I’ve never been a fan of baby talk, not even to babies. When adults incorporate baby talk into their regular everyday conversation it’s like nails on a chalkboard to me. Baby talk, even when directed at babies, seems to assume the listener is a complete moron. And when you hear a grown woman talking to her grown husband/boyfriend/significant other in baby talk it’s just downright creepy. Like women who call their significant others “daddy” and then follow it up with a partially-gibberish request for jewelry. Gross.
(However, although I’ve never baby-talked to my dog, an ongoing discourse of complete nonsense is not, for some odd reason, an irregular occurrence: “Who’s the best dog ever in the whole wide world? Is THEO the best dog ever? Ever in the whole world? Yes she is! Oh yes she is! I’m going to fold the laundry now! Do you want to help fold the laundry? Nooooo Theo can’t fold the laundry! Theo doesn’t have opposible thumbs! No she doesn’t!” etc. As long as I pronounce each word maturely I for some reason consider this acceptable.)
While up until now I’ve managed to keep baby talk out of my speech completely, even when whispering sweet nothings to romantic interests at the peak of my teenage hormonal years, the somehow inherent necessity of repeating everything to anybody who is not an adult human being has not escaped me. Why do we do this? Is it because we feel the need to immediately fill any possible silence after a silly declaration to indicate we understand the joke is on us? Is it because we think somehow that even though the listener is certain not to understand us the first time, they will somehow gain whatever knowledge is necessary to decipher our meaning a millisecond later?
And now that I have an actual baby I do find myself doing the real baby talk thing, not just the repetition of inane but adult-word commentary - although not to an obnoxious degree (I must tell myself this, so I can live with myself). I’ve given myself a pass with the minor baby-talk that seems to just slip out - a phenomenon that seems to kick in whether you like it or not as a side-effect of giving birth - but only, obviously, when directed at my baby. Therefore you can imagine my shame and embarrassment when I asked a coworker the other day if her lunch was “lummers in her tummers.”
Even I don’t know what this means, although like Jabberwocky the context does at least provide a fairly reliable definition to infer. My coworker either didn’t notice or has a brilliant baby-talk filter mechanism because she didn’t react at all, just answered the nonsense question as if it were perfectly ordinary. But this did not alleviate my mortification. What if I’ve completely lost all baby-talk self control? What if she reacted so smoothly because I do this ALL THE TIME and don’t even realize it?!
For those of you who do not have or interact with kids and, therefore, have no reason to know this, babies have a tough time with pronouns so it is recommended you refer to her and yourself in the third person or by name. But Tom and I now refer to ourselves completely in the third person at home, even when not addressing the baby. “Mamma’s going night-night” has replaced “I’m going to bed.” We do it when the entire rest of the sentence is completely inappropriate for a baby’s ears: “Daddy is so FUCKing exhausted.” We may say “fuck” around our kid but at least we remembered to refer to ourselves in the third person.
I think the barriers between home and work are slowly erroding, as evidenced by the lummers question. Now I’m living in a constant state of paranoia. What if in my next staff meeting I burst forth with, “Who wants to hear Mamma’s reporty-worty? Who wants to hear? Who wants to hear Mamma’s reporty-worty-torty-lorty?” I really feel sometimes like this might not be too far off.
Is Mamma going a little nutsy-wutsy? Is she? Is she? Is Mamma going to have to go away to the hospital wospital? Oh, yes she is! Oh yes she is!
So Tom, Annora and I were hanging out in our sub-basement bedroom in our underwear, with three fans pointed at us, wondering how we were going to get through this summer’s heat. Because not only do Tom and I have to worry about my very vocal discomfort but for the first time we now have another person in the family who is - and who ever imagined this were possible - more vocal about her displeasure than I am.
“It’s hot,” I whined.
“Aheh-aheh,” A agreed, which is baby-speak for “I am upset about something. I do not have the vocabulary to say what, exactly. But you have 30 seconds to figure it out before I reach Full Baby Meltdown and I don’t think I need to remind you what happened last time.”
“We should get a baby pool,” I suggested. “That would keep her cool, and she loves the water. We’ll just get one of those small ones, fill it up and plop her in. She’ll love it!”
“AHEH-AHEH,” insisted A.
The next day we were out bright and early shopping for a baby pool. It turns out inflatable pools are quite cheap so we decided, why should A have all the fun? We should get one big enough for the whole family! We (as in, Tom) even had the presence of mind to measure the one flat space in our backyard to make sure the biggest one within our budget would fit.
We dragged our purchase home and ripped open the box. It was a matter of hours before the heat of the day would be on us and the aheh-aheh warning siren would begin. While A had her lunch and nap, Tom would inflate and fill up the pool and joila! Instant happy family splashy time.
But after about an hour of playing with A, and rapidly running out of amusing tricks, I wandered into the backyard to see what the hold-up was. The pool lay limply on the deck where we’d left it; Tom was in the yard sweating profusely over a plastic bag.
“What are you DOING?” I asked impatiently.
“We can’t put the pool on top of dog poop,” he pointed out. Well, I couldn’t argue with that; nor was I about to volunteer to help. So A and I skeedaddled back into the house.
A was in the middle of a tasty lunch of squash and peas (her favorite - don’t ask me where she got that) when Tom came inside, soaked with sweat, and announced, “Blowing this thing up is going to take a year and a half. I’m going to the store to buy a pump.”
I suppressed my sigh, glancing at the clock, but figured there was still time to get the pool inflated and filled before A woke up from her after-lunch nap.
While she snoozed I headed outside once again to check Tom’s progress. The pool was still limp, and Tom, barely recognizable he was so covered in sweat and grime, was futily pumping away with a hand pump. “I’ve shortened the amount of time to maybe 6 months,” he said grimly.
“Don’t we have an electric pump?” I asked. It seemed to me that at some point in our past Tom declared the necessity of an electric pump for reasons I no longer remember and didn’t bother to argue at the time.
Tom looked vague, then sheepish. “Oh yeah.” He went down to the garage and brought the pump up, and I went back into the house to attend to A who had awakened from her nap and was in a very sociable mood.
After I’d gotten A changed and we’d played a rousing game of peek-a-boo we once more went to check on the progress of the pool, only to discover - guess - that it still lay limp on the deck exactly where we’d dropped it that morning.
“I forgot this pump only works by plugging it into the car,” Tom said.
“So why don’t you bring it down to the street and inflate it there?”
Tom looked a bit dubious but also recognized no real alternative other than going to the store and buying yet another pump. So he hefted the heavy hunk of plastic over one shoulder and tottered down the steep driveway to the car, where he laid the pool out on the grass and hooked up the pump. After watching this ordeal and subsequently hearing the satisfying hum of the pump’s motor, insuring that soon, soon, we would be sitting in a cool pool of water, I headed back inside once more to dig deep into my creative soul for more ways to entertain a six-month-old.
After another hour or so, A decided, for lack of anything better to do, to take another nap. I put her down and glanced out the window to see how far along Tom had gotten with the electric pump. The pool was still completely limp. I watched him fiddle around, turn the pump off and on and off and on, and crouch beside the pool rubbing his face in consternation. Then a lightbulb must’ve gone off in his head because he suddenly lept up, did something in the car, came back out, and started up the pump again. This time I could see a barely perceptible ripple run through the length of the pool. At last! When A woke up she would get to experience her very first pool!
A had been up for another two hours by the time the pool was done inflating. She had run through absolutely every single toy and activity we had in the house and was clearly expecting an afternoon soujorn, as we did most afternoons to alleviate her predictable late-day boredom. But we couldn’t go anywhere with the pool ALMOST ready, and in any case we were fast approaching dinner time. While there was certainly plenty of time to have a nice splash in the pool, we’d be pushing it if we tried to go out anywhere, and we learned the hard way one day when we delayed at a friend’s party for an hour that you do NOT mess with the nighttime schedule. On penalty of insanity. But after another few minutes had gone by, still with no pool present in the backyard, I once again stuck my head out the front window to witness Tom attempting to maneuver the not-heavy but incredibly unwieldy pool - which was significantly larger than I envisioned it would be - up the front steps and into the house. I plopped A in her bouncer and ran out to help him.
“We may have been a bit overly ambitious,” Tom admitted.
“We can do it,” I said. “We’ll just get it up the stairs and heave it over the couch and around the dining table and out the patio door just as soon as I move all the patio furniture over to the side.”
So that is what we did, and finally the pool was inflated AND in the backyard. Now all we had to do was fill it and instant family play time!
“It’s getting dark,” I observed. The previously sunny patch of lawn which was the one place the pool would fit was now in shadow. “Do you think it’ll be too cold?” When the sun goes down in Seattle, the temperature plummets pretty quickly.
“Oh, it’ll be fine,” Tom said with a certainty that I had learned over the years not to argue with. “I’m not worried about that.” Which begged the question - what WAS he worried about? But I decided to leave it alone, particurlarly since A was starting to wonder aloud if, after fifteen minutes, she had been left completely alone on the planet. We played roller coaster baby for awhile, a game that would have made me, personally, sick to my stomach but which caused A to shriek with delight. When I started to feel light-headed and as if my arms were going to fall off, I brought A outside once again to check on this fabulous pool I had been promising her all day. And lo! There was water in it! In the inflated pool, in our backyard, there was water!
Tom grinned with pride, his dirty, sweat-soaked t-shirt sticking to him, and gestured at the pool he had assembled for his little family. “Go ahead and try it out! No need to wait till it’s completely full!”
“Okay!” I cried excitedly and whirled back into the house to get our bathing suits. I debated for a brief moment just leaving A in her diaper. What does one do in this situation for a person who still pees in her pants? If I leave the diaper on her, it will soak up half the pool water and I won’t be able to lift her out. But if I take the diaper off, the carefree feeling of a breeze on her tushy will inevitably cause her to add a little of her own warm water to the pool’s. I decided a little pee was no big deal - it’s sterile after all - and a loaded-down diaper full of pool water was less desirable. So, dressed in our bathing suits (A’s too big, mine too small) we gleefully headed out to our pool.
“Look sweetheart, it’s like a big bath!” I told my daughter, who squinted at it and looked unimpressed. Nevermind, I’d show her soon! She was going to love it! I clambered over the side of the pool with one leg and gasped. “Holy shit, it’s FREEZING.”
Tom rolled his eyes. “Well give it a second, you have to get used to it.”
“No, Tom, it’s FREEZING. Check if you don’t believe me.”
He stuck a hand in. “It’s freezing,” he said flatly.
We looked at each other in the waning light and Tom pursed his lips with determination. “We’ve gotten this far,” he grumbled and marched into the house. I watched as he filled bucket after bucket with hot water from the sink and dumped it into the pool. After about six trips he said, “Okay, that’s enough. This is getting ridiculous.” I couldn’t have agreed more. But at that moment A considered the delay an excellent opportunity to have a nice long pee, and it was currently running down my arms and legs, her bathing suit providing no road block whatsoever.
After I got us both cleaned up and decided to resort to the diaper-full-of-pool method we trudged downstairs into the twilit evening and I once again dunked in a toe. “It’s freezing,” I muttered glumly. “I’m done. No pool. It’s A’s dinner time anyway.”
Tom looked crestfallen. “But what do I do now? If I leave the pool out it’ll get full of bugs. I am NOT going to empty it and go through this again tomorrow.”
I just stared at him, too weary to offer suggestions.
Tom heaved a sigh. “I’ll go to the store and get a tarp to cover it,” he said, and off he went again looking like a homeless person in his crusty, dirty shorts and t-shirt. Or like a dad who is trying to give his kid a fun time in the yard. It’s a fine line.
A was finished with her dinner and we were moving on to bath time - the regular kind, in the tub, which she frankly never found anything wrong with in the first place - when we went once more to check on Tom. What we saw was the inflated pool sitting on top of a tarp, covered with another too-small tarp, and held together with a complicated series of bungee cords which Tom keeps in his car for things like this and securing Christmas trees to the roof once a year. Our yard was gone and had been replaced with a webbing of bungee cords which the dog would have to somehow maneuver through and around in order to relieve herself.
Tom looked up at me from his crouched position, looking like a very tired, very disheveled, and very dispirited spider in the middle of a web, and said without emotion, “I got the wrong size.”
At that point I think you’ll agree there was nothing to do but burst into hysterical laughter, so that’s what we did, until Annora gently reminded us that it was getting very close to bedtime, and woe to the parent who did not heed the warning:
“Aheh-aheh.”
First, allow me to apologize to all of my fans out there (both of you - hi, mom) for the huge gap in between blogs. You see, my brain has turned to mush, and I forgot how to type, formulate sentences, create original ideas, and everything else not associated with poop or drool. Frankly I’m still operating with less than half a deck and on hardly any sleep, and I have the attention span of a thirteen-year-old. All this does not bode well for a blog that makes sense, much less is entertaining. So you should probably just stop reading now.
Still here? Aw, thanks Mom. Okay, today’s topic is: useless signs. The idea came to me when I was in the restroom today at work, washing my hands. Because this is something one does after one has gone potty. This is what I was brought up to believe, and I certainly intend to bring my daughter up in the same manner. In fact, I am SO adamant about this particular habit that not only do I wash my hands after *I* go to the bathroom, but also after my daughter does. Because so far I’m the one who handles THAT matter as well. She keeps her hands clean; or, when they are not clean, she thoroughly cleanses them by emitting a bucket of drool which ends up being far more thorough than my own method involving soap based on sheer quantity of the water flow. Anyway, in the restroom at work is a sign that says “Wash hands before leaving this room.”
What a completely useless directive. Those of us who were not raised in a cave (and maybe even those of us who were) know to wash our hands without needing a reminder. Those of us who - and there is one in every office, if not several, and you know who you are and should be ashamed of yourself - do not make this an automatic practice are certainly not going to be reformed by a cryptic sign. I’m not sure what, exactly, it would take to convince someone who has just handled their own excrement that it’s a good idea to clean their hands afterwards if this thought does not occur to them on their own.
This led me to continue to contemplate useless signs, as to do so is less strenuous on my mushy brain than to try to engage in work. Work, after maternity leave, is something one has to ease into, like a frigid swimming pool at the very beginning of summer. I read the New York Times and deleted all the email in my inbox, and I think that, after having done NOTHING for the past 20 weeks except make silly faces, I have the right to call it a day and fuck off until five pm.
“Avoid alcohol during pregnancy.” This is one of my favorites. First of all, the choice of the word “avoid.” As if one might be ambling down the sidewalk and, due to a pregnant woman’s natural lack of balance, accidentally fall right into a pitcher of beer. If only she had been more careful to avoid it! Secondly, in order to read this sign and have it apply, one must already be a pregnant woman in a bar. Chances are solid decision making isn’t what led you to this circumstance in the first place and, again, a sign certainly isn’t going to convince you otherwise.
I don’t know if my absolute favorite sign of all time is still on the side of the highway leading to the Phoenix airport, but every time we read, “Caution, low flying aircraft,” everybody in my family would yell gleefully, “DUCK!” How, exactly, is this sign supposed to be of assistance? If an aircraft is flying low enough for you to be concerned about it, that’s pretty much it for you.
Of course, “Baby on Board” has been done to death, the typical sarcastic comment being “Well, I WAS going to hit your car, but since there’s a BABY on board I’ll let you go on your way.”
I’m sure there are lots more, but frankly I’ve lost interest.
In the process of taking care of our 7 week old daughter, I see my husband for a total of about 10 minutes a day. Our encounters are limited exclusively to blearily handing over the baby for the next shift, and reporting any new helpful techniques we’ve discovered that may or may not have coincidentally calmed or entertained her.
At 12:15am: “She’s just been changed, and I discovered if you rock her gently from side to side while at the same time jiggling on the balls of your feet, she’ll go to sleep.”
At 2:22am: “Here, you’re turn. She likes it if you hold her tightly with her stomach turned towards you while bouncing up and down on one leg and holding the pacifier in her mouth.”
At 3:58am: “Take her. I haven’t eaten in three days. Oh but I found out that the best way to get her to burp is if you get in a crouching position, hold her arms over her head and roll her from side to side while humming.”
“Wait - humming what?”
“Steve Martin’s The Thermos Song or Carly Simon’s version of Itsy Bitsy Spider but NOT Cat Stevens or she’ll scream.”
At 5:03am: “I tried what you said, hopping up and down on my left leg and chanting “rigatoni, rigatoni” but she wouldn’t go to sleep.”
“Did you spin around clockwise three times first?”
“Oh, CLOCKWISE? I thought you said counter-clockwise. No wonder she was so upset.”
The books don’t help at all. They make suggestions for soothing what must be NORMAL babies, but not OUR baby, because none of the suggestions ever work or even make sense. “Establish a bedtime routine to teach Baby when it is time to go to sleep, and the difference between night and day.” Well, her bedtime is 7pm, 7:45pm, 8:30pm, 9:45pm, 11pm, etc. So when, exactly, should this routine be performed? “Sleep when the baby sleeps.” Yeah right. That sounds terrific in theory and yet is impossible to do. After spending two hours trying to get her to sleep, she finally conks out, at which point you run around like a maniac trying to get all the piled-up chores done so that you can lie down too. As soon as you lie down, a little light goes off in her baby brain and she starts wailing.
I know my husband is the other person in the house who is an adult and wears a bathrobe, but that’s the extent of our relationship now - vague recognition in the hallway as we pass the baby back and forth along with our newfound theories, each one more ridiculous-seeming than the last.
Meanwhile our daughter also seems to have no idea who WE are. While she eats she gazes up at me with wide eyes that seem to say, “I appreciate the milk. Do I know you?”
“I’m your Mommy,” I remind her with false cheer as I struggle to keep my own eyes open.
“Hm, no, sorry, not ringing any bells,” her eyes say. “Where would I know you from?”
“Um, the womb?”
Her gaze doesn’t waver but appears apologetic. “Nope, sorry. Maybe you have me confused with another baby? You do seem nice, though.”
And just when it seems hopeless - I will never again curl up with my husband on the couch to watch inane TV, my daughter will never catch on that I am the same person who fed her two hours ago not to mention gave her life - she’ll throw us a bone in the form of a tiny smile that may or possibly may not have been gas-related. But it’s enough to keep us going for a little longer.
And we three strangers struggle on towards the very distant hope of a full night’s sleep.
I am too tired to be clever, or to try to be clever, so mainly I am writing to announce the birth of our beautiful daughter so that you can all stop worrying about me. I’m sure your concern for my labor probably dampened your holidays this year more than the depressed economy. So now you can ring in the New Year assured that I survived the ordeal, as did our daughter, although we were both a bit battle-weary from the experience.
Want the whole bloody story? Well, sorry. I vowed I would not be one of those women who tortured people with gory tales of her labor unless specifically asked. I will just say this: labor kind of sucks. I told Tom that our daughter could forget having a sibling. We’ll just get her a dog. I can’t imagine why anybody would go through that more than once. My friend and mother of two says just wait a bit - I’ll get ”Momnesia” and want to do it again. I say whoever claims you “forget” the pain was probably high on cocaine and never felt any.
But enough about that. What I meant to tell you is that I have not had time to fill you in on the joyous arrival of our offspring because our household revolves around two things: the baby and sleep, in that order. Any downtime - and there really isn’t any downtime, more on that later - is spent in tense anticipation of when she will make her next demand. When we hear her little “a-heh, a-heh,” warning cough we react as if to a five-alarm fire.
“YOU - get the pacifier!” Tom shouts to my mother, adding hand gestures to aid in the rapid direction of household traffic. “YOU - clean diaper! I’ll get the burp cloth. MOVE PEOPLE, MOVE! THIS IS NOT A DRILL!”
We all leap up and crash into each other in our haste to accomplish our assigned tasks, for we know that we have approximately 12 seconds from “a-heh, a-heh” to full-fledged, ear-piercing, gutt-wrenching, soul-crushing wails. It is our top priority to prevent full baby-cry escalation from occurring.
When we are not catering to this 8-pound person’s needs which, despite being as basic as they can possibly be, somehow still manage to consume an entire day, we are trying to get some sleep. Here is a conundrum: if the baby sleeps an average of 16 hours a day, how is it I am lucky to get four? That defies all logic. And yet even the dog isn’t getting enough sleep, and she is a real pro at sleeping through anything. So what am I doing during all those hours? I’m not cleaning, that’s for sure. Our house looks like it’s occupied by ten college freshmen boys. I’m not completing - or even starting - her birth announcements. I’m not working. I’m not shopping. I’m rarely bathing, and certainly not doing my hair. Where does the time go?
I think I can account for about ten hours spent just staring at her. She’s fascinating. Just like a real person, only tiny. The rest of the time is spent doing laundry. The baby owns approximately ten outfits that fit. I own about five pairs of pajamas. That means that I am doing laundry roughly twelve times a day.
So here I sit, surrounded by filth, in pajamas stained with breast milk (pre- and post-consumed), twigs sticking out of the snarls in my hair, purple bags under my eyes, next to this clean, fed, gorgeous little baby who will one day be embarrassed to be seen with me. I can’t imagine why.
I am down to the single digits. It seems like only yesterday I was shocked to learn it was 99 days until my due date - double digits. And now here I am, waiting to give birth. And yet I still don’t believe that I am pregnant, despite a belly that sticks out into the next time zone. I guess I have to assume the doctor knows what she’s talking about, that the belly isn’t, as I suspect, just made up of all the cookies I’ve eaten over the past nine months.
So to humor the nice doctor I am proceeding as if I will in fact have a baby sooner rather than later. I spend a lot of my time, time that should be spent working or paying attention to where I am walking, wondering what this new, unfamiliar ache or pain might be. Last night I sat up as a sharp pain hit my side and thought, “Oh my God! This must be it! I should wake Tom!” Then I farted. Turns out it was not labor, just the broccoli I’d had for dinner.
In my defense, my organs are so randomly distributed at this point that it really is difficult to pinpoint previously obvious sensations until they manifest themselves somehow (oh, I have to pee! when I go a little in my pants or oh, I’m hungry! when I pass out at my desk, etc).
Tom and I have been spending all our free time preparing for the birth by reading endless books and pamphlets that helpful institutions send us on a regular basis under the assumption that we are two babbling idiots who should never have procreated. We get literature from every direction - the doctor, the insurance company, the hospital - daily, explaining to us using small words that we should feed our baby a lot and not poor hot water on it. Once we had those basics down, we ventured out on our own and bought a slew of books on child rearing, each with a contradictory approach, all of which make complete sense, which is enough to turn you into a babbling idiot if you didn’t start out as one. I want to give birth just so I can stop reading all this theory and put it in practice before I forget everything. It’s like studying for the SAT - although you feel compelled to continue cramming until the last minute, at some point your brain is full and will hold no more. You just want to take the fucking test already.
So with all this cramming and aches and pains and memorization of factoids (no pacifier until 2 weeks old. No wait, 2 months. No wait - Time’s up! You get an incomplete on the “Things Baby Can Suck On That Won’t Scar Them for Life” portion of the test) is it any wonder I can’t sleep? And as long as I can’t sleep, I might as well be taking care of a newborn. Yet I am still 9 days away from my due date, and we all know babies are rarely punctual. Plus, this is Tom’s baby, and if she follows in his footsteps she will definitely not be on time. So I wait. And spend a lot of time with my head cocked to one side, reaching deep within myself to determine if this current little tug in my belly heralds the onset of the most challenging event of my life, or just lactose intolerance.
I was devastated when I found out the due date for my first baby is Christmas Day. I hate to think that my child will have to compete with the holidays on her birthday every year - combined presents, her special day getting swept aside by the excitement of the season, the difficulty putting together a birthday party when all of her friends will be out of town. How could I have done such a terrible thing? “Great,” I thought to myself when one of those online calculators revealed the date. “Literally my first act as a parent and I fucked it up.” (Note: don’t have unprotected sex in early April. Nobody told me that they start counting the 40 week gestation period before you actually conceive - what the hell kind of sense does that make? How could I have known this? And now my child will pay for my ignorance every single year of her life.)
When someone finds out that I am due on Christmas Day, about 7 out of 10 of them exclaim delightedly, as if I did this on purpose as a special treat for myself, “Oh, what a wonderful Christmas present for you!”
Now, I admit that I am not completely familiar with all the Christmas traditions. My family is Jewish, although not religiously - we have chosen to retain the guilt and anxiety but skip the holidays and belief system - so I didn’t even celebrate Christmas until junior high or so, when my mother remarried a gentile who brought with him the lovely tradition of gluttonously opening all your presents at once on a single day. My brother and I embraced this change with all the exuberance of the spoiled American child with no sense of or interest in any deeper purpose other than self-involved consumer fulfillment.
So, while I have thoroughly enjoyed the traditions of trees and cookies and gaining 10 pounds and presents galore, I admit I have not actually read up on any background to the Christmas story or could in any way be considered an expert. Don’t get me wrong - I do understand it has to do with that guy Jesus. But more importantly for me it heralds my Aunt-in-law’s annual peanut butter balls.
However when it comes to gifts, I’m pretty clear on what constitutes appropriate. Gifts after all know no religion. I’ve been receiving them for years and years. Therefore, despite my lack of knowledge regarding the origins of the Christmas holiday, I would like to list here the Top Ten Reasons Why Having a Baby Does Not Qualify As a Christmas Present.
1. One is not usually expected to make one’s own gift.
2. Christmas gifts are usually wrapped in shiny, attractive paper and festooned with ribbons and bows. They are not wrapped in blood and mucus unless you are a family of vampires.
3. Unwrapping/unveiling the gift should not cause hours or days of excruciating pain. If it does, either a) you are doing it wrong or b) whoever gave you this gift doesn’t actually like you and you should probably not be their friend anymore.
4. While a really awesome gift may include packing a bag and leaving at a moment’s notice for an overnight stay somewhere, the somewhere should not be the hospital.
5. One should not be expected to carry around one’s own wrapped gift for nine months every single place one goes, even while one sleeps, before being allowed to open it.
6. After opening your Christmas gift, it is not acceptable that that gift then be the only recipient of all future gifts, Christmas or otherwise, instead of you (or anybody else in your household) for the rest of your life.
7. Usually a Christmas gift should not immediately demand to suck on your boob. Unless you’re into that sort of thing. Whatever floats your boat. Hey, I’m liberal!
8. A Christmas gift should never EVER have anything to do with the phrase “bloody show”.
9. Your Christmas gift should not cause you to gain 50 pounds. Five, even ten pounds are acceptable under certain circumstances (a 2 lb box of See’s candy, for example), but by no means is 50 pounds okay.
10. A Christmas gift should never make you threaten to murder your husband. Unless he gives you a blender. Then it’s okay. Or a steering wheel cover. Okay, SOMEtimes a Christmas gift might make you threaten to murder your husband. That one isn’t a good qualifier. So one more.
11. Generally, you should not be required to expel your own gift from a bodily orifice which you would normally never discuss, let alone display, in public. I say generally because I understand different families have different traditions, and far be it from me to judge. Like how some families open presents on Christmas Eve instead of Christmas.
So while I have little knowledge of Christmas, and even less of babies, I do think the points detailed here are inarguable. Therefore nobody is off the hook from getting me a present this year just because I might birth a baby. Keep in mind I already have a blender.
Pregnancy is a beautiful thing. There is glowing involved. Unless of course you happen to be me. I should like at this time to expound upon the ways in which my body has revolted. Or, more accurately, has become revolting. If you’re a “shame on you, you should feel blessed by every discomfort” kind of person you may not want to read further because it’ll just annoy you.
Starting from the top. It’s a commonly known fact that a pregnant woman’s hair gets thicker. This is because older hair doesn’t fall out, but new hair is still generated. However, several years ago my hair decided to stop growing. So my hair is essentially only accumulating more hair that refuses to grow, rather than growing longer, creating a Jew-fro appearance about which I can do nothing because I do not have the stamina to stand at the sink for an hour in an attempt to tame it with product and appliances. Nor can I afford losing that extra hour of sleep, because then I would only get 11 hours a night.
On the bright side our drains aren’t backing up anymore from the accumulation of my DNA.
I no longer have any differentiation between my neck and my chin. It all just sort of flows out of my cheeks, Jabba-the-Hut-like. (Note: I can say this about myself but if you call me Jabba you will lose a testicle, as one unfortunate and not very bright friend has already learned.)
Need I expound on the size of my chest? It has become udderly (misspelling intended) ridiculous. I don’t even know if anybody makes a bra big enough for these things. When forced to wear one, a requirement which I am relaxing further and further as I make it my primary goal in life to wear no clothing that involves bands, hooks or restrictive elastic, the best I can do is find an approximate size. And I am constantly losing things in my cleavage. Not just crumbs, but the entire muffin. Some people may view this as a handy place to store keys and loose change, particularly since most maternity pants do not have pockets (perhaps they assume you don’t need them given your abundant cleavage?) but that is uncomfortable.
The flab on my underarms stops waving hello about five minutes after the rest of my arm does.
My belly is actually quite attractive, I have to say, and I take full credit for this. I attribute the lack of any new stretch marks to the fact that my body is already used to expanding with weight gain and then contracting through dieting on a fairly regular basis, so a giant belly is one thing for which I have been preparing and training for decades. Rather than new stretch marks I am just digging deeper grooves into the pre-existing ones.
I won’t go into my ass. I may never find my way back out again.
I think I’ve covered my painfully unhinging hips, which by now I could probably fully detach from the rest of my body without too much effort if I so chose. Despite the pain, I choose not. I’m fairly certain they are necessary evils.
My thighs are two barrels atop my knees. I give new meaning to the term “cottage cheese thighs.” They hang over my chair, halfway to the floor. If I were allowed to fly, Southwest airlines would make me buy not two but three seats - one for me, one for each of my thighs. I would request for them the special kosher meal, just because one has to get one’s jollies where one can when one’s thighs are fucking monstrous.
My ankles are reminiscent of the Pillsbury Dough Boy’s. It is fun to see if I can sink my finger in all the way up to the first knuckle.
My feet… I don’t know. Maybe someone else can fill you in on those. The other day I discovered I can officially no longer tie my own shoes and I had to ask my husband for help. As an aside, I also can no longer vacuum, which is another task my husband has had to take over, but you won’t hear me bitching about that one.
My immune system is shot. I’ve had a sinus infection for 3 weeks or seventeen years, I’m not sure which. People already part like the Red Sea when they see a big pregnant belly coming at them, as if pregnancy were contagious. Although I think with men (particularly those without children) it’s more that they become struck with a confused Madonna worship. As if they are simultaneously overwhelmed by the creation of life and at the same time horribly embarrassed because they now know for a fact you’ve had sex at least once. They avert their eyes and give you a wider-than-necessary birth. (Haha, birth) But add to that the coughing, hacking, sneezing, nose-blowing delight of a year-long cold that WILL NOT DIE and you pretty much find yourself alone most of the time.
I require twelve hours of sleep per day and still can’t focus properly on my work. I have perfected the dumb stare. I grunt when I get up, sit down, bend, walk, climb stairs, think hard or breathe. My throat makes funny bubbly noises that are beyond my control and when I am hungry I make this loud, also uncontrollable, hiccup sound, almost always in a very small, very crowded space such as the elevator at work. Think loud, alarmed parrot when trying to imagine this sound in your head. I sweat from just sitting. I cry at everything, including this blog. I forget to put on socks and can’t understand why my feet are so cold.
All that being said… I wouldn’t trade any of it. I could be sobbing my eyes out (no, no reason) but one kick from this baby girl and I’m grinning like a fool. She got hiccups yesterday for ten minutes and I was so delighted by this clear demonstration of talent and genius that I was high for hours.
Did I mention the mood swings?
I have always been an obnoxiously responsible person, to the point where I’ve managed to take most of the joy out of life. But now I realize I was a mere amateur.
“You are the most organized person I know,” my best friend has told me on more than one occasion. I feel sort of smug about that, despite the fact that “organized” can very often, especially in my case, be easily replaced with “anal-retentive,” which isn’t so much of a compliment. I wow the world with my spreadsheets and budget analyses, my three-month forecasts and multiple-variation contingency plans. My husband long ago happily relinquished control of most of the household since I am a better planner and also it isn’t a fun job, something he’s always known but nobody ever told me.
Tom and I (and by “Tom and I” I mean “I”) had everything calendared out: big move, home purchase, baby. And with the exception of a few months here and there, everything pretty much went according to plan. I had the crib picked out the moment we confirmed a heartbeat. I had it put together before I reached my third trimester. I put it together myself because Tom was assigned the less romantic task of cleaning out the garage so that everything previously stored in the baby’s room could be moved out of my way. We still had four months to go, but I could not wait a day for Tom to finish the garage before I got started on the crib. This was the way the schedule had to go, because I said so, and I am the Most Organized Woman Ever.
Or at least so I thought. Because a few weeks ago, still with over three months to go before my due date, I started looking into daycare.
“Wow,” those of you who don’t have kids yet are probably thinking, “you won’t need daycare for another seven months and you’re already thinking about that?”
Or at least that’s what I thought when I started doing it. “Look at me!” I thought. “I am so far ahead of the game! When this kid is born I will have EVERYthing in place and a statue will be erected in my honor - World’s Most Organized Mom!” Yeah, right. Every single place I called has a waiting list of at least - at LEAST - a year. The place most highly recommended, which literally costs per month the same as the mortgage on a summer home would, does not anticipate openings until the end of 2009.
“So,” I said quasi-casually to the very nice woman on the phone, “if I were better prepared, I would have gotten on your waiting list before I got pregnant.”
There was, if you don’t mind the blatant metaphore, a pregnant silence. A silence I took to mean, “Oh, honey, you are SO naive.”
But wait, there’s more! In order to get on the waiting list you have to take a tour. And the TOURS were booked for a month out. So I got on the list to get a tour in order to get on the waiting list. But wait, there’s even more! Once you have the tour, in order to get on the waiting list you have to pay $100. Not for any reason. The $100 will never be refunded or applied to your first month’s tuition should you be so fortunate as to be called at some point in the distant future before your kid goes to college. It’s just because they can do that if they want to. I guess I should be glad they don’t charge $1,000 because, really, what’s to stop them? $100 is quite humanitarian of them. They are givers.
Several of my coworkers raved about this place or I wouldn’t have bothered. There was also the fact that ALL of the places operate this way, so I might as well reach for the stars. Prior to my tour, about which I was as nervous as if I were taking the SATs again, my friend and coworker advised, “The Director is deaf in one ear. No, wait, both ears. Oh, I don’t know. But speak up.”
So when I arrived at the front door, eager to make a good impression, I yelled, “HELLO! I AM HERE FOR THE TOUR!” to which he responded, wincing, “I’m sorry the Director had to leave early today, but I’ll be happy to conduct your tour.”
Lovely. Off to a perfect start, we headed towards the “infant room.” This is where, you may have guessed, the infants hang out. It looked pretty nice. There were even a couple of infants in there, who all looked wise far beyond their years, like lifers who were about ten years into their sentence and pretty much resigned at this point. I think they were trying to tell me something with their eyes as I passed - but what? “Lady, are you really going to pay $100 to put your name on a list that, as far as you know, is totally bogus as soon as a friend of a friend of the deaf Director wants to get his kid in? Really. You have GOT to be smarter than this. I can barely sit up and I get it.”
At the end of the tour I thanked the guy and left, thinking, “Well, that seemed like a nice place.” But what do I know? As far as I remember, that was the first time I’d set foot in a daycare center in 32 years, at which time I had a very different perspective. All daycares are terrifying anyway.
So while I continued doggedly to make absolutely no headway on the daycare business I went about the next Really Responsible Task on my list - creating a will. “Why do we need a will?” Tom whined. “We don’t OWN anything.” Which isn’t exactly true - we own a lot of debt. That is to say, we own a house. Plus, I had to explain patiently to him, as he is the kind of person who would rather enjoy life than be Really Responsible all the time, we were now going to be parents, and we had to make sure our daughter would be taken care of in the unlikely event of our untimely demise. Tom looked completely shocked when I said this. I guess it hadn’t occurred to him. No wonder he’s such a happy guy. I wish these things didn’t occur to me, either.
A few phone calls revealed that the business of writing down, “I want my spouse to get it all and my kid to not be raised by creepy strangers,” can cost you anywhere between $1000-2500. It seems to me that when a court is involved, a lawyer is justified in charging a shitload of money for his services. Because courts are really, really scary. Attorneys are like the Indiana Joneses of the legal system, swinging out there on a rope in front of all the danger to bring you back whatever it is you needed to get or defend. But to write stuff on a piece of paper - stuff we TELL them to write, not stuff they come up with on their own - which doesn’t even have to be filed with a government entity? $2500 for that? Come ON.
But they do, because they can. I guess I should just be grateful they don’t charge me $100 to get on a waiting list to see a lawyer to pay him $2500 to write a will.
Next week’s task: write a plan to eliminate the National Debt. I just need to focus on something simple for a little while.
I couldn’t help but notice the excruciating hip pain I’ve been experiencing during the night. I noticed it mainly because my body makes sure I’m awake for it. God forbid I should sleep through any really interesting pain.
I explained the hip pain to my doctor who responded, typically, “That happens often in pregnancy.” My doctor responds this way to most issues I raise with her (and you may not believe this, but I am not a problem patient; I do my reading, and only bring up a concern on the rare occasions I haven’t found the answer myself). I could say, for example, “Yesterday while I was typing, three of my fingers fell off.” And she would respond, “That happens often in pregnancy,” and would most likely prescribe Tylenol. They (the “They” assigned to all Very Important Decisions) have determined Tylenol to be the one medication unlikely to cause instant death to a pregnant woman, so doctors like to dispense it liberally. “Take Tylenol,” sounds better than “Just deal with it,” particularly when addressing concerns like missing limbs.
She had an actual explanation for the hip thing though: my joints are loosening to allow my pelvis to widen so I can accomodate my growing baby. Now, that’s pretty cool, I admit. What the human body just automatically knows to do without my having to read it on babycenter.com first is pretty amazing. However, a reason is not a solution to the problem. Agreeing that this is, indeed, a very wise course of action for my body to take does not make it any less painful in the middle of the night.
In addition, the shifting and growing that is going on has managed to land everything on my bladder. Now, I am the kind of person who already had to stop at every rest stop on a road trip “just in case.” I have a terror of being too far from a bathroom, something that has always been inate in my makeup but was made worse by a situation in Costa Rica on my honeymoon involving no outdoor toilets, a lot of mud, and poor balance. Anyway. Suffice it to say that my life has now become absolutely consumed by bathroom locations. I have to know where the closest toilet is at all times, because I never know when this darling little girl will decide to start using my bladder as a trampoline. I realize there is very little to do in there, what with no TV or ipods (we run a tight, boarding-school-like ship in this here womb), but her new-found hobby has become increasingly stressful for me. I spend most of my time either going to the bathroom or thinking I very urgently need to go to the bathroom.
The thing is though, it doesn’t matter if you have babies or don’t have babies, it will all fall apart eventually anyway. “Use it or lose it” and “Use it and lose it” are nature’s mottos when it comes to women. If you have a baby, chances are good that later in life, due to all this stretching and pulling and realigning of parts, you will sneeze one day and your uterus will fall out, causing you much embarrassment at the public pool. However if you don’t have a baby, They say you have a higher liklihood of getting breast cancer. I managed to beat all the odds: I am having a baby, but not until the age of 35, which means my uterus will fall out AND I am more likely to get breast cancer.
The rules extend further than baby-making parts. For example if you don’t exercise, you’ll have a heart attack and die. If you do exercise, your hips, back, knees, feet, legs and torso will have to be replaced later in life. My mom has to have reconstructive knee surgery. She was stupid enough to be really healthy when she was younger, and ran marathons and irresponsible things like that. So now she must pay the price by slowly (and painfully) replacing each of her body parts with prosthetics. She is extremely creeped out by this, but I think it’ll be cool to have the Bionic Woman for a mother. When she leaps onto rooftops I will stand on the ground with my own busted and useless knees, thinking of the day I, too, will become part Terminator, and encouraging her by making the requisite ”DA-na-na-na-na,” Bionic Woman sound. That’s only if they let her through security at the airport though because apparently prosthetic knees can sometimes be mistaken for weapons of mass destruction. But then, so can a tube of toothpaste so you might as well have bionic knees.
What is my point? I don’t really have one. Except to say that one way or another, everything will fall out or off eventually so you might as well just do whatever you want, whether it’s birthing babies, running marathons or peeing your pants at work because your baby decided to solute Obama’s acceptance speech with a firm fist to the bladder.
I have to go to the bathroom.
