Shannon Phillips

Our cat Marlis died last night from kidney problems. She was fourteen. Like many tabby cats, she was very affectionate and cuddly: if there was a lap, she wanted to be in it. She used to follow me around from room to room—when I took a shower, she’d even hop up on the toilet seat and keep me company from there. She slept every night curled up on my feet. Sometimes she liked to lick my face before she settled down to sleep: her tongue was rough, but I let her do it, because she was so sweet.

She was a little brown kitty with a beautiful stripey face, green eyes, and velvety soft paws. She had a ready and splendid purr. She was part of our family, and we loved her.

In Láadan, the “language of women” invented by Suzette Haden Elgin, there are five different words for pregnancy. If I were writing in Láadan now, I would use some form of the verb widazhad: “to be pregnant late in term and eager for the end.”

As of tomorrow I’ll be 37 weeks pregnant. Although due dates are calculated for a 40 week term, any time after 38 weeks is actually considered full term. I told Sam that I bet this baby’s coming closer to week 38 than to week 40. And he told me that’s what I said last time. (Robin was born 40 weeks to the day.) But I swear to God there is no more room in there. If he wants to get any bigger, this baby is going to have to make some alternate arrangements.

This is the text of an email I originally sent to my BFF Nina, who encouraged me to post it to my blog.

It would break your heart, but we did zero research before buying the faucet. We went to a certain store in Berkeley (The Sink Factory) that had been recommended by our plumber. When I called to see if they were open, the man on the other end said, in a charming Eastern European accent, “No we are not, but I’m in the store doing paperwork, so come kick on the door and I’ll open it up for you.”

This turned out to be easier said than done, as the store was really seriously closed, in fact barricaded behind a ginormous wooden gate, upon which my feeble fists and feet made about as much noise as downy snowflakes landing softly upon a granite slab. Eventually I went around to the side and found a window to rap on.

This brought down the proprietor, who turned out to be a thin gentleman with scraggly white hair and a fabulous plum velvet jacket, and who actually swept me a low and elaborate bow as he drew open the door. Inside was a shadowy, almost museum-like collection of strikingly beautiful sinks. I ventured to ask if he carried toilets as well and he immediately responded, in his excellent accent, “Certainly, every home should have one.”

He had exactly three faucets that would fit our tub/shower arrangement. One was ugly and cheap, one was possibly made out of solid gold or at least priced as if it were, and the one in the middle was the one we bought. We asked no questions and we paid full list price. I was dazzled by the accent, the velvet jacket, and the hushed reverential quality of all that white porcelain arrayed in shadow. I hope Barclay fixtures are good? Especially if you buy them from vampires?

We came back from a trip to Baltimore to discover that our grill, patio furniture, and new garden hose were stolen out of our backyard while we were gone. They left the hummingbird feeder as, perhaps, a little welcome-to-the-neighborhood gesture of kindness.

Robin is now expressing definite opinions as to what he wants to wear. When I get him dressed in the morning, the first thing he does is hop down off the bed to go look at himself in the mirror. For the last couple of days he’s been wearing the Thomas shirts that his Pops and Mo sent, which produce transports of ecstasy when he beholds them in the mirror. This morning, however, the plain yellow shirt I’d picked out for him was not acceptable: he stood in front of the mirror doing the kind of fake-crying thing that toddlers do, and whining “fwee! fwee!” (fish) until I pulled out his shark shirt instead, which is also yellow. Then he was happy.

And it’s no use explaining to him that the plain yellow t-shirt is organic cotton, or that sometimes in fashion understatement makes a stronger effect. It may surprise you to hear this, but he doesn’t care.

I have to admit I was sort of hoping to have the fun of picking out Robin’s clothes at least until he started going to school. But it looks like he’s going to start taking over sooner rather than later.

Oh well. At least I have another helpless little baby coming along, and I can dress him however I like!

Sam brought this poem to my attention: it is hilarious and poignant and very fitting for Mother’s Day. Or the day after Mother’s Day, as the case may be.

The Lanyard
by Billy Collins
from The Trouble With Poetry: And Other Poems

The other day I was ricocheting slowly
off the blue walls of this room,
moving as if underwater from typewriter to piano,
from bookshelf to an envelope lying on the floor,
when I found myself in the L section of the dictionary
where my eyes fell upon the word lanyard.

No cookie nibbled by a French novelist
could send one into the past more suddenly—
a past where I sat at a workbench at a camp
by a deep Adirondack lake
learning how to braid long thin plastic strips
into a lanyard, a gift for my mother.

I had never seen anyone use a lanyard
or wear one, if that’s what you did with them,
but that did not keep me from crossing
strand over strand again and again
until I had made a boxy
red and white lanyard for my mother.

She gave me life and milk from her breasts,
and I gave her a lanyard.
She nursed me in many a sick room,
lifted spoons of medicine to my lips,
laid cold face-cloths on my forehead,
and then led me out into the airy light

and taught me to walk and swim,
and I, in turn, presented her with a lanyard.
Here are thousands of meals, she said,
and here is clothing and a good education.
And here is your lanyard, I replied,
which I made with a little help from a counselor.

Here is a breathing body and a beating heart,
strong legs, bones and teeth,
and two clear eyes to read the world, she whispered,
and here, I said, is the lanyard I made at camp.
And here, I wish to say to her now,
is a smaller gift—not the worn truth

that you can never repay your mother,
but the rueful admission that when she took
the two-tone lanyard from my hand,
I was as sure as a boy could be
that this useless, worthless thing I wove
out of boredom would be enough to make us even.

So I guess I’ve been in the third trimester for a little while now? I’m feeling some heartburn, and my back is really achy—I don’t remember my back hurting me this much when I was pregnant with Robin, but Sam assures me that I complained about it then too. Overall, though, I feel pretty good. I’ve been sleeping fairly well and I have enough energy to get through the day, and most importantly of all, I’ve been reasonably sane. The hormone-driven mood swings are by far my least favorite part of pregnancy, but there haven’t been too many of them, and the rest of the time I’m calm and chipper.

We’re trying to prepare Robin for the arrival of his little brother, with pretty limited success. He understands that there’s a baby in my belly: he’ll give me kisses and pats on the stomach, and he often points to my tummy and says “Baby!” Unfortunately, he also seems to think there’s a baby in his belly. He often pulls up his shirt, points to his own tummy, and says, with the same beaming expression, “Baby!” So there’s some confusion there.

I really don’t think the concept of a baby brother is going to make a lot of sense to Robin until the day we bring one home for him. But he does show a lot of interest in babies on the sidewalk and at the park, and he plays nicely with kids younger than him, so I’m hopeful that he’ll be happy with Davy when the time comes.

This is the first year we really “did” Easter with Robin, and he actually got into it to a much greater extent than I expected. We almost didn’t dye eggs this year; we thought Robin wasn’t old enough to do much besides make an unholy mess and get frustrated by our attempts to restrain him. Instead we thought we’d go to one of the city’s organized events, like the Union street parade and petting zoo, or the Children’s Easter event with the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence. After all, nothing says “Easter in San Francisco” like egg hunts with drag nuns!

Then we woke up to a cold, windy, rainy day, and decided to come up with a Plan B. I hardboiled some eggs, mixed up some food coloring cups (we only had yellow, green, and blue, but we made do), and set up a dye station. As it turned out, Robin “got” the project immediately: he was quite happy to drop the eggs into the dye, and see them come out a different color. After they dried we let him put them in his basket, and let him have some fun handling the colored eggs for a bit.

Then I spirited the basket away and went out to hide eggs in the hallway. Most of them weren’t hidden very well:

But some of them were a bit harder to spot:

Then we called Robin out and encouraged him to find the eggs. Again, he figured out the routine pretty quickly, although his first instinct was to clutch all the eggs to his chest as he went running down the hall. We convinced him to put them back in the basket:

He needed some hints to find all the eggs, but eventually he got them all:

We gave him a big round of applause when he’d collected them all. Then he wanted to count them, and practice naming the colors:

All in all it was a lot of fun to be gotten from a dozen eggs and some food coloring, and Sam and I were really pleased by how easy it was to have a nice Easter afternoon with a two-year-old, even in the rain.

Those of you who use Google Reader to read this blog may notice that I managed to blow up the RSS feeds last night.

This post is mostly just a ploy to get Google to refresh its feed.

So, I’m experimenting with a new WordPress layout. I know the text is hard to read right now and I intend to fix that, but it’s late and I have to go to bed.

If I weren’t such a cowgirl I’d do my tinkering on a sandbox blog and not roll out any changes to the live site until everything was perfect, but I am and I did, so. I’ll make it better tomorrow.

Update: I think I’m more or less done tinkering. The new layout adds some extra functionality like threaded comments and a search bar (at the right sidebar). How does it look in your browsers?