping he’ll take some interest in his appearance and stop letting himself go. I realize I’m never going to talk him into botox or skin peels, but if he would just invest a little in himself, I think he’d really perk up and be more confident in all areas of his life. It feels like he doesn’t love himself anymore. When he looks in the mirror, he doesn’t see the incredibly handsome man I see. That’s why I want him to dye his hair. I think he would feel more handsome if he would just get rid of the gray.

Watching my husband deal with getting older has made me glad I’m a woman. I’ve been going gray since my early twenties. If had to hide my white hair, at the rate my hair grows…ugh, I’d have spent a small fortune on salon appointments. Fortunately, I’m not a man, and I don’t have to work at making everyone think I’m at least a decade younger than my actual age to be happy with my appearance.

Actually, women don’t really talk about our age that much. Now that I think about it, I’m not even sure I know exactly how old my best buddies are. We’re usually too busy talking about politics, whether or not to refinance our houses, the cost of health care. And sports. I swear my friends and I still don’t get through one round of drinks before someone references Lloyd’s hat trick in the World Cup final. Why would age even come up?

I hope my husband knows that I’ll love him no matter how old he gets and what he looks like. I hope he knows how handsome he is. Gray hair and all.

This of course is a piece of comedy. Although I have, in fact, been going gray since my early twenties. Unfortunately, I have spent a small fortune on trips to the salon. I had coloring my hair in the same category as bathing, an essential and basic part of my self-care routine. But in the last year, afternoons to myself for writing were in short supply. I didn’t want to give up a whole afternoon to painting my hair, so I let my hair grow and grow and eventually ended up with a couple inches of gray hair at my temples.

No, that’s not a lighting effect. That’s four months of hair growth highlighting my temple.

And life’s pretty much the same. It turns out coloring hair is a choice. One my salt-and-pepper headed husband chooses not to pursue without comment or consequence. I’m going to opt out too from now on. I’m not promising to never color my hair again. But for now, there are other things I’d rather do with my time and money. Will you still invite me over for dinner?

This post is part of Happy Mama Happy Baby‘s Body Positive January. Check out her site for more awesome posts from great writers, book reviews, and giveaways!

January 22, 2016
Why I’m an Expat in Brazil Part III: Leaving the Friend Zone

Dancing crosses culture and brings people together. It did for my husband and me.

My husband and I never actually dated. Not officially. He never asked me to dinner. I never invited him to a movie. We didn’t sit across from each other in a dimly-lit, over-cooled restaurant asking about family or hometowns between sips of wine. When one of the parties can pull out a two inch file on the other there is no “getting to know you” period.

“So, I’m from Rio de Janeiro originally…”

“Yes, I read that in your program application. I also saw that you got your law degree from a university in Bahia and recently completed your master’s in law at the State University of Rio de Janeiro. Changing the subject, your blood pressure is fantastic! Do you have any cardio tips?”

For his part, he’d listened to a running stream of personal revelations from me as I attempted to make each of the Fellows (him in particular) feel at home in DC. I thought the best way to do this was to talk about my parents’ divorce and bring travel photo albums to lunch. He’d met my closest friends within two weeks of meeting me because I’d recruited them to be student hosts for the Fellows, and he met my parents when I brought them along to karaoke with the Fellows at a bar in Adams Morgan.

He may not have had a full medical history for me, but he knew exactly who I was within a month of meeting me: a 22 year-old who excitedly brings her parents out to a bar to show off her new work colleagues.

I hid nothing. I revealed all of me including friends, family, and cat. The only reason I did something as insane as show the HD version of myself from the start is because it was inconceivable that we would end up in a relationship. And I mean inconceivable literally. I did not imagine, envision, or hypothesize any scenario in which we were more than friends. His different nationality and culture had nothing to do it with it. He was…is sixteen years older than I am. His professional career at that point included naval officer and auditor with Brazil’s IRS. My professional title at the time was “Graduate Assistant”. We were at such different stages in our lives that all I had my sights set on was an incredibly impressive letter of recommendation from him at the end of year.

So when my friend confidently told me over dinner one Saturday night “He’s totally going to stick his tongue down your throat.” I replied “Wha…he…I…uh…we…nooooo, he is not.” Because I was both incredulous at the idea and painfully uncomfortable talking about physical relationships. It was a cool evening in early October, and my friend and I were having basin sized salads before I headed out clubbing with some of the Fellows. The Fellows from Zimbabwe and Cameroon were desperate to go out dancing, so I’d agreed to pretend I could dance and go with them. The Brazilian said he’d come too. The plan was for me to meet him at the metro stop near our apartments and head to Dupont Circle together.

“So you’re going to the club together,” my friend concluded. I changed the subject.

We were headed to Cafe Citron, a club I had visited once before, and thought (wrongly) I could get to without directions. After lapping the circle, asking for directions, and finding the other Fellows at the club, we hit the dance floor. This was the part I had been dreading. Besides soccer playing, the only other skill I associated with Brazil was dancing. Samba. The Girl from Ipanema. Carnaval. Bossa Nova. I imagined a country full of people who celebrated soccer victories by literally dancing, extremely well, in the streets. I could handle the “Electric Slide”, the “Chicken Dance”, or a montage from Greece, but as we weren’t at a suburban high school homecoming, I didn’t expect to shine very brightly on the dance floor.

Fortunately, neither does he. The Brazilian doesn’t dance.

Oh, he dances better than I do, but the music and the crowd that night kept things simple and close. I could follow. Not that we danced for long.

I felt the tension from the first sway of my hips. After having lunch together for weeks, I suddenly couldn’t look him in the eye. I looked at his shoulder, just beyond his shoulder, his feet, his forearm, his hand, his chest. Eventually, I was down to body parts that would have been far more awkward to stare at than his eyes. So I looked up. We made eye contact. And he made his move.

His move was confident and calm and so wonderful. It was the unhurried and sure kiss of a grown man. Thank god, we got married because after a minute of kissing, I was spoiled forever for mid-twenty grad students.

We left the club a couple. Not dating. Not open to other people. We left together.

Not that we told anyone. Why cause a fuss if it wasn’t going to work out? But by Christmas break we’d said I love you and it was time to tell my family I had fallen for a Brazilian, atheist, sixteen-years my elder, who was in the states for only another seven months.

It went better than I expected.

August 18, 2015
Why I’m an Expat in Brazil Part II: Between Meeting & Dating

Some very impressive Humphrey Fellows and me.

It is a long way between meeting someone for the first time and marrying him.

I saw my future husband for the second time early the next morning as I collected the entire group of Humphrey Fellows to escort them to their welcome meeting. As an international studies major, I was in quite the fan-girl tizzy over the Humphrey Fellows, specifically the Fellow from Bhutan. There are only about 700,000 Bhutanese in the world, and I was going to work with one! I’d been bringing her up in conversation regularly for months in an effort to compete with my roommate’s stories from her internship on Capitol Hill.

On that typically humid August morning, I found my Brazilian waiting in the dorm lobby next to the Fellow from Kenya. We chatted as the others slowly trickled down. There was a lot of hand shaking and slow pronouncing of names, my own name included. “It’s pronounced like Lynn, except with a Br instead of an L.” “No, it’s not a boy’s name. That’s Bryan, with an A.” “No, I don’t think my parents knew my name would be unpronounceable to, apparently, the entire world.”

Orientation for an international exchange program is probably the most emotionally exhaustive thing a person can go through that doesn’t involve a birth, a death, or a space suit. A person is expected to navigate a new place, new culture, possibly a new language, and new people, all while jet lagged and in some amount of digestive distress from new food. It’s not a vacation. There’s no sleeping in. I met the Fellows in the lobby at 8:45am for a welcome meeting that started at 9 sharp, and from that moment on for the next two weeks, it was a race to get them registered for classes, bank accounts, cell phones, and long-term housing before fall semester began.

Our Fellows had an added emotional blow as they went from being up and coming stars of their respective professions to nobody.

Welcome to Washington DC! It has the highest concentration of PhDs, law degrees and self-esteem per capita of any city in the world. You are now officially unimpressive. You will not have maids. You will not have secretaries. If you don’t know how to send an email or cook, well…we can teach you how to email. Try not to starve.

Undergrads who study abroad don’t have these problems. They haven’t been on their own long enough to be embarrassed by dependency. The Humphrey Fellows however ranged in age from 35 to 50. They arrived for their year in Washington with impressive CVs and very fragile egos. Working with them taught me how to explain what to do with used toilet paper without sounding condescending.

Culture shock and a complete lack of family and friends explain why I, at 22 with the ink still drying on my diploma, was treated by the Fellows as an equal. Nobody asked me to get their coffee. They asked me to explain the online course registration. They asked me to listen as they cried over how much they missed their kids. They asked me to explain the endless variety of milk in grocery stores. At that moment in their lives, they needed an insiders guide to Americans. I was an American with a ~~embarrassingly~~ fortuitously empty social calendar and that huge fan-girl crush on them. I became the group’s cultural wingman.

I started hanging out with the Fellows on weekends. We went to a coffee shop at Dupont Circle for s’mores. We hit some bars in Adams Morgan and tried out an Ethiopian restaurant for lunch. The group changed depending on who had a paper due or a bad case of culture shock, except for one member: the Brazilian. In my memories he’s always there. Always up for anything. Usually available for lunch. He’d rented a basement apartment close to where I lived, and we often ran into each other on the shuttle heading to and from campus.

But I was so hung up on his resume and the sixteen year age difference, I never imagined he actually thought of me as a fellow adult. I was sure the Brazilian, like the other Fellows, was being incredibly polite to someone helping him. When he paid close attention as I took him through every picture from my semester in India, I must have subconsciously chalked it up to good manners because I would never, NEVER, have brought a photo album to lunch with someone I actually hoped to date.

About a month after orientation, the Korean Fellow invited everyone to his apartment for dinner. I clearly remember a few wonderful minutes in the kitchen as the Brazilian taught me how to make caipirinhas and I tried one. I blamed my flushed cheeks on the cachaça. Later a group of us took the subway home. It was several blocks to the metro station, and the temperature had dropped changing my sandals from cute to extremely impractical. My toes were slowly freezing and I probably would have lost a few, if the Brazilian hadn’t stopped, taken off his shoes, and handed me his socks. He gave me the socks off his feet.

And I still didn’t see the first kiss coming. But that night deserves its own story.

August 10, 2015
How I Met My Husband or Why I’m in Brazil

We met, we married, and I moved to Brazil.

Ten years ago today, I met my husband.

He showed up at the office a day early and if he had been less adventurous or more patient, if he had just followed his orientation schedule, I’d probably still be in Washington DC with an impressive career in international education.

He was one of nine mid-career professionals from around the world being hosted by the Washington College of Law as part of the Hubert Humphrey Fellowship Program. His welcome orientation was scheduled for August 4, 2005. I was spending August 3 sprawled on the floor with my hair in a pony-tail hole-punching, stacking, and assembling orientation binders. At least, that was my plan, but about mid-morning the office manager poked his head into the conference room and told me the Brazilian was at the front desk.

The office manager actually called him, “The Brazilian”. We all did, even program staff at the national level, because no one had a clue how to pronounce his name, which is quite a statement considering the range of nationalities around the office suite. My boss was out of the office, so I got to be the first to hear the correct pronunciation and fail repeatedly to say it. We would be dating before I could correctly say his name.

I saw him as soon as I stepped out of the conference room. He was standing by the reception desk just beyond several ubiquitous office cubicles, including my own, and I thought, “Wow, he’s white. I didn’t know Brazilians could be white.” It was the first in what has turned out to be a lifetime of revelations about Brazil, many of which have revealed an embarrassing number of unconscious assumptions based exclusively on Pelé.

My second thought on seeing him was “He’s really handsome.” My third was “I can’t believe he found this place.” The program office was located in a suite on the bottom level of a building two blocks down from the law school. The suite housed a variety of programs and offices, none of which had found a way to give directions that didn’t get most visitors lost. The Brazilian had successfully navigated the maps and directions while jet-lagged and operating in a foreign language. I was impressed.

But I’d been impressed by him for months. We received a binder on each Fellow that included a medical history, their complete program application with letters of recommendation, and the Fulbright selection committee’s evaluations. The Brazilian came with a letter of recommendation from a Supreme Court Justice and a clean bill of health. Not bad as boyfriend applications go. For my part, I’d been a college graduate for three months.

Truly I don’t know what about me got his attention. Maybe it was my stellar administrative skills or consistent punctuality. Somehow, I managed to make navigating my home country in my native language seem impressive. Thank god for home court advantage.

I wasn’t thinking relationship in that first moment. After recognizing that he was attractive, I went straight to professional mode. I took him on a tour of the school and to the bank. There is nothing romantic about banking or walking around DC at midday in August. Unless pit stains are considered a turn on. We grabbed lunch at the sandwich place across the street where I proved I was strictly business and indifferent to others by ordering the onion smothered Greek wrap. We chatted easily over lunch, and I believe that casual conversation over vegetarian wraps laid the groundwork for everything that followed.

If my boss had been around that morning, she would have been the one to take him to the bank and to lunch. If we had met the next day along with the entire group, we wouldn’t have had the rapport that made me the obvious choice to go with him apartment hunting while the other Fellows opened bank accounts. And if we hadn’t gotten to know one another while touring some rather frightening basement apartments in Northwest DC, it wouldn’t have felt perfectly natural to meet up for lunch periodically over the coming weeks.

By the time we went on our first date, we’d already opened a bank account, shopped for an apartment, and been subjected to a variety of team building exercises together. Rarely has a couple’s compatibility been so thoroughly tested. All we lacked was an astrologer’s blessing.

But all those moments came after that first meeting, when he showed up early and I mispronounced his name exactly ten years ago today.

August 3, 2015
5 Things You’d Never Guess About Brazil

5 of the many things that have surprised me about Brazil…

“Do you like Brazil?” I heard this question for the thousandth time last night. I don’t know why people bother to ask this question. It’s in the same category as “Does this make me look fat?” and “Did you read my last blog post?” Nobody wants an honest answer. “Do you like Brazil?” The correct response is an enthusiastic “Yes!”

At least this question has an obvious correct answer, unlike “So which country do you like better? The US or Brazil?” What am I supposed to say? I usually cop out with humor. “Neither. I’m giving up on the whole nation-state system. I’d like to start my own island tribe based on handedness.”

Another strategy I’ve developed over the years is to answer these politically loaded questions with lists: “Things I love about Brazil” or “Things I miss about the US”. Below is my favorite list. I like it because it’s personal but more unusual than the standard “Things I love about Brazil.”

Five Things That Surprised Me About Brazil

1) Stellar Dental Hygiene Brazilians are obsessed with their teeth. If you go into a restroom after lunch, there will be a wall of people between you and the sink, all of them flossing their teeth. Helpfully, many public restrooms have floss dispensers to facilitate this habit. You should brush your teeth after every meal and ideally after every snack. As an after-breakfast-and-before-bed brusher, I have the most disgusting teeth in all of Brazil. Fortunately, my husband accepts me for who I am and ascribes my poor dental hygiene and once-a-day-showering to my Anglo-Saxon ancestors’ affinity for filth. Although thanks to him, I have grudgingly become a daily flosser.

2) Your Fingers Must Never Touch Your Food When I learned that many Brazilians use a fork to eat french fries, I almost moved back to the US. Brazilians use a knife and fork for EVERYTHING! Your fingers must never touch your food. As my people created a category just for “finger foods”, this is not a custom that I’m particularly comfortable with or always able to keep in mind. I’ll be at a birthday party happily popping mini-pizzas in my mouth, when I notice everyone else at the table has a napkin delicately wrapped around their snack, creating a polite barrier between fingers and food. After 9 years, I still can’t muster that level of formality for something that came frozen out of a box. (Honestly between the finger eating and lack of teeth brushing, I’m surprised my husband agrees to go out with me.)

3) Japanese-Brazilians My initial thought when I saw my husband for the first time was “Hey, he’s white!” True story. Pretty romantic, huh? Before my husband, the only Brazilian I was aware of was Pelé, thus my unconscious assumption about how Brazilians look. I wasn’t totally wrong. According to the 2010 census, 50.7% of Brazilians do consider themselves black or mixed-race. But in addition to the 4.8 million people brought as slaves from Africa and the indigenous tribes who were already here, Brazil has had substantial immigration from Portugal, Italy, Japan, Lebanon, and Germany to name a few countries. With a history of intermarriage between the groups, Brazilians cover the entire range of possible human phenotypes.

4) Brazilians Love Volleyball! Everyone else in the world besides Americans might already know this. Probably the world loves indoor volleyball, and it’s only us Americans who are in the dark. Literally. We’d rather just sit in the dark than watch a volleyball game. But not Brazilians! If there’s no soccer game, the sports channels are covering a volleyball match. They have incredibly popular professional leagues here, and if you stay in Brazil long enough, you will find yourself at a bar with a women’s club volleyball game on the TV. Or judo. Judo is also very popular in Brazil.

5) Did You Already Add Salt? This is a question most Brazilians won’t ask because they’re going to go ahead add more salt regardless. Meal after meal, I see Brazilians get food placed in front of them and without even tasting it, they reach for the salt packets, rip one open, and rain salt down on the entire plate. Very shortly after arriving, my husband made sure to treat me to one of Brazil’s traditional meals imported from Portugal, bacalhau or codfish. Imagine a salt lick served with potatoes and onions. That’s bacalhau. I couldn’t eat it. The same was true for feijoada, a uniquely Brazilian dish involving black beans, all the leftover pieces of pig, and a few ice cream scoops of salt. Not surprisingly, Brazil has a hypertension epidemic.

Those were some of the most surprising truths I learned about Brazil. I’d come up with more, but I just ate a pretzel and must go floss my teeth.

June 8, 2015
Why I Don’t Want Another Child

My daughter at 3 years

Yesterday my husband, daughter, and I headed out early for a morning on the beach. We dug a giant sand pit, built and promptly stomped on sandcastles, and failed to convince my daughter stepping on seaweed is not the absolute worst thing in the world. We followed this with fish stew and fried bananas on the beach. In the afternoon, there was a skype call with grandparents, tutus, and puzzles, and a thirty minute tantrum during which my little ballerina spit in my face.

When I finally crept out of her bedroom at night, I collapsed on the couch thinking “I will never do this again.”

There it is. My true feelings about parenthood. I love my daughter. I also love myself. And I cannot spend any more of my one lifetime parenting a small child.

Despite being born with a uterus, I never dreamed of having children. In high school through my early twenties, when I imagined my future it never included children. I pictured travel, politics, law, publishing a book and going on tour, or accepting an appointment as a US ambassador. Babies never made an appearance. Then I got married and in my late twenties, I began to think that a child might be nice. Also, my husband is sixteen years older than I am and given women’s tendency to outlive men, I’d rather not be alone for the last twenty years of my life.

Wanting a guaranteed companion in old age is a pretty selfish reason to have a child. But aren’t they all? I’ve never heard of a couple having a child because the kid asked to be born. “I’ve always dreamed of a big family.” “We need someone to carry on the family name.” “I just love babies.” All selfish reasons. Yet society reacts with hostility to a person who decides, “Yeah, I had a kid and I really don’t like parenting a baby. I won’t be doing it again.”

Of course, I’m not just a person deciding I don’t want more children. I’m a woman declaring I’d rather spend my Sunday afternoons reading as opposed to stringing macaroni necklaces. I searched for other posts about women with one child by choice, and every mom wrote about her family feeling “complete” with just one. One child just “feels right.” Not one mother said, “It was hard. I struggled. And I’m not doing it again.” Well, I’ll say it. The last three years have been a struggle and I’m not going through it again.

My daughter was born seven weeks early by emergency c-section after a placental abruption. She spent 28 days in the NICU. Her stay would have been shorter but she developed a food allergy at 2 weeks-old which caused loose, bloody stools at every feeding and meant I, the breastfeeding mother, had to begin eliminating things from my diet to isolate the cause. I eventually removed all dairy, soy, peanuts, nuts, eggs, tomatoes, and berries from my diet but traces of blood and a poopy diaper every two hours continued for 7 months. I clearly remember sitting at a Mexican restaurant, surrounded by my entire extended family and their plates of cheesy, processed deliciousness, while I ate my skinless chicken breast between two crumbling slices of homecooked, dairy-egg-soy-free bread. On the plus side, I dropped to under my pre-pregnancy weight in three months.

Since her homecoming my daughter has rejected the idea of sleeping in her own bed. Not just her bed. In her early months, she rejected swings, vibrating chairs, strollers, moving strollers, car seats, swaddling, and every means of soothing except a parent’s arms. And when I say “reject”, I mean she would scream until she couldn’t breathe, and it would take fifteen minutes of rocking to calm her back down. At 3 and a half, she still doesn’t sleep the whole night in her own bed. At least now, she will wake up and walk to our room and not just scream waiting for us to come.

Her separation anxiety is so extreme, I have spent exactly one night away from her since she came home from the hospital. It happened this January, while we were visiting my parents. We prepped my daughter for days. Mommy and Daddy were going away for a couple of days but she would be with Gramma and Grandpa. There were chicken nuggets, new toys, and Legoland. My husband and I kissed her goodbye at 6pm. She cried from 2:30 to 7:30am and was back with us after 20 hours. It’s been two months and still every story she plays out, with stuffed animals, Legos, or Littlest Pets, involves a lost parent.

I haven’t even mentioned her tantrums. And I won’t except that my dad witnessed one and described it to my brother this way: “Whatever you’re imagining, however awful…it was worse.”

I’m not writing all this to convince anyone of how hard I’ve had it. My daughter is happy, healthy, and growing. Despite being a preemie, she is now on the median line for height and weight. Her teachers send home glowing reports about what an active participant she is and what strides she has made recently with sharing. When I ask her teachers about the tantrums, they acknowledge her fits are extreme but not abnormally so, and they are occurring less and less often. It’s clear she will outgrow them.

My point in listing my greatest parenting challenges (so far) is to say that as tough as these years have been, they could have been worse. Much worse! A second child could have health complications or developmental challenges that make my daughter’s early life a three year vacation. My marriage can’t take that. My sanity can’t take that. I can’t take the risk! In the choice between a sane mother and siblings, I think we can universally agree a sane mother is more important for a child’s development.

In the most private recesses of my mind, I think that I am simply too selfish for a parent. While pregnant, I thought that hormones would flip some martyr switch that biology had surely hard wired in me. It didn’t happen. My dreams, interests, and personality remained mostly unchanged. I would throw myself in front of a bus for my daughter, but I still find coloring and crafting tedious. I’m making play-dough spaghetti and wishing I could get back to my book.

I do see a light at the end of tunnel. I see a turning point, a threshold, an event horizon approaching. We recently took her out Stand-Up Paddling for the first time. Fun was had by all. She’s asking to revisit the sea turtle center, making up stories, and composing songs off of the top of her head. I’m seeing flashes of a person, one I can’t wait to know and think I’ll have a few things in common with.

I definitely will not be repeating the past, but I am genuinely excited about the future.

March 9, 2015
The increasing weight of my uterus

The other morning at breakfast my husband casually brought up an old colleague who had called him out of the blue. I listened attentively and then with a slowly furrowing brow as my husband explained this colleague wanted to put my husband in touch with a local college. This college is in need of professors. Perhaps my husband would be interested in teaching beginning in September?

Between bites of peanut butter toast, I calmly reminded him that he has a daughter arriving at the end of August. Won’t things be stressful enough without a new teaching gig on the side? That’s why he was taking the month of September off from work. So, he could be here helping with the baby and coordinating international family visitation. I agreed this was going to be a huge help but what about after September. He would go back to two jobs and I will be at home with no jobs.

We left the conversation at “Let’s wait and see what the college offers if they ever actually call,” but I continued to think about it for the rest of the day. Even knowing how much my husband loves teaching and has missed it over the last few years, I couldn’t muster any enthusiasm for this new project. His dissertation is not due for another few, stressful months and he’s already looking for something new to fill up his time. I would have thought a new baby would fill time pretty effectively but my husband seems to think he will still have some left over.

And he just might be right. After all, he isn’t the one whose body will be battered and bruised and need recovery time. He doesn’t have the mammary glands required to feed the baby every few hours. It’s not his voice lecturing on supply and demand that the baby will have heard for months and most likely have become very attached to. He’ll have a more fit body, more energy, and maybe even enough time to teach a few law classes, all in addition to having a warm, squishy baby to rock to sleep. Who the hell came up with this ridiculously unfair system?

That was it. That was the real reason I couldn’t support my husband pursuing something he loves. While there are legitimate arguments to be made about adding stress and leaving me alone for more hours during the week (I’m including the hours needed to plan lessons), my real hang-up is that I am jealous.

Taking on a professorship in September would not even be an option for me. There is no discussion. No debate. There is not even a discussion about continuing the job I have in September. If my husband and I have a baby, I’m not working for several months. Period. It does not matter how much I enjoy my job, how much money I make, or how long I’ve waited to find a real job in Brazil. I’m staying at home because in this partnership, I’m the one with the uterus.

I’m loving my job. I have been waiting for years wondering if my master’s degree would end up a completely wasted investment. I’m making friends and coming home daily with enough stories to fill up a week of dinner conversation. Seriously, at this point, I’ve got conversation material to last through July. But that doesn’t matter. I will be giving it all up for months and my own dreams, interests, and capabilities do not matter. Because I am the one with the uterus.

Before the defenders of motherhood swoop down around, let me say that, yes, having a family is a dream of mine, so having a baby is in fact pursing one dream. It’s just not the only one I have. And my husband gets to have a family without putting any of his dreams on hold and even has the option to pursue an additional interest.

I do not regret getting pregnant and I cannot wait for the moment I get to meet my daughter face to face. It is just a little shocking to me to have my life plan decided so absolutely by an internal organ other than my brain. I haven’t changed. The person who is Brynn still has the same interests, the same flaws, the same quirks as four months ago but, at least for the end of 2011, those things are secondary to the fact I have a uterus and have put it to use. Do men have any experience remotely equivalent?

I brought all this up to husband over dinner last night. I asked if he had any problems with my blogging about the subject. He said he didn’t mind, but he added one thought at the end. He told me he was making sacrifices to have this baby too. I asked what they were. He told me, “I’m going to have to share you with someone for the rest of my life.” And I suddenly felt a whole lot lighter.

Update: My daughter was born 7 weeks early and is turning 4 next month. My husband did finish his PhD and take the teaching job. He is now the coordinator of the law school…And despite not having a full night’s sleep since July 10, 2011, I have managed to write a graphic novel set in Brazil. Now if I could just get an agent to say yes, I’d have quite the uplifting cinematic ending. ; )

April 9, 2011
The Miracle of Pregnancy?

The miracle of pregnancy is that any woman voluntarily goes through it more than once.

At 19 weeks into my own pregnancy, this is the conclusion I’ve come to. Am I the only one that thinks a process which makes the act of consuming food torturous at exactly the same time your diet becomes more than ever before, is flawed? Admittedly, eating has become less of a chore in the second trimester, but between constantly belching like a teenage boy chugging soda to an increasingly limited number of comfortable sleeping positions, I’m not sold on the experience.

I’ve been doing a lot of research. I’m reading every thing from mommy bloggers debating epidurals to the Mayo Clinic’s week by week summary. Pretty much everyone, doctors and bloggers alike, reference this “glow” pregnant women experience. A warm, fuzzy feeling that radiates from toes to earlobes every time a woman looks at her belly. Unless this glow refers to light reflecting off of my sweat, I don’t know what they’re all talking about. I’m waiting for the fuzzy feeling. Seriously, any time now.

Maybe my hormones are off. Although, I’ve done so many blood and urine tests at this point, I’d think somebody would have noticed and told me if they were.

Do not misunderstand me. I’m not upset about being pregnant. I’m not regretting it. Really, I’m a huge fan of family. Go family! “More family,” I say. I can’t wait to go to school plays and put colorful, abstract renditions of the family pets on the refrigerator. I’m just not a huge fan of the pregnancy part and based on the vast majority of what is online, this feeling (or lack of) puts me firmly in the minority of women.

Reading the material available for pregnant women and new mothers, it’s pretty clear there are millions of women who dream about being pregnant. They yearn for it. They wish, hope, pray and stare longingly through store windows at baby clothes. I have never felt this. I never dreamed about being pregnant and giving birth was never on my list of life goals. In complete honesty, getting pregnant has yet to give me even half the personal satisfaction that finishing my master’s degree did.

When my husband came home from the doctor two years ago and said we might have trouble getting pregnant, I said “We can just adopt. There are plenty of kids that need parents.” I truly didn’t feel any sense of loss. What I wanted down the line was a family and that, at least in my mind, never required my being pregnant.

I understand many women feel a need to be pregnant, but I can’t empathize. I’m thrilled the baby is healthy and growing. I’ve got a library’s worth of books coming that will tell everything from how her synapses are forming to all the colors her poop can be and what they mean. Her nursery color scheme and theme are set five months before she’ll need it. Yet even amidst the nesting, there is a feeling Audrey will be an only child. At least, the only one I’m giving birth to. I’ve told my husband we can totally have more kids but it’s his turn to gestate. He assures me this won’t be possible. I shrug my shoulders and say “Well, there are lots of kids who need good parents and a big sister.”

March 30, 2011