Shannon Phillips

The boys are home sick today, watching a lot of TV and cuddling on the couch. Both of them have fevers, and Robin has a bad cough—this seems to be a secondary infection piggybacking on an earlier stomach virus. Nonetheless, there’s something heart-warming about seeing them curled up together on the couch.

I also get a rush of happiness just looking at our stockings. Each of them was made for us by one of Sam’s sisters, except for Sam’s own stocking, which was made for him thirty-five years ago—probably by his mom? They are such tangible evidence of family and love. They make me really happy.

And Davy’s is my absolute favorite.

Lookit that adorable owl! Wearing a scarf! I can’t get over it.

So it looks like we’re going to be adding to our pack of boys—I had an ultrasound today, and the baby is pretty clearly another little boy. I can’t say I wasn’t a little bit disappointed, but there’s advantages too—not least that three boys can share a bedroom indefinitely, if need be. Maybe we don’t have to leave our sweet two-bedroom bungalow after all. We’ll just put them in bunk beds, barracks-style.

We’re not totally committed on a name yet, but the front-runner is John Solomon Phillips, nickname “Sol”. Robin is totally geared up about the new baby and eager to help…Davy, a little less so. “No baby!” he screeched. “Chicken!” I guess he’s hoping to bargain his little brother away for a new hen?

Robin: “Do you love me? Or not love me?”
Davy: “Love you!”

When I was a kid Hallowe’en was my favorite holiday, but now that I’m grown up Thanksgiving seems perfect. The food is fantastic and the company even more so—we are very grateful that we were able to share the day with Nonna and Pappy and a couple dear friends, and the rest of our far-flung family and friends are close in our hearts on this holiday too. A day for celebrating the bounty of the land with loved ones…what could be better?

Maybe there’s one thing better: the day after Thanksgiving. A day for just sitting around in our bathrobes grazing on all the leftovers. That’s pretty great too.

Our Thanksgiving menu this year:

slices of Pink Lady apples and Point Reyes “Toma” farmstead cheese
slices of prosciutto and fuyu persimmons drizzled with balsamic vinegar
smoked almonds
rum-glazed pecans

murderous mashed potatoes (seriously, the mashed potatoes will kill you—I make them exactly twice a year, and they are fantastic, because the Cook’s Illustrated recipe involves a stick of butter and three cups of heavy cream. I always warn everybody beforehand so those with any cholesterol issues know to take them very sparingly.)
pan seared brussels sprouts with bacon
pear-ginger cranberry sauce
BN Ranch heritage, pasture-raised turkey
and in place of stuffing, Judy Rodgers’ bread salad. (My friend Matt, who is gluten-intolerant, usually comes for Thanksgiving, so most of the menu is gluten-free…this is my single “asterisk.”)

sweet potato pie (I use Leah Chase’s recipe, substituting gluten-free flour for the crust.)
flourless chocolate cake

So as you can see, the leftovers are plentiful and delicious.

My philosophy on inviting guests with dietary restrictions is this: I feel pretty okay about gesturing expansively to a table groaning with food and saying “You can eat everything but the strudel,” or whatever. So when putting together a meal I usually allow myself a single “asterisk.” It’s a lot nicer than leading a guest to the same table and saying “This is all poisonous to you, but I made you a special bowl of pilaf.” Matt insists that he’s perfectly happy as long as there’s something he can eat, but I think it’s plain mean to invite a guest if it’s only to make them watch other people eating delicious foods they cannot have.

I joke that when I die I’d like my memorial plaque to read simply: “She ate well.” Thanksgiving is probably the day that we eat best of all, but the day after Thanksgiving features all of the food and none of the work. Best holiday ever? It might be.

In the first draft of my novel, I had a chapter opening with this sentence: “That evening, Viv found herself scouring her limited wardrobe for something that looked effortlessly attractive in an oh-this-old-thing-I-just-threw-it-on way; or, failing that, dressy and cute in a we’re-just-friends way; or, as a last resort, somewhat acceptable in a not-completely-retarded-when-worn-with-a-beret way.” (There’s some backstory for why Viv is wearing a beret at that part of the book, but it’s not really relevant to the point.)

In the revision process I changed the word “retarded” to “ridiculous.” I resisted the change for a while, even though every time I got to that sentence the word scraped at me—but part of me felt that I was being true to the character, that Viv’s internal thought patterns are not particularly sensitive to “politically correct” speech, and that a more disparaging term made the line funnier.

Then I realized that even if all of that were true, it didn’t matter. Viv doesn’t exist, but lots of people with Down syndrome and other kinds of intellectual disabilities do exist, and many have been clear that they find the words “retarded” and “retard” to be very hurtful. I’ve heard a lot of pushback on this and maybe even felt swayed, at some point, by these kinds of arguments: that any term used to describe an intellectual disability will take on negative associations (witness the mocking use of the word “special”), or that an obsession with “politically correct” speech creates an atmosphere of Orwellian repression, et cetera et cetera.

For me, in the end, it comes down to this. There are people saying, “This hurts me, please knock it off.” I don’t want to hurt those people. In general, when I have a choice between hurting people or being decent to them, I would like to choose decency. That’s why I’m trying to eradicate the word “retarded” from my speech and my writing. It hurts people.

I don’t think Ann Coulter is particularly concerned with hurting people, but I’ve seen a lot of defenses of her language, and of similar words, that are essentially attempts to avoid confronting that central fact. It’s not about the PC mafia or whatever. It’s about real people and whether or not you want to be decent to them.

Because Sam and I celebrated an anniversary yesterday, I’ve been thinking about this whole concept of “soul mates.” On the one hand, it’s not true. People don’t have to sort through the seven billion potential partners on the planet in order to find deep and abiding love; they manage to do it with pretty much whatever selection is on hand. Widows and widowers remarry. People can have more than one great love in their lifetimes.

On the other hand, the longer I’m with Sam, the harder it becomes to imagine that anybody else could ever understand me so well or be so nice to live with. I think there’s a mechanism underlying long term relationships that kind of feeds into the soul mate myth. Basically, the longer two people spend together, the more they adapt to each other’s idiosyncrasies. They develop their own daily rituals, linguistic shorthands, cultural touchstones, in-jokes, and odd habits. They cover for each other’s weaknesses. They work around each other’s sore spots. Their lives become a shared island away from the rest of the society, and it becomes more and more difficult to imagine ever sharing that life with an “outsider.”

In short, people get weird when they spend a lot of time together. Every family is weird in one way or another. In fact families are more or less defined by their shared oddities. I think this might be part of what sustains the soul mate myth—we can look at old married couples and think, wow, it’s a good thing they found each other because nobody else would put up with that.

I guess what I’m saying is, I love you, sweetie. Let’s get weird together.

We had lots of appointments yesterday! First Thora had a vet check in the morning (10.7 pounds and practically perfect in every way), and then we split up in the afternoon: Sam took Robin in to the doctor for some booster shots, and I went to meet with a new midwife, because I am once again enceinte. I still find that term very charming. Wikipedia says it’s “from Latin incinctus: girdled, surrounded…a French term used technically in fortification for the inner ring of fortifications surrounding a town or a concentric castle. In architecture, generally, an enceinte is the close or precinct of a cathedral, abbey, castle, etc.” Isn’t that an interesting metaphor for pregnancy? Because, you know, at that stage, the walls of the abbey have rather been breached.

I suppose it’s the baby who is meant to be fortified.

I used to have a quote at the bottom of this blog: “I positively think those ladies who are always enceinte quite disgusting; it is more like a rabbit or guinea-pig than anything else and really it is not very nice.” —Queen Victoria, mother of nine. In fact Queen Victoria is an excellent source of trenchant commentary on motherhood in general. (“I must say it is a bad arrangement.”)

Fortunately, my outlook is sunnier than Her Majesty’s. For us three children was always in the plan, although the truth is that of late we had started to feel two was a very comfortable number as well. So we weren’t exactly trying—but a new baby is a perfectly welcome result nonetheless.

I’m about 11 weeks along at this point, which would put my due date in mid-March. We won’t know for a while yet whether it’s a boy or a girl; I’d love to have a baby girl, but there’s also something appealing about the idea of having our own little pack of boys. Really the only source of anxiety is about outgrowing our two-bedroom bungalow. “Let’s just stay here and pile the kids up like kindling,” Sam said, which I took to mean “bunk beds,” and, well, that’s one solution. St. Louis is another. But basically, the future is both a little more exciting and a little more stressful than it seemed just a few months ago.

Last night at six PM Sam came home with a bunch of bananas, two pints of strawberries, and three nectarines.

Today at 3 PM we have in the house 0 bananas, 0 strawberries, and 0 nectarines.

Robin: “A monster car could be useful. But monster trucks can be useful too because they’re big! They could say RAWR like Godzilla!”

Robin has a loose tooth! He was pretty anxious about it when he first noticed it—came running in to say, on the verge of tears, “Mommy! My tooth is broken!”

And it struck me all at once that this is the purpose of the Tooth Fairy story: to recast something scary (a kid losing their teeth) into something fun and exciting and magical. To show them quite literally (with cash!) that they are gaining, not losing, by the process. I felt like I got the whole Tooth Fairy thing for probably the first time.

So I assured Robin that this is normal, that it’s supposed to happen; I told him all about how his baby teeth are going to fall out and his big boy teeth are going to come in; and then I told him that “some people believe” that if he puts his tooth under his pillow, the Tooth Fairy will come and take it and leave a present behind.

“Other people believe that there is no Tooth Fairy,” I said, scrupulously, “and that somebody else takes the tooth and leaves the present. This is science! You have two hypotheses, the Tooth Fairy hypothesis and the ‘somebody else’ hypothesis. You will have to make observations and decide for yourself what you believe.” This is the same solution I’m using for the Santa Claus dilemma: I don’t want to lie to my kids, but I also want to give them the opportunity to enjoy these stories for as long as they want. And on a more serious note, it’s exactly how I plan to present world religions: some people believe this, other people believe that, it is up to you to decide what you believe.

But as it turns out, Robin was vastly uninterested in the question of where the present would be coming from. He only cared about what sort of present, exactly, he would be getting. “You’ll have to wait and see!” I told him, but this was unacceptable: he started making a series of ever-more-improbable guesses until I finally cracked and told him that the going rate for teeth is one shiny gold coin. (I have a stash of Sacagawea dollars squirreled away for precisely this purpose.)

And this seemed to satisfy him completely. Bribery, it has its uses!