This is the third and final ramble in what has become a three-part epic about having the peditrician tell us that Baby Pickles was underweight and that we needed to give her formula and what we’ve done about it so far.  You can read part one here and part two here.  And before I get going, thanks so much to all the lovely folks who have commented on the first two posts.  Particularly the comments on my intial post made me feel so awesome and supported and not alone and hell yeah.  And right about being skeptical!  Because a doctor saying your baby’s weight is too low is not necessarily the last word on the subject.  Because doctor’s are particularly good at fear mongering.  Anyway, as usual, you guys rock.  Thank you.

I hadn’t realized.  But having kids makes you realize so many things, and what I’ve been particularly focused on realizing lately is how much, how seriously very very much, what we eat affects us.  I mean, I knew that.  Sort of.  You are what you eat, right?  And so I try to make sure I am not an enormous vat of white sugar, Frankenstein plants, antibiotics, pesticides, and partially hydrogenated vegetable oils.

But did you know that what we eat and how we eat it can change the way we look?  Not in a “he’s fat and she’s thin” sort of way, but in a fundamental “this is the shape of my jaw” sort of way.  For example, if you breastfeed, your baby’s jaw will develop differently than if you don’t (or if you don’t for very long).  And of course a lack of various nutrients (or the presense of various detrimental substances) can result in smaller people, smarter people, allergic people, and on and on.  Realizing this as I’m watching Baby Pickles grow has shown me how much more of what we eat we really are.  So much more than I ever really was able to wrap my head around.  Everything.  Everything.

Which is why breastfeeding Baby Pickles for as long as it is mutually acceptable for both of us is so important to me.  Which is why I was hoping to never have to give her a drop of formula.  But, whoops, too late.  As I have mentioned here and here.

The first time I fed Baby Pickles formula was a Saturday.  After a week of up-and-down weights that ended with a cumulative gain of either absolutely nothing or a 20 gram loss, depending on which scale you were willing to believe, I didn’t want to wait any longer (it is taking all my self control not to make a wait-weight pun here, badabing!).  I still wasn’t convinced that the problem was that my body wasn’t producing enough milk, couldn’t produce enough milk, but I didn’t want Pickles’ health to suffer for it in the meantime.

More worrisome to me had been the thought of having to give Pickles a bottle.  Because babies don’t have to suck as hard on a bottle to get at the milk, they often start to prefer the bottle to the breast.  And ruck-zuck, as they say in German, you’ve got yourself a baby who refuses to breastfeed.  I wanted to give Pickles as much breast milk as I could—the stuff is pure magic I tell you—and so I didn’t want to run that risk.  That’s where the supplemental feeding contraption came in.

A supplemental feeder is a kind of spacey device designed for just this purpose.  It consists of a plastic bottle that you wear, upside down, on a string around your neck.  Two tiny tubes are attached to the head of the bottle, and these you tape onto your nipples so that the end of the tube sticks out just slightly more than the nipple itself.  First you let your baby drink breast milk, and when you’re empty, you open up the tube and let her drink formula.  That way she only drinks as much formula as she really needs, and she still has to suck just as hard to get it.  I.e. laziness doesn’t come in and ruin your breastfeeding relationship, and you don’t have to think too much about how much milk you’re giving her.  She gets to decide.  Another pro for the supplemental feeder.

So we started with one bottle a day.  In two days Pickles had gained 130 grams (about what she had gained per week previously). Using the contraption was pretty easy, and Pickles drank about half of each bottle offered to her.  Then she drank the whole bottle, slurping the last sips with that straw-at-the-bottom-of-the-soda-cup noise.  Then we offered her two bottles a day.  Now we’re back to one, which she is only drinking half of.  If there is any information to be gleaned from this (non) pattern, I don’t know what it is.  I am glad, however, that it appears the problem lies with me and not with her.  *Cue more detective work.*  Because I’m still not willing to believe this is an unsolvable issue.

About a week into formula feeding, a good friend with a nine-month-old baby gave me a call.  She knew about my milk problem, had been with me to La Leche League meetings, even lived in a Bauwagen herself.  “I had an idea,” she said.  “Why don’t I just pump milk for you to give to Pickles?  I have more than enough.”

I grinned.  “Really?  You would do that?!  I have to admit the idea had already occured to me, but I didn’t ask you about it because I thought you might think it was weird.  Or too much work.”

“No, I mean I don’t want to do it forever since I want to get rid of my milk eventually,” she went on, “but if you’re only giving her one bottle a day that should be no problem.  As long as I don’t have to clean the pump.”

And so Baby Pickles got her own wet nurse (technically it’s a milk share since she’s not feeding at another breast, but tomato, tomatoe).  There are a lot of people out in internet land who seem to find the concept horrifying, disgusting, wrong.  But to me it feels natural.  What would someone with a milk supply problem have done 200 years ago?  1. Not been freaked out by worried doctors obsessed with charts.  2. Not had her baby constantly weighed.  3. Probably only noticed a weight issue if it was very very serious.  And then 4. Looked for a wet nurse, if she could afford it, or cross nursing with a mother friend.  Did you know that royal ladies only nursed their first-born children?  It was part of the whole “you are marked for greatness” spiel.  Everybody else got farmed out to a wet nurse.  The history of wet nursing is kind of fascinating.  As is the fact that it appears to be quietly reappearing in many people’s lives today.  Having a friend willing to share her milk with my baby makes my little community feel even tighter, more supportive and magical and healthy.

Unfortunately, our milk sharing hasn’t worked out quite so idyllically.  First of all, preparing bottles sucks.  SUCKS.  I keep my Wagen relatively neat, but I am not in the habit of washing anything—be it dishes, my body, or a bottle—every single day.  And with baby bottles you have to wash the damn thing, then you have to sterilize the damn thing, and then you have to warm the damn food up (if using the formula, to a boil), and then you have to wait for the damn stuff to cool to just the right tempurature.  And hope that Baby Pickles is still even interested at that point.  Or hasn’t been torturing you for an hour with heart-rending screams of agony.

Every time I make a bottle, I find myself wondering why anyone would choose this feeding option because “it is  more convenient.”  My ass it is.  Breastfeeding: no washing involved!  A quickly moved shirt and—bam!—you’re rolling!  So there’s the irritation of washing the pump and the bottle.  Add to that trying to meet up with said friend, who only lives a kilometer away, every day for her to pump, at a time when both of our babies aren’t screaming and hers, preferrably, is sleeping (she gets jealous about the pump being on her milk tap).

But despite the difficulties that lie in the logistics of such an arrangement, it’s not the reason that Pickles is still getting mostly formula.  Nope, that’s because she had horrible screaming fits of intestinal (we assume) agony every time she received our friend’s milk.  So either our friend is eating something Pickles’ can’t stomach, or the make-up of the milk (which is currenlty tuned for our friend’s nine-month-old baby) is just too hard for her almost-three-month-old stomach to digest.  Looks like we’ve got detective work on every front.

Sheets and blankets and towels don’t make for good headlines.  But from them I built my comfy sleeping nest (well, not the towels), and my comfy sleeping nest is pretty much the most important place in my little house.  Because we live so tiny (our main dwelling being 7 meters by 2,20 meters for those of you just tuning in), our bed tends to serve as both bed, couch, and living room.  When I’m inside, I’m usually hanging out on the bed.

I’ve written about the bed in my Wagen before, about how I built it out of dumpstered materials, got a mattress from a friend, and then clothed it in dumpster-dived pillows, sheets, and blankets.  And the bed in our main Wagen is pretty much the same deal.  Though the main frame was in it when we moved in, the extension that we added to make it huge (so Baby Pickles could sleep in it with us) was largely dumpstered and the mattress extension was cut out of a bit of foam headed for the trash.

Though I haven’t been checking the trash across the street so often for booty (and the university changed the type of trash cans there, which makes for slightly more work for the diver), I still managed to find one of the recurrent “bed bundles” this season.  What is a bed bundle?  Well, it’s when a student, for no reason I can ascertain, takes the fitted sheet off of their bed, wraps all of the rest of their bed clothes in it (blankets pillows etc) and then tosses it as-is in the trash.  It blows my mind every time I find one, and over the years I’ve found quite a few, and it is the reason that all (with three exceptions, one from a flea market and two old fitted sheets from my mom) of my sheets, the sheets (and towels) that you see in that photo, are from the trash.

As usual, thanks to the wasteful students!  (But really?)  How ironic (is this actual irony?  I have never bothered to really hammer the true definition of that word into my head) that I profit from the same waste that frustrates me so.  Oh those twisted webs.

In case you missed it, you can read part one of this post about dealing with potential breastfeeding problems and an underweight baby here.

As soon as we had gotten home from the pediatrician’s office I had downloaded the World Health Organization’s (WHO) charts for healthy baby weights.  Pickles wasn’t even on them, her weight was so low.  Hmm, I thought, well that doesn’t sound good.  But she had been gaining, and I remembered the words of my midwife, who had also pointed out Pickles’ low-end weight gain during her many post-partum visits.  “If you were both the size of bears I might be worried, but look at the two of you.  She’s probably just going to be small.”  Was she just gaining at her own pace?  Or was this a serious problem?  Was she going to be a dwarf?  Did she already have a tapeworm?  Had her metabolism stopped working?  Was she going to die?

One little rock, and there goes the whole mountain.  It doesn’t take long for me to jump from worry to WORRY WORRY DEATH DEATH DEATH FUCK HOLY SHIT WAAHHH.  Not long at all.  I feel like I spend most of my emotional life trying to get the emotional voices in my head to listen to the intellectual voices.  The intellectual voices are almost always right, but the emotional voices just seem to put their hands over their ears shouting “lalalalalala” every time they try to talk the emotional voices down off the ledge.  The two of them spend a lot of time screaming at each other in there.

It was the doctor’s opinion that I didn’t have enough milk to feed Pickles.  But did you know it is actually really rare that a woman’s body is physically incapable of producing enough milk to nurture her baby?  There is only one condition that does it, and it is a lack of tissue in the breast.  All the other issues a woman might have with breast milk supply usually come from outside factors—things like c-sections, bad latch, lack of support or information, painful nipples, breast surgery, and on and on—and many of these factors are fixable.  Why would a doctor assume I had this rare condition immediately, without asking a single god damned question?  Why would she recommend something less healthy than breast milk for my baby without even examining my breasts to see if I actually had the rare condition that she claimed was causing the problem?  Forgive me for the repetition, but I still can’t believe that a pediatrician could know so little about breastfeeding, a subject that impacts every single one of her patients.  It strikes me as ludicrous, as irresponsible.  But you’ve got to be your own advocate, other people be damned.

After getting my sack o’ herbs and talking to our La Leche League leader, I made an appointment with the midwife filling in for my own during her vacation.  Turned out I was kind of glad that Clara was on vacation.  She may be Ina May-esque in her philosophies when it comes to birth, but when it comes to feeding she is of the “one bottle won’t kill her” school.  (And no, one bottle won’t kill a baby.  Formula doesn’t kill babies.  Well, unless you’re talking about the African babies who starved to death because free samples got them onto formula, their mother’s stopped lactating, and then, when the family couldn’t afford to keep buying formula, could no longer feed baby.  But formula comes with a set of risks that I preferred to avoid opening the door to.)  But Anna, Clara’s replacement, turned out to be an adamant proponent of breastfeeding, which not only made me feel comfortable with her, but meant she was also very well informed.

When Anna arrived at our home, the first thing we did was to weigh Pickles.  Her scale showed 100 grams more than the doctor’s.  It didn’t put Pickles on the weight charts, but it did mean that she had continued gaining at her pace, that her weight hadn’t stalled completely.  Then we talked.  She asked me about our breastfeeding habits, how often, how long, and did Pickles generally seem pretty content?  She examined Pickles, who didn’t show any physical signs of being malnourished, and whose head was developing just fine.  (Development of the head is apparently a far more important benchmark than weight gain, the brain being our most important organ.)  We told her what Clara had said, what the doctor had said, and that we had both been “underweight” babies.  She asked me about the birth (and was relieved to hear that despite the c-section, we were successfully breastfeeding as soon as I had been stitched up).  She watched Pickles latch on and drink.  This is the kind of care I wish the health care system offered.  At least it still exists in certain corners of the industry.

So what now?  There was one option remaining, and that was that maybe I did have that rare condition.  Anna examined my breasts.  “I just took a seminar about this, so it could be I’m just seeing it everywhere because of that, but your breasts look like the breasts we saw pictures of during the course.”  Awesome.  Because having small breasts in a country obsessed with big breasts wasn’t awesome enough (America being that country, Germany is less with this), their smallness had to fuck me over as a mother too.  Thanks body, thanks a lot.  But Anna presented a plan.  I should pump my milk to see how much I had, and then feed it to Pickles using a contraption she would bring me, a bottle attached to two tiny tubes that would allow me to supplement Pickles’ diet directly at the breast, thus avoiding any interruption of breast feeding, any nipple confusion, or any further depletion of my milk supply (through a lack of sucking).

When she left to pick up the supplementary feeding contraption, I felt a little better, like maybe there was a chance that there was nothing wrong with me, and that we could get to the bottom of Pickles’ low weight.  The Beard was glad to see me less freaked out, and he headed off to work.  A half an hour later, Anna was back with the feeding contraption, which she showed me how to use.  But suddenly she was talking about formula again, about how I could feed Pickles as usual and then offer the formula to see how much more she drank.  If it was a lot, she obviously wasn’t getting enough.  If it wasn’t, then the problem lay elsewhere.  But why was she talking about formula again already?  When we had just discussed a plan to figure things out without it, putting off supplementation for one week of detective work before going down formula road?  I was confused.  She left.  I started to cry.  Stupid broken body.  I felt so angry at it, that it could let me down like this, that it couldn’t even feed my baby.  Maybe I was never supposed to have children.  Maybe I should have died at birth myself (I was a footling, born by planned c-section, so it is likely that I would have).  I called the Beard, and he came home.  He can be stunningly optimistic sometimes.  It helped.

We decided to go through with our week of detective work.  I would take the herbs, and we would borrow a baby scale from the pharmacy so we could track Pickles’ weight ourselves.  I tried the pumping experiment, but the pump hurt my nipples something fierce (while pumping and for several days afterwards), so I decided not to take that road.  I made a conscious effort to eat more, double-checked that I was drinking enough.  I offered Pickles a drink more often, and I started using the compression method (explained in an article here), which helped Pickles get all of the milk out.  And at the end of the week Pickles had, according to the numbers we’d observed on our own scale, gained absolutely nothing.  A slow weight gain was potentially acceptable, but no weight gain in an infant is bad news.  I had enough evidence.  I went to the organic grocery store, and I bought a box of powdered formula.

Apparently this is the longest story ever.  Because here I am finished with another post, and I still haven’t even told you about what we’re doing with feedings now and how it’s going.  I almost did it here.  But sometimes a sentence just feels like it is the end of a post, and I like to go with that.  So once again, tune in again later for The Tribulations of Baby Pickles or Operation Tube Milk.

We’ve had two months with Baby Pickles, and I haven’t been particularly chatty online about it.  It’s not that I haven’t wanted to.  It’s that my time with two hands and more than five consecutive minutes on the computer has been few and far between.  But it makes me feel like I’m going to explode when I don’t get a chance to write anything (stuff for work doesn’t satisfy this need, unfortunately), so the Beard is making a concerted effort to get out of the Wagen with Pickles more often.  It’s not that he doesn’t want to spend more time with Baby Pickles, it’s just that she likes to spend most of her time at the milk tap.  Go figure.

I really love breastfeeding.  The lazy part of me loves the ease and convenience—no equipment to wash or sterilize, no formula to prepare and warm to just the right temperature.  The thrifty part of me loves the savings—formula and bottles and things are expensive.  The foodie part of me loves the health benefits it allows me to pass on, and the knowledge that I am not feeding my baby anything artificial or funky, no label-reading required.  And the rest of me loves the soul-wrenching, mind-numbing level of beautiful, serene, forever bonding that it facilitates.  An adorable teeny tiny baby who, while having a drink, is suddenly so overcome by happiness that she feels the need to stop for a second and smile goofily up at you?  Oh. My. God.  Janitor to aisle four, another customer has melted.

That being said, you then might be able to imagine how I felt when we took Pickles to her third doctor’s appointment, and the pediatrician looked at her weight (which was low) and said: “You need to give her formula.”

A baby being labeled as “underweight” is one of those sort of wishy-washy things.  The charts the doctors in the west use tend to be on the high side (as in, expect high weights), while the WHO charts include a lower range of weights under “healthy.”  But individuality complicates the issue (ah yes, the complication of every medical issue, ever, and the one our current medical system seems to have lost the time for dealing with) as a baby with small parents might be smaller than one with bear-sized parents, for example.  It is hard to say which baby’s low weight is a result of a problem and which baby’s low weight is a result of genetics or individual timing (some babies having growth spurts at different ages than expected, for another example).  And doctors these days don’t often have the time to figure out the difference.

Those three words felt like a sledgehammer in the face: “give her formula.”  No, no, no!  This wasn’t the kind of doctor I wanted to work with!  The kind of doctor who would recommend formula before asking me one single question about breastfeeding.  The kind of doctor who would rather throw the easiest solution to the problem at her patients than take a few minutes to see if the healthiest choice for Pickles diet—i.e. human milk–could be sustained with a little tweaking of tactic or technique.  Then again, I’m not sure I’ve ever met a doctor who had the time for that kind of relationship with his or her patients.  The system just isn’t designed that way.  So I told her I would get a second opinion from a lactation consultant and my midwife, thankyouverymuch.

I’m still wondering if the pediatrician thought I actually wanted a second opinion on Pickles’ weight.  Though in my head I was thinking “well, we’ll see what the WHO charts say,” as well as “we’ll see what the midwife’s scale says,” it was the need for formula supplementation that I wanted a second opinion on.  The stuff isn’t pure evil or anything, but I knew that feeding babies formula carries certain risks (you can read all about them here if you are interested), particularly at this age, before Pickle’s intestines are completely finished developing.  I would give Pickles formula if she needed it, but I wasn’t going to believe she needed it until I talked to someone who had the time and the training to talk to me intelligently about breastfeeding.

The doctor, meanwhile, seemed a little rattled that I wanted a second opinion at all.  But maybe she’s just not used to having people question her advice.  Doctors, after all, enjoy a rather haloed position in society.  I was 25 before I realized that they don’t actually know everything, that a lot of the time, they don’t have a fucking clue what’s wrong with you or what to do about it.

So we went home, and I went into hyperdrive.  I went to the pharmacy and had them order fenugreek capsules (an herb known to help increase milk supply), bought nursing tea, and combed the internet.  Then I called the leader of my La Leche League group (a breast feeding support group that I have been going to since I was a couple of months pregnant).  Incredibly kind, she helped me cool off, and then popped a package with blessed thistle capsules (another herb alleged to help boost milk supply), The Womanly Art of Breastfeeding book, more fenugreek, and domperidone (a medicine available only in Belgium, strangely) that might help in the mail.  (Fenugreek, blessed thistle, and domperidone are the combo of supplements that LLL adoptive mothers hoping to breastfeed might take, but don’t ever take domperidone as a first response to breastfeeding problems!  Read up on it, and  for the love of cod don’t base any of your own medical decisions on my blogular anecdotes.)

We talked about boosting my supply, about making sure I was eating and drinking enough, and about options for the case that I really did need to give her formula, among other things.  Talking to her was fantastic, calming.  Because despite all the information I have about breastfeeding and supplementation (and how the supplementation is often not necessary), despite the fact that I know that doctors don’t always know everything or have time to discuss more time-consuming options with their patients, hearing a doctor express worry about my baby was scary.  And the knee jerk reaction to fear is to do whatever the loudest voices are saying you have to do to fix it.  Even when we know better.

To read part two in this series, click here.  For part three, click here.

Those of you who have been reading for a while will remember the au pair chronicles—a serial about how it is that I ended up in Germany and what it was like spending 10 months au pairing for a insanely rich family in Frankfurt am Main. Well, I’ve been busy writing new installments to share with you during operation whirlwind baby. But since a hell of a lot of new readers have become regulars since I first began the series a year ago, I thought I would start by re-publishing the series thus far—both to buy me baby time and to get everyone caught up before continuing the saga. You can find an index of the entire series here. This segment was originally published on February 4, 2010.

October, and two months in Germany when a high school friend emailed to tell me that he would be in Frankfurt for the night. My mother would be arriving in a few weeks, but this would be my first visitor since moving.

We met at the train station and headed to a pub. I don’t remember where we went or what we drank, but I will never forget how, between drinks and pubs, we came past the Cole’s house. “Let’s go in for a second,” I suggested, excited at the chance to show someone from back home around the set of my strange new life. “I’ll give you a quick tour and we can use the bathroom.”

I showed him the stainless-steel kitchen and the pink-chaired dining room. “Can you believe these chairs?” I asked pointing at the plastic-backed, pink-velor upholstered seats surrounding the long wooden table. “Janet had them specially made.” Lodged in the (plexi?) glass chair backs were fake pink feathers. I had never seen such ugly chairs in my life, and it hurt my head when I thought about how much Janet had probably paid to have them custom made. They seemed to scream “I want you to find me avant gaurd and edgy,” but the execution was sloppy and tasteless, just like the stainless steel faux antlers she’d commissioned for the stairwell we were now walking up.

On the second floor we met Janet and Jens. In bathrobes. Lurking. Angry. “What the hell do you think you’re doing? Who is that?” Jens yelled. “No strangers in the house!”

“What?” I shook my head no. This was news to me.

“NO STRANGERS IN THE HOUSE.” The yell had become a threatening bellow.

“You never told me that before. Besides, this is an old friend of mine. I’ve know him for seven or eight years. I just wanted to show him where I live, he’s not staying, we just wanted to use the bathroom…”

“NO STRANGERS IN THE HOUSE.”

Eyes wide, we turned and scuttled back down the stairs and out the door.

“What the hell was that about?”

“Apparently I”m not allowed to bring friends over.” So much for the affectionate monologues Janet held when she was in a good mood about me being “part of the family.”

The next morning Jens found me in the kitchen. He wanted to talk. “It’s very important that you don’t bring anyone into the house.”

“Ok, that’s fine,” I conceded, “But it would have been nice if someone had told me that before embarrassing me in front of an old friend. I’ve known him for years. He wasn’t just some guy that I picked up at the disco. And he speaks German, so he understood everything you two said. You didn’t exactly make him feel welcome.”

“Well, maybe I should tell you a story. I used to be in banking. A few years ago I was hired to run this bank, and, well, once I had a look through the books it seemed clear that something fishy was going on. I called the police. Twelve people went to jail, and I get worried sometimes…”

He pulled his cell phone out of his pocket and pulled up the speed dial directory to show me the first number. “That’s why I have the police on my first speed dial. For a while we were worried that someone would try to kidnap the children. I’m sure you don’t know what it’s like to walk down a dark street and fear for your life every time you see another person coming in the distance, but that’s how I feel every night.”

Sure, Jens. No woman has ever felt that before. I nodded, wondering why a man with so much to lose would hire a complete stranger to drive his Porsche and take his 4-year-old twins to the park. Maybe I had been hired to kidnap them, Mr. Jens, ever thought of that? And even if I hadn’t been, what was one apathetic, underpaid au pair going to do to stop someone who did?

“Now I can’t get a job in the banking world anymore,” he admitted sadly. “I’ve been working for Janet’s father ever since.”

Later I Googled the case in search of more details. I had Googled the family name before coming to work for them, but without banking-specific keywords I hadn’t found anything about the Cole’s dirty little secret. There wasn’t much to find, but there were a few articles about a sketchy court case involving suspected embezzling, a tattling CEO, and some leniently interpreted Swiss banking laws.

After that, the drama of daily life in the Cole house started to seem absurd, hilarious. A Choose-Your-Own-Adventure, live-action afternoon soap broadcast right to my living room, dining room, bedroom, and kitchen.

Is this happening to you, here?  (Not that you’ll be able to tell me if it is.  Sigh.  How annoying.)  I’ve been having problems commenting on a lot of blogs I read lately, and I finally did some research on what’s going on.  Turns out, WordPress changed their commenting system so that if you try to leave a comment with an e-mail address tied to a WordPress account, you need to sign in in order to leave a comment.

But what I’m hearing is that sometimes that doesn’t work.  And that maybe they are going to require everyone to sign in, either with WordPress or Gravatar, in order to leave a comment on a WordPress-run blog.  I think this fucking sucks.  Why make communication even harder, leaving comments even harder?  That is kind of against the point of blogs.  My blog isn’t hosted by WordPress, but I use WordPress to run it.  And now I’m thinking maybe I need to switch to something else.  But what?  Thanks for nothing, WordPress.

If you can leave comments (as some people have been able to—though I did notice a huge dip in comments right when this started happening) what hoops did you have to jump through to do it?  Or were there no hoops?  I’d really appreciate it if all of you just gave it a shot.  Just click on leave a comment, and if you encounter the sign-in and don’t want to deal with it, then don’t.  I will assume that mass silence affirms the issue.  If you are able to leave a comment, let me know if you were signed into WordPress at the time, or needed to sign in, or whatever.  Much obliged!

Every couple of years the university, which owns the land on which our community stands, comes along and starts making threats.  We have to leave, they say.  They need this parcel of land, they say.  But it has never panned out.  Bluffs?  Maybe.  At least a couple of times the money for their proposed project has run out.  And once about four years ago, just when I was moving in, they relocated half of our Wagenplatz to a plot of land in the middle of a field about a kilometer away.  But this year they were serious. And it looks like we might be moving.

At the beginning most of the group was skeptical.  The uni had threatented so many times before, why should we get our panties in a bunch this time?  But after a number of meetings and negotiations we are working on a pre-contract for moving the Wagenplatz.  I don’t know exactly when, but it appears that sometime in the next year or so our community will be moving to a spot in the field next to what used to be our other half.  After over twenty years of successful squatting of this parcel of land we will be entering into a much more rigid (it is assumed) agreement with the university about our rent, about what we can and cannot do with out little piece of green.  What will happen to Haus Mainusch is still uncertain.

One of the biggest issues is that the land they want to move us to is not green at all.  Currently a field, it will take years before any trees grow big enough to provide any shade.  The first spring we’ll be living in a puddle of mud.  A windy, shadeless frying pan.  It was one of the reasons that a lot of people were (are) so adverse to the offer in the first place.

Yet I find myself looking forward to it.  I’ve always found change cleansing in that “new start” sort of way.  I was one of the few who was ok with the idea of moving from the beginning, and I’m glad that we are being offered a replacement parcel of land, that the Beard and I won’t have to leave entirely because I wouldn’t feel comfortable living with Baby Pickles with the threat of eviction hanging over our heads.  Police have compacted people’s Wagens right before their eyes in the past.  I don’t know if I am strong enough to handle that kind of wait-it-out situation alone, but I am not strong enough to handle it with a baby in tow.  Nor do I want to be.  So there’s that.

But when I think of leaving this parcel of land, of the university building yet another one of their borg-ship constructions on it, I feel sad.  We can move. but what about the snails, the birds, the hedgehogs?  They won’t be offered a new parcel of land, and whoever survives will be forced to squeeze into the ever decreasing bits of greenery.  When we move, I will mourn the walnut tree who has taken so many years to reach such majesty, whose fruits have fed us, could feed us in an emergency, and which they will cut down as if it was just a bowling pin to be struck down in sporting whim.

A lot of Click Clack Gorilla readers want to know more about moving to Germany.  About to take the same journey themselves (or trying to match dreams with realities) they (you!) write to me with questions about visas and salaries and job oppurtunites.  I’ve done a FAQ about moving to Germany to answer all of the questions about how I got here and how I got a visa and a job and a place to live.  And here comes the FAQ for the folks who want to come over to teach English.

How did you find a teaching job?

I came back to Germany after a two-month visit to the States, and I started throwing resumes at everything that moved.  Which is to say that I looked up English-language schools in the yellow pages and sent a resume and cover letter (in English) to every single one.  In a big city like Frankfurt, that turned out to be somewhere between 20 and 30.  Two called back: a language school at which I got an interview but no job and inlingua, where I taught for some time.

Before returning to Germany I also had a lead on a job at a start-up language school that I also taught at briefly, but which turned out to be a waste of time with more classes canceled than taught (and paid for).

What kind of experience do you have?  Do I need a TEFL to get hired?

Attention all native English speakers with a college degree: you will not need TEFL, or any other certificate, to get hired.  You need to be personable and a meticulous speaker of English.  Seriously.  That’s all.  (While this is probably not true for every language school, it seems to be true of all the franchises.)

My personal English-classroom-door-opening qualifications include my BA in English Lit and a few years spent tutoring college kids in writing at my college’s writing center where I ended up the head tutor of the ESL division during my senior year.  See?  No teaching certificates, no relevant degree (though it may have English in the title, I promise, being able to analyze a novel will get you nowhere in front of a business English class), and no real teaching experience.

Do I need to be able to speak German?

Absolutely not.  In fact, since most language schools encourage the trial-by-fire method (aka teaching students only in the target language for ultimate furstration, I mean absorption), you will be strictly forbidden to speak it.  Although I occasionally bent the rules with true beginners and students who were utterly lost on subjects of grammar, which was admittedly helpful.

What was the job like, day-to-day?

Most English classes, particularly those of the business English variety, are held before or after office hours.  Which means you’ll usually have to get up early for an 8 o’clock class, and then will have the day free before teaching a second class at 5 or 6.  This irritated the hell out of me—I prefer to get all of my working out of the way at once instead of having it drag me out of bed far too early only to spit me back out after an hour and a half with eight more hours to feel anxious about my next class.

Once in a while I taught daytime numbers that involved four hours with the same group of apathetic adults.  And those irritated me even more.  My favorites were one-on-one classes where I would either go to a student’s home or meet her in a cafe and spend the hour and a half chatting, correcting, and role playing.  You’d be amazed how many people are interested in practicing small talk.  Usually classes were in student’s homes or offices, but once in a while I would teach in the company’s classrooms.

At inlingua, teachers are supplied with all the course material, so all you have to do is figure out a vague lesson plan and follow the dotted lines.  It’s a method that leaves a lot of room for both laziness and creativity.  (And also means you can teach someone how to talk about accounting in English without having a clue about accounting yourself.)

Was it hard to make ends meet?  How much do you get paid? 

Not at all, though of course you should remember that I am a pretty lo-fi person.  I was a very dedicated dumpster diver at the time, though not because I didn’t have the money to buy food.  My main expenses were my apartment (300 euros/month including utilities), health insurance (126 euros/month), and beer (a beer in a bar in Frankfurt is expensive at between 2.50—if you’re lucky—and sky’s the limit, which is why I usually bought mine at the supermarket and drank with friends in the park).  I worked about 20 hours a week and had money to spare at a rate of 18 euros/teaching hour (a teaching hour is actually just 45 minutes).  But!  Don’t forget that as a freelancer, which is how most English teachers are billed, have to foot their own insurance and taxes, so we are talking a pre-tax number here.

Pros?

A sweet hourly rate for talking to what usually turned out to be very interesting people (and seeing their homes and offices) and a lot of free coffee.  Every day was totally different, which kept things from getting too ho-hum.  Oh, and when a student cancels a class same-day, you don’t have to work, but you get paid anyway.

Cons?

Weird hours, Saturday classes (four hour blocks blarg!), dress code, apathetic students.

Do you still teach English?

Hell no.  While I loved teaching one-on-one lessons, I don’t have the energy to stand in front of rooms full of apathetic adults who expect to learn English and be entertained on a regular basis.  I much prefer freelance writing, where I don’t need to be “on” ever and can work at home in messy hair and dirty pajamas.

If any of you have any more questions, include them in the comments and I’ll answer them there (and include them in future FAQs).

Those of you who have been reading for a while will remember the au pair chronicles—a serial about how it is that I ended up in Germany and what it was like spending 10 months au pairing for a insanely rich family in Frankfurt am Main. Well, I’ve been busy writing new installments to share with you during operation whirlwind baby. But since a hell of a lot of new readers have become regulars since I first began the series a year ago, I thought I would start by re-publishing the series thus far—both to buy me baby time and to get everyone caught up before continuing the saga. You can find an index of the entire series here. This segment was originally published on January 27, 2010.

Eight months had passed before a question started to form in her mind, becoming more and more urgent as she met each of my parents in turn and, while playing at the role of kindly host mother, started learning more about my life. And the question was this: what the hell is this woman doing working for me?

One afternoon in the kitchen she asked, delicately avoiding the fact that this was really a question about class, about privilege. It was a question she never would have asked Maria— who she knew would have been fucked without her job cleaning Janet’s toilets—or Anna—who had spent her entire working life raising Janet’s children.

Anna and Maria might have fit neatly into Janet’s idea of “hired help” because neither had been to college or had any “professional” work experience. But I came from middle-class privilege, she knew now, and had a college degree from a fancy schmancy college. This meant that I had the qualifications and the connections to be working at what she would have called “a real job”—and yet I was playing hide-and-go-seek and wiping four-year-old ass. Neither did my story mirror the stories of her previous au pairs or those of her friends, many of whom had taken the job in hopes of finding a permanent way out of a bad situation at home.

But me? I was, as far as she could tell, doing this for fun, and this must have been confusing: after all, these were her children, and she wasn’t even raising them “for fun.”

“So why is it you wanted this job anyway?” She was wiping down the stainless steel counter tops when she asked, and I was picking at the leftovers from lunch.

“I’m a writer,” I told her, a little surprised at the question, sure we’d discussed this during both of my interviews. “I wanted to get into travel writing and improve my foreign language skills, and in order to do that I needed to travel. I thought this job would be an interesting way to get to know a new country. I know a lot of people who got their fix studying abroad, but I think you experience a lot more of a culture’s nuances when you live with a family.” (Admission: there is no way that this is what I actually said because I still have no clue how to say the word “nuance” in German, and my German now is a trillion times better than it was then. But I said something like it.) Never mind my political and philosophical reasons for abandoning corporate life. That wasn’t a conversation I felt Janet and I’s relationship was ready for.

She nodded slowly, absorbing the words. Writer. Writer? “Have you been published?” She sounded like she was trying to sound nonchalant, but something like fear was creeping into her eyes.

“Yeah I have actually. I co-authored a little guide book about the college I went to, did some newspaper articles, a few things on the internet.” She stopped wiping and looked at me. Recognition flashed in her eyes, and for the first time since we’d met it felt like she was actually looking at me. It had never occurred to me that someone might feel unnerved by my profession. But writing is about communication, and maintaining one face for private use and one for public use is about keeping secrets.

“But you’d never write about us would you?” Suddenly she was slathering every syllable in the syrupy, artificial tone she used for socializing, for her public face. Suddenly she was remembering ever soap-operatic family story she’d ever told me.

But I have a syrupy “social” voice of my own, and I lied right to her face, just as she had when she’d told me that of course I would be paid for overtime. “Of course not,” I said. “Never.” Liar, liar pants on fire.

I have a few words of advice for you, dear readers, and heed them or be damned: never trust a writer who you’ve just spent eight months treating, well, let’s just say “not as an equal.” Then again, maybe I didn’t lie, but just avoided the question with a shrug, and left the room. Memory changes details. There is no such thing as non-fiction.

Today, thinking back on that conversation, I wondered what Janet would think if she were to read the things I write about my year working for her (extremely pissed off). And for the good times, because there were a few of them and it could always be worse, I’ve changed enough names and details to keep them anonymous. Perhaps they wouldn’t even recognize themselves. Because Janet could be so many people, really, and my story is one of thousands just like it.

Wow. Wow. Wow, wow, wow. How can you have so much time and get absolutely nothing done? I don’t feel like I’m doing a lot. Even though I am, and every time I lament my feelings of uselessness to the Beard he reminds me that I’m doing something really important. Feeding another human with my flesh and blood, for example. But, shit, it still just feels like laying around in bed most days. This blog post pretty much sums it up.  And as the House of Flurfel writer  points out in that post, in part it’s not that you’re not doing anything when you’re mama-ing, it’s that you’re never, ever finished.  Because kids are never “finished,” and their constant interruptions mean everything else has to happen in three to five minute increments.

So, umm, sorry about all those comments on blogs that I haven’t responded to.  (To the person who keeps asking about how we wash our cloth diapers, and who I think assumes we are way more badassly off-griddy with that sort of thing than we are: We have a washing machine.  It has a cycle called “baby clothes.”  And I am so glad.  Hanging up the laundry is a task that I can only accomplish over multiple days, so I can’t even frickin’ imagine having to actually scrub the goo out of every one of those little scraps of fabric by hand.  I know people who have done it.  But I remain foreign to their numbers, green as it might be.)  There are blog posts and ramblings and rantings backed up in my head to fill this space every day for months.  But instead you’re probably going to be facing a lot more empty space than I’d like.  I just hope you all stick around to find out what sort of blog rhythm I manage to settle into here, post baby Pickles.  And I also just hope that my head doesn’t explode beforehand, unwritten words oozing out of my ears.

Stay tuned.