Livingston, I Presume

Let's call it what it is...xenophobia

In between blowing my nose, I've been hearing and reading a lot about illegal immigration, most of it not exactly flattering to my American brethren. Yesterday on NPR they played a snippet from a woman who  said something to the effect of, "We need to keep them out of here. They bring disease here." Without saying anything that might offend Southern-Americans, let me just comment that this woman did not exactly sound: a)like her family came over on the Mayflower or b)like she was a Native American.

Where does she suppose her own "disease-ridden" ancestors came from, then? Did they spring fully formed from the stone heads of Mount Rushmore?

The other interesting fact in the NPR report was that, in general, people who live in communities most affected by illegal immigration have more tolerant viewpoints than those who live in communities where illegal migrants are rare. That tells me that Ms. Disease Fearmonger has probably never met an illegal in her life, so when she spews her venom, she has no clue what she's talking about.

I guess this would be a good time to let you in on my little secret. I was once an illegal alien and so was my husband. Now, granted, we were Americans in the Czech Republic ("rich" Westerners going to live in a poorer Central European country), so we didn't face the kind of scorn and hassle that your average Mexican faces coming here, but we did feel the fear of crossing a border, going to the Foreigners' Police, and getting paid under the table while we waited for our papers to be in order. In my case, it took only a few weeks (although I then made the mistake of omission of not registering and could have been deported), but Chip's papers took a lot longer. We made our travel plans, opened our bank accounts, lived our lives in the way that would be most likely to let us continue to live there without hassle from the authorities, and after we both got legal the first time, we never let anything lapse again. We paid our taxes and social services, registered our baby even through extreme bureaucratic stupidity, and tried to be good citizens.

But this was all possible in the Czech Republic. It wasn't as if we were going to be deported simply for showing up at the Foreigner's Police. The truth was that we had entered the country under a tourist visa and had proceeded to take jobs and set up residence. We took care of the legalities after, although I should say in our defense that we did *try* before we left the U.S. Try "taking care of the legalities" after the fact in today's America. Not likely. Have fun on that bus back to Honduras.

For as much as I complained about the bureaucracy surrounding getting our permits in the Czech Republic, I was always keenly aware that it was miles easier for me to do than it was for a Czech to get a simple tourist visa to the U.S.--or for a Ukrainian to get legal in the Czech Republic. Every place has its immigrant bogeymen.

What I see when I look at most illegal immigrants--whether they're Mexicans in the U.S. or Somalis in the U.K.--is hardworking people desperate to make a better life for themselves and their families. One CNN documentary on illegal African immigrants to Europe followed a man who worked three jobs--more than 20 hours a day--to stay in England. That doesn't sound to me like someone who is coming to suck off the social welfare teat.

Are there people who come here to sponge off America's "generous" social safety net? Probably. But, like the mythical welfare queens, I would bet that their impact on our national coffers has a tiny net effect when compared with, oh, say the corporate welfare that we overlook every day as a nation.

Now I need to blow my nose.

Felled

Night before last, it was a tickle in my throat. Yesterday morning my nose was running. By last night? Full-fledged ill. It's springtime, dammit! I'm not supposed to be sick! And I can't even blame my germ-carrying toddler, as he is (thankfully) completely healthy.

*Touching wood madly.*

Naturally this would happen on the Friday before three deadlines. That's just the way it goes. So my next stop is the shower to try to wash some of this out of my hair and hope that I feel well enough to get some work done.

Oh, and hi, Sher! Good to see you among the commenters!!! :)

At what point do I begin to worry about the lying?

When someone, usually a non-parent or someone long removed from child-rearing, says to me that they love children because they are just so honest, I have to laugh a little and wonder where I have gone wrong with Connery. I bring this up because again today at Kindermusik he brought forth a bold-faced lie, even better than last fall's assertion that yes, we did indeed have a puppy at home. Today's topic was crying babies, relevant particularly because two of the toddlers in the class have new baby sisters. Mary asked if their babies cried sometimes, and they said yes. Then Connery pipes up, "We have a new baby at home, too. We had to take it to the doctor."

All of the other mommies looked at me, some concerned that perhaps we had lost a baby or something, and I had to say that he was just lying and that if we had a baby at home, I wasn't aware of it. One of the new-baby-mommies quipped, "Perhaps you should check at the doctor's...?"

When he stayed at Chad and Amy's house over the weekend, Amy asked him if he was potty-trained. His answer? "I go poop on the potty." In his defense, this could be a sort of cagey, Clinton-esque response, as he never asserted that he was actually potty trained, just that he went poop on the potty. It depends on what your definition of what is potty-trained is, I suppose.

Also, there's been a trend toward his denying problematic behaviors and blaming them on others. Example: He throws his napkin on the floor at mealtime, prompting a rebuke, and then says, "I didn't throw the napkin! You threw the napkin!"

As per usual, my mother finds this all hilarious, never failing to remind me of my childhood penchant for cheating, especially on what had to be the dullest of all boardgames, Little House on the Prairie. She's probably trying to make me feel better by allowing me to see that a highly deceptive child (me) can grow up to be marginally ethical. But mostly I think she is  secretly thinking, "Payback's a bitch!"

Friends, fasting, and Fiddler

Given our normal weekend plans (stay home and watch DVDs, perhaps visit Bozeman, grocery shop), this weekend was jam-packed with activity. On Friday night we had dinner with Jen and Duncan and their two kids and thoroughly enjoyed watching the kids interact. Connery later told us that they had been in the tee-pee to "hide from the parentses." It's good to know that has started already.

On Saturday, Chip and I were trying a "spring cleaning fast," an idea borne from the concept that springtime is a perfect time to take a break from food and detox your body from the many pesticides, additives, and other all-around yuckiness that daily life provides. The plan was to do a modified juice fast for 36 hours starting Friday night in which we would consume numerous 8-ounce glasses of "master cleanser" made of water, lemon juice, maple syrup, and cayenne pepper and nothing else. Let me just say that as bad as that sounds, it tastes worse.

We managed to choke down two glasses before we headed to Belgrade to look at neighborhoods. If the lack of food and lingering taste of cayenne wasn't enough to make us depressed, Belgrade was. I've never seen so many connecting driveways and so few trees in my life. True, there was evidence of young families everywhere, and it seemed safe enough, but I don't think we left Prague to find ourselves cheek-to-jowl with every other young family in the Gallatin Valley. By the time we got home, we were hungry, dispirited, and suffering from caffeine headaches, but more fun awaited.

Part of the spring cleaning was to do a half hour in the sauna to encourage those toxins to flee. Chip went first, and he came back looking pretty good. I had fallen asleep while he was there--my body apparently unable to function without food--but I headed to the sauna anyway. When I first got in there, I was feeling pretty good. I mean, it was only 80 degrees! How bad could it be? Then I noticed it was 80 degrees CELSIUS, i.e. 160 degrees F. I managed to make it 22 of my scheduled 30 minutes and got out with the express intention of not fainting and possibly hurling.

By the time I drove home in my fog and stumbled into the house, I was pretty sure that I wasn't going to make our 36-hour mark, especially as I contemplated drinking more of our master cleanser. It didn't take too much to convince Chip to throw it over, so we nibbled on some pita and hummus and started to feel immeasurably better. So much for detox...

On Sunday, we had planned to take Connery for a little swim, but we woke up to snow and so decided against it. That afternoon we dropped him off at Chad and Amy's to play with their two little boys while we went to see Fiddler on the Roof in Bozeman. It was nice to see live theater, and the production was really impressive, except for the performance in a certain key role. I don't want to turn this into a local review site so I won't say anything more, except to add that if I had been in the cast, I would have tried very hard to arrange an accident for that player before opening night--non-fatal and not serious of course, but big enough to prevent that person from taking the stage. Given the accomplishment of the rest of the production, it was a shame to have it sullied. Overall, though, it was still an enjoyable few hours, and it seemed to go by very quickly, except when that person was singing.

When we returned to Chad and Amy's to pick up Connery, he had decided he wanted to stay there and be adopted so that he could play there forever. He had a great time and was more or less ready to collapse from exhaustion the second we got home. Mission accomplished!

Good mail day!

It was a snail-mail excitement extravaganza at our house today! The long-awaited April 18th issue of Woman's Day containing my first-ever story in a major U.S. publication arrived, and there was my story, right on the first page of the Kid's Day section. While I didn't get a mention in the table of contents, the story did! It is on newsstands now for anyone who wants to have a look (page 117!).

The other arrival was a little surprise from my friend Lanny, who has been working at Starbucks as a recruiter for a few months now. He mentioned a while ago that he might send us some coffee, and today in the mail was 16 beautiful ounces of whole-bean Espresso Roast, just for us! And such perfect timing, since Chip ran out of coffee this morning.

I can only think that good things will come from this happy mail convergence.

With a voice of singing...

My friend Chris, in addition to having known me since I was 4, is the unofficial historian of our high school and Montana Youth Choir choral music experiences. Every once in a while a little surprise package arrives for me in the mail from Chris. Most recently, he sent two CDs with digital versions of our high school Delphian Choir recordings. Before that he sent a DVD with our farewell Youth Choir concert. The quality on these DVDs--converted straight from whatever amateur cinematographer/proud parent shot them--is not anything great, but they have an amazing power over me.

First there's the weirdness of seeing and hearing your 16 or 17-year-old self in glorious technicolor (especially in the beauty of the lilac dresses). Then there's the actual physical feeling I get when I hear certain passages. When I was listening to the Delphian CDs last week I felt myself tensing up at a certain part. I then realized it was right before a solo I had done a thousand times that year and was recorded for posterity. I heard one song and immediately thought about a time we had performed it in the hallway of Missoula Hellgate High School. It still gave me chills. As the camera pans over the group on the MYC DVD, I see people I still keep in touch with--and people whose names I can't even remember.

Some of my absolute best memories in my life have been while I was singing. I miss it. I just don't think I realized how much until Chris started sending me surprise packages.

Fashion plate

Much like his father, Connery is something of a clotheshorse. It doesn't hurt that he has two grandmothers who love to buy him great duds and a mother who delights in dressing him in said duds. Still, perhaps we've taken things a bit far. This morning, I was getting him into a new sweater vest/polo shirt combo, festooned with colorful sailboats. He's been excited about wearing this sweater all week. As I was adjusting it, he said to me, "I think Kendall is really going to like this sweater." What two-year-old predicts the impact of his attire on the older girls at school?

Meanwhile, we're desperately trying to figure out oh, say, our whole lives. We've decided not to buy my grandfather's house from my parents, which means that my parents will be selling it before the end of the year, which means we need to find someplace new to live. That decision has all the predictable ramifications--do we stay in Livingston, where Connery has a safe and happy pre-school but where there are few opportunities for me to find traditional employment? Do we move to Belgrade, a growing community much closer to Bozeman, where we would need to find a new school for Connery but where there would also be more opportunities for enrichment? House or condo? Rent or buy? Paper or plastic? And then there's the overriding question of whether we can make it longterm in Montana. There are so many advantages to being here, but are we leveraging our future by settling for far lower wages in an area in which living expenses are no longer notably lower?

I told Chip the other day that adulthood sucked. There are just too many variables, too many compromises, too many worries. I try to tell myself that things will work out as they are supposed to, but it's hard to trust in that.

Luckily, I have a small, persistent toddler to keep me from dwelling on it too much.

How did I manage this?

Apparently, I have the only toddler in the known world who would rather eat cauliflower and pears than macaroni and cheese.

May it ever be thus, my son.

Maybe the tide is turning?

Democratic ball-lacking aside, I can finally spread some good news: There seems to be a real shift in the perception of George W. Bush among the populace. A report from the Pew Research Center linked in several places on Salon shows that, among other things, "48% [of those surveyed] use a negative word to describe Bush compared with just 28% who use a positive term, and 10% who use neutral language."

It gets better:

Until now, the most frequently offered word to describe the president was "honest," but this comes up far less often today than in the past. Other positive traits such as "integrity" are also cited less, and virtually no respondent used superlatives such as "excellent" or "great"  terms that came up fairly often in previous surveys.

The single word most frequently associated with George W. Bush today is "incompetent,"and close behind are two other increasingly mentioned descriptors: "idiot" and "liar." All three are mentioned far more often today than a year ago.

This brings me great joy, though it is of course tinged with sadness and not a little anger. Where were these people in 2004? He was just as much a lying, incompetent idiot when we elected him then. Does it really take the loss of thousands of lives (Katrina + Iraq) to shake people out of their "oh, but I'd rather drink a beer with him" stupor?

Let's hope we can sustain the momentum we have going to make some real changes come November. It would be helpful if the opposition party--indeed, my party--decided to put up a real fight now and again.

Traffic picks up

Thanks to Sara, my blog is suddenly getting a lot of visitors from our neighbor to the north who care about issues of childcare. I think it's great that so many people there are talking about it, as it is an issue about which I care deeply. However, I don't see myself as any particular expert on the subject--particularly as it relates to Canadian politics and Tory bloggers.

What I know about childcare--and what I wish for my own country--relates almost entirely to my experience of having a baby in semi-socialist Europe and raising him there for a year. The luxury of having paid maternity leave and receiving monthly child benefits was almost unimaginable to me. I was so grateful not to have to make the same wrenching choices that my friends who were having babies stateside were. Exclusive breastfeeding? I could do it. Long walks with my baby? I could do it. Not worrying about whether my sleep-addled brain would cause me to crash the car on my commute? I could do it.

I totally agree with Sara that we seem to spend too much of our time in a media-driven, non-existent "Mommy War" conversation about whether stay-at-home moms or working moms are better mothers. I think it's a smokescreen to keep parents from agitating for better conditions and more support for moms AND dads. As one poster on Salon.com described it in a letter about their feature today on the Mommy Wars, it's like this endless, pointless conversation is just one other "hamster wheel" to put women on to keep them under control.

Anyway, that's a long way of saying that I support the efforts of my Canadian blogging colleagues to raise the issue of the intrinsic value of caregiving. I think women AND men should be able to make the choices they want to care for their children (or parents or other relatives) and not find themselves in the poorhouse. I don't think anyone can argue against that--except the corporate world.