bad reacting

Friday, nov. 13, 2009   |   0 comments

When I talk about baby matters, I get some interesting reactions. Sprinkled amongst the many supportive “congratulations” and “I want to bite that baby’s cute fat cheeks off“s are some strangely off-putting responses, and they seem to fall into two categories. At one end of the spectrum we have the “If You Think This Is Bad” spoilsports. On the flip side are the “Surely You’ve Never Loved Like This Before?” unsinkables. And even though one is pessimism embodied and the other is the purest expression of incomparable, undiluted love, I find them both equally disheartening.

Say I announce at the water cooler that pregnancy is killing me with its stupid two-to-three-hours-of-sleep insomnia. The spoilsports hop gleefully in to announce that if I’m suffering now, just wait until the baby gets here! At which time I can kiss all sleep goodbye, and also travel, reading, any and all me time, and happiness in general!

Since I’m barely hanging in here as it is, baby-having wise, it’s never fun to hear that things are going to be even darker just around the corner. Maybe I should give up now?

Or maybe, maybe it doesn’t always get harder? Or, if it does, my parenting skills might evolve to keep pace with the baby’s spiraling degrees of difficulty? But somehow those encouraging words never seem to be part of the message. Why are these spoilsports so fired up to inform me how in for it I am? Maybe they just want someone to keep them company in their hard, cold Legion of Doom?

Meanwhile I post new chunky, pink baby photos online, and the unsinkables rush to gush about the new levels of love I’m surely achieving.

Now. When we birthed this baby, after the midwives and cheerleaders had all cleared out, I quietly confessed to Marco, “You know how everyone says that the moment your baby is born, you feel a love like no other? Yeah, I didn’t feel that.” Don’t get me wrong! I was very happy when the baby was born. I just wasn’t euphoric like all the books and movies and Friends episodes had prepared me for.

I’ve definitely grown to love him, over time. (Especially now that my tore up vagina’s all good and healed!) But it hasn’t exactly been rainbows and bunny bellies…parenting is hard. So hard! And there are times when I love the baby a ton, like when he’s…sleeping. Or when I squeeze his soft, chubby American thighs. Or when he laughs and shrugs his shoulders and makes his cheeseburger face. But there are also times when I like him a whole lot less, like when he’s bolt-upright awake at wrong-thirty in the morning, or when he’s vociferously refusing to take his bottle from the nanny-share nanny so she has to call me and I have to race back over to the nanny-share house to coax him into taking it, thereby negating the many positives of paying for childcare.

So when someone goes to bond with me over how amazing and transcendental it all is, I don’t really relate. And not being able to relate to that sunny sentiment makes me feel like a heartless alien robot by comparison.

A heartless and clearly doomed alien robot.

are you ready for desi's clothes up?

Thursday, nov. 12, 2009   |   4 comments

It isn’t always an awesometoberfest having a helpless 15-pound being on your payroll. Sometimes he wakes up at three in the morning and refuses to go back to sleep unless you stick your thumb in his mouth and push him in his swing 500 times. Sometimes he plays with his food, smacking painfully on your budders like he’s blotting chapstick. And sometimes he blows right past his bedtime and Marco’s already asleep because he has to get up at 5am for work so you have to hold the baby’s squirming body in one arm as you type up the evening’s web log entry with one hand.

On the bright side, we get to dress him up in the world’s cutest outfits! Hooryay!

unexpected side effects of baby-having #167: irrational hatred of inanimate objects

Wednesday, nov. 11, 2009   |   0 comments

Since this baby hit town, our floors are now adrift in infant accessories. Bouncers, swings, carseats, plastic keys, stuffed animals, various vibrating danglies…they’re everywhere. Sleep deprived and distracted as we are, navigating the boobytrapped maze of stumblebles has left us scraped and bruised, and our nights are punctuated with whispered swears.

Marco harbors a particular grudge against Desi’s cradle, which he’s tripped over no fewer than twelve separate times, and he’s threatened to “chop up into a million fucking pieces and throw into the middle of the goddamn street” more than once.

Meanwhile I’ve acquired a teeth-grinding hatred of our fitted sheets, which react to all the scootching and rearranging of midnight baby feedings by peevishly popping off at the corners, leaving me to try and levitate, with baby in arms, my sleeptime sweatpants slowwwly creep down, as I stretch and strain the stupid thing back into place underneath me.

A glimpse of exposed mattress corner now flies me into a homicidal rage. A loving, nurturing, new mommy homicidal rage.

subconsciousness raising

Tuesday, nov. 10, 2009   |   0 comments

In the late 90s, I did my California-required year in therapy, a somewhat less than satisfying experience that seemed to leave me with more self doubt than I started with, which, considering how doubt-full I was in my 20s, is saying a lot. I couldn’t decide, though, if the digression was the fault of my faulty brain, or my faulty therapist? Ultimately it didn’t matter because I ran out of money and could no longer afford to keep going.

On the night of my last session, I went to make my final payment and discovered I’d already written my last check. When I came back later with a check, I somehow managed to leave my coat behind. Et cetera.

Could my subconscious be more transparent?

Last month I took my cat of ten years, Marbles, back to the fancy SPCA from whence she came. Much to my sadness, she had celebrated our blessed, bouncing arrival by peeing in all the heating ducts, a tactically genius maneuver that transformed the house into a reeking cloud of cat urine whenever we ran the heat. She also took to howling in the hallway at 3am. And then she bit the baby.

After many tears and frets, I decided that we would all, Marbles included, be happier if she found a new home. The nice ladies at the shelter were very optimistic about her likelihood of getting adopted — apparently extra-toed cats are a big draw? Anyway. It was hugely depressing and made me feel like a horrible, bad-cat-mommy monster. And the actual handoff was just awful. But after mopping my eyes and filling out the ten tons of paperwork, I finally managed to stumble my way home…only to discover that I’d left my driver’s license behind. Oh, subconscious.

Today we did a dry run with Desi’s nanny share — we’re sharing a sweet young childcarer with the baby of a lovely couple (Colleen and Mike, friends of the Liz Dunn!) who live a conveniently scant six blocks away. I dropped the baby off at 8am, then proceeded to wend the rest of the day in a hazy daze. I went to Peet’s, I went to Trader Joe’s, I took a two-hour bath, I made cupcakes…basically, I lived out a page from my decadent, pre-baby youth of just over one year ago.

The only problem was, each fancy-free hour was marred with a nagging, sinking, lightly blue feeling that I’d once again left something important behind.

Oh! Right. The baby. I’d left the baby behind.

regrets, I have a few

Monday, nov. 9, 2009   |   0 comments

I know it isn’t the healthiest thing for my happy, but I just can’t seem to stop driving by the house we didn’t get, sighing and sulking over its gigantic basement and quiet street and superior school system and convenient proximity to casual carpool. I want to punch that perfect house in its stupid perfect house face!* And then french it all over.

It feels wrong, like I’m cheating on my new house. And I really do like our house. I do, I do! And I feel so lucked out over all the insane work that Marco and company did to make it so very cute. Plus we have a much bigger yard where we are now, and there’s a lot more fun stuff within walking distance, and we have the kind of neighbors who bake us banana bread and knit us baby things.

But oh! How nice it would have been to have gone home with the house that made me feel all panty and crushy and flushed? Versus this dumb nagging wallow of feeling like we settled?

Then again: I own a house! I have a healthy, dimpled baby! And a job to go back to! And I have three totally different flavors of ice cream chilling in my freezer. In short: Shut up, me.

*Credit: The entirely non-regrettable Hot Rod. Stream it up!