Me and My Valentine

Me and M on our wedding day

What you have to know about me and M is that our life together is based on one fundamental concept- the joy of randomness.  If it wasn't for pure coincidence, absurdity, and silliness, we never would have gotten together.

Me in my studio- note the real-life Tetris

We first met online in 2003, on a website called OKCupid.  It was the newest incarnation of the recently re-purposed Sparkx.  It had a hilarious and fairly accurate personality test, and endless user-created quizzes.  I was living in a bizarre artists collective, in a tiny studio apartment filled with WAY too much stuff that I only managed to squeeze in through my expertise at real-life Tetris.  I kept my bed in the closet, and much of the kitchen (an absurdly small hallway filled with aging appliances) was filled with my ferret cage.  My couch was made of unsturdy foam, my dresser was also my desk, and the only thing that really allowed me to squeeze in was the shared studio space the next building over.  I was always burning incense and sage, cooking with whole spices from the local Indian and Ethiopian markets, and working with turpentine and linseed oil inside my studio, but it never quite masked the ferret musk.  My studio was a strange, strange place.

The costume that started it all

Being an insomniac, I would stay up into the wee hours taking trivia quizzes about Harry Potter, The Lord of the Rings, or The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.  Of course, the site was aimed vaguely around dating, so whenever you logged in the site would show you pictures of people it recommended for you to send a romantic note or something.  Or a "wink," whatever the hell that was.  One day I got tired of seeing the same faces on my homepage every day, and made two changes to my criteria.  I unchecked the "Jewish" box, and I widened my area of interest to include the Chicago suburbs.  Immediately, a picture of a man wearing a big blue suit appeared on my home page.  A simple mouse click revealed that he was dressed as SuperGrover.  I was intrigued.

His profile seemed standard enough.  He was living in Evanston, attending Northwestern University for engineering, and he had good taste in music, cinema, and literature.  Aside from that, he seemed a bit boring.  Until the very last sentence.  OKCupid prompted, "You should message me if..." and he responded, "You appreciate randomness for the art that it truly is."

Well, I figured he was asking for it.  It was three in the morning, I had nothing better to do, and I felt that I had just been personally challenged to prove to this stranger that I was more random than him.  I didn't think this would be too difficult.

Me and M in 2006

I sent him a three page long email, entitled, "The Art of Random."  In this email, I mused that the orange clouds at sunset would probably taste like strawberry instead of orange sherbert, that pirates would be decimated by zombies, that dolmades were the world's most perfect food, and that my sock puppets (for which I had created an entire quiz on OKCupid- "Which Sock Puppet are You?") would one day rise up against the still functional clothing in the closet.

I figured either he would change his profile so that I wouldn't be tempted to harass him again, he would tell me I was crazy and to leave him alone, or he would report me to the OKCupid authorities.

What I did not expect was a line by line response, a full three pages long, either agreeing or disagreeing with everything that I said.  We sent this email back and forth for months and months, until finally I convinced him to come visit me for dinner in my studio apartment.

The day before M proposed

He was so out of his element.  He had never met a ferret.  He had never been in an artists' collective.  He had never eaten dolmades.  He had never taken the train alone into the city to meet a strange internet person.

We had a lovely evening, and didn't see each other again for two years, when he graduated from Northwestern, got a job, and moved into the city.  Where suddenly I was one of only a few people that he sort of knew.  He became a regular fixture at parties at my (new and much less terrifying and small) apartment.  Before you knew it, we were officially dating.

M played hard to get.  He has since told me that he was reluctant to make any move because he though there were only two outcomes- I would leave him a shattered hull of a man unfit for life, or we would end up living happily ever after.  Turns out he was completely right.

An outtake from our Save the Date shoot

We moved in together in the spring of 2007, and on Independence Day he popped the question.  We had been scheduled to go on vacation on Friday (it was Wednesday), and he had this master plan.  We were going to my childhood home of Guppy Lake, and he was going to bring a ring, a bottle of champagne, and get me on my own in my favorite picnic spot.  It was a lovely plan, but he hadn't gotten the champagne or ring.  And time was running out.  Our Fourth of July was so romantic and wonderful... we'd had a gigantic california benedict breakfast at home, spent much of the day walking around in Pilsen (sort of like a Little Mexico) with fireworks and music everywhere, had food and drinks at a friend's rooftop party, and made love off and on all day.  That evening he just asked me, no prelude, no planning.  Just asked me to marry him.  And I said yes.  What else could I possibly say?

Me and M, New Year's 2008

The very next day he was playing in a company softball game and had a grand mal seizure.  He was rushed to the ER, where I had the distinct pleasure of referring to him as my fiancé for the first time.  Over the next ten hours we waiting and waited, and finally learned that there were several large masses in his brain.  By the time we went home, he had been scheduled for brain surgery five days later to diagnose the masses.  Turned out they were cancerous- astrocytoma.  The prognosis was very, very bad.  Within two weeks he was admitted to a clinical trial to use arsenic to penetrate the blood-brain barrier (to aid the chemotherapy) and began treatments of chemotherapy (including arsenic) and radiation.

Our Wedding Day

As the months wore on, every MRI showed that he was improving.  His doctors were so helpful in arranging his treatments around our life- he was able to keep working all through the chemo, and we even managed to shift his treatments in the spring so that he wouldn't be taking chemo the week of our wedding.  It was a wonderful wedding- not only because we were so in love and happy, but because it signified a triumph over cancer as well.

We were married on a rooftop, with a spectacular view of downtown Chicago.  My friend, the amazing writer C.S.E. Cooney (of the artists' collective) officiated the ceremony.  M's grandfather, a Lutheran minister, delivered the shevat bruchot- the Seven Blessings.  We used my father's tallis and boughs of birch from my childhood home as our chuppah.

M's toast brought down the house

I have never been to a happier, more joyful event.  All our friends and family came out with their love and support, and despite all the drama and the fear and the chaos in the year that led up to the happy day, and despite the fact that it was an outdoor wedding in bizarrely unseasonable cold in LATE MAY, it was truly the most magical day of our lives.

We honeymooned in New Zealand, again around M's chemotherapy schedule, and had a wonderful time.  When it rained, we stayed in and watched "Dune," and when it was sunny we swam in the Pacific and Tasmanian seas.  We would love to go back again someday.

M continued on chemotherapy for a full twelve months, with unprecedented success.  At the end, we decided that it was time for us to start a family.  Like so much else in our lives, M's cancer really changed the way we looked at our priorities.  Having children was important to us, and if (God forbid) something should happen to M, we wanted as much time as a family- all of us together- as we could possibly get.  We tried IVF, as M's chemotherapy caused damage to his *ahem* genetic materials, and on our first attempt we became pregnant with SI and DD.

Me and M at Hokianga Harbor

Through it all, the most important thing has been our ability to laugh, always.  No matter how bleak or frustrating things may seem, we always laugh.  Because really, our whole relationship is pretty much based on a joke, or a dare.  "How silly and random can YOU be?"

All this time has passed, or maybe so little time has passed and we are still best friends, and completely in love with one another.  Each day we seem to be happier, more crazy about each other, and more in love with our little family.  And every single day is filled with laughter, with unceasing random nonsense, and with so much love.

M and I- the happiest day of our lives

A To-Do to Die For

Peppermint Dusted Candy Canes and Ginger Underwear-Men, '08

I am genuinely looking forward to my week.  Through the magical powers of hiring my own personal Mary Poppins and the fresh baby-proofing of my kitchen, I have been able to construct a to-do list for my week that feels not only possible, but genuinely fun.

What sort of To-Do list incites SuperMommy to wax rhapsodic, you ask?

1. Make/hang curtains over dining room window
2. Make holiday cards (this involves both studio arts and fun crafts this year, so I'm particularly excited)
3. Bake holiday cookies (this year's selection: date balls, chocolate crackle-tops, ginger underwear-men, cocoa amarettis, and peppermint dusted candy-canes)
4. Make myself that skirt I've been so excited about since I saw one similar to it at Anthropologie in September and picked up fabric and buttons for immediately afterward
5. Set up Christmas tree
6. Wrap Christmas presents

 ...not necessarily in that order.

The girls have proven that they can be very cooperative while I cut and pin fabric, if not while I actually sew.  They've shown that they can be at the very least not COMPLETELY destructive and distracting while I cook, even if they are still too young to really understand the whole hot oven STAY AWAY concept.

Best of all?  M's semester has ended, and his work might be slowing down enough that I can actually imagine us sitting down to a family dinner every night this week.

Oh, it's a glorious time, all right.  It's a magical, wonderful, beautiful time.  And if my exciting and busy week keeps me completely away from you, I'm sure you will understand all too well that I'm just having too much fun to talk about it at the time.

And just for you, and the Multiples...and More! network, my signature cookie:

Cocoa Amarettis Recipe:

1c blanched whole almonds
1/2c sugar, divided
1 tbsp cocoa powder
2 tbsp powdered sugar
2 egg whites
1 tsp almond extract
slivered almonds to decorate

Lots of Cocoa Amarettis, '08

1. Preheat oven to 350.  Bake almonds for 12 minutes, turning occasionally.  Set aside to cool, but leave the oven on for baking.
2. Once cooled, place in food processor with 1/4c sugar and process until finely ground but not oily.  Mix with cocoa powder and powdered sugar, and set aside.
3. In a copper mixing bowl, beat the egg whites until stiff peaks form.  This CAN be done in another bowl by adding a pinch of tartar, but I highly recommend against it.  Sprinkle in remaining 1/4c sugar, 1tbsp at a time, beating until thoroughly aborbed.  Continue beating until the egg whiles are glossy and stiff.  Beat in almond extract, and then gently fold in processed almond mixture until JUST blended.
4. Transfer batter into piping bag, or gallon ziplock with a little hole in the corner.  Pipe 1"-2"rounds onto parchment lined baking sheets about an inch apart.  Press a slivered almond into the center of each cookie. 
5. Bake for 14 minutes.  Cool on sheets for 10 minutes, then transfer to wire racks to cool completely.

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Many Holidays in our Household

Multiples... and More! Question of the Week - What are your families' holiday traditions?





This is a question M and I have discussed quite a bit over the past few years.  With M being Lutheran, and with me a Conservative Jew, the question of which of our own childhood's traditions will be passed along has a lot of nuances to take into consideration.  For example, the Jewish holidays run on a lunar calendar, while the secular (and Christian) world use a solar calendar.  This means that Channukah doesn't fall on the same secular calendar days each year.  This year it's early, Channukah started on December 1st.  Next year, it will start on December 20th, and run through Christmas.

SuperMommy and her super sisters light Channukah candles

This means that if we were to try to maintain the sort of holiday traditions that I had as a kid, sometimes Christmas would get trampled on a bit.  But if we ignore the Channukah traditions just because it's Christmas, it sends a clear message about which holiday is more important.  And we don't want ANY messages about some holidays being more important than others.

So far, we've established a few basics.  We will have at least as many menorahs as there are ladies in the house.  This means that we're short a few just yet, but as it's a lady's duty to light the candles I want my girls to have menorah's to think of as their own.  Each night of Channukah we'll light candles.  I would like to delineate the gift giving a little, give each child a specific night on which it is their turn to give gifts.  It is important to both me and to M to make sure that our kids understand that it's not about GETTING presents, it's about GIVING presents.  About showing the people you love how much you care, not about who gets the best stuff.

My extended in-laws... on one side

Another tradition I'll be passing on to my children is trivia for gelt.  In my family, nobody just gives you gelt for playing dreidle.  You have to answer questions about Channukah and Jewish history to get your chocolate coins.  Year after year, my mother asked my little sister the same question until she got it right- what does Channukah mean?  The answer is rededication.  I want my children to understand why we celebrate- not just that we're eating delicious latke and sufganiyot and opening presents.

As far as Christmas is concerned, we have a tree (although it's not up yet- we haven't found a baby-proof location!), but mostly it's the purview of Grandma.  We go to Minnesota to visit M's family every year for Christmas, so the actual experience of Christmas Eve and Christmas Morning are very much what M experienced as a child- there are extended family gatherings and gift exchanges, then a small family dinner with M's parents and sister and BIL on Christmas Eve, followed by opening the presents from each other.  Then we all go to bed, and in the morning open presents from "Santa," who only fills up stockings.  Then Christmas Day is a lazy adventure of watching new movies, eating junk food, and stuffing ourselves with my MIL's amazing Christmas cookies.  My first year of Christmas with my in-laws involved making a fool of myself for eating an apple that came in my stocking.  I was very happy to eat my apple, but apparently it had never been done.  After all, who eats apples when they have peanut M&M's and cookies in such abundance?

DD, my MIL, and a little cousin at last year's Christmas

We try to make it to my family's Channukah celebration, but it's trickier.  We decided when we got married that Christmas travel trumps Channukah travel, and that Passover travel trumps Easter travel.  So sometimes my family's Channukah celebration is very early, this year we had it Thanksgiving weekend.  Sometimes it's very late- a few years ago we had it well after New Year's.  And some years we don't make it at all.  It's sad for me, because I have such fond memories of my childhood Channukah's with my grandparents and great grandparents and aunts and uncles... but we all have to make sacrifices.  I'm confident that on years that Channukah and Christmas overlap, my in-laws will be happy to have my daughters lighting their menorahs by the Christmas tree.

Creepy Twin Things

I knew when I had twins that they would do twin things.  you hear about it all the time, what sort of telepathic link or strange associated actions they have.  You hear about the mythological associations with twins, the historical significance... people make a big deal out of twins.

And then you start to see, well, twin behavior.  And it kind of freaks you out.

Today I was working on some homework, and I heard a strange sort of sound coming from behind me.  Dead silence, with a rhythmic thumping.

I turned around and there were SI and DD, sitting next to a big cardboard box.  And what were they doing?  Sitting shoulder to shoulder, leaning forward together, and thumping the box with their inside hands in perfect unison.  Why?  I don't know.  How did they communicate to each other that they were going to do this?  I don't know.  The creepiest part- the looks of total concentration on their faces.  Whatever they were doing and why... it's a mystery to me, but it must have been important.

I don't generally find my children disconcerting.  But there was something extremely unnerving about that kind of behavior.  You hear about it a lot more in identical twins, and I'd been hearing for a long time now that twins tend to make up their own language, but this wasn't either of those.  This was dyzygotic twins (that's fraternal, not identical) doing something they should have had no business doing, and in a completely unspoken way.

What the hell was going on?

My father has given me a book  on this subject, "Indivisible by Two."  It's about real-life twins who's lives make up the same sort of stuff as these stories.

Twins are all over in mythology.  The ancient Aztecs thought that twins were back luck, and frequently killed one at birth.  The belief was that twins would eventually kill their parents.  However, their mythology is also filled with stories of hero twins.  So if they're not evil, they're very very very good... with super powers!


There are twins in Greek and Roman mythology as well.  Artemis and Apollo,Castor and Pollux, Remus and Romulus... There are twins in Judeo-Christian stories as well.  Jacob and Esau, for example.

People have always been fascinated with twins.  I never completely understood it until know, but I have to say I finally get it.  Twins can be just plain creepy.  I had thought that being a twin wouldn't be terribly different from having a sister nearly your age.  I grew up with a sister less than a year and a half in either direction.  We were very, very close.  And how different could it really be?  People have two babies in 11 months all the time... even if I think they're crazy.  I didn't think about twindom as being a truly unique relationship.  But It is.  Unique, and completely other to the experience of being a singleton.

I adore my girls.  I'm not scared of them, I'm not worried that this will effect their permanent social development somehow...

But twin babies... they do some creepy things.

I'm an Offbeat Mama!

See my feature in Offbeat Mama!

http://offbeatmama.com/filed/features/it-worked-for-me

My favorite comment?

"Darned right saag paneer is comfort food!"

Domestic Tranquility

Early on in my very complicated pregnancy, I had to withdraw from school and take a leave of absence. This involved sitting down with the head of my program, and having a nice long talk over my ultrasound photos. She offered me a piece of advice that was absolutely true and good, "The best gift you can give your kids is a good relationship with their father."

A little background- it might in fact be true that nobody has a stronger, healthier relationship than me and my husband. I don't know if that was the case when we got engaged, but nineteen hours later I was rushing to the hospital to find him after he had a grand mal seizure during a softball game. It turned out that he had a few tumors, one the size of a golf ball, in his brain. The diagnosis was astrocytoma- a glioblastoma similar to the one that killed Ted Kennedy recently. The prognosis was very bad, but we forged ahead. With a lot of positive thinking, a lot of love, and an amazing medical study, he's basically as good as new. This July we'll be celebrating his doubling his life expectancy at the time of prognosis.

This tends to put a lot of things into perspective. Like, whether or not it's important that the dishes always get cleaned, or how much stress it is to be out of work, or how hard raising babies can be. No matter what life throws at us, we can smile at each other and say, "At least it's not brain cancer."

That said, we are fighting three of the leading causes of divorce at the moment. The first, we're both out of work. I'm still freelancing but hell- I'm a full time mom these days. And he's still looking, but his field was hit particularly hard by the economic downturn, and when the going gets tough the tough go to grad school. So he's going to be starting a master's program in the fall.

The second is that we have very different diets. I'm a life-long vegetarian (thanks Mom and Dad!), and he's a meat-and-potatoes Minnesotan. You'd be surprised how important comfort foods are to a feeling of security in your own home, and if my comfort food is saag paneer and his is meatloaf, you can see how we might have a problem.

The last is religion. I'm a Conservative Jew, and he's a Lutheran.

This is remarkably rarely an issue of contention, even when deciding how to raise our kids. The biggest religion-related fights we've ever had are about whether or not Christmas is a secular holiday. I maintain that it's absolutely not, which he says that all religious meaning has been removed and it has been completely secularized. We've pretty much agreed to disagree, although it's still a sore spot, but the girls are going to be celebrating it regardless.

On our recent trip to visit his family, his grandfather the pastor baptized the babies. If they'd been boys they'd have had a bris, but I don't really buy into the "naming ceremony" Jews have for welcoming babies into the world. It's a pretty recent invention, and I just don't get it.

My husband (M) and I are concerned that by baptizing we may give the wrong impression to our families. We don't want anyone thinking that this is some sort of final choice on the girls' upbringings. It's just one element of half of their religious education. As for the bulk of their religious education, we've decided to send the girls to Hebrew school and not Sunday school. It's my hope that they will want to become Bat Mitzvah, but it's going to be up to them what religious choices they want to make in their lives. Living in America and attending public school, they'll learn all about Christianity no matter what. Their Jewish education won't come so easy. No need to push them to spend their entire weekend in parochial classrooms, Hebrew school and an American education should do it.

That said, the baptism was remarkable difficult for me. Not because of watching the babies get Jesus-ed, that was fine, it was more the sudden feeling of being outnumbered by my Christian family members and their desire for my children to grow up and follow their religion. It's made me think a lot about how M will feel when at the end of the month we're in New York for my cousin's Bar Mitzvah. Surrounded by my family, will he feel just as second guessed and pressured, despite not a word being uttered? Probably. And then we'll look at each other, and that silent mantra will fly through both of our heads again. "At least it's not brain cancer."

So I've done it. I've outed myself as a Jew with baptized children. But that doesn't stop me from singing them Hebrew lullabies, it doesn't stop me from putting them in a four questions onesie, and it doesn't hurt any of us. At the hardest, it just teaches both of us to ask better questions, to respect each other's beliefs, and to remember that our children are people. They will make their own choices someday.