On Dec. 11, my mom's co-workers handed her $1,700 in cash and told her to go see her grandson. On Dec. 15 she was on a flight bound for Dresden. And on Dec. 17, six days after receiving the money, she held her first grandchild.
She'll be with us till Jan. 1 and we're having a fantastic time watching her work her maternal magic around here. Thank you to my mom's friends and co-workers. We are humbled beyond words by your gift and are making the most of every moment together.
From: Val Erickson Subject: FW: Project Germany Pictures Date: December 12, 2008 12:53:21 AM GMT+01:00 To: Jasmine Michaelson, Jake Michaelson
Guess who's coming to dinner????
My sweet friends at work have had a secret project going....me. They've been gathering donations to buy me a plane ticket to come over. I am totally blown away & cannot even believe this. I didn't think I was acting that desperate or sad.
I grossly underestimated how much time a new mom spends with her can glued to the couch. I haven't actually worked it out, but I'd guess that on average I now spend about two-thirds of my waking hours sitting on the couch.
I think this would drive a lot of people nuts, but lucky for me, couch-sitting is something I've always done remarkably well. It's integral to almost all of my primary hobbies: knitting, guitar playing, movie and TV watching, reading, and couch sitting. The thing is, now, my couch sitting is accompanied by my hands being occupied. And usually sticky with milk and baby puke. So that means that, most of the time, knitting, guitar playing, and reading are off the list. Oh yeah, and we don't have a television. But (thank the heavens), about a week before the birth, Jake — in all his unparalleled brilliance — figured out how to get us American television.
Normally, videos on sites like hulu.com and all the network sites aren't available to us because the Internet fairies tell them that we're not in America and some sort of legal-copyright hullabaloo makes viewing the videos in other countries illegal. Or something. Anyway, turns out, the trick is getting a server in the States and routing your traffic through that. You'll have to ask Jake for the details if you're interested. All I know is that now I can watch TV. And, boy, do I watch a lot. Random stuff. Stuff I never watched before. And I have a new favorite show.
Seriously. You should watch "Family Ties" again. They have a kajillion episodes here on cbs.com. It is a fantastic show. You'll thank me.
Michael J. Fox aside, though, all the guilt-free time on the couch is made even better by the fact that much of it is just spent snuggling this:
In the 25 years I’ve spent in this body, I’ve never pushed it to any kind of extreme, never exposed it to pain beyond everyday bangs and bruises, never nursed it through any illness or ailment requiring more than antibiotics and sleep. I’ve never performed well in athletics, and I’ve always dismissed myself as being a little on the weak end of the spectrum.
And so I had my doubts.
I knew going into this that, in Germany, epidurals aren’t passed out like candy the way they are in the States. Under the socialized medical system they have here, nobody stands to gain anything by pushing them. As I understand it, they are normally reserved for special situations. My midwife told me several months ago that they are available to everyone, but nobody stands over you with the syringe saying, “You ready for it?” The attitude seems to be if you are young and healthy, had a complication-free pregnancy, and are progressing normally through labor, an epidural will only serve to slow things down — which, of course, is highly inefficient. And we know how the Germans feel about inefficiency.
Initially, for the reasons stated above, this worried me. But as the pregnancy progressed, I started to embrace the idea, thinking this would be a great opportunity to let my body, for once in its existence, show what it can really do.
But as Jake and I waited outside our apartment building for the taxi that would take us to the hospital at 10:30 p.m. on Sunday, Nov. 16, I said, “Actually, I wouldn’t say no to some kind of painkiller right now.” Thirty minutes earlier, the contractions — which had started at about 3 a.m. that morning and had been coming (mildly) every ten minutes or so all day — sped up to every five minutes, and the pain was increasing exponentially. I’d spent the day cooking and cleaning and knitting and watching movies and thinking, “This is labor? This is a breeze!” But now, pacing the parking lot in the dark in my pajamas, semi-doubled over and forcing myself to breathe through the stabbing in my abdomen and lower back, I thought, “Ah. This is labor. And it’s only starting.” And I was nervous.
The taxi ride took about 15 minutes, which meant about three contractions, one of which hit just as we pulled up to the front of the University Frauenklinik. I had to lean on Jake outside the cab and breathe through it before heading up the steps. The cab driver wished us, “Alles Gute,” and we checked in.
The place was empty and half-dark when the lone midwife on call in the OBGYN office checked me. She said I was dilated to a 2, and if I wanted to, I could go home, get some sleep and come back later. I was shocked. The pain was already the most intense pain I’d ever experienced — and I still had 8 centimeters of dilating to go, followed, of course, by the pushing. I told her I felt I should stay, and we headed upstairs.
Jake and I were put in a room with a bed big enough that he could lie with me and hold me in his arms as I rode the waves of contractions. They grew stronger and breathing evenly through them became almost impossible. My water broke, and the nurse gave me an injection in my hip to dull the pain a little, warning me that the injection would hurt some, which I found strangely funny. The contractions still hurt, but the pain didn’t increase. And then the shot wore off. Jake and I were alone in the room when the full force of the contractions laid into me. They were incredible. I was clawing at things, shaking uncontrollably, and trying not to vomit when the midwife stuck her head in long enough to apologize and say she’d be back in 20 minutes, but there was an emergency down the hall that required her assistance. Jake held me and soothed me until they could come back and give me another injection. It was a long 20 minutes. This shot was a little stronger and allowed me to allow Jake to sleep for a few short, fitful intervals and allowed me to close my eyes. But I didn’t sleep.
Eventually light came through the windows, revealing a cold, gray November morning and a bustling construction site across the street. By mid-morning, the contractions were still coming and I still had not reached 10 centimeters. Mentally and emotionally I was sucked dry, and physically, I was so weak, Jake nearly had to carry me to the restroom.
I’d been in labor long enough that the work shifts had changed. I’d been handed over from one midwife with excellent English to a young midwife-in-training with no real English skills and her overseer, another midwife with good English. They told me that they were concerned about me keeping my strength up for the pushing and felt that it was time to put something in my I.V. drip that would expedite the last 2 centimeters of dilation, followed by something else that would speed up and strengthen the contractions. I can only imagine what my face must’ve looked like when they delivered this news. I was upright, but I can’t in good conscience use the word “standing”. Jake was holding me up by my armpits, and my head was buried in his chest. I couldn’t lift it anymore.
“I can’t do it,” I remember mumbling into his shirt. “My body can’t do it. I’m too weak.”
I wanted nothing more than to be able to say, “Well, I think we’ve put in a good day’s work. Let’s hang this up for today, get some sleep, and pick up tomorrow where we left off.” But it doesn’t work that way. Jake told me that I could do it, but I didn’t believe him.
Gradually the pushing contractions began. I clung to Jake and the pillows as each one overtook me. They were disembodied things. They didn’t feel like they were coming from within my shivering shell of a body. They were too powerful, like a rip-tide. They’d suck me under, and rather than fight it, the midwife would encourage me to push, to dive into it. Each time I came back up for air shaking harder.
I read somewhere that the average duration of the pushing stage of labor is around two hours. As it was happening for me, I had no concept of time, but Jake guesses I pushed for something like four hours. I don’t remember much from this time. I remember the midwife-in-training patiently encouraging me to breathe deeply and try to rest and store my strength between contractions. I remember changing positions every few contractions in an effort to shake things loose. I remember Jake’s arms around me and him whispering, “Good girl,” into my hair each time I surfaced, gasping and sputtering. I remember yellow cranes out the window at the construction site across the street. Mostly I remember feeling like I was drowning.
I was lying on the bed on my side when the midwife said the head was coming. She took my sweat-slick hand and brought it down so I could feel the top of my baby’s scalp. It was slippery and had hair. She and Jake were delighted, smiling and cheering me on and telling me it was almost over, but I think I was too delirious for the reality to set in. Then, suddenly, there were a lot of people in the room — other midwives in scrubs, people in white coats. The place was a beehive. Everyone was doing something. And I was screaming. Not screaming, really, not like on a roller coaster. It was like an animal. Stroking my leg, a midwife instructed me to shut my eyes and mouth when the contractions came and use the scream to push, and I did. I screamed through my chest and belly and hips and fingers and toes.
And then the biggest tidal wave yet slammed me into the rocks. I pushed until every molecule of oxygen had been forced out of every cell in my body. I tried to contain my scream, like they told me, but it leaked out, with a desperate sob. Everyone in the room was shouting encouragements in English and in German. Then all at once, everyone gathered around the bed started breathing hard and fast in and and out through their mouths with wide-open eyes. I followed their lead. And then all together, we clenched our teeth and bore down as another massive wave pummeled my body.
Then there was a flash of fire and a rushing flood of warmth. And then there was a cry. A raspy, staccato cry. And then I cried.
Jake cut the umbilical cord, and the tiny, purple body was laid on my bare chest. (I’m not even sure how or when my chest became bare.) We were both soaking wet and shaking. He was screaming for all he was worth, but it still sounded so small. I stroked his warm, wrinkly skin and shushed him and told him everything was OK. Because it was. Everything was OK.
I delivered the placenta a few minutes later, with a freshly blanketed, quieted and named infant sandwiched between Jake and me on the bed. Then the doctor stitched up my body where it had torn admitting my firstborn into the world. She did it in true German form — with no anesthesia — but I was too drained to protest. Much. Soon they were finished and everyone congratulated me and left and then a midwife and Jake took Jethro to be weighed and checked. I was left alone in the room, shuddering a little beneath a bed sheet. As exhausted as I was, I couldn’t sleep. I stared at the ceiling and gingerly rubbed my soft, deflated belly and marveled that, in spite of the violence my body had only minutes prior experienced, the emotion that had floated to the top was one of absolute peace.
And that is how I brought life into the world for the first time. I’m still, two weeks later, in disbelief over it and can barely talk about it without getting emotional. Never in my life have I felt more scared or more exhausted or more hopeless.
Thanks so much for all the well wishes! Jake brought all your comments to me while I was still being held captive in the strangely Internet-less hospital and they really brightened my day. I just wanted to let everyone know that Jethro and I are home safe and sound. We got home Thursday night, and I can't even express how good it feels to be back on familiar turf. My body's patching itself up nicely, Jethro's developed a ravenous appetite and is filling out that baggy skin, and Jake's been taking care of us both with angelic patience. We're all a little bit zombified, but we're having a blast. Jake and I are thoroughly enjoying getting acquainted with this new inductee into the human race.
I've been working on a lengthy post about the birth for a few days now, but what with Jethro's newfound bottomless pit hunger and my own exhaustion, it's taking longer than I'd banked on. At any rate, it's in the hopper. I just wanted to stick my head in and say hi and thanks and assure you that this blog is, indeed, still happening. I'm just a little distracted by these big, bright eyes at the moment.
Since Jaz is still in the hospital, she has condescended to allow me to announce the birth of our son on her blog. When she's released from the hospital in a few days, she'll undoubtedly fill you in on all the details.
Jethro Val Michaelson was born yesterday - 40 weeks exactly. At birth he weighed 3,370 grams and was 52 centimeters long. Here's a link to an online unit converter for our friends on the imperial system.
Mother and baby are healthy and happy and will be home later this week.
For all the grief the German language gives me, there are aspects of it that I find fantastic. In particular, I love the hilariously literal names Germans often give things. Gloves are called "Handschuhe", literally "hand shoes". Lullabies are called "Schlaflieder", literally "sleep songs". Santa Claus is the "Weihnachtsmann", literally the "Christmas Man". The ceiling is called the "Zimmerdecke", literally the "room blanket". The refridgerator is the "Kuhlschrank", literally the "cool closet". The hospital is the "Krankenhaus", literally the "sick house".
But easily one of my favorite German words is "Kinderwagen", literally "child vehicle", referring, of course, to a stroller. It's fitting that the stroller has such a tough, utilitarian name in German because German strollers are just that. You really can't even call them "strollers". It's like calling a Ford F-350 a "car".
Here's our Kinderwagen, and I ask you to keep in mind that this was one of the cheapest and most rudimentary models we found in our extensive search of Dresden's baby stores.
You'll notice the removable baby gym bag. That's not really what it's called, but that's what I call it because that's basically what it is. Anyway, when you take out the baby gym bag, you can convert the whole thing into a sitting-up-for-a-bigger-kid Kinderwagen.
It also has pretty sweet shocks and these:
Yeah. Actual tires. That you inflate.
See? They even have the air pressure printed on the side.
Even if you wanted one of those lame-o American strollers with tiny, swiveling, shopping cart wheels, you wouldn't be able to find them here. I'm not sure if it's got something to do with how much Germans love going for walks, the prevalence here of cobblestone, or if it's just another manifestation of general German OCD, but I think you'd be hard-pressed to find a country that takes its pedestrian Kinder transportation more seriously.
And I'm already trying to work out how we're going to get this sucker back the States.
Although I'm not currently working as a journalist, I still consider myself one and try to hold myself to the standards I like to think good journalists hold themselves to, namely keeping my personal political opinions private. I'm not opposed to sharing them in private, but I try to avoid broadcasting them to the universe.
That's why I wasn't going to bring this up at all.
But for the last couple of days I've had the almost irresistible urge to elbow strangers in public and, beaming, say, "Hey! I'm an American! Did you hear what we did?" And I just realized that this feeling has nothing to do with my personal political opinions — but, rather, everything to do with my homeland proving, yet again, that anything is possible on its soil.
And I'm proud of us.
JEM
P.S. Here's a great (and short) piece about how, all of a sudden, being an American in Europe is OK.
Oh, hi! It's me, your friendly neighborhood blimp, here. How are you? I'm huge. And so afraid of popping that I now rarely wander farther than the grocery store down the street.
Boredom, anxiety and excitement regularly combine to form an interesting cocktail I call "madness".
Lately, I've been combating this by knitting. Here are some things I recently made:
I started this blanket a couple of weeks after I found out I was pregnant and finished it just a few weeks ago. It's the most substantial thing I've ever knitted — my first ever blanket — and I'm pretty stoked about it.
I've also been cooking a lot. I attempted cinnamon rolls for Jake's birthday and experienced something I've almost never experienced in the kitchen before: success.
Considering this attempt three years ago at snickerdoodles ...
I have to say I think I'm really progressing.
Even Jake's caught the domestication bug. A few weeks ago he put the finishing touches on the homemade beanbag chair he's been sewing.
It's a marvelous work. It's become my favorite chair — as long as there's someone else around to help me get out of it.
Sidenote: The beanbag stuffing Jake ordered to fill the chair up with came with this complimentary gift:
Because nothing says "Thanks for buying your gigantic bag of Styrofoam filling from us" like a personalized hand towel. That's spelled wrong.
Jake got it in his head that he wanted to watch "The Shining" on Halloween. Me and scary movies don't traditionally get along too well. (I like to think it has something to do with an overactive imagination, but it's really because I'm a coward.) So anyway, I'd heard rumors that "The Shining" was, like, the most terrifying movie ever made of all time, or something along those lines, so I was a little hesitant. But after watching this trailer on YouTube, I felt a lot better about it and decided to give it a go:
Turns out that trailer is a little misleading.
But in a related story, there's no way I'm letting Jake talk me into watching this one:
Just for the record, though, that can't really happen, right? I mean, for a little guy Junior can get to kicking at the walls pretty hard, but he couldn't actually, you know, make my torso explode, right? Right?
Hello?
JEM
P.S. Thanks, Andreas, for letting us borrow your copy of this fine film.
We stumbled upon an anti-Nazi demonstration a couple of weeks ago.
We were headed to Dresden’s main train station at the heart of the city to buy me a new public transit month pass, when we noticed a number of law enforcement vans and SWAT teams decked out in body armor searching people. After getting off the tram, we had to pass through a row of police officers, who stopped us and asked if we were there for the rally. Turns out we’d arrived just in time for a major anti-Nazi march, which was convening at, and would shortly be embarking from, the train station.
These happen pretty frequently in Germany. Dresden’s last big anti-Nazi rally was about 8 months ago. They tend to draw out lots of liberal young adults, many of them punks with Kool-Aid hair, most of them dressed in black, a lot of them likely socialists. More or less the same people you’d see at a vegan march or an Iraq War protest. Rally kids.
As a foreigner, I find these anti-Nazi rallies particularly interesting. Considering that people generally rally to bring awareness to issues that the public is split on or undecided over, could there really be a need for a rally informing us that Nazism is bad? Haven’t we all pretty much been in agreement on that since — y’know — 1945? For an American, sure, it’s that simple. Of course, for an American, Nazis have been considered enemies of the State from Day 1, or darn close to it. In Germany, it’s a little more complicated. For Germans, the Nazis of World War II aren’t simply the sadistic Aryan caricatures that they are to most Americans. For Germans, the connections are often personal, and the reasons are visible. The Nazis were the ones who temporarily brought Germany out of a devastating economic tailspin, creating jobs and slashing Germany’s whopping post-WWI unemployment rate. They’re the ones who built the Autobahn, for crying out loud. Obviously Germans today are aware of the atrocities the Nazi party wreaked during WWII. They’re painfully aware. It’s a burden every German — whether they were alive during WWII or not — carries. (This fantastic piece from the German news magazine Der Spiegel goes into it more deeply than I could ever attempt to as a non-German — and it’s in English.)
But the point is, Germany’s relationship with Nazism is a complicated one, and nowhere in Germany is this complex relationship more apparent than it is in the former East Germany, particularly here in the state of Saxony. Thanks largely to high unemployment and a general sense of disappointment in Democracy’s promises of prosperity, a rising number of young East Germans are finding a sympathetic ear in thinly-veiled neo-fascism.
Germany’s far right political party, the Nationaldemokratische Partei or NPD, never overtly associates itself with neo-Nazism, but openly touts ideas such as making German citizenship impossible for any “African, Asian or Oriental”. By and large in Germany, the NPD is considered racist and extremist and not taken very seriously since it’s never gained the minimum 5 percent of votes required for the party to be able to send delegates to the German Parliament. But in the 2004 state election in Saxony, the NPD won 9.2 percent of the overall vote. The next state election will be next year, and the NPD is expected to retain its seats. They’re doing it with the help, primarily, of young, single, male, blue collar Saxons who feel the NPD is the only party that will listen to them. (You can read a little more about their history and recruitment methods, which focus on milking public fear and anger at vulnerable moments, here.)
So that’s why the left-wing rally kids feel the need to remind everyone that Nazism is a bad thing.
Though I suspect this fight won't be as simple as saving the sea otters.
When we were first married, my mother-in-law, a marriage and family therapist, gave me a book called "The Five Love Languages". The writing was pretty gushy, but I thought the ideas were really good — namely, that different people have different ways of expressing love and of accepting expressions of love. The key, of course, is determining the love languages of the people you love, so that you can express your love to them in the way that is most meaningful to them.
Most of the people in my life were fairly obvious, but I struggled narrowing Jake down. I watched him and analyzed him, but I couldn't figure him out. Finally I just asked him. And he wouldn't tell me. Over the six years of our marriage, I've occasionally come back to this and tried to work it out without much success. But about a month ago I asked him again and he finally came clean with me.
Turns out Jake's love language (and I can't believe I wasn't able to figure this one out) is binary.
So, Jake, on the occasion of your 28th birthday, this one's for you:
I'm from Idaho, but I live in Dresden, Germany. In a former life I was a journalist. I'm married to a mad scientist from Las Vegas named Jake, who is working on his Ph.D. here in computational biology. We have a baby boy named Jethro. We are Mormons fascinated by various things. This blog is about our lives, with particular emphasis on life in Germany through the eyes of an American. Enjoy your stay.
