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Americashire

by Jennifer Richardson

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Easter and Chinese Restaurants

In honor of Easter, I am posting a little excerpt here from a chapter in my forthcoming book, Americashire: A Field Guide to a Marriage. It's all about the lovely Cotswold village church we sometimes frequented while living there and how I managed to relate the resurrection to our local Chinese restaurant.

...Well rested and hangover-free, we made it to church the next morning. We were greeted by the usual suspects, our six elderly ladies and the fiftysomething man who I suspect attends mostly out of civic duty to the golden girls of his village. The upside of a measly church population is everyone gets a job. Jean says matins when Godfrey is tending to another church, the lady who drives her red Nissan Micra like a bat out of hell for the couple of blocks between her cottage and the church reads the Old Testament verse, the lady with the Danish accent takes the New Testament, the gentleman collects the offering and rings the bells, and Dorothy, in her orange peacoat, recites the Collect. This last one is my favorite. Dorothy’s prayer reads like an überletter to Santa Claus, her requests ranging from a pony (“good health for the Queen”) to a trip to the moon (“peace on earth in our time, Lord”). I say this not to poke fun at her earnest and childlike approach, rather in humble admiration of a person who has managed to retain these qualities after ninety years.

I, on the other hand, am totally godless. That’s the only way I can explain why Jean’s Lenten sermon made me think of the saga of our local Chinese takeout place. Jean was preaching about when Jesus had to prepare the disciples for the fact he was going to die. They responded with the textbook five stages of grief—denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance—not unlike my fellow villagers and me when faced with the recent shuttering of Dynasty. But then, just that week, we had been given an early Easter miracle. D, playing the unlikely herald, burst through the back door of the cottage asking if I wanted to hear some fantastic news. He was so jubilant I was sure that Inspector Clouseau had been fired. But no, he brought good tidings that the Dynasty woks were firing once again, like a phoenix risen from the ashes. Just like that, Kung Pao chicken Friday nights were back. I suspect Jean would fail to appreciate my loose interpretation of Easter theology, but it was nearly spring and I was taking my themes of rebirth and renewal where I could find them. I didn’t know it yet, but I was going to need them.

And that's when I realized...

Check out my guest post from earlier this week over on Nested:
http://www.thenestedblog.com/2013/03/and-thats-when-i-realized-i-didnt-want.html

Make It Count

Yesterday I read a blog on the Huffington Post that managed to annoy me for the entire day, Ann Brenoff's "Midlife Ramblings: What I Don't Get About My Childless/Childfree Young Friends." It started out just fine: a couple anecdotes about young people Ms. Brenoff had recently encountered who expressed an interest in possibly not having children and her surprise at learning this. It then teetered into the well-trod territory of the economic woes of not having a birth rate above the replacement rate. Even here Ms. Brenoff caught herself before she started blaming the childfree for problems her generation will have funding Medicare and Social Security, asserting "even I am not that selfish."  But then, with this, she fell off the cliff:

Parenting, in my opinion, also presents us with the best opportunity to have our days on Earth count for something: Producing a child who can make us better as a civilization, turn us into a kinder and gentler nation. It is our last best-chance to make a difference and answer the question of why we are here. And no, we are not here to simply try every hip new restaurant or tweet about what we watch on TV.

There are three fundamental problems with this assertion. The first is the (terribly American) underlying assumption that life is supposed to "count" for something at all, a belief system I have struggled with before on this blog here. But even if I generously allow Ms. Brenoff this, I must dissent when it comes to her subsequent assertion that kids are the answer. After all, I could make a persuasive argument the guy who makes the coffee at Peets is in the running for the job with "the best opportunity to have our days on Earth count for something." Ms. Brenoff should really take a look at Gateway Women's Gallery of Childless and Childfree role models to get a sense of the breadth of ways women without kids are making their days on earth "count." And why do you have to produce a child to make us "better, kinder, gentler." Isn't that our personal responsibility first?

But the real problem, the problem that would have rendered the previous two null and void if it didn't exist, is that Ms. Brenoff chose to use the word "us" in this paragraph. If she simply would have said that she believed parenting was HER best opportunity to have HER days on earth count for something, I would have read the article, respected her opinion and choices about her own life, and carried on annoyance-free with the rest of my day.

No Regrets

This blog has been languishing for two reasons. First, the happy one: I have been busy getting my book, Americashire: A Field Guide to a Marriage, ready for publication in April. I could and undoubtedly will write more blog posts on this. But the blog post I have been avoiding writing is about what else has been going on in my life, namely being diagnosed with multiple sclerosis.

This did not come as a total surprise. Almost four years ago I had my first run-in with this mysterious neurological disease in the form of my first “clinically isolated event.” In laymen’s terms this meant I was slurring due to the inflammation of some lesions on my brain. But multiple sclerosis is called “multiple” for a reason, and I wasn’t diagnosed until I had my second “clinical event” this past December. This time the symptom was numbness in my face. It felt like I had been shot up with Novocain all along the right side of my head, only, unlike with Novocain, the numbness didn’t subside for several weeks. Despite the fact that my first neurologist had warned me there was a 75% chance I would develop the disease, I was still surprised when, after four years with no symptoms at all, the damn thing showed up again.

Four years ago when I had that first run-in with MS, it played an unexpected role in my decision about whether or not to have kids.  But first let me explain a little bit about the disease. MS is notoriously mysterious. Nobody really knows what causes it, there is no cure, and one person’s experience with the disease is no predictor of another person’s. Symptoms range from the temporary and relatively benign – like mine, thankfully, so far – to much scarier things like extreme fatigue and paralysis. Naturally, when I was first faced with such maddening ambiguity, I pressed my neurologist for specifics.  Wasn’t there anything I could do to decrease my risk of developing the disease?  After careful caveats, my neurologist mentioned there was one recent study that had demonstrated pregnancy may help reduce the risk.

His answer came as a shock. I had been considering the motherhood question for about a year at that point, and had been unable to muster much enthusiasm for the prospect. That first bout of symptoms had frankly been a convenient excuse to cease all thoughts of having a child while I dealt with brain scans and symptom treatments and multiple doctor visits. And now it was in my face. It struck me as a double- whammy of that old gem people like to use when arguing in favor of having a child: Who will take care of you when you’re old? Alongside that suddenly more tangible question, there was this more urgent variation of relying on a child to take care of me now.

But within a few weeks of getting that tidbit of information from my neurologist, I knew how I felt.  As I write in my book, having a child to lessen my chances of developing MS seemed “at best drastic and at worst teetering on the edge of unethical” – not unlike how I feel about having a child based on the wild assumption he or she would take care of you when you are old.  Now, four years later, childfree, and freshly diagnosed with MS, you may wonder if I regret my decision. Could I have held off this fate if I had given birth?

There are, of course, many things I have wondered about in the past two months: The implications of MS for my healthcare (eleven months to go until the pre-existing condition of Obama’s healthcare plan kicks in), for my marriage, and for my quality of life, not to mention how I, a needle-phobic, am going to deal with shooting up my medication every week for the rest of my life (or at least until a pill comes along).  That I should have had a child never got a second thought. 

Note: It hopefully goes without saying, but this blog is not intended as source of medical information on MS. Rather, I represent my personal experience with the disease and my healthcare providers. My current neurologist suggests the MS Society website as a reliable source of information and also gives no credence to the theory that pregnancy reduces risk.

Dress Classy. Dance Cheesy.
Merry Christmas 2012, #GangnamStyle

xoxo

The Baroness

Announcing Americashire

My book, Americashire: A Field Guide to a Marriage is coming out on She Writes Press in March 2013.  It's the rural idyll memoir for any woman unsure about having kids, and the press release is here. Check out the Facebook page here. Merry Christmas!