maybe everything isn't hopeless bullshit

Still in self-imposed physical rehab mode after the two months of near-complete immobility, but...

I'm so thankful for so many things right now.

I'm thankful that the blood clot appears to be absorbing into my body so that it's less likely the placenta abruption will get bigger. This is after the doctor had told me to be prepared for the baby to die about three weeks ago.

I'm thankful that I'm allowed to move around even if just slowly, with the doctor's permission. If the medical establishment, which tends to be overly cautious about pregnancy, gives the go-ahead, I do have that extra dose of assurance.

I'm thankful that I was able to go for a crawling swim yesterday. It felt so good to be in the pool. 

I'm especially thankful that I can go back to cooking for everyone at home. That the organic produce store I order from called ahead to deliver due to the incoming typhoon and the deliveryman volunteered without prompting to carry a whole box of groceries up the five flights to my apartment door because he'd remembered that I'm pregnant from an exchange more than two months ago. It's so wonderful to have a reliable, ethical food source with thoughtful customer service. Sure it's a little pricier than the traditional markets, but accounting for everything it's worth it. Plus with the hard winter and now typhoon, produce prices have been skyrocketing from other sources anyway.

It makes me really happy to be more active, and to be able to watch my family eat, knowing nothing but the best ingredients cooked in a healthful way are nourishing their physical well-being. 

Thank you, God, thank you. 

the university of life

As I was spending some time singing worship songs today (something I haven't wanted to do in a long, long time), I was struck by how I am still constantly learning even the most basic skills and attitudes for living responsibly.

Every church I've ever attended until I moved to Israel had eventually "drafted" me into its song worship team, and each timespan on every team had brought up issues I spent a lot of time and energy wrestling with. Such as: what is the point of leading song worship? What is the purpose of song worship itself? Am I doing it right? Am I leading as helpfully as I can? Have I chose the right songs or is the congregation simply on autopilot? I'd dealt with procrastinators who never practiced the songs ahead of time so that I had to spend excess time teaching them on the spot. I've overreached and chosen songs I wasn't familiar enough to lead with and trainwrecked entire song worship services. There were a couple of times when I got lectured by church leadership on choosing songs that were too secular because at the time I had been focused mainly on seekers.

It all left a wary feeling towards leading song worship, but now looking back, I'm starting to appreciate all the friction and struggling. I learned a lot in searching for the questions that surfaced. I've come to a better understanding and relationship regarding service roles and purposes. I almost want to email the team coordinator from many years ago to thank him for all of his silent and vocal critiques. He's probably forgotten all about me by now though, or remember me as a rebellious blip the way most church leadership I've rubbed shoulders with seem to regard me. Oh well.

Then my mind wandered over to when I was the ruckus manager for my grad school a cappella group. To be honest, I wasn't too clear at the time on the purpose of my position or even the mission of our group. We were a Christian a cappella group, which means that it's obviously not enough just to entertain our audience. Our music has to MEAN SOMETHING and inspire and evangelize or something. I don't know. As ruckus manager, I was given two hours every week for us to do something together. Now I understand the role to help everyone bond better. Knowing that *now*, I would have went out of my way to organize exploratory activities throughout Pittsburgh. But being rather muddle-minded at the time, we ended up doing a lot of administrative details during those windows of time per the group director's request and the most outspoken member of the group announced at the end of that season that "ruckus is rather lacking this year."

Lesson learned... If I don't know the purpose or reason for something, FIND OUT. As soon as possible. Don't just trudge through as the clock counts down. I feel bad for the wasted opportunity and lousy time I was in charge of. All the more reason to now size up any situation and make the best of things in an active way.

I really admire my cousin T who is years younger than I am, yet had the boldness to travel around the world by herself, live in Iraq for a year as a US agent, write for the AP, manage her own affairs and car purchases, etc. She has vented before that she's had to be so independent because her parents never had her back aside from the basic room and board. I, on the other hand, suspect that I have been coddled for most of my life regarding fending for myself financially and with personal agency. Although I was left alone most of the time, my meals and chores were always done for me. Any desire to make a decision for myself or undertake a more off-the-beaten-track aspiration was quashed under excessive parental doubting and negativity. And I didn't have the strength of mind or spirit as my cousin to say, well, I'm still going to try on my own anyway.

This is something I'm keeping in mind as I raise my kids. When they experience failure, I hope I can help them see the lessons they can use. And if they are setting themselves up for the possibility of such failure, I hope I can advise and instruct in the best ways to lessen risk but never infringe upon the absolute necessity for them to exercise their flying muscles. I will never demand of them: "Can you guarantee that you will succeed? Can you promise that you won't fail?" (How I hated that!) I do not want my children to end up having to learn for the first time only in their late 20's/early 30s how to stand up for themselves and take responsibilities for their own decisions--and be willing to make decisions and own completely even the ones that turn out badly. I want them to be better people than their mother.

filling my present-day while on house arrest

Since the days now mostly consist of me trying to pass the time without going berserk, I think a game plan needs to be in place. I recall wishing to have more time to do other things I don't have time for once I started working again. While I was lesson/assignment planning, addressing student requests for certain things, grading, and designing presentations, etc., I'd wanted to have more time to study Hebrew, Japanese, French... Japanese would be more practical in Taiwan, French would be more practical for the family's periodic work trips to Europe, but Hebrew is what most of my non-American and non-Chinese friends post on FB, etc. Plus I do have a wary relationship with the Japanese language; a part of me, and this is rather silly, rebells against voluntarily studying a language that I would have been forced to learn under colonial rule.

So, language learning. I have Rosetta Stone (good marketing, meh product) for Japanese, and I found a comprehensive and very well done podcast for Hebrew that I may have to pay for if I head into the intermediate levels. Duolingo online for French.

What else....well, swimming/hiking/running are out. But I found some youtube videos that serve as tutorials for toning exercises. I think for a while back in middle school and high school before a surgery, exercise to me was what not eating was for people suffering anorexia. Now that I am forced to choose between this form of helping me feel in control vs. letting my body self-image go to rot for the safety of the baby, there is a psychological/mental process going on that is currently too raw to dwell upon much for now.

So, a little bit of old-fashioned calisthenics via modern technology. Just like bed rest: Can't hurt might help why not.

I'd wanted to master more classic Taiwanese dishes that I never really learned how to cook because (1) my mom or grandmother made them so I didn't have to, (2) the ingredients are difficult to find abroad, and (3) I could usually just buy take-out versions for cheap whenever I was in town. Now's my chance to experiment with (as two examples of what I've done so far) how to make green bean soup with winter gourd sugar via the rice cooker and stir-fried vermillion with numerous ingredients that need to be individually grated, blanched, etc. Multiple steps in prepping and cooking for one dish used to annoy me, but I'm starting to appreciate all the finger work and time I must invest into producing a final nutritious tasty product for the family to eat. Time is not of the essence, and it's a way for me to eat more intentionally after having walked through a series of non-demanding but still helpful activity for rebuilding my decimated physical stamina.

So, cooking. Ordering from local farms with sustainable practices and keeping the fridge orderly with no ingredients left behind.

Declan discovered Uno, a good purchase by Daniel. We played for like two hours straight of Uno yesterday. I should spend more time with the kids. That's a perpetual mantra and guilt, the latter emotion because I get so easily irritated by them. I wish I'm an Earth Mom type that's super nurturing and patient and kind. I know of several moms for whom this appears to be their natural temperament. Sadly, I've always gravitated more towards Captain Von Trapp than Maria in my style of going about life.

So, spending more time with the family. Aside from finding local events and helping to plan outings that way, there are movies, books, boardgames... and with kids and husband, chores as well. Those take time too.

If I just take it one day at a time and not get discouraged about the likely possibility that this will be IT for the next five months for me or bemoan/revisit all the original summer visitations with friends and family that I have now scrapped, I might just make it.

Maybe.

informal physical rehab

Apparently there are people who get paid as medical experiment guinea pigs to lie in bed, immobilized, for weeks. One of the purposes for said experiment is to see what effects such immobility can have on the human body.

I wish I got paid for that shit.

It's been about seven weeks since I started bed rest. There was a brief light at the end of the tunnel about two weeks ago, when my OBGYN gave the first optimistic update about the conditions of the fetus and his/her surrounding environments aka my uterus/placenta. I came home feeling unusually positive, and spent the following day sitting up to catch up on grading my students' homework and essays. Then, I started bleeding again that night. Back to the ER, back to full bed rest.

But I can feel it; I feel my muscles deteriorating. I got the sense that this is abnormal and somehow very wrong. I googled searched about bed rest and found medical studies that dithers about its benefits. My conclusion thus far is that bed rest for my condition (sometimes bleeding, sometimes not) is more of a "can't hurt might help why don't we try it" kind of treatment. Well, I have to say in my case, the negative impact of bed rest at this point might be starting to outweigh the potential--and I must stress only potential, not proven--benefits of this why not prescription. So about two days ago, I said F this, and tried to get up to clean the apartment, straighten out the fridge, and make home meals again for the family. I still did a lot of resting, as now the least bit of activity tires me out within minutes. I woke up the next day with excruciating back pain. Regarding pain, I know from my years of competing athletically that I have a fairly high pain tolerance. But by last night, I was a bawling mess as Daniel deep massaged my back. I really just lost it. I felt true despair. I suspect the source of the paralyzing burning is the muscle mass underneath my scapula. Because I used my arms to wash and chop up vegetables, and to stir the wok. Each pressing down of the thumbs on my back set off such spikes in unpleasant sensation that I was torn between wanting to vomit or split in half.

I'm trying to remember how much pain I endured when I first started running competitively, and how long it lasted before I could walk without stiff legs (about a week). I can take a week of excruciating pain. I just can't let the pain win. It woke me up at 3:30am this morning, and by 4:30am I figured there's no point trying to find a less painful sleeping position. So I got up and washed the dishes/cleaned the kitchen/search online for local activities to help Daniel keep the kids busy until the birds started singing, the sun came up, and the kids woke up.

Thank God all my students' grades are calculated and submitted. This past semester was a complete trainwreck. I'm so relieved to be done with it. For about two weeks, I fielded emails from apathetic students who suddenly started caring terribly about their final grades until my self-imposed deadline of submitting to the department on 1 July. I really appreciate the intellectual integrity and moral understanding about grades and the student-teacher relationship regarding them that my CMU director drilled into me. It stopped me from caving in after the eighth round of student pleadings for special treatment.

My body has never felt so disastrously broken. I guess I have had an easy life. I wonder if I will ever feel okay again about myself.

my life doesn't deserve a title

I am physically hurting, emotionally crippled, scared, scornful at myself and others, disappointed, resentful, wistful, and frustrated

And many other things

I had been counting down the days until the Belgium/Paris trip next month, through the thick haze of constant pregnancy nausea and dizziness so intense I haven't even registered the frequent short earthquakes that'd been occurring sporadically for the last three weeks. My class of students clued me in during one session; I thought they were joking.

Now, no more Belgium and the forests there that I love to run through. No more Paris and attending a friend's wedding there. No more trip to Israel later to attend another friend's wedding there either, or do a swim-across-the-Kinneret event with another friend as planned.

Instead bed rest, immobility as much as possible, with continued nausea and dizziness as they bump up my progesterone levels through injections and pills. Waiting and seeing whether the person growing in me will live or be expelled. Others praying for the baby's placenta, which has so far ripped from its anchoring in my reproductive organ by 30-50%, to stay intact, maybe heal. I have to be honest: personally, I would not mind that much if I have a miscarriage. There, I said it. I am that sick of being sick. But I can't even have a normal miscarriage if I can't have a normal pregnancy. Instead, I am offered inane accounts of other people's straightforward miscarriage experiences, or I-feel-ya sympathies comparing their 38+ week difficulties or minor pregnancy issues with my current situation. This is not the Woe-is-me competition, but honestly you have no f*cking idea what I'm going through right now. A few people get it; a friend in Israel who wrote and shared about her own truly difficult pregnancy circumstances, a local mom who didn't ask periodically like everyone else "Are you better yet?", a friend in Utah who reassured me about premie support and dates of viability. They didn't laugh as someone did when I started crying while sharing about the first day of heavy bleeding. Yes, laughed. I feel bad for this future therapist's patients.

Thank God substitutes were found within the week to take over the rest of the term for my three classes. I wish I could have finished things out. I still need to do all the grading and the lesson planning, with the bonus now of needing to write out a report so someone else can deliver my plans in class and get paid my salary. The money is whatever; I just hope the students don't miss me at all (which also means I'm pretty dispensable) or feel cheated out of a decent course (ugh).

Now I need to lie back down.

first ever experience of a taiwan running event

Participated in a running event organized by the Miaoli County Postal Service...The event was located about 14K from my city. This is my first time EVER running in a Taiwan distance event, so super exciting.

Reflections:

1. The air quality in the county is so much better. I plan to visit the area again just for fun.

2. Are running events in Taiwan always so...calm? I started cheering the returning 21K runners when they started appearing, but it seemed like I was the only one and the other runners seemed to find me strange. No acknowledgement whatsoever from the runners I was cheering on either, so I eventually just kept to myself and ran (silently) like everyone else.

3. After the races I'd attended in the US, runners usually received bananas, oranges, and bagels. In Israel, I had gotten dates and Israeli bagel. After today's race, I got meatball soup and rice noodles. Never knew these were good recovery food!

4. Newfound appreciation/respect for the Eighteen Peaks Mountain. Due to prolonged illness and bronchitis, I'd only ran three times (4-6K lengths) in the last two months. My expectation going in today was just to finish. Was pleasantly surprised to find how much Eighteen Peaks Mt. had prepared me for the hills, which seemed like nothing (save one really big one, which ironically was the south end of the Eighteen Peaks Mt).

My result for the 11K: chip time 1hr 8min; age division: 23th/460 (prize money: the equivalent of ~ US$3 or 12 shekels -- I know, I'm RICH); Total placement: 324th/2808. I'm sharing so much of this rather ho-hum data because this is actually one of the few times I have really felt a sense of accomplishment after the race. I had almost forfeited due to various reasons (such as forgetting my sports bra and discovering I'm about six weeks pregnant), so thank you God!

pacing at the starting line

The first class I teach for this semester begins on Thursday. I have a training session to attend tomorrow (Wednesday). Vegetarian lunch provided--yes! Hopefully the training session would help me to finally incorporate the E3 platform in helping my students. Unlike Blackboard, which CMU used when I was teaching there, E3 is not so visually-intuitive but the students seem receptive enough to using it, so why not adopt this resource?

Still trying to figure out this work-family balance, if it is in fact a balance framework I should be striving for. During the winter break that just ended, which was really just solo parenting as I shepherd the kids between Hsinchu, Taipei, and Kaohsiung (lesson learned: the kids are only borderline ready in staying at hostels) while Daniel was at a conference in Italy, I started cramming on parenting skills again by re-reading books by Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish. There was a time when I decided to just use my own intuition since our family life was just too crazy with all the international moves, but the amount of bickering between the kids had become intolerable, and surprisingly Siblings Without Rivalry has helped a great deal in giving me some strategies that worked much better than just yelling for everyone to settle down. So now I have five other parenting books that's been standing on my bookshelf for a while and I plan to read (in some cases re-read) them all, probably during the one or half hour I have to myself before my own bedtime. Better than nothing, right?

I also recently acquired a cooking gadget called a Thermomix. Some people here call it "the German maid" because it's produced by a German company and it basically revolutionizes cooking. I'm not using that word lightly; just youtube or google it to get a shallow understanding of how much it dummy-proofs mainly stir-fry/steaming methods of cooking as well as baking preparation. It has a built-in scale and everything. Of course it costs literally more than a brand-new washing machine, but I think it's worth the investment in food safety (more and more of an issue in Taiwan as well) and just more ease of home cooking. I really need the motivation as eating out in Taiwan is still too convenient and habitual.

So, as a new semester begins, this is a little bit of what's been preoccupying me.