Decade End

I'm fond of retrospectives (I am an historian after all!), so I like all these decade reflections that are going around the Internets.  So without further ado, here's mine.

Jan 2009

2009: One-year-old Piglet finally started sleeping at night and taking a regular afternoon nap.  Finished and published my first novel.  Started my stamping business and a blog about my crafting endeavors.  Opened an Etsy store and took on custom invitation and book-binding orders.  Traveled back to Moscow to introduce the city and country to my family.  Became pregnant with Boo in August after more than a year of fruitless trying.  Spent the fall on homicide-inducing progesterone treatments to keep the pregnancy going.  My maternity leave ended and I decided to withdraw from my PhD program.

May 2010

2010: The city received 80+ inches of snow between January 1st and March 1st and the city more or less shut down for 6 weeks.  Piglet got better at hailing cabs than me.  My beloved grandmother died in March after a long decline with Alzheimer's disease.  I was unable to attend the funeral, and I still regret it.  Boo was born in May after a long labor and a lickety-split delivery.  We take a family trip to Ireland that is delightful and attend a family reunion in the Twin Cities over Thanksgiving.  My allergist here throws up her hands in despair and refers me to an allergist in NYC.  Begin regular trips to the city for food challenges in the fall, some successful, some not.  Became pregnant with Birdie in December (surprise!)

August 2011

2011: A difficult pregnancy with Birdie and one of the hottest summers on record, including six weeks of a so-called heat dome over the city, was followed by her birth just ahead of Hurricane Irene at the end of the summer.  Piglet started preschool and Boo still refused to walk or talk.  Birdie spent the fall in and out of doctor's offices and hospitals, falling further behind developmentally.  At the urging of a friend, I start a second blog (this one!) about raising kids in the city in a small house.

March 2012

2012: I wean Birdie at four months as she continues to decline and is borderline failure to thrive.  She begins seeing GI and pulmonary at the children's hospital where she is finally diagnosed with significant airway malacia with GI involvement.  She is put on a medication regimen that requires an erasable marker and a spreadsheet.  She is inpatient again for a week after Pascha.  She begins twice-weekly PT and OT, and by midsummer she has started to catch up to her peers developmentally.  I am finally diagnosed with gastroparesis after struggling with various symptoms for several years, start on a weight loss journey in the late spring and lose 30 pounds over the summer.  I dive deep into vintage style. 

August 2012

We take a family trip to Austria in August that puts me off traveling with Birdie for a long time.  Piglet is also diagnosed with airway malacia in the fall.  Illness has become the norm in the household.  Become pregnant (surprise again!) with Ponchik in September, but don't realize it until nearly the end of the first trimester in the late fall.

May 2013

May 2013

2013: Ponchik is born by emergency c-section at 36 weeks following preterm labor and placental abruption.  I have my best recovery ever, and Ponchik is an easy baby but extremely attached to me.  Piglet finishes kindergarten and starts first grade and Boo finishes his first year of preschool and starts the second.  I am totally burned out on stamping but continue to keep my demonstratorship current through the end of the year.  I am sewing most of my own wardrobe and some of the girls'.  I take up knitting again and make a few little things for the girls.  I consolidate my blogs and keep writing here.  Birdie has febrile seizures during a respiratory infection in the fall, and continues to be in and out of hospital.

April 2014

May 2014

2014: I do a lot of reading and writing about post-modern society and technology and culture, and begin a long deep dive into textile and clothing history and the historical reenacting sewing community.  The Vanderaas have another reunion in Minnesota that summer and Ponchik is a velcro baby the whole trip.  Ponchik finally weans in the fall at 18 months (my longest nurser!) and I feel free to stop making nursing-friendly clothing and return to dress making.  Ponchik is also diagnosed with airway malacia and asthma, and spends a day or two at the end of December in hospital for a respiratory infection.

June 2015

2015: I did a lot of vintage sewing and some historical sewing.  I started doing Project 333 in the summer to get a handle on my wardrobe and style.  My husband joined the ranks of the clergy. Around the same time, I embarked on another weight loss journey, which involved working out at the gym and counting calories.  I was making good progress until my EoE flared in a big way and I suddenly could eat only Cream of Wheat and baked potatoes.  The Pope came to town in September and I spent a tense couple of days alone with the girls, with a possibly perforated esophagus, waiting for the security perimeter around my house to open up enough to allow me to get the hospital for an endoscopy.  It turned out that my esophagus had shrunk to less than 8 mm in diameter (normal is 18mm or more), and thus began the endoscopy/dilation journey that would last until summer 2017.  Birdie's health continued to be precarious.

July 2016

2016: Birdie landed in hospital with sepsis in March, and had one of the scariest breathing episodes I've ever gone through with her in July, and our pulmonologist referred us to immunology in the fall, where she was diagnosed with a mild immunodeficiency.  She started a new medication regime that was nothing short of a miracle, and passed her normally sicker-than-sick, respiratory crisis-after-crisis months in a manner befitting a normal kid.  I started sleeping for more than two hours at a time for the first time since 2010, and began the long task of assessing my other kids' emotional needs and pursuing needed therapy.  My own health continued to be precarious as I continued to have dilation endoscopies about every 12 weeks, with the consequent recoveries and problems associated with them.  My diet was up to five items, all white, all soft, all boring. I finished my 18th century working woman's costume and gave a presentation to Piglet's class in the fall.  I realized I was moving beyond the vintage world, both stylistically and sewing-wise, and tried to figure out what was going to fit my life the best.  I wrote a bit about body image and thought increasingly about how our culture contrives to make women feel terrible in their bodies.

Feb 2017

2017:  Pursuing therapy for the kids became my main priority.  I had dental surgery that further complicated my food life.  By late spring, my throat was stable and at 16 mm, and I realized I needed to address my dietary deficiencies and relearn how to eat.  I decided to try a keto(ish) approach, and started that in June.  I lost some weight, felt better, and was eating more foods again, but couldn't manage anything that was dense or stringy like bread or meat.  I started writing my second novel in June, anticipating having all four kids in school in the fall, and eager to get back to a professional life.  I actively grieved the things that come along with having special needs kids (but didn't write much about it because I couldn't, and still can't).  We visited England on a family vacation in the summer.  I continued sewing and knitting, trying to refine my style.

April 2018

April 2018

2018: My food life improved dramatically, when I discovered I could eat bread and other dense foods again, and in the fall I successfully passed a chicken challenge, and was able to incorporate poultry back into my diet after a decade's absence.  I had a breast cancer scare in the summer and now have to have an aggressive check every year.  Work on the novel continued throughout the year, and I had a messy over-written manuscript by December.  I slowed down considerably on sewing, as my style shifted and I didn't know what was going to replace it.  I started feeling the changes of being in my late 30s, both ontologically and physically, and thinking about what it all meant.  I continued writing about body image, and thinking about how to feel better in mine.  I began seeing a family therapist with the kids and it made all the difference in the world.

June 2019

2019:  I wrote about this year already.  My food life is still complicated, and probably always will be, but I'm okay with that.  My body went on a hormonal roller coaster in the late spring; I've probably entered perimenopause. I'm still trying to sort out what I think about it. 

November 2019

Whew!  I barely recognize the person I was ten years ago.  I am curious to see what the next ten years bring.  It's been a funny odd decade, that's for sure. 

Happy New Year!

Year End

This time of year is always a bit odd for me.  I've been observing Russian Christmas on January 7 for the past 14 years or so, and it still feels bit a off, in part because my kids are all in school now, with a winter break keyed to Western Christmas on 12/25.  It's been a number of years since we traveled to either side of the family for Western Christmas, and so these two weeks tend to feel like suspended animation.  (Also, I miss my family something fierce during this month, and am usually in a melancholy sort of frame of mind as a result). 

This month has been marked by a lot of illness; Piglet came home from a trip to the monastery over Thanksgiving with a fever and a cough, which then spread to the other kids in turn.  The kids' school also had several similar viruses running around, plus a stomach bug.  So the weeks of December were punctuated by sick kids at home, weekends wondering if we needed to take a child to the ER, antibiotics, steroids, and interrupted nights. 

On the last day before the winter break, Piglet came down with another fever.  A scary fever.  I don't scare easily when it comes to medical issues; I've seen too much in the past eight years to panic regularly.  But that fever.  Man. 104.4.  In my mind, that is seizure territory, because for Birdie, it is.  And febrile seizures mean ambulances, and years off my life.  The grey hair on my head didn't come from nowhere.  But for Piglet, it meant misery and delirium and fever interventions that seemed to take ages to kick in. 

Finally, after several hours, two different fever meds, a warm bath, and several wet washcloth applications, his fever got into a range that I no longer felt scared.  He fell asleep and so did I.  On Saturday, he saw the doctor and was diagnosed with pneumonia and placed on antibiotics.  (It also convinced me I need a new stethoscope, because I couldn't hear it on my old one at home).

Any plans I had for the winter break have been placed back on the shelf for reassessment on a day-to-day basis.  It's okay, actually.  I'm exhausted, and long school breaks are usually pretty stressful for me.  Having kids who are still recovering is probably a best-case scenario at this point, because we can have a relaxed schedule, and just take the days easy. 

It is the first time in a long time that I've felt at leisure to have lazy days.  I've been more at ease during the day these past few days than for a long time.  It is pleasant to be with the kids and doing my things while they play with legos, sing Gaudete, watch holiday movies, and make craft projects.  (That's not to say that they aren't fighting in frustrating ways; that's to be expected.  But the overall tone of the day is much more pleasant, and anyone who knows me in real life will know that is a big change). 

These past weeks have been a time of reassessment for me, of thinking about the year gone by, and considering the year to come.  I started the year feeling unusually anticipatory.  New Year's Eve had given me a sense that something was going to happen in 2019.  I was open and curious about many possibilities of change.  There were perhaps glimmers of things to come, but nothing substantiated. 

As I approach another New Year's Eve, I confess to feeling somewhat deflated.  I wonder about the things I attached significance to, thinking they portended something, but turned out not to (at least not at this writing).  Was I just delusional? 

Nothing has really happened this year.  Sure, I finished my novel, and submitted to a publisher, but it is languishing in limbo at the moment.  (Perhaps I'll hear one way or another in the spring).  I started sketching out the next book.  Sewed some clothes, knitted some things.  The kids finished one school year and began another.  The summer was what it was.  I turned 40.  Digging in with the emotional lives of my kids is one of the constants of my days, and I remain committed to therapy with all four of them, plus my own.  My shoulders ache with the weight of it all.  I've perhaps learned a little bit more about being a parent and a lot more about the extent of my own brokenness. 

But mostly, life just kept on trucking. 

Perhaps that is what it is right now.  Just the slow and steady putting of one foot in front of the other, of setting aside the optional and cosmetic for what lies beneath. 

Talking Tuesday: Fear and Clothing

Image via

Sometime in November, on the good advice of Lynn at American Age Fashion, I purchased Cintra Wilson's book, Fear and Clothing: Unbuckling American Style.  The book did not disappoint.  It was my first foray into Wilson's work, and I found her bracing tone enjoyable--hilarious at times.  (Her take-down of Washington DC style had me rolling on the floor). 

There were moments when I thought Ms. Wilson walked right up to the line of being offensive, but she often turned it around by a very insightful observation about her own shortcomings.  The book is organized roughly by regions, and she visits many different parts of the country in her quest to understand the particular sartorial leanings of an area and what it says about the people who live there. 

Where the book really shines, however, is toward the end, when she turns her lens on New York City, her home for many years.  Her observations about how fashion mirrors larger social trends (for good or ill), how human labor is increasingly devalued, and the ways in which capitalism twists our desires are razor sharp.  I found myself dog-earring pages and nodding along.  

Writes Wilson:

"I figured out what was really bothering me, finally, in a sea of $188 T-shirts.  I felt something vital to mankind was being violently ignored to death.  The commodity that is currently the most undervalued thing on earth is the attention, care, and labor of individual human beings. 

When you devalue actual labor--when you falsify and fetishize a look of artificial work and legitimate heavy use in a garment--how does this corrupt our ability to recognize and value actual work?  The dignified patina earned by objects of actual use and usefulness?" (pp. 225-226).

She also makes a few interesting observations about fashion in the culture that I had not considered. First, she notes that there has been virtually no change in fashion for the past 20 years or more, putting our culture in a sort of strange stasis.  This may seem unimportant, given the state of the world, but fashion tends to reflect the larger state of things. 

By way of example, you can date early 1940s garments against late 1940s garments because the lines are so different.  Early 1940s were war years, and the garments are utilitarian, military-inspired, and defined by rationing.  Late 1940s are post-war years, and the clothing reflects the softer civilian milieu and the desire for things to get back to "normal."  You could never look at clothing in 1970 and compare it to 1980 or 1990 and say there had been no change!

The stasis of fashion speaks to our Internet Age, which seems to produce nothing new, but rather recycles cultural nostalgia, comodifying and flattening the original meaning of it until it means nothing (pp. 242-43).  Plus, as Wilson and other culture watchers observe, all the fashion ages are happening all at the same time--there is literally a sartorial niche for everyone, and if everything has a niche, there is no place for fashion to push the boundaries (p. 276). 

Historically, fashion has pushed lines, change boundaries, making conversation about who we are. If there is no boundary, if all the rules have been transcended, there is nothing to be avant garde about. Fashion has become an endless line of cash-grab sequels in the Hollywood model, and we know nothing ontologically.

More importantly, however, is how our late capitalist system has transformed our very selves.  "We have all internalized the pervasive message that the gratification of our immediate individual desire is our highest priority.  We have been subliminally trained to buy things we merely want, as opposed to the things we need--and to indulge ourselves even to the point of self-sabotage whenever we feel weak, unlovely, or unloved....Our will toward consumerism feels irresistible--because it is intended to.  As a society, we choose to remain largely unaware that our desires have been built for us, by experts who have become so insidiously successful at planting seeds in our minds that grow into giant kudzu-sprawls of unanswerable longing that by the time we act upon these desires, we are fully convinced that they were organically grown in our own psyches.  We rationalize big, crazy purchases as being investments in our better selves" (p. 281-282, 285).

With the loss of ontology comes the loss of telos: the end goal of our lives.  If we don't know who we are, we cannot possibly know what the point of anything is.  Who are we living for, why are we living?  What is the legacy we leave for our children? 

This sort of cultural nihilism weighs heavily on me, because I'm far from immune from its darker impulses.  It's like constantly fighting against a current--sometimes you just want to float for a while, and stop swimming. 

My kids are at a stage where it feels like stuff is just sliding through my fingers constantly.  They are growing too fast for efficient hand-me-downs, and knit fabric (most of my kids' clothing) wears badly and is difficult to mend nicely.  I feel the environmental cost of my every purchasing decision very keenly, and it feels like dropping pebbles into an ocean, trying to dam the flow.  (And I'm not even doing a very good job of it).  I'm so very tired. 

I suppose the best way to fight it is to continue to use what we have, thrift well, mend or darn everything I can, purchase fabric and yarn as wisely as possible, and hold fast to the more ancient rhythms of the Church year.

Corduroy Madness (part the fourth)

Okay, so I made another corduroy skirt.  In my defense, the navy one I made in October ended up not being a great skirt.  I did wear it about once a week or more this past month, and I love the color.  The fabric is buttery soft and beautiful, but it is a bit too lightweight for this style of skirt.  As a result, it just bunches and rides up and the waistband Does Not Behave during the day, despite rather strong petersham interfacing.  I think the 21-wale cord would work better as a dress, but since I don't have a winter dress pattern I love right now, I'm just going to stick that in my back pocket for future reference.

So, that left me short a cold-weather blue skirt.  I went back to the Kaufman 14 wale corduroy line to see what options I had.  The navy colorway was out of stock and the same fabric on etsy was eye-wateringly expensive, so I decided to take a chance on the Pacific colorway.  I was concerned it might be too light, too Delft or something, but actually, it is a really gorgeous shade of blue.  The thread that coordinated best was a bright navy thread (as opposed to midnight navy).  I think it will work well with my cold weather clothing and is different enough from my denim skirt to feel fresh.  

I decided to go back to a yoked pocket on this version, because I prefer them, and using the Hollyburn pocket meant I could avoid finishing the side seam (in the Hollyburn pocket, the yoke and pocket bag are all in one, so you just finish the bottom edge, as the side and top edges get put into the side seam and waistband.  With corduroy, I'm always cognizant of how many seams I need to finish and try to reduce that where possible.  Hence the side zip and omitted center back seam.

 

I omitted the button closure on this one, primarily because I have about four big fissures on the tips of my fingers right now and working a buttonhole through thick corduroy just wasn't going to happen.  As it was, sewing on the skirt hook and snap were tough enough.  

 

(And yes, I do have cream for my hands, but it doesn't help that much.  My hands are like this all winter).

 

 

My only complaint about this skirt (and it is minor) is that it is just slightly too big in the waist.  My oregano skirt has a similar issue, although I did just move the button over and add a snap, so it might be okay now.  I've already adjusted the darts and side seams on this blue skirt, but can't quite get the fit perfect.  As with anything fitted through my waist and hips, the differential is difficult because my torso height is in my rise, and there is between 10-12" of difference between my full hip and natural waist measurement.  (I think my waist measurement might be changing a bit too, so the difference is a little more pronounced than it has been recently).

I suspect that a trip through the washer and dryer might sort it out, so I'm hesitant to unpick the waistband and fiddle with it until I try that.  (And there's the not insignificant issue that my waistline tends to expand and contract a little more than average, so perhaps having a bit of extra room isn't a bad thing).  It does make for a comfortable skirt!

I think I can adjust my pattern for next time (I'm strongly considering a wool flannel version) and see if I can get the fit even better.  In any case, this is plenty wearable, and I'm happy to have it in my closet.  (And yes, my name is Juliana and I have a stripey shirt problem).