Headscarf Part I

It's time. I've been wanting to post my online treatise on this topic for ages, and the opportunity has just presented itself. LE's asleep, BE's off doing some business that couldn't possibly have been managed during the day or with a simple phone call, there was no need for me to cook a proper dinner, and I have a half-finished glass of Asma, a typically sub-standard brand of Turkish wine that's available by the liter and is often on sale. Screw top. Don't knock it.

Headscarves are the talk of the town these days, and have been for over a month, ever since our good leaders voted to change the constitution and allow girls to wear them in universities. The ban on headscarves in public buildings still remains, and at present, CHP (the nationalist party who was in power before the religiously conservative AKP won elections by a landslide) is bringing a challenge to this change to the constitutional court, where it seems likely the new amendment will be overturned.

That's the short version, and this explanation may be lacking due to its brevity. I have just quit paying attention altogether because I'm sick of hearing about it. Sick to death. BE has been an absolute fiend for any news or discussion on the topic. He scours the paper newspapers for a few hours on Saturday and Sunday mornings, the goes online to read it all again, cursing colorfully or asking me if I'd like to go out and buy some headscarves now. Many dinners have been spoiled because of some televised discussion that absolutely MUST be watched, wherein some talking heads who have no actual say on the issue spout off their opinions, all at the same time and with increasing volume so even if I could understand the nuance of their Turkish, I still wouldn't be able to understand because no one gets to finish a sentence before everyone starts talking at the same time. It's like Jerry Springer meets Fox News, only without the hair pulling. Inevitably the panels contain one or two women, covered or not, who spend the entire show chirping 'Can I say something? Can I say something?' (this is a common conversational gambit in Turkish, by the way. Another one is 'I'm going to say something' before saying it, as though it's already built into the conversational structure that no one is listening unless you announce first that you're going to say something), and occasionally they are allowed to say something that amounts to an entire sentence or two but they're usually drowned out by three or four men who all start talking at the same time. And so it goes. The 'moderator' (usually a man) also spends the whole program asking if he can say something, but no one listens to him either, especially if his sentence starts with anything like, for example, 'Hacar Hanım (Mrs. Hacar) is going to say something.'

I digress. I do enjoy poking fun at the details. A quick background on this topic (and again, I apologize if I'm off on the specifics) is that when the Turkish Republic was founded in 1923, as one of several initiatives to make Turkey into a secular state Atatürk banned religious and traditional head coverings for men and women. For the men, no more fezzes (a shame, that. Fezzes are cool, and can be seen on ice cream sellers all over the city) or woolly skullcaps, and for women, no more headscarves. Men were encouraged to wear the more European and 'modern' bowler hat. Some biographers claim this ban stemmed in part from Atatürk's humiliation while attending a party in Europe, where people snickered at his outlandish hat. I guess fezzes weren't considered cool back then. In any case, the point of the ban was twofold-- to make the Turkish public (at least appear) secular, and to make Turkey more European. Over time, the fez ban took but the headscarf ban didn't.

Here's where I get a bit foggy on the history and I'm too lazy to look it up, but I gather Turks were getting a bit lax in their secularism as well as their headgear, and the ban was reinforced or perhaps made more specific again in the 1980s, when the military took over. It was at this time that women were forbidden to wear headscarves on university campuses and in public buildings. Specifically, they cannot be covered on campus when they're there as students or teachers, and civil servants cannot be covered on the job. I point this out because I found it interesting that at the university where I used to work (where 80% or 90% of the female students were covered), women visitors often wore headscarves or even full black chadors (noticeable because chadors aren't especially common here), and the students themselves were often covered in the orientation time before classes had officially begun. When students arrived at the threshold of the campus, the scarves came off and when they crossed it again to leave, the scarves went back on. There was even a special room next to security with blacked out windows to give the girls privacy to change.

The current dispute about lifting the headscarf ban is only about universities (I hear that there are a lot of covered women workers in some state-run companies, but no one seems to be doing anything about that. Conversely, the university I referred to was nearly shut down around 2000 because of people getting sloppy about obeying the law), and it is specifically only about what is called türban in Turkish. Women's headgear has its own language here. Many women, particularly older women and women outside of the cities wear a traditional başörtüsü, meaning 'headcovering.' It looks something like this (though it's not always tied around the neck and I've rarely seen them covering the face):
A lot of other (usually older) women wear scarves outside, though loosely and with hair showing, much like my grandmother did on windy days in San Francisco, to keep her hair neat. Many women in başörtüsü aren't especially fierce about keeping their heads covered outside, and will take them off on the bus or wherever to re-tie them or shake out their hair. The başörtüsü says things like 'I am from the village' or 'I work hard cooking and/or cleaning and I don't want my hair in the way getting dirty.' It can even say 'I belong to such-and-such ethnic group.'

The much-disputed türban looks like this:
or this:It is always worn over a cloth swim-cap-like thing that completely covers the hair and smashes is down. The scarf is pinned or tied under the chin and the neck is covered. It is also pinned to the swim-cap thingie to prevent the scarf coming off, and it's usually folded so that the edges come out beyond the edge of the face like horse blinders. I'm not sure whether this is to prevent the woman from giving askance come-hither glances, or to prevent men from from looking at her from the side, but it sure makes the wearers crappy drivers. The türban is usually worn with a raincoat-like garment (thin or thick according to the season) which hides any hint of (to borrow a phrase from the Black Eyed Peas that cracks me up) lovely lady bumps. Unlike the başörtüsü (and whether the wearer likes it or not), the türban is politically charged in Turkey. It says 'I am a devout Muslim and I'm proud of it.' To some people, it also says things like 'I am oppressed' and 'I am modest and you're not.'


So that's the background and some other information. Really, I have more to say on this whole thing than I have time for (it's getting on my bedtime and my thinking is getting thick), so I'll have to post Headscarf Part II another time, where I will attempt to pick apart my (and others') very mixed feelings on this issue.


May it be sooner rather than later.

Plugs

On the topic of being a foreigner in Turkey, there is an interesting post and discussion in the comments shaping up over at realmotherhood, the blog of a fellow foreign mom in Istanbul. I often find our blogs complementary-- Siobhan has different perspectives on similar topics of expat-wife-and-mom life, and there are often things I think of but forget to write that turn up in her posts, making me think, duh! Why didn't I come up with that? If our blogs were people, they would be a crotchety old couple finishing each others' sentences. Plus, her son is darling.

On an unrelated topic, David Vincent at ELT World is preparing to release the third issue of his online journal, Horizons: The Journal of ELT World. He was kind enough to feature one of my posts in Issue 2, and has requested to use another post in the upcoming issue. I'm not just plugging him as a way of plugging myself. He's done a really nice job not only with the journal, but with his ELT blog and accompanying forums. All this, plus a job, a small child, and a baby. ELT World is one of my few remaining ties to the world of teaching and Istanbul EFL, though I admit it does remind me at times that being a dad must be very, very different from being a mom.

No offense to the dads out there. It's just that, at the moment, LE is watching the re-scheduled Galatasaray-Konyaspor match (the first was cancelled due to a lovely dump of snow) with his dad (one reason the snow is lovely is it's kept BE home from work). Only LE isn't really watching the game. The door to living room is closed to keep LE out of the kitchen with its enticing trash can, but there is a lower pane of glass missing on the door, so LE is sticking his head out looking at me here on the computer, alternating between throwing his toys out the hole and sobbing because he can see me and I'm not coming to him. I can see my hour and half of freedom dwindling to 40 minutes, since in a few minutes he will be so worked up with rage and confusion at my absence that only some nursing time will ease his pain.

Foreigner

In the header of this blog, I call myself an accidental expatriate. I wasn't trying to be poetic or make an oblique reference to The Accidental Tourist. The fact that I'm an expat is pretty much accidental. Okay, it wasn't by accident that I came here. That was on purpose. I also married a Turk on purpose. It was all planned, all the steps that led up to my being here. But the fact that I'm still here is kind of an accident. I never imagined I'd have a baby and furniture and a dishwasher and a real life in a foreign country. When I came here, somewhere in the back of my mind, I'd always planned to return home at some point. I didn't realize how hard the distance from my family would be, or how much harder that would become when I brought our sweet little boy into the world. They miss him, I miss them, and I hate taking him away from them. That part is even worse than leaving them after a visit.

But here I am, by accident, sort of. When it was just me, I was free to pick up and leave at any time. Then I managed to marry the only foreign man in the world who doesn't want to live in America and become an American citizen. Perhaps there are other men in the world like this, but not according to US Immigration, there aren't. So there's that, plus the problem of what on Earth would we do to make a living in the US? ESL teaching is an even less glorious profession over there, and certainly not overpaid like it is here. BE works for his family's business, in steel export, and I don't think there's a big demand for small business steel exporters in the US. Since he didn't go to college, there's not much of a demand for him at all, except perhaps in the competitive and exciting fields of busboy or gas pumper. Perhaps that's being overly pessimistic, but that's how it seems from over here. Anyway, as I've said before, I like staying home with LE. I'm happy to have this as my job. Turkey gives me the luxury of doing this. I feel like if we lived in the US, BE wouldn't be able to make enough to support us, so I'd have to go back to work as well, for the privilege of working full-time to pay for LE's child care and a few hundred bucks extra, not to mention the joy of seeing my son raised by strangers in an environment filled with other children that I imagine to be very lord of the flies.

In my darker moments, I think that I'm only here because of my husband. I generally refrain from reminding him of that. But then there are times he kind of asks for it, like when he complains that he doesn't want to live on the Asian side of Istanbul (where we're planning to move soon), and he's only doing it for me, thereby reserving him the right to blame it on me when he's miserable over there and doesn't like his new barber as much.

BE's best friend from childhood has a very cool mother, Aunt S. She's cool in any case, but as a Turkish mother, she utterly unique as far as I can tell. She won my heart when one of her sons was whining that he was hungry, and, rather than dutifully rush off to kitchen and prepare something for him, she listed the contents of the refrigerator and reminded him that he had feet. She's intelligent and intellectual, opinionated, worldly, and curious in the non-nosy sense. I can hang with her. I often find myself wishing she were my mother-in-law instead of the one I've got, who, though it's quite mean to say, has pretty much the polar opposite of each of those qualities (though for 'opinionated' you may simply substitute 'judgmental'). Once Aunt S. asked me what it was like being a foreigner. Because it was in Turkish, and because I didn't want to roundly belittle the entire Turkish race, I really had to struggle and think out my answer. After fumbling a bit, I arrived at this: that there are times, sometimes for weeks on end, that I just can't bring myself to go outside of the house. Perhaps I've inherited a touch of my grandmother's agoraphobia, but I don't think it's as strong as that. It's more that sometimes, I just don't feel like I have the energy to face the foreignness outside. I can't be bothered to speak Turkish and have people automatically not understand me because I'm foreign and their brains shut down (my Turkish isn't great, but it's not so bad or so heavily accented that I can't make it clear I want 200 grams of white cheese). I can't face people staring at me, or pointing, or even pointing me out to their kids going 'Look! There's a foreigner! What's she doing?' I can't face the drivers who won't give 2 seconds of their lives to slow down so they don't kill me, or the women who gather in doorways to gossip, then ignore my polite 'Pardon me,' several times no matter how loudly I say it, then mutter how rude foreigners are when I try to pass into the doorway. I can't always deal with the attention I get, even if it's positive, like when people think I'm cute or exotic or funny because I'm so obviously different.

The word in Turkish for foreigner is yabancı (it sounds like 'yah-bahn-jee'). You can be sure it's one of the Turkish first words any new foreigner here learns, because it murmurs in the air around us most of the time.

That, I told Aunt S., is what it's like being a foreigner. Of course, I pointed out, there are advantages. Big ones, like we get paid more for doing less work than locals (though unfortunately, in some schools I've worked at, the foreigners didn't know this and never could quite figure out the seething resentment of their Turkish counterparts). People go out of their way to help you, and fall all over themselves to make sure you have a good impression of their country. A lot of the time, business proprietors are utterly delighted to see you walk into their stores, and it's not just because they think you're rich-- it's also because they're flattered and thrilled you've chosen them, and they're just dying to know about your country and what you think of their country, and why the hell you came here when so many Turkish people are scrabbling to get out. Usually, I'm happy to oblige, and tell them how much I love Turkey and Turkish people and Turkish food. I'm usually even okay with letting them pinch LE's cheeks or pick him up and carry him away to show him off to other people because fair babies like him are apparently extra cute. Sometimes I actually don't have a desperate feeling of wanting to leave here and I try so hard to give back as much kindness as I get.

But sometimes, I just can't face it. I feel tired.

I'm starting to sound like I'm blaming this bad feeling on Turkey. I'm not. This is entirely down to me. It's my own feeling and how I perceive the world and my place in it. It's not an easy feeling to change. I can ignore it a lot of the time, but it's still there. I recently read An Equal Music by Vikram Seth, a story about chamber musicians in London. About halfway through the novel, it occurred to me that, although Vikram Seth is not a native Brit, he seamlessly and successfully wrote a lovely story, in the first person no less, about the internal and external lives and relationships of the people of his host country. 'How can he do that?' I wondered. How can he feel so confident and knowledgeable about Britain, where he wasn't brought up, to just write a novel like that? How can he get into the details of these people's lives without somehow poking fun at them for all the things that are different from his own culture? It's not just that Vikram Seth is a really wonderful writer with a knack for catching not only human foibles, but also the quirks and idiosyncrasies of the types of people in certain places, and portraying these in a way that might be funny but isn't cruel. There must also be something about Vikram Seth as a person, that his sensibilities allow him to parse out that which is human in all of us. I can't do this. I'm too Us or Them. Or Them and Me. I'd never be able to write a book from the point of view of Turkish people without feeling cynical about having them praise a plate of sucuk (a type of sausage) or kuru fasulye (overcooked navy beans in oily red water with bits of meat). In my story, someone's mother would always be going on about someone else's feet (while still others were thinking her right for doing so), characters would wake up ill from having sat in drafts, and people would be going on about Atatürk all the time. Even if I wasn't feeling mean-spirited, if I had a Turkish character do something perfectly mundane, like eat cheese for breakfast or haggle over the price of some clothes, I still would feel like I was somehow making fun, and I would be afraid of being perceived as making fun, even when I wasn't.

In Turkey, I will always be a foreigner. I could get citizenship and I'd still be one. I could be 50 years old, teaching English to schoolchildren, having been a Turkish citizen longer than any of them had been alive, and they'd still know they belonged here more than I do. My opinions, experience, and language will always have the taint of foreigner, and I'll always be (or feel) somehow less important as a result. At best, I could do everything possible to 'integrate' and change my behavior to be more 'Turkish,' study really hard to perfect my language, and maybe obtain a status like 'Foreign, but okay because she loves Turkey.' At worst, I'll just always be a bit of lighthearted comedy like that guy Balki in Perfect Strangers; human, yet an amusing antic waiting to happen. I don't think I'll ever quite understand what people say or what's going on around me and it's not just because of the spoken language. There is also the highly contextualized cultural language that decorates every interaction, and if I ever do understand it, it will still be as an outsider and my point of view will always have the cast of an anthropological observer.

So of course it's nothing wrong with Them. It's that I can't find a place here (outside of my foreign friends) where I'm comfortable as myself, and where I feel like people understand me as myself, as I want to be taken. I feel like a foreigner because I feel like everyone else is so foreign.

Funny/Not Funny

The Turkish Minister of Forestry and the Environment was quoted in yesterday's Vatan Gazette as saying that he trusts God to sort out the drought problem here, and that he's leaving it in God's hands (funny). I'm so glad Turkey's elected officials' strategy is to do nothing, and everyone is happy with that because they mentioned God (not funny). Istanbul's reservoirs are at about 20% capacity. All the government has done about this is raise the price of water by 130% and encourage the populace to buy dishwashers (funny/not funny). If the drought continues and water cuts increase over the coming summer, I'm curious if the ingenuous populace will think God doesn't favor AK Party, or if they'll think God is punishing us and we deserve it somehow. Only time will tell, and some AKP officials too, no doubt.

In other news, last week, a building exploded (not funny) in the part of Istanbul where BE works. This was because, in the same building, there was an illegal gin distillery and an illegal fireworks factory (funny). The tank of gin blew up first, which then ignited the illegal fireworks, blowing 3 floors off the building and killing 22 people (not funny). Among the 22 killed were eight passersby who stopped to gawp at the fire from the distillery, and who were then blown up by the fireworks explosion (a little bit funny?*). The owners of the two factories are nowhere to be found (totally predicatble).



*Maybe it's only funny if you live here and have seen how quickly gawpers appear out of nowhere to gather, stare, offer commentary, and as often as not, begin arguing or fighting. They gather for the smallest event, like someone standing on the street looking up. They gather for car accidents and further hold up traffic, even in areas where there are no houses or businesses or people or anything.

Bri's Meme

Again that word meme. Even though I know the pronunciation is different than the Turkish word, I still feel like I wrote Bri's Breast.

Speaking of meme, an aside. In Turkish, I know of two ways to say 'breastfeed.' One is the more widely used meme vermek (literally 'give the breast') and the other is emzirmek ('nurse'), which is the more formal word, used by doctors and medicine bottles. I've also heard "Emiyor mu? ('Is he sucking?)," asked when someone enters the room where I'm nursing, which I find to be a rather stupid question to ask of someone with her shirt pulled up and a baby's face in her breast. But I digress from my digression. When LE was first born, my mother-in-law always used 'meme vermek.' Whenever LE made a sound, no matter who all was in the room (and there often tended to be a slew of relatives around), she would start going "He's hungry! He's hungry! Give him the breast! Give him the breast!" My mother-in-law rarely says anything once. Perhaps she's used to everyone ignoring her. Or perhaps everyone ignores her because she witters on endlessly, repeating things all the time. Anyway, at some point she stopped shouting about my breast in mixed company. She started being wry. Or trying to, anyway. Now, whenever LE makes a sound (or does the much more subtle action of grabbing my breasts or shoving his face into them), someone invariably goes "What's wrong with him?" and someone else goes, "He's bored/hungry/tired/he wants me/whatever," and my mother-in-law goes, "Başka bir şey istiyor (he wants something else)," meaning LE wants my breast. Then she looks around the room wryly to make sure everyone got her clever reference. "Başka bir şey istiyor," she says several more times, looking wryly into each person's face to make sure no one missed her clever reference to what apparently has become a shameful habit of LE's.

For some reason I find this intensely annoying, though perhaps it's just because it's so predictable. But I can't help but wonder, why is it shameful to mention my breast in front of her own husband and son, or in front of other women, when the word 'breast' is clearly embedded in a phrase that refers to the fairly mundane act of my son getting some nourishment, and why was it not shameful in the first three months of LE's life, and if it's so awfully shameful to say meme, why not just say emzirmek? Unanswerable mysteries, I'm afraid. Perhaps it's just that she has so few opportunities to be wry. Again and again and again.

So here’s the meme (not breast) from Bri over at Unwellness.

The Rules
1. Link to the person that tagged you
2. Post the rules on your blog
3. Share 6 non-important things/quirks about your kid
4. Tag at least three people at the end of your post and link to their blogs
5. Let each person know they've been tagged by leaving a comment on their blog
6. Let the fun begin!

And here are LE's quirks, at least the six best ones I could think of. Either he's very quirky or I have nothing else to do during the day than notice and encourage his idiosyncrasies:

1) The boy is a dancing fool. Starting from about eight months, whenever he hears anything like music, he starts rocking out. At first it was so subtle that I wasn't even sure it was dancing, where he sort of hunched and un-hunched his back in a sitting position. So I tried turning the music off and on again, and sure enough, he was dancing. He gets a sort of glazed look in his eye, stops whatever he's doing, and gets his freak on. His repertoire of moves has expanded over the last three months to include head-bobbing and shaking, swaying, jumping, and bouncing up and down on his butt. Anything works, from proper music to advertisement jingles to rhythmic clapping or snapping. He even pretty much dances to the beat these days.

2) LE has inherited, to some extent, my grandmother's thumbs. This means that his thumbs easily and painlessly bend backwards to lie almost flat on his wrists. Many times I have gotten his wiggly little hands into a sleeve only to find that his thumbs bent back and didn't make it, giving me quite a start and thinking I had pulled his thumbs off. This bodes well for his future bar chats of showing off various gross body tricks.

3) LE has started begging for food like a dog, whether he's particularly hungry or not. If someone has food, he wants it. Perhaps I started this by feeding him bits from the table while he was crawling around on the floor because I thought it was funny when he ate like a dog. I should have known from my experience with dogs that this is a bad thing to teach. Now, if anyone's eating, he pulls himself up on their legs and jumps up and down giggling and shouting. Last week at our playgroup, the mothers were sitting on sofas balancing plates of snacks on our knees while we talked and watched the babies. LE didn't even limit himself to me for begging. He went to other mothers, tapping their legs, giggling, and trying to snatch things from their plates. Nothing to do but pop bits of food into his mouth.

4) A less cute habit is that as soon as his diaper comes off, LE grabs his bits. Rather violently. I first saw this when he was about three months old, and I was letting him kick around naked after a bath. I went off to fetch his clothes and when I came back, he was silent and looking shocked and disturbed because he'd gotten his bits caught in one of those early baby death grips, where they can grab but not necessarily let go. Now, he pulls and twists them. I would think it must hurt, but he doesn't seem to notice. He has drawn blood more than once. At first, I tried to stop him, but then I quit making a fuss thinking maybe it was my fuss that was encouraging him to do this. But he still does it, though less violently. Now I only stop him if he has poop on there. It makes him really mad when I stop him, often resulting in more poop-spreading that I care for. His foreskin, as it turns out, is very stretchy. Won't he just kill me if he reads this when he's older? Hehe.

5) Interestingly, LE has started yawning when someone else yawns. For some reason, I was really curious when he would start doing this, wondering if was an instinct or a social behavior. I guess it must be social. If he doesn't really have to yawn, he still makes the sound-- a big sigh with a 'Hummm' at the end.

6) And now, time to learn if I can attach pictures into here. LE makes this face on command:
It's called his Uggy Face. If you tell him to be uggy, this is what he does. Very uggy indeed.

So that's six. It was hard to limit myself to this. As per the rules, I'm going to tag someone else, Siobhan at realmotherhood. However, as usual I'll have to bend the 4th rule, because I only know one other blogger with a kid that Mrs. Bri hasn't tagged already.

My 90 minutes of Mommy Time, conveniently the length of a football match and broken up by two nursing sessions, has come to an end.

Baby Sleep and a Confession

So it's been nearly another month again since I last posted, and here I am feeling like I need to offer some sort of excuse. That's the problem of having a blog, I suppose-- sometimes it's just one more damn thing I need to do that I can't keep up with.

But really, I have a good excuse, which is that LE has stopped napping. Completely stopped. He kind of stopped in America, which I attributed to the 10-hour time difference plus all the interesting and wonderful things going on at all times, plus a good dose of separation anxiety. I hoped he'd return to his usual schedule upon coming back to Turkey, but no. No naps.

I'm a selfish, selfish Mommy. While I know the Nap is for the baby, to let him rest and recharge and grow and feel good, in reality the Nap is for me. Up to three hours of baby-free Mommy time is really freaking great, as it turns out. Instead, LE is attached to me all day. Though he's not walking yet, he gets around just fine, and gets into everything without a problem. As much as we've baby-proofed the house, there are still things I don't want him to have and places I don't want him to be. For example, I don't want him to have the toilet brush or the kitchen trash, and I don't want him to be under the desk in the jungle of computer cords. Naturally, these and other dangerous places and disgusting things are what he wants most of all, over and over again. Plus he doesn't like it if I'm not looking at him. Plus, he's tall enough to reach the keyboard and the mouse if I attempt to use the computer. So it's really just better to not bother. My days are now full of snatched moments on a crossword puzzle when LE isn't demanding that I look at him, and hours of Roll The Ball, Throw The Toy, Hide From The Baby, among other riveting sports (okay, I'm not so cynical as I'm coming off as because I do get a kick out of playing with the little fellow, however repetitive the games might be because I LOVE LOVE LOVE making him laugh), and more hours of listening to endless whimpering and whining because he's tired. Exhausted. Puffy, red-rimmed eyes. Sloppy, clumsy movements. Dozing off for a few seconds sitting up, then fighting with all his might to make it go away. But no matter how tired he is, or how completely asleep he is while nursing, as soon as I try to get him into his bed, BAM! Screaming, writhing, and no sleep.

I've tried everything, really. Staying by his bed for hours shushing and singing and patting and rubbing until he's asleep only to have him wake up five or ten minutes later. Rocking him in his carseat. Taking him out for walks (where he stays awake until we're five minutes from home and I get all optimistic but he usually wakes up again as soon as the key is in the door). Changing his nap times. Eliminating a nap. Feeding him more. Leaving him to cry for varying amounts of time. No dice. This past Monday, he woke up at 5am. I got him to nap for about fifteen minutes in the middle of the day, then he was up until 7pm. That's right, an 11-month-old baby awake for fourteen hours. Little maniac.

This was a guy who used to love his naps. About 2 hours after breakfast he'd go 'Mah!,' have a nurse, and fall asleep for two hours. Repeat after lunch, though perhaps it was a little harder going for the second one. Lately I've just resorted to letting him fall asleep on me while nursing and staying put with a book until he wakes up or I have to pee, whichever comes first. Good thing I bought a lot of books in the US.

But that's not really the confession I promised you in the title. The confession is this: I finally got fed up with LE not sleeping at night, and decided to try the Evil and Cruel and Much Warned Against Cry It Out.

(*Cue Crunchy gasps and moaning*)

My husband, for all that's good about him, is completely useless with helping out at night. For about six months, the most sleep I could hope for was about 3 hours a night, very broken. A couple nights I got two straight hours and absolutely felt like a million bucks the next day. LE got to be too active to have in bed with me, but he wouldn't stay in his own bed, and more often than not he just thought the middle of the night was time to play and abuse me in various ways. There were nights he'd be screaming in his crib right next to me and I wouldn't wake up, I was so tired. Even still, no help from my husband, who by then was sleeping in the guest bed with the door closed so as not to be disturbed. His excuse was that he had to go to work, because apparently I was just sitting on my bum eating bon bons all day. Even in America when we shared a bed, and LE was between us hitting my face and refusing to sleep, BE just ignored it and wouldn't help. His excuse then was that he was too tired. I begged, I screamed, I cried, I probably pissed off the neighbors at 3am, but no help. So in the end, I had a few goals: get some damn sleep, save the marriage, not be mad at my baby all night, and not murder BE for being, quite frankly, a complete asshole. A side goal was to not endanger LE, because I started getting pretty sloppy during the day and would forget to do things like strap him into his high chair or carseat, and I almost dropped him a few times, and I bumped his head and legs on the doorjamb more than a few times, and he got some pretty nasty rashes from me totally forgetting to change his diaper a few mornings, feeding him his breakfast and asking him, 'Why on earth do I keep smelling poo?'

And you know what? Crying it out worked. So there. It was awful the first couple of nights. Really, unbelievably awful. The first day I tried it for a nap, following Dr. Weissbluth's plan of leaving him for an hour then getting him up and trying it again later if it didn't work. It didn't work. Somewhere in that hour I thought to myself, 'What if he's hurt?' but I resisted. When I went to him, he didn't even hate me for leaving him. He was just really happy to see me and stopped crying immediately, but his little chin and hands had blood all over them where he'd apparently banged his mouth on the edge of the bed and cut the inside of his lip on his teeth. I would have preferred it if he hated me a little, I felt so guilty. The first night he stood in his bed and cried for two whole hours before finally settling down for the rest of the night. The next night it was an hour, then after that, zero to fifteen minutes. Now he sleeps all night. Really all night. Or, at least until 5am. It's a miracle.

The second day of leaving him for a nap, I was less strong, thinking of his poor lip and how happy he would be to see me. I went online to the Crunchiest Mommy place I know, the Mothering.com forums. My goal in doing this was to make myself feel really, really bad about leaving him to cry. Like I really needed to feel worse. And it worked, all those crunchies confessing that they were thinking about leaving their babies to cry, and all those other crunchies bustling in with a flurry of 'Don't do it, Sister!' and citing research about how leaving babies to cry makes them learning disabled or socially inept or evil or serial killers or obese. One mother cleverly pointed out that wolves don't leave their babies alone to whimper in other caves so nor should we. And even though I thought, 'Yeah, but wolves don't cook their meat either, and they smell each others' butts,' I still felt bad, specious reasoning aside. Damn hippies.

So there it is. I've confessed. I'd like to think the refusal to nap and the all-night sleep are related, but he quit napping well before I started leaving him to cry. Now at least he's getting 9 hours at night instead of 4 hours at night and not much in the day. We're sleeping at night, but there's no Mommy Time anymore. The Crunchies would probably say this is some sort of cosmic retribution, not having any free time. And perhaps it is. I've thought and thought about it, and finally arrived at the conclusion that it's better he sleeps at night. At least I don't hate my husband all the time, and I certainly feel better.

I know. It all sounds like desperate justification. It kind of is. But my menfolk are back from the market, meaning my 90 minutes of Mommy Time for this week are over, and part of that 90 minutes was spent on laundry. I have list of notes of things to blog about in the coming days, and I think I'll just have to learn some ways to do it, even with LE whacking the mouse.

Off for a rousing 'I'm Bringing Home A Baby Bumblebee.' LE can bring home the bumblebee and smash it up quite adeptly. After that he whacks himself in the face.

Notes From The American Front

I know. I'm a Bad Blogger. Home for the holidays and nary a post for a month. Part of it is that LE seems to have decided that naps are no longer necessary. Part of it was all the relatives and visitors and food and, quite frankly, a lot of much better and more interesting things going on than blogging.

We've started trying to get LE to sleep by putting in the long fight, after nearly a month of no naps. He's starting to turn into one of those babies no one can deal with, from lack of sleep. You know the kind. Whinges when he's in the high chair. Whinges when he's on the floor, then tips over and bumps his head. Whinges when you hold him. Whinges when you don't. Yesterday I sat next to him for an hour till he slept. Today my mom and I switched off with him for 2 hours (mostly her) while he refused to sleep, and he eventually gave up and slept with his eyes open, snoring. I seem to remember a Grimm fairy tale called The Willful Child. It had a very bad ending for said child. I'll have to read it to him someday.

I'll post more on baby sleep another time. It's become an obsession for me lately. But for now, I want to stick to America. Let it not be said I don't love freedom. I leave tomorrow and as usual, I'm not ready to return to the land of No Pork and Nosy Strangers. I'm kind of pissed off about it, actually.

America, for someone who's been away for awhile, is cool. Broad flat sidewalks. Fresh air. Trees and grass. Very little trash. Beautiful skies. Great things to buy. I develop this uncontrollable greed when I'm here, maybe from lack of cool things to buy in Turkey, and probably also from the feeling that I may never have a chance to buy it again, so I need it Now Now Now!! I always have to pay for an extra piece of luggage on the return trip, no matter how hard I try. It doesn't even matter that my husband is with me, allowing for two more suitcases. Or that the baby allows for one more. I've still filled an extra box. That the airlines keep chipping away at the weight limits every year isn't helping.

I haven't nearly gotten run over even once here, not even close. But a weird thing American drivers do is that if you signal to change lanes, they won't let you in. Even if they're several car lengths behind, they speed up so you can't go in front of them. There must be something to be said here about capitalism, or American ambition, or something. In a previous post, I mentioned that American TV commercials are mostly about cars and food. This is no longer strictly true. They're still there, but most of the commercials I've seen this trip are about prescription and non-prescription medications (and seriously, how do they not see how ridiculous it is to list all those side-effects when trying to push a medicine? Is the cure ever better than the new symptoms?), and slick or not-so-slick ads about debt payment and debt consolidation. There must be something to be said here too, about America.


I have seen many bare baby heads. In Turkey, the only babies' heads I see other than my own baby's are my foreign friends' babies' heads. A bare baby head outdoors in Turkey is a non-existent sight. Quite how they keep their babies from whipping their hats off is beyond me. Babies' heads look really nice to me after them always being covered up for the supposedly Siberian Turkish winters. And springs and falls. And summers too, really. LE's even been out with bare feet a few times. He didn't get sick. And never once, NEVER ONCE, has a single stranger approached me to tell me how I've done something that will make my baby get sick, and not one single person (besides friends and relatives) has either kissed or touched him. It's bliss, seriously. I'll bet I get back to Istanbul having gone all soft in my baby-protecting skills.

BE and I left LE for a night without Mommy for the first time in his life, for New Year's Eve. Never once did I feel an urge to call and check if he was okay. If he wasn't, I didn't want to know, feeling light as I did not having a baby attached to me. Which isn't to say I didn't think about him constantly. At the party we went to, a woman started telling us about her job photographing newborns at the hospital. I kept piping in with information about LE as a newborn, assuming that the conversation was about babies. It wasn't. It was about this woman's feelings towards her experiences engaging with new babies and new parents. Eventually, like I've always tended to do at any party I've ever gone to, I ended up in the basement on a sofa having basement conversations with a big smelly, cuddly dog on my feet. There was a guy named Leo from Wisconsin. He kept saying he was from Wisconsin. He had a lot of stories to tell, very long ones, and most of them were about Wisconsin and things that happened to him there. Sometimes Michigan figured in a story.

My friend B was the one who invited us to the party, followed by another party at a club. B is one of the few friends I've kept in touch with in the US. We pick up where we left off like no time has passed, the baby just another amusement. He's not from Wisconsin, but he's half Norwegian and tried to contribute to the Wisconsin talk. Leo, however, was a one-upper kind of fellow, and always had a better story. If it wasn't better, it was just longer. B's stories are funnier, though this Leo was a pleasant enough fellow.

I love the basement. I'm glad I haven't changed much. In fact, my American self seems to be stuck at about 6 years ago. I fail to see a need or a point to having high-definition TV, or a Blackberry, and there's all this stuff in the common cultural currency I've never heard of. I remember it was last year that I finally realized Paris Hilton wasn't a hotel, so perhaps this is a blessing.

Many people at this club we went to were in costume. B warned us ahead of time that there would be people in costume, but that it wasn't required. There was clearly some theme to these costumes, though B and I couldn't identify it. We had fun trying, though. Moulin Rouge meets Jules Verne. Scary 1920s carnival meets Jack the Ripper London. The White Stripes meet a wacky inventor of dirigibles and a few Anne Rice New Orleans whores. All very Victorian with something gadget-y yet off about it. For B, a clown lurking in a dim alleyway with an ether rag figured heavily in his descriptions. He has a pathological fear of clowns, and fortunately for him, there weren't any there. There were a lot of vests, though, and bowler hats, and goggles, and walking sticks. Crinoline and corsets. I saw a few leather corsets with little pockets for cell phones cleverly attached to the sides. I was impressed by this, and several times found myself wondering where these people do their shopping. I finally asked a guy in a vest, bowler, and tails what the theme of this party was. He started on about people who want to do their own thing and then said something about Burning Man, at which point I lost the plot. The mention of Burning Man did help to explain, though, the acrobats and the prevalence of large moving gadgets. B asked another person what the theme was and she said it was called Steampunk. B and I had to look this up on Wikipedia.


But even though I didn't really know what was going on, I didn't feel uncool. I was all prepared to feel uncool. Maybe I'm too old to feel uncool. Maybe I've accepted being forever uncool because of being a mom. Maybe because people here are really nice. Most people at the party and club were thirtysomethings like me. Maybe it's the 20somethings that go around making each other feel uncool. In any case, when I asked that guy about the theme of this party, he seemed more pleased to have a chance to explain than a chance to make me feel uncool. For my part, my 'costume' was in the details. I went as 'Someone Without A Baby Attached To Her.' As such, I wore my hair down for the first time in 11 months. I wore earrings. And a necklace. This was because the baby wasn't attached to me, and so wouldn't be there to keep grabbing at hair and jewelry. I also wore lipstick, free as I was to not worry about getting lipstick all over the baby's face by kissing him. As we were leaving the club, a drunk guy fell on the floor in front of B, who neatly picked him up and propped him back against the bar. As I passed, he lurched out again with a hand extended towards my head, and I just dodged it as swiftly and automatically as I do a baby hand.

Through some great stroke of luck, we found a taxi home. We'd managed to leave just as the bars were closing, and from the taxi we saw, on every block and corner, pockets of people leaping out trying to hail our taxi. Our taxi driver was Somalian. Apropos of nothing, BE said in Turkish that he hoped LE was sleeping well, because Insallah is used to mean 'I hope' in Turkish. The driver picked up right away on the Insallah and they immediately established the camaraderie of coreligionists, so that was just like Turkey, my husband getting into a taxi and finding a point of commonality with which to befriend the driver. It's a really sweet thing about him, how he makes friends with everyone. The taxi driver's wife was expecting a baby, so we all talked about that for awhile.

There it is then. I can hear LE continuing to not sleep downstairs, and I can hear that even my mom has given up trying. No matter. We're going home tomorrow and the whole sleep thing is bound to be screwed up for awhile anyway. I have 16 hours on a plane plus a 4 hour layover with a baby who thinks I'm a jungle gym to look forward too. I also expect some stern looks from counter personnel for my bags being slightly overweight.

And I didn't make any New Year's resolutions. I expect I'll be fine.