Light and Momentary

Seven Quick Takes: New Semester Edition

1. Oh, you guys, it's a glorious day. The sun is shining brightly and I don't have to teach today!

2. Teaching 4 days a week is going to be an adjustment.

3. This semester I have two classes, one grad and one upper-level undergrad. Their content is pretty similar, which means that lecture prep overlaps -- more detail for the grads, more explanation for the undergrads. But still-- I had forgotten how long it takes to prep a lecture. I think it was like forgetting about childbirth pain. You think to yourself, "It can't really be that bad, can it?" And then -- surprise! -- it is.

4. Luckily I have left behind much of the angst that attended lecture prep in the early weeks of last semester. I knew that it would take me a lot of hours to pull together six anatomy/physiology classes, but I also knew that I could handle it. And I know too that the prep load will lighten a bit when we get into the clinical portion of the course.

5. I'd been feeling more confident until Wednesday afternoon, when the chair sent out an email saying that course evals were ready to review. Reading them was something I'd been dreading, so I decided I'd just bite the bullet and look at them right away. There was a lot of grumbling about my standards for writing assignments -- a whole lot.

6. I have been thinking a lot about this. (Read: waking up in the middle of the night with student comments on the brain.) On the one hand, I don't want to be the Usage Nazi, nitpicking meaningless distinctions. On the other, they're heading into a profession that requires more writing than the average job, and I want them to be prepared for that. If I give them four weeks to write a short paper, and post my grading rubric in advance, and steer them to the writing center if they're uncertain and review first drafts on request and STILL they turn in papers with mistakes on every page -- then, yeah, I'm going to dock their grades. I will not apologize for expecting grad students to use semicolons correctly.

Doesn't mean it didn't smart, reading those comments.

7. I'm going to have a chat with my chair this morning about the whole thing, to get her take on whether it's typical grumbling from students who aren't used to getting Bs, or whether there's a kernel of truth I should take to heart. Here's hoping I can let it go afterward.

More quick takes at Jen's.

Lift up your split peas, too

I'll blame it on sleep deprivation: I was up past midnight getting ready for my morning class. When the lector at noon Mass said, "Lift up your lentils, O ye gates," I was flummoxed. Immediately the vowels started trying to rearrange themselves in my foggy brain. What's that word? Not mantel. Another thing that goes on top of the other thing that ends in -tel. Lintel! Lift up your lintels!

Unfortunately I missed half of the psalm trying to figure that one out. (It was a short psalm, but still.) A few years ago I wrote a passionate post about not dumbing down the language of the liturgy. Clearly, I was overestimating myself at the time.

My Chisel-Wielding Brother

Somehow at dinner we were talking about Oxford's New College, which is called new even though it was founded in the 14th century. "Oh!" I said, "you know the gargoyle on the office wall above the computer? It's from New College. The summer that Alex was 2, my parents and brother and sister came to the UK. I spent my birthday in Oxford and Uncle Rob gave me one of the New College gargoyles as a present."

I descended briefly into reverie, remembering how happy I had been to see my family. I loved living in the UK but it was lonely and no mistake. The train trip from Edinburgh flew by, even with Alex in my lap and his younger brother, in utero, kicking us both all the way. We went punting on a glorious summer day, and we saw an outdoor production of Midsummer Night's Dream in the New College Gardens. Toddler Alex did not appreciate Shakespeare, so I spent most of the second act away from the performers, near the chapel. I remember the bats were out in force, swooping down on their suppers, but they were up high enough in the purple twilight -- up by the gargoyles, which are the small round things where wall meets roof in this picture -- that they were fun to watch and not alarming. Afterward we ate real ice cream, Ben and Jerry's Phish Food. In 1999 the UK was an ice cream wasteland. Ben and Jerry's was available here and there but it cost more than $7 per pint. We had no money for extravagances, so it had been a long time since I'd had good ice cream. Yum, I can almost taste it now.

In this welter of happy memories it took me a minute to notice that my 12yo was making a strange face. "How," he asked, "did Uncle Rob get the gargoyle off the building?"

A replica, I hastened to tell him. It's a replica of a New College gargoyle.

My Bunyip

I lose things in January.

Two years ago I wrote about my laundry-chute-cum-wormhole; two years before that I wrote about losing a friend's charitable contribution. So maybe I only lose things in January of even-numbered years. But it makes some sense to me that I'd lose things in January: all of the Christmas gifts need new homes, and at the beginning of the year I am usually resolving to Organize All The Things. Putting things away in whirling dervish mode is an excellent way to ensure that some of your family's belongings will end up in Secret Hiding Places.

My husband gave me a pair of black yoga pants for Christmas. They were perfect -- not too snug and not too loose. I tried them on in the downstairs bathroom, and then I...

...I've been trying to finish that sentence for the past three weeks. At last, I think I have an answer.

At my 12yo's urging, I read His Majesty's Dragon right after I finished my Crazy Shakespeare Project. It was so much fun that I galloped through the rest of the series. (Recommended, by the way. Uneven -- she's no Patrick O'Brian -- but laugh-out-loud funny and an interesting jaunt through alternate history. I've been dreaming of dragons.) In the sixth book they travel across Australia, where they have repeated and alarming encounters with creatures called bunyips.

The bunyips engineer underground streams to create water holes, and then lurk nearby to snatch their unsuspecting prey. At first the novel's characters have no idea why the members of their party are vanishing; later, they can hardly credit the speed and rapacity of the bunyip they observe in action.

Obviously, that's my problem.

I put an important piece of paper in a sensible place, like the file labeled "Taxes 2011," but the bunyip tunnels through the back of the file cabinet. Sluuurrrrp! I go back in search of that paper, but there is only a telltale trace of bunyip drool. I toss that pair of hand-knit socks in the washing machine, but the bunyip is hungry and only one appears in the laundry basket. And my yoga pants? Imagine the stealthy bunyip, disappearing into the ductwork with black Lycra trailing from his greedy jaws.

I suppose I should be grateful he's not the man-eating variety, but I'd like my yoga pants back all the same.

Dat's MY Mama

My daughter is not shy, not shy at all, about finding one-on-one time with me. If she and I are doing something together and one of the boys approaches, she tells him fiercely, "Dat's MY mama." I say, "Sweetheart, I'm his mama too," but she is undeterred.

Tonight in the car my oldest was in the front seat, telling me about a complicated plotline, when his sister decided he'd had quite enough of my attention. "Dat's MY mama," she announced. "Stop talking!" she told him firmly. I sighed. I said to Alex, "Tell her who your mama is."

He jumped in instantly: "That's MY mama." From the back there were three immediate echoes from his brothers: "That's MY mama!" "That's MY mama!"  "That's MY mama!" One of them added, "And it's MY couch too!" (she's been known to be territorial about the furniture); the rest of them quickly amended their shouts to include the couch as well. The din was impressive. Alex said to me, "If you keep laughing like that while you're driving, you're going to run into something."

"Okay," I said, "time to stop now." The cacophony ended quickly. In Stella's view this meant only that the last word was hers. "MY mama," she asserted. "Dat's MY mama."

Whenever the Duggars are mentioned in a blog post somewhere, the comments will include adults from large families talking about how little attention they received as children. This haunts me, even though five children << 19 children. I wonder often if my kids' needs are slipping through the cracks. I tell you what, though, I think if I were going to neglect my daughter I'd have to work at it.

Living with D-MER

[Part 1 is here.]

The night we brought my oldest son home from the hospital, I remember sitting at the dinner table. He had been sleeping and I was hoping he would wake up soon -- I needed him to nurse. I remember a sudden wash of hopelessness, as if a veil had been pulled back and I could see what a hideous place the world really was. Close on the heels of this surge of emotion I felt a not-yet-familiar ache in my breasts.

Over the next few weeks this became a very familiar cycle: a sudden conviction that the world was unremittingly bleak, closely followed by spraying milk. I remember talking about it a few months later with a friend of mine, who found it very surprising. It must be prolactin, we agreed.

It made sense to me at the time. I had read about the calming effects of prolactin, but I also remembered the weepiness I'd experienced after taking Valium for outpatient surgery. Maybe, I thought then, one woman's calm is another woman's depressed. I also remembered my experiences with PMS as a teenager, when I would experience a distinctive, physical kind of sadness. "I feel sad in my stomach," I would think to myself, and I would know to tuck supplies in my purse for the next day. There was a kinship between the PMS sadness and the letdown sadness; it made sense to me that a unique emotional reaction could be tied to a hormonal state.

My D-MER was never devastating, though I just dug up an email I wrote more than a decade ago in which I described it as "overwhelming" in the early days of nursing my oldest son. On a bad day, it could bring tears to my eyes; on rare occasions it made me a little reluctant to nurse. I tried to shape my emotional response by saying, "Calm, calm" to myself when the feelings hit (which never worked, FWIW); I reminded myself that I would feel better very soon; I tried to get a little extra rest or a little time to myself on the days when it really bothered me. I was extremely (you might even say militantly) motivated to breastfeed, and I just figured it went with the territory for me.

Still, I felt a surprising relief when I first read about D-MER on an email list for lactation consultants. It wasn't just me. I wasn't some kind of aberration. There was a reason I had needed to push away those feelings, all those thousands of times.

Fifteen years later, I rarely notice my D-MER. When I do, it's always milder. I don't know what has changed, exactly, though I vaguely remember that it always became less pronounced as my babies grew into toddlers. I started taking fish oil five years ago, and there may be an association between fish oil consumption and higher dopamine levels (can't find a good link, though -- LMK if you know of one, please). Additionally, I've experienced that rush of unhappiness so many times that I recognize it easily and think, "Oh, it's you again" without paying much attention to it.

For the women with D-MER who might read this, I hope to offer a little encouragement that things can get better without weaning. And I also want to mention a little silver lining -- three small advantages to D-MER. First, difficulty dealing with the D-MER feelings can be a cue that I'm not taking care of myself adequately, a sign to look again at what else is going on in my life. Second, D-MER gives me much more empathy for a couple of people in my life with substance abuse problems. Part of the addiction cycle is lower dopamine levels during withdrawal, and do you know what? If the world routinely looked as hopeless to me as it used to in those moments when my dopamine level plunged, I might very well have a substance abuse problem of my own. D-MER offers me a bit of insight into the mysterious potency of brain chemistry. Finally, those early days when the feelings are strongest are also the days when the breasts are most likely to leak. That unmistakable flash of misery was a cue for me to apply discreet pressure in time to contain the spray. I might have felt that I was looking out across an empty and barren world, but at least I could do it with a dry shirt. :-)

Here again is the link to the D-MER site, where there's lots more information for mothers with D-MER and their supporters: http://d-mer.org.

Why some women hate breastfeeding: what you should know about D-MER

This post was prompted by a discussion I observed recently on Facebook. A pregnant woman wrote about how unhappy she had been while breastfeeding her previous baby, and the onslaught of advice started at once. She should encapsulate her placenta this time, they told her. She should take vitamin supplements. She should think about any deep-seated issues that might be causing her problems.

I wondered, though, if it might be D-MER: dysphoric milk ejection reflex.

In most women the milk ejection reflex works like this: the anterior pituitary secretes prolaction, stimulating on-the-spot milk production in response to a suckling baby, and then the posterior pituitary secretes oxytocin, triggering contractions in the myoepithelial cells of the breast. They squeeze the milk out in what's more commonly called a letdown. You can think of it as a baseball team: the center fielder (that'd be the anterior pituitary) whips the ball to the second baseman (posterior pituitary), who tags out the guy from the opposing team (failure-to-thrive heads back to the dugout, shoulders sagging).

For a subset of women, the process unfolds a little differently. It's thought that their dopamine levels plummet in association with this hormonal dance, causing a surge of negative emotion just before each letdown. To continue the baseball example, it's as if the shortshop runs over to get in on the action at second base and injures himself along the way.

There's a range of severity: for some women, it's a mildly unpleasant wave that passes quickly. For others, it's crippling. As you might expect, there's also a range of possible treatments. For some women, just knowing what's going on is enough to make the feelings manageable. Others report that improved self-care can ease the unpleasantness. For women with more severe cases, prescription medication can help. It's important to note that the antidepressants most commonly prescribed for lactating women are unlikely to help with D-MER: Zoloft and Paxil can affect serotonin levels, but serotonin is the wrong neurotransmitter to tackle when D-MER is the problem.

So is it possible that some women hate breastfeeding because they have deep-seated psychological issues? Sure, it's possible. It's also possible that some women might find vitamin supplementation helpful. (All I'm going to say about the placenta encapsulation idea is "to each her own.") But it's also possible to hate breastfeeding because every letdown -- we're talking maybe three or four of them per feeding or pumping, ten or twelve times per day, plus the times when the baby sleeps too long or cries too loudly and her breasts say, "Hey, did somebody need some milk around here?" -- every one of those letdowns triggers feelings of hopelessness or anxiety. Knowledge is power, and ignorance about D-MER is widespread. Find out more here.

[Update: here's a follow-up post on nursing happily despite D-MER.]

Resolutions for Ordinary Time

I never really start my resolutions in earnest on January 1 -- I usually have Epiphany resolutions instead. This is partially because I usually make food-related resolutions and the Christmas season is the wrong time for austerity. But now -- ho ho! -- let the sprouted lentil burgers begin!

Even though it's the eighth of January I have more musings than firm resolutions. I should make some decisions, because resolving to do All The Things is a good way to do none of them.

Top of the list: tend the body. The brain works better when it's fueled better. I have been hitting the eggnog and chocolates, with the result that small slights are magnified, my absent-mindedness is amplified, and my stupid pants are snug again. My plan is to give up sugar until Valentine's Day, and eat veggies at every lunch and dinner.

Dinner is much on my mind, actually. 2011 was a good year on the self-discipline front, but it still feels s-l-o-w, you know? I have a good morning routine down and I'd like to get an evening routine in place as well. Evening is harder because everybody's more tired and fractious.

I am envisioning 2012 as a year of finishing things. I have a bad habit of buying religious books and then not reading them, and I have several unfinished items on my Kindle. I'd like to knock out some of the book backlog. I also have something crazy like 12 projects on the needles. This year I'd like to finish all the knitting I currently have in the works and keep my knitting-related expenditures <$30. Ideally, I'd also make the sweater I bought yarn for when my neighborhood yarn store closed, but I wont' get carried away. One of my WIPs is an Autumn Rose, which I think is a stunning design but which is very very slow -- 7.5 stitches and 8 rows to the inch.

I've also been wondering what might happen if I spent 15 minutes a day trying to make my home more beautiful. I requested a Pinterest invite for inspiration (because CLEARLY the solution to the lingering ugly spots around my house is for me to spend more time on the internet). How does a person get started on Pinterest?

And one more: I -- heavy, heavy sigh-- am way behind on pictures. The last albumified pictures are from late August 2010. Uuuuuggggghhhhhhhhh, she groaned. I should just buckle down and put in 15 minutes a day on pictures.

Now that I've finished both of the projects I started in 2000 (Dickens and Shakespeare) I need something new to take me into my 50s. Any ideas? My dad suggested Mark Twain but he doesn't speak to my soul like Dickens and Shakespeare and I'm not sure I want to spend ten years on him. Any resolutions of your own you'd like to share?

Part of my evening routine is going to be dealing with personal email, which I allow to pile in a frustratingly consistent manner. Perhaps 2012 will be the year in which I become an email ninja. Kapow! Kerbang! Inbox zero, yet again.

Tucket

As of 12:20 this morning, I'm finished with the Crazy Shakespeare Project! More anon.

The Crazy Shakespeare Project: Close, No Cigar

There is a reason you've probably never seen a performance of Troilus and Cressida.

After my enthusiastic start last January, I never quite managed to read one play each month. Once my new job started in August, in fact, I hardly read any Shakespeare at all. Reading Shakespeare is much easier than it used to be, but it still requires concentration. It turns out that teaching graduate classes in an area outside my specialty also requires concentration, and so Shakespeare took a back seat to lecture prep for the whole of the fall semester.

I had hoped I could catch up in December since I wasn't prepping lectures, but the demands of finals plus the dreariness of the remaining plays meant that I couldn't pull it off. Bummer.

Still, I read 14.5 plays in 2011, and all but one of the poems.

Titus Andronicus 1/5/11	Coriolanus 12/4/11
Henry VI Part I 1/10/11	Two Gentlemen of Verona 7/4/11
Henry VI Part II 1/15/11	King John 5/30/11
Henry VI Part III 1/20/11	Twelfth Night 1/7/12
The Winter's Tale 4/3/11	Measure for Measure 7/18/11
Troilus & Cressida 1/1/12	Venus & Adonis 12/11/11
All's Well That Ends Well 1/4/12	The Rape of Lucrece 1/6/12
Richard III 1/25/11	The Passionate Pilgrim 12/2/11
Timon of Athens 12/21/11	The Phoenix and the Turtle 1/30/11
Pericles 1/29/11	A Lover's Complaint 4/17/11
Cymbeline 4/11/11	Sonnets 5/29/2011
Henry VIII 12/28/11

I've been saving Twelfth Night, which I've seen a couple of times but never read, for last. Perhaps I can finish Twelfth Night on Twelfth Night? After I'm finished I'd like to reread Hamlet and Othello, both of which I sped through too inattentively as a sophomore in college. I asked for and was given a copy of The Two Noble Kinsmen for Christmas -- it's not in my Complete Works -- and I think I'll tackle it this year too (she said a little wearily, hoping it's more like Macbeth (did you know Macbeth is thought to have been co-authored? Wikipedia says so and that means it must be true) than Pericles or Timon of Athens).

Boy, this is kind of a gloomy post. (This is kind of a gloomy blog lately. December/January at Light & Momentary: brought to you by Seasonal Affective Disorder.) I'll try to do a cheerier wrap-up post when I've actually wrapped up the project.