Bringing up myself

Disclaimer: Dear parents, I know you tried your hardest. Any deep inner flaws are the fault of the author. Or her sister.

I’ve been thinking a lot about parenting lately. It’s that time of life, I suppose. I’m a healthy hormonal 27-year-old female. The other night I dreamt I gave birth to a kitten. It was very cute after we washed the amniotic fluid off it. (My dreams are often physiologically detailed.) We were so proud. By ‘we,’ I mean me and my boyfriend — who in real life enjoys other people’s babies and, if I’m being real euphemistic about it, cats from afar. I have informed him that I do not wish to have babies unless they are kittens. Babies, ick.

Which is why the next part of the dream was a nightmare. The brain riffed; and in the next one-act I had birthed a baby. Mind you, the baby never surfaced in any scenes. One minute I was thinking my pants were getting a bit tight, and the next the belly was pancake-flat again, and it was clear something had exited it. At the time I was on some kind of quest, let’s say a Hajj. The whole thing made me feel hard-core and resourceful, because I seem to have had the baby on the side of the road.

I’m hoping this isn’t my entrance into the Zone. That place women go from 27-33, where hormones rule and babies suddenly stop smelling funny and their minds have an inability to remember how horrible it is when babies, toddlers, or teenagers screech, especially in inappropriate places, embarrassing their parents.

As my friends all know, my plan has always been that I’d only have children if I could take fertility drugs. Some cocktail that would splice the egg, not release a bunch of them. I’d like to have a passel of identical children, so that I can do psychological experiments on them with a sample size to support reasonably good statistics on the results. As a conscientious scientist I would have to send some of them away as controls — to be raised by wolves, penguins, cats or Eugene Oregonians. I have considered naming them all George Foreman, but just for fun. They’d have to have nicknames, too.

I’ve always known, anyway, that I needed a lot more parenting before I could legitimately traumatize another generation. Example 1: Hygiene and tidiness. I was finishing an audio job early this morning; I absently took a sip of coffee from the mug on the right while staring at the screen; but today’s coffee, unfortunately, was the mug on the left. Also, I actively avoid looking at my kitchen sink. Example 2: An overdeveloped sense of fairness, wrought by intense sibling rivalry, which manifests in times of need as an overdeveloped sense of unfairness. Do not eat the last donut alone. You will discover my wrath. It is embarrassing to see my own childishness sometimes.

My own parents cannot help me. They have moved on to cats, themselves. I think they prefer them. The cats are Abyssinians, which respond to commands like ‘fetch.’ That’s more than I ever did.

But I discovered a solution. I will parent myself! I’ve been considering bidding for a video-podcast editing job for a parenting-science center. The example vodcast was a lesson in gratitude. A cheery woman parent explained to her cheery interviewer that each night at bedtime, she asks her child to list three things about the past day that she’s grateful for. Over time she has begun to compile the list during the day. Mommy was most pleased the day that the child declared, upon receipt of an afternoon ice cream sundae, that this would be one of her three things that day. It’s a way to raise a person who is conscious of and grateful for the good things in her life. A glass-half-fuller, the cheery women explained. It’s certainly preferable to having one of those children, and we’ve all heard them, who screeches “But I wanted the PINK FLAVOR!” at the top of her lungs in public.

I’m going to abandon my Inner Taskmaster (who is named Vladimir, by the way) and cultivate my Inner Cheery Mom.

Today I am grateful for:

(1) My adherence to high coffee standards, even in poverty. High-quality work cannot be done on low-quality sludge. And I have already finished for the day!

(2) Pirated software. I can say no more.

(3) My landlord, who brought me smoked-turkey soup last night when I had to work late.

(4) The two kittens I am about to pick up from the SPCA. People who know me, don’t worry — it’s only temporary. I’m becoming a foster cat mama.

But we all know kittens are the gateway baby.

Canning adventuress

1996. My sister, my mother, my father and I descended into the cellar after Grandma Elizabeth died to see a tree trunk, about 10 inches diameter, holding up the house, wedged between the kitchen floor and the cellar dirt. In the darkness beyond, the shelves were lined with fruits and veggies my grandmother had canned, probably in the 1970s. I don’t remember what any of them were. I only remember my father warning me to keep my distance, because they could explode at any moment. The projectile bacterial goop would give us botulism and we would likely die. Botulism was a popular tactical topic in our arguments, as well as an endless source of jokes. My father took it the most seriously. Later it got worse, when he wandered away from physics and toward bioremediation, that is, cleaning up anthrax or other bad microbes for governments or hospitals, and learned a bunch of biochemistry that cannot have been good for his mental health. Worse for us, because there are few ways one can fight the kind of convincingly solid scientific evidence my father uses in his arguments about why we should not eat the toast that fell on the ground. “Hantavirus! Hantavirus!” he would yell, snatching the toast away. My preferred method is bravado. “I have an amazing immune system,” I’d reply, suggesting that if I died, science was welcome to name this new strain of the virus after me.

Hantavirus kategoldenii.

Nonetheless, my father successfully indoctrinated me and my sister with a fear of jars of food with handwritten labels, the year smudged, harboring who knows what. So it was with more than a little bravado, conjured from the past, that this week I ventured into Home Canning.

The first catalyst was that last week I moved into a cottage in the hills that sparks my domestic instincts. It is an adorable cabin, lots of trees, no roommates. I have also begun reading Walden.

The second catalyst was that my grocer was selling almost-overripe strawberries at 79c for a quart pack when usually they are at least $3.99. I bought six of them, congratulating myself for my frugality. And a pack of jars, and the Ball Blue Book on Preserves, which, at $1.79, seems to me an excellent deal for what (so it says on the back) has been the authority on home canning for the last 50 years.

The Ball Blue Book briefly explains the difference between conserves, jams, jellies, preserves, and butters. I have read it several times but I cannot keep it straight. The recipes for strawberry jam, preserves, heirloom preserves, and conserves, seem to me almost identical. I embarked on what was called “Heirloom Preserves,” mostly because it sounded expensive and prestigious and fancy, as opposed to “jam,” which just had another cup of sugar and no lemon juice. What I ended up with was delicious, but it tasted and looked an awful lot like jam.

In the end, it took me two days to get all the jam off the wall. I smashed the strawberries down to compact them, with some difficulty, into 12 cups. I had three pots going. The recipe said to boil “rapidly” until the sugar was clear and the stuff was a thick gel. Trouble began after about 10 minutes, when the stuff really did start to boil. Bubble, bubble, toil and trouble: the foam rose quicker than I could assuage it. I was lifting one pot, stirring another–wait, the third’s boiling over–now the second’s doing nothing, turn that up–fuck, it’s hot–is that my HAIR in the pot? The gel became messier as it thickened, but it never thickened to the point at which it would slide off a spoon in a sheet. And just what was that foam? A disgusting light pink scum that I couldn’t get rid of. After a few hours I stuck it in a big pot in my closet, where, according to the directions, it was to sit for 24 hours. A day later it was nearly solid. Amazing. Still covered with foam, though. What is that foam?

One month later. I light a candle and make a PBJ in honor of dear departed Grandma Elizabeth. As of yet, no apparent botulism.