"The Sleep [Non]Sense Program" V. The I Ching

Yesterday Night

11:43 p.m.: Wake up next to Clara, who's sleeping peacefully in my bed with me. David is out at a fundraiser for his non-profit Spacetaker.org at Dean's Credit Clothing. Dean's is a bar, and the fundraiser features a fashion show where models strut down a makeshift runway, wearing stylish and skimpy fashions from Erotic Cabaret Boutique. The suggested donation for the evening is $10.00 at the door, meaning it's not exactly a fundraiser. It's a party where some funds might be raised.

11:45 p.m.: Get up and go to kitchen for a drink of water. Spy plastic baggie containing chocolate brownie cookies purchased last Saturday at the Farmer's Market. Decide I HAVE to get rid of these cookies so that I stop consuming them. Solve problem by eating what remains of them. Wash them down with two glasses of really cold Vanilla soymilk. The Dessert Lady, who homemakes these wicked-good cookies among others, sticks computer lables with the printed ingredients on her $5 baggies. The surprising ingredient in the chocolate brownie cookies is coffee. Remember this when I'm back in bed, tossing and turning and tossing and turning, trying not to roll over onto Clara.

3:23 a.m.: Curse the chocolate brownie cookies. Look at Clara, who's sleeping but waving her arms up and down in a "Danger, danger Will Robinson" way. Wonder what she's dreaming about. Consider the I Ching and praise Confucious for leaving the human race with such a wise, useful book.

* * *

The other night, I decided that it was time for Clara to "learn how to fall asleep on her own," which is what the blasted "Sleep Sense Program" promised would happen, or else I'd get my money back. David agreed to go ahead with the plan: we would put her in her crib -- awake! this is important (?) -- and wait a predetermined amount of time before entering her room to help her 1) stop crying and 2) get back to work on putting herself to sleep. And cry she would, no doubt about it. We were just gonna have to deal with that.

David and I determined that we'd leave her alone for no more than three minutes at a time before returning to try and calm Clara. Clara cried for 2 hours: inconsolable, hyperventilating, and choking on her own saliva. Finally, I stopped leaving the room and just lay down on the floor next to her crib, praying to the BVM to help me stay strong.

The next night when I went to put Clara in her bed after her "bedtime routine," where I repeated the "key phrase" night-night time often while bathing, massaging, dressing, singing to and nursing her, she started wailing immediately, freaking out about being anywhere near her crib.

That was the end of that. "The Sleep [Non]Sense Program" was damaging my baby. I picked Clara up (a big NO NO in the "Sleep [Non]Sense Program") and held her and danced with her, nursed her, played her some Bob Dylan -- "To Make You Feel My Love" -- and then put her in the swing, where she slept soundly from 7:45 until 12:30 a.m.

The next day, I felt as if I were the worst mother in the world: not only had I failed to teach my four month old to soothe herself and fall asleep on her own, but also I had traumatized her and made her afraid of her crib and the world in general.

My own mother tried to console me by telling me that, yes, it was hard, but that once Clara learned to fall asleep on her own, it would be better for both of us. Then she told me that the child she let cry the longest in the crib was Marco, my brother who seven years ago nearly died at dawn on a lawn in Oxnard, CA from a speedball injection.

Her consolation was no prize, let's just say.

I know Rome wasn't built in a day and all that. I know that if I want Clara to learn to sleep on her own, I have to be CONSISTENT. Consistency is the mother of all intervention. I have to put her down the next night in her crib and let her cry and cry until she realizes that going to bed without Mommy is not so bad and she starts cooing to her stuffed animal and giggling herself to sleep.

But, we don't live in Rome; we live in Houston, TX, which requires an enormous amount of effort to weather, and therefore an enormous amount of comfort to compensate for the horribleness that is a Houston Summer. Clara is a baby, and I'm going to baby my baby. She can learn to fall asleep on her own later.

Which brings me to the I Ching. The I Ching, otherwise known as the Book of Changes, has saved my ass in the past 15 years. This book has the ability to connect me with that subconsicous part of myself that refuses to come out of hiding unless I'm asleep or drunk.

The way the I Ching works: Ask a question -- an open ended question -- while tossing three pennies six times. Each toss results in a static or changing line in the hexagram you're building. Keep your question in mind the whole time you're tossing the coins and building the hexagram. After you have your hexagram (mine for this question was #52 -- Keeping Still), consult the oracle inside the book for the answer to your question.

So I did. I asked the question: "How can I be the best mother to Clara in the wake of the trauma I may have caused her with the Sleep [Non]Sense Program?" The answer, as you will see, could not have been more specific:

"If you feel any hesitation as you are just beginning something [the sleep [non]sense program], trust in your doubts and change your direction. Trust any feelings of your first judgements as a kind of reverse beginner's luck. Careful: your reaction to second thoughts should be a shift in direction, not a reversal, not a pulling back. The impetus for your direction remains valid and you do not fulfill an impetus by quelling it" (The I Ching: A New Interpretation for Modern Times, by Sam Reifler).

Bingo!

I DO understand that learning how to fall asleep on one's own is important. My impetus to help Clara do that is valiant (says the sleep-deprived-insomniac mother). However, the Sleep [Non]Sense Program is not the way. I want my money back.

For now, the "shift in direction" is to let Clara have more room in the king-size bed I share with David and her. That way, her flailing arms won't wake me as often. I hope that this will work while I figure out how to get her to love her crib and giggle herself to sleep.

Happy Father's Day

My dad's motto is "Everyone loves the smell of his own farts."

He has hotboxed his children in a moving vehicle more times than I can count. The worst offences take place in cars with automatic window locks. He locks the windows to make sure we can't roll them down to dissipate the smelly fart. He doesn't lock the windows to humor us; he honestly does it to make sure he can smell his own fart before we try to save ourselves from the fumes. He is serious about his farts. Not one shall go unsmelt if he can help it.

My father praises my three month old daughter, Clara, for being a "man-farter." The first time he heard her fart, he wasn't even in the room. Clara's fart was so loud and resonant that he could hear it while he was brushing his teeth. "Alright, Clara!" he shouted from the bathroom, his speech garbled by toothpaste. He came to the doorway of the bedroom where Clara and I were rocking, looked me in the eye and announced, in a hushed, proud tone: "Clara is a man-farter!" Now every time my daughter farts, I think of my dad. It's sweet, really. I call him to tell him this. He laughs and repeats proudly: "Clara is a man-farter!" I'm sure that after my dad's gone, a fart will make me sentimental for him. It will have the power to move me to tears -- and not because of the smell.

Used to be, when I called my dad, his greeting was "Why are you calling me? Are you drunk?" Truth was, most of the time when I called him at that point in my life, I was drunk. It was the only way I could stand to talk to him. Our conversations would inevitably deteriorate during a discussion about money, where I would shame him by reminding him how he welched on his promise to help me pay for college, and he would retort by yelling, "Go FUCK yourself!" Then he'd hang up on me. He always wanted to be the one to hang up first.

Somewhere along the line, I realized that he was my only father, and that I had a choice to accept him or to keep hoping he would change. I realized that he wasn't gonna change (surprise!), and I decided that I was lucky to have such a warped character as my dad. I grew to see him as Falstaff, that larger than life Shakespeare character. Seeing him this way helped me accept his fallibility, helped me understand that he just wanted love and adulation, like we all do.

Now I call him in the morning, when I'm sure he's home, when he's just waking up. Sometimes he's already out of the house when I call. Last time I called him, he was at a garden show at the mission San Juan Capistrano. I said, "I just called to say hi, Dad. Tell you I love you."

"That's good," he said. "Do you have anything else to say to me, because I want to stop talking now so I can get my free habanero plant."

"No dad," I said. "That's it."

"Okay," he says. "Call me on Father's Day."

So I did.

"Don't Shake the Baby"

My brother Carlos and his wife Celine recently had a baby, too. A boy named Lou. Not Louis, Luis, or Louisiana; just plain Lou. My brother and his wife call each other Woozer, or Woosy. I don't know why, but they do. My sister and I have talked about the importance of not accidentally nicknaming Lou "Loser."

Carlos called me every day after Clara was born. As he was waiting for Lou to show up, I could tell his anxiety was mounting.

"Hey Christa, it's Carlos."

"Los! What's up?"

"How's it going? Do you like motherhood? Do you love Clara? Is it fun?"

Do I love my daughter?

Yes, I love her, I say.

Is it fun?

A newborn is not exactly "fun." A newborn is hard work. Scary and challenging, especially if you've never had your very own newborn before. They are like fragile inklings of what is to come. And you hope that they make it with your help.

"Yeah, it's fun."

"Really?" he says. "you don't sound sure."

"Well, it's hard, too."

"What's hard about it?"

"I don't know Carlos, it just is. Sometimes it's frustrating."

"Don't shake the baby!" he warns, as if it might be my next move.

"I'm not gonna shake the baby, Los."

"Good," he says, "or she could go blind."

The day Lou is born, I call to congratulate Carlos and Celine. Carlos answers.

"Congratulations, Loski. How's it going?"

"It's great," he drawls. "Greeeeat. I already love him."

"That's great, Los."

"Yeah," he says. "So...it's pretty fun...So far....It's hard, too. Isn't it?"

"Yeah. It's hard," I say, "but it gets easier every day."

For some reason, all the cliches about having a baby are true. Why is that?

"Mom says he's cuter than Clara was when she was born," Carlos says.

That's so not true, but whatever.

Blaaaagh

Here's what I hate about blogs: They pull you in quickly with the voice of the writer, the POV, the je ne sais quoi -- maybe the graphics (where ARE all those cooler looking blog templates? Where can I get one?) -- and then...THEY AREN'T UPDATED! At least not regularly, as in daily.

Come on, people, if you're gonna blog, the blog being an instantaneous publication genre, then you're gonna have to blog daily. Daily updates are, in fact, the nature of a blog. By definition, you see. Otherwise, it's just too easy.

And if blogging is going to enter the fray as an aspiring artform (as the novel did in the 17th century), then it needs to be difficult because, as Donald Barthelme said, "Art is not difficult because it wishes to be difficult. Art is difficult because it wishes to be art."

I have high hopes for the blog. Or else, I have high hopes for my blog. I have this dream of blogging becoming an internationally recognized legitimate genre, complete with big advances and "blog" deals (instead of book deals), movie options, speaking engagements, cushy university teaching posts. Nobel Prizes. The best bloggers will be banded together by superstar networks. When, from these blogstars' sites, you click onto other blogs, you are riveted and fascinated by the company they keep.

I used to be in a band -- called Shag (before Austin Powers movies). I was in this band for 7 years, but I never harbored dreams of becoming a rockstar because of it. A few of my friends and several fans told me that if I wanted to be a rockstar, I could be. I just needed a good manager. The effort it would take to become a rockstar seemed like a lot of trouble to me. If I were gonna become a rockstar, it was gonna have to be accidental -- like backing my car into a ditch. I never wanted to be a rockstar that much anyway.

But I do want to be a BLOGSTAR. Blaaaaghstar!!

A Novel Pursuit, or Who is the Cervantes of Blogging?

At the cafe today, I ran into my friend the writer Greg Oaks. I asked him what he thought of blogs. He said he hadn't thought about them too much; he'd only read a couple of them in the past. He mentioned a blog, Helen.org, that he'd read -- a woman's chronicle of her failed relationships. "I was amazed," he said, "She was pretty brutally honest." (Disclaimer: when I googled that site so I could post a link, the quoted title -- Helen.org -- led me to an erotica sight, which is great! and all, but maybe not what Greg meant?)


The brutal and naked honesty of the blog is what makes it appealing. The tone of a good blog reminds me of the "I'm just saying..." attitude. The girlfriend chat. The roll one is on when one is rolling.

Greg and I talked about how blogs with angles were better than blogs without -- say a blog about music, cake decorating, or teaching retards. I told him about the secret blog site: Post Secret. Then Greg said, "The blog will be like the novel in the 17th century. Back then, nobody knew what it was they were dealing with." As we spoke, I noticed the novel sitting on Greg's table, Light in August by William Faulkner.

Where Faulkner is concerned, a lot of people still don't know what they're dealing with.

My high school students introduced me to blogs. In 2001, they were keeping online diaries and sharing them with one another. "Check out my blog, Ms. Forster," they'd say and write the address on the black board. One day when I was surfing the net when I should have been grading their papers, I looked up at the board and typed the address of a girl's blog into the computer's address bar.

At that point, the idea of a "public diary" was still an oxymoron to me. A diary was a private thing: what you wrote for yourself, to yourself. I myself kept "notebooks," which, in truth, are basically the same thing. Calling my private writing a notebook, however, dignified it more than calling it a diary, which I imagined as small, pink, equipped with a flimsy lock, a miniature key, and stealthily stuffed under a twin mattress for safe-keeping.

This girl whose blog I looked up was fairly popular, which explained, I guessed, why people might want access to her online diary. Otherwise, I couldn't imagine what would make someone want to read someone else's diary, especially a 17 year old's random thoughts about "LIFE." Really, I thought, who cares?

Soon enough, I found myself riveted to the mamby-pamby ramblings of this girl. I took the quizzes she posted. I went to the links of other schoolgirl blogs. Clearly, they were putting a lot more energy into their blogs than they were their homework, judging by the color and verve of their postings versus the blandness and incoherence of their academic essays -- the ones that sat collecting dust in one of the precarious piles of papers on my desk.

Years later, I am riveted to blogs kept by people my own age, writers I know and non-writers (or people who don't consider themselves "writers"), alike . Blogs like The Other Mother, written by my friend Robin who runs Writers In The Schools here in Houston, or It's Perfectly Legal to Have This Much Fun and Little Miss Messycovers by my girlfriends Jennifer and Cathy. From these sites, I navigate to other people's blogs, people I don't know, like this one: The Tard Blog. And I can't help myself. I can't look away. I check back every day, and when there aren't new posts, I get mad.

The blogging genre has already hit the bigtime, as many of you know. A lot was made of blogging during the 2004 Presidential election. And have you heard about the BlogHer conference? I just found out about it on someone else's blog (of course). Sounds a lot like an AWP or MLA conference, for all you elitists out there who still believe blogging is puerile and narcissistic.

Q: Who would the Cervantes of blogging be? Is there even a possible answer to that question? Is the very idea of a Cervantes blotted out by the blogging genre? Some academic out there: help me out here.


CONFESSION: This morning, I loathed the idea of becoming a blogger, but I had no idea how satisfying it could be. I think it'll serve my quixotic nature very well.

Uh oh ho ho.

Clara Ys-adorable

Here is the reason I started this blog

Clara Ys-adorable
Originally uploaded by xtaforster.

-- the girl I want to be near night and day.

I'm hoping to freelance write and teach so that I can make my own hours and raise my own daughter (as opposed to raising other people's kids, or other people raising my kid). When I told a friend of mine that that's what I was gonna do to make money, she said, "Do you have a blog?" I told her I hated blogs. She told me to get over it, that a blog would be a good way for potential employers to see my work.

Whatevah!

But maybe she's right. Maybe blogs are more than just the ramblings of self-involved gadflies. In any case, I'm going to give it a try.

And anyway, I'm an Aries. We're known for being self-involved.