Book Envy
My friend Kevin tells me that he’s making good on a New Year’s resolution and “reading again.” Then he quickly rattles off a list of authors he’s finished recently that would make any honors comparative lit professor proud: E.L. Doctorow, J.M. Coetzee, and…
Okay, I confess I do not remember the rest of the tomes. Each impressive title he ticked off was such a reminder of how much I don’t read these days, I had to stop listening — La la la … I can’t hear you! — or I’d want to take a header out of my office window. Jealous much? Yeah, maybe. Just a tad.
See, I love to read. And once upon a time, I read volumes. I’d find an author I loved and devour everything they’d written. There was a John Irving phase. An Edith Wharton period. For a while I was seriously hooked on Gloria Naylor and Howard Fast. I even — though I’m embarrassed to admit it now — had flings with Stephen King and (blush!) Danielle Steele. And okay, okay, on the recommendation of a college friend, I also consumed the Harry Potter series en toto, like a fat girl tearing through a Whitman sampler. All right … so my taste isn’t always exactly high brow. At least the books weren’t made of cardboard and filled with pictures. (Except for … well, maybe … The Better Built Bondage Book. But that was strictly educational.)
Alas, my read-for-my-own-pleasure days were predominantly pre-child. When Fletcher was born, my friend Joel gifted me with Haiku Mama, whose very prescient tagline goes “Because 17 syllables is all you have time to read.” Sigh … I usually don’t even manage that. These days, I consider myself extra special lucky if I get 10 uninterrupted minutes to skim a Parents or Redbook. And usually those moments are stolen in the bathroom, with sudden — and completely invented — attacks of diarrhea or constipation. Oy! The lengths I’ll go to just to get through a “Modern Love” column in the Sunday Times! Back in the pre-Fletcher days, Sunday mornings were for languidly perusing the Times … under the umbrella … by the pool … on the patio … with a French press of French roast steaming beside me. Now, I read frantically and on the sly — grabbing a page here and there — like an adolescent boy rushing to “finish” with his Playboy before someone bangs on the door. Though since Fletcher learned how to turn the handle and roust me from my commodal sanctuary — Mah-meeeeee! Whatcha doing?Are you going poop or pee? — those moments, too, are becoming exceptionally rare.
Even perusing my friends’ bookshelf pages on Facebook is an exercise in envy and frustration. Jessica is deep into Broken For You. Jeff is bured in The Unlikely Disciple: A Sinner’s Semester at America’s Holiest University. Cliff is paging through Aldous Huxley’s Point, Counter Point. Kelli is actually reading … Moby Dick. To a once-avid reader, this is like being the diabetic at Magnolia Bakery: You can appreciate how scrumptious those cupcakes are, but … No Cupcakes For You!
So, the last actual book I read? Trucks Roll. It’s a primary-colored paen to the massive gas-guzzling, hardly eco-friendly 18-wheelers that haul “books and bulldozers, dolls and clocks …through mountains, over rivers, past towns … around blue sky curves through rain pouring down.” The book has about 170 words in it. I finished the whole thing — aloud, natch — while Fletcher gnawed through his bagel and cream cheese this morning. (Hey, it was a whole wheat bagel with low-fat cream cheese —what kind of mother do you think I am?!)
If you’ve got kids (boys!) in your house, chances are you know what I’m talking about. And chances are equally good that the novels and nonfiction that used to pile up on your nightstand have been shoved aside by these:
*Green Eggs & Ham, The Cat In The Hat … really, anything from the Dr. Seuss oeuvre.
*The complete Curious George collection — even the paperbacks repackaged from the PBS show.
*Anything from the construction genre. Besides Trucks Roll, house favorites include My Truck Is Stuck, Truck Town, I’m Dirty, Bob The Builder (Duh!) and Big & Noisy Trucks and Diggers, which — bonus!! — comes with buttons that make honking, jack-hammering, crushing, clanging, banging construction sounds throughout the story. We call it Migraine in a Book.
*Thomas The Tank Engine. Count your blessings if you only have the books. There are also tons of mind-numbing DVDs (those with George Carlin narrating, excepted), not to mention the miles of track and bazillions of toy trains and stations to go with it!) You can literaly drown in Thomas crap.
Any and every book about dinosaurs, like the brilliantly fun Dinosaur Circus, which has the added attraction of allowing you to customize the story so that your kid’s the hero (available from StoryTots).
Goodnight — anything. Moons to gorillas.
If You Give A Moose A Muffin … A Mouse A Cookie … A Pig A Pancake … A Cat A Cupcake … A Mom A Martini (Okay, this last one’s not a kids book. But I find having one (or several) makes the kid lit go down easier.)
Hippos Go Berserk, Horns To Toes And In Between, But Not The Hippopotamus, and just about any other screed by Sandra Boynton, who (like the good folks at Pixar) creates children’s books that parents can read again and again, without wanting to dip a syringe into the black tar heroin. And for that we are forever grateful.
So … what’s in your library? Post a comment … or email me!
[Oh, by the way, the lovely photo, above, is by jpmgrafika]
HEY — DID YOU MISS THESE?
*And There Were Three In The Bed …
Double-Shot Tuesdays -- June 23rd Edition >Double Shot Tuesdays>
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Double-Shot Tuesdays — June 23rd Edition
It’s Tuesday, and that means … time to dip into the blog archives for a double shot of some old favorites from back in the day — before I discovered the beauty and the power of the Share button.
Last night as my friend Jordan was helping me navigate the intricacies of social networking sites, he asked me, ”So how’d you come up with your blog name?” Oddly, he hasn’t been the only one to ask me that in recent days, so in honor of The Ever- Helpful Jordan, who thankfully works for brownie slabs and advice about girls, and for other curious readers, here’s how my blog came to be named Don’t Put Lizards In Your Ears … because, in fact, not everybody’s old enough to know better.
Don’t put lizards in your ears.
Who would, right? I mean, that’s a pretty weird thing to say. Good advice, but a bit incongruous. And really, how often do those words actually come together in conversation? In my experience … uh, never. But I’m finding that as a new mom — and a late-in-life mom at that — I say a whole lot of things to my 2-year-old son, Fletcher, that I never — not in all my wildest college-era hallucinogenic-fueled dreams — thought would tumble out of my mouth. Read more …
[What's the most bizarre thing that you've ever said to your kid? Post a comment or email me!]
Meanwhile, while we were flying home from Denver last week, Fletcher commandeered my laptop to watch Stuart Little, which gave me a chance to catch up on my New York magazines. (Truly, the bathroom and the cabin of an airplane are the only places I can read in peace these days … though I don’t recommend an airplane cabin bathroom!) I was transfixed by Jeff Coplon’s “Five-Year-Olds At The Gate,” about the incredible lack of public school seats available for the city’s exploding kindergarten population. A close friend recently told me that her youngest had gotten wait-listed at several public kindergartens and she wasn’t sure what would happen come Fall. “What am I paying taxes for?” she wondered. All of which made me grateful that, much as I miss it, we don’t live in New York anymore … and that I only have one child to worry about getting into school. Even as one of my cousins is contemplating having a third, once again, here’s why one’s absolutely enough for me.
When I got married the first time, I don’t think the wedding band was on my finger 15 minutes before my father asked, “So when am I going to have a grandchild?” Well, 12 years, one divorce and another wedding later, he finally got a grandson. And barely a year later, I started getting from all quarters, “So, when are you going to have another one?”
Huh? Are you kidding me?!?! I’m still adjusting to this one.
My standard reply alternates between “We don’t want to have more kids than we can afford to send through graduate school” and “Well … maybe if we’d started earlier …” Yes, I’m aware that women in their late 50s are having babies, thank you Aleta St. James. Hey, if you wanna be pushing 80 at your kid’s college graduation, go for it … and I hope that in the excitement of watching your progeny receive a diploma, you don’t trip over your walker and break a hip. But, as far as I’m concerned, this factory produced a single model and is hereby closed to business. Read more …
[What's your ideal family size? Post a comment or email me!]
Double-Shot Tuesdays -- June 23rd Edition >Double Shot Tuesdays>Double Shot Tuesdays
It’s Tuesday, and that means … time to dip into the blog archives for a double shot of some old favorites. This past weekend my youngest cousin got married in Denver. Being surrounded by my other cousins’ new babies — seems everyone had babies all at once! — put me in mind of my very early baby experiences. So without further ado …
My Misadventures In Breastfeeding … Or How I Learned To Love Baby Formula
“So, are you breastfeeding?”
When I was a new mom, I got asked that a lot. It’s the kind of question — along with How much weight did you gain during your pregnancy? and Are your nipples chapped? — that even complete strangers feel is well within their rights to ask if you’re toting around a baby. And given everything we know about the health benefits of breastfeeding — the higher IQs, the lower risk for infections, allergies, and a host of other problems including obesity and diabetes — the expectation was that I’d say Yes. Because of course I’d be foolish . . . make that down-right selfish, to deny my baby the precious elixir of breast milk.
Until . . . I couldn’t do it. Read more …
(Did anyone else have trouble breastfeeding? Please post a comment or email me!)
When I was pregnant, I was convinced — 1000 percent positive, actually — that we were having a girl. My husband Stewart would refer to my growing belly as “he” … and I’d routinely correct him. “No — She.” These back-and-forths usually played out when we were in a department store’s baby section, and I was mooning over some ridiculously frilly powder pink dress that no baby could conceivably be comfortable in.
Not that there was any rationale to my insistence that there was a girl baby cradled in there. My thinking ran along the lines that my sister already had two boys, and I figured, with the kind of twisted logic that makes Lotto addicts play the same combinations day after day, convinced their numberswill come up … someday, that it was simply time for our collective family to have a girl. And thus I was carrying her. So certain was I, we’d already picked out her name — Quinn. I wasn’t even thinking about boy names, because … well, why bother? Obviously, we were having a girl.
And then around about 14 weeks, I had my amniocentesis. Read more …
(Anyone else get “surprised” by their baby’s gender? Please post a comment or email me!)
Double-Shot Tuesdays -- June 23rd Edition >Double Shot Tuesdays>Vomit
I was at Orlando International Airport when my cell phone rang.
“Hon –”
It was Stewart. My husband. He’d just dropped me off at Jet Blue’s curbside check-in. In moments I’d be headed for New York. My first business trip back to the City in six months. I’d just gotten done with the requisite shedding of shoes and electronics at Security, where my favorite high-protein-low-carb-low-sugar-Greek-strained yogurt was carefully scrutinized and ultimately confiscated by the TSA. Have a nice breakfast, I thought, exasperated, as I watched my $2/cup yogurt disappear. It was just 7:30 in the morning, but I could already taste the martini I was planning to down that night at the Campbell Apartment.
But back to my cell phone … which was ringing … insistently. Jeeeee-zus … Can I not get five minutes to myself? C’mon! I already shower with my preschooler parked right outside the (glass) stall, banging away on his toy synthesizer piano. And I’d long ago given up peeing and pooping (also known in Mommy Circles as — Shhhhh! — hiding out and reading) in peace and solitude. I’d been off Mom Duty for exactly 23 minutes. I hadn’t even left Orlando. Is it time to board — and turn off my phone — yet?
Sigh. I flipped open my phone.
“Hey — ” I answered, fully engrossed in CNN, where the news was all about an Air France flight that had disappeared somewhere between Brazil and France the night before. We can photograph car license plates from space. How does a plane just drop off radar? That couldn’t be good. And how nice that I’ll be watching this airplane disaster unfold as I flew to New York.
“Uh … Hon?” Stewart’s voice pulled me back. He sounded concerned. Guess he wasn’t just calling to say I love you before I took off. “Uh … Fletcher threw up all over himself … and the car seat … and his blanket … and Cee Cee.” [Cee Cee is Fletcher’s never-go-anywhere-without-it stuffed hermit crab lovee. Hey, when your dad’s a marine biologist, you get toy sea critters, not teddy bears.]
“How bad?”
“Remember Linda Blair in The Exorcist?
Head spinning. Spewing green goo. Disgusting stuff, really.
“This. Is. Worse!” I could hear the slight panic in his voice. It was a little funny actually, considering that this is a guy who, when he was curator of The Dolphin Habitat at The Mirage in Las Vegas, once KY’d his entire arm, then stuck it all the way down a dolphin’s throat and into its belly to retrieve a toy car it had swallowed. But a vomiting child — his vomiting child — that was freaking him out. “What should I do?!?”
Was it wrong that I took some perverse pleasure that this was happening on Stewart’s watch? Just when I was moments from fleeing the city on a big ol’ jet airliner? For five whole days?!?
Not that I was at all happy that Fletcher was sick. What mom, apart from the crazy Munchausen types, ever is? But a teensy part of me was doing the happy dance that this time, it wasn’t on me. Literally. It’s got to be some twisted Murphy’s Law of childcare that kids will get violently (and repeatedly) sick when you’re the only one around to clean it up.
(Show of hands — or comments — Moms if you’ve mopped up and hosed down more than your fair share of kid throw-up while Dad’s doing the three-martini business dinner at Peter Lugar’s on the company expense account? Post a comment or email me!)
Of course, immediately, reflexively, I snapped back into Battle-Ready Mom Mode as I ran down the checklist of things to do to forecast whether we could expect more projectile vomiting or if this was an isolated spill.
“Clean him up. Take his temperature. Keep him quiet. Monitor his activity level,” I instructed. “Lethargic and uninterested even in WordWorld or Sesame Street? Definitely sick. Hopping off the couch to play with trucks … and puzzles …. and race cars … and dinosaurs? Demanding waffles for breakfast? He can go to school.”
Of course, current behavior was no guarantee of future performance. Fletcher’s played possum before — or maybe I should say reverse possum. Not too long ago, after another random bout of vomiting, he’d seemed fine. Fine enough, anyway, to go see Mamma Mia!, then clamor for a cupcake at our favorite bakery/gelateria. But as the day went on, he began complaining about a tummy ache and that it hurt when he peed. Which is how we ended up at Night Lite Pediatrics late on a Sunday afternoon where, because he hadn’t yet learned to pee in the potty and they needed a urine sample to check for a bladder infection, they snaked a catheter up his baby penis. Now that is a fun time. And if you haven’t experienced that yet, I recommend skipping it.
If I had more Mom Experience, I probably would have sensed that things were gonna go south earlier in the day when Fletcher climbed into my lap as I was using the bathroom. (Remember what I said about never going alone?) It’s universally understood that I have a teacup of a bladder — seriously, Fletcher can hold it longer than I can, the little camel. So all dressed in workout clothes, I was making my last pit stop before setting out on a power walk with Fletcher in the stroller to provide extra resistance. He crawled into my lap, snuggled his sweet little head into my chest … and then vomited. All over me. Repeatedly. There was no warning. No Mommy, I don’t feel well that might have prompted me to quickly hop off and yield the bowl to Fletcher. Nope. He seemed fine one minute; the next, he was spewing like the Exxon Valdez. You know you’re a mom when you’ve had warm toddler vomit gush between your breasts, spill down your legs and soak into your cross-trainers.
All this is by way of saying that I’d been fooled once into thinking that a little vomit was no big deal when it really heralded a tenacious bacterial infection that had Fletcher spewing out one end or the other for more than a week. Vomit is just that much more special when it’s accompanied by its cousin, explosive diarrhea. There’s just nothing like opening your son’s diaper to find that he’s sitting in a puddle of diarrhea that comes nearly to his waist. It got so that I had to cover his changing table with a tarp. ‘Course, that didn’t help much the day Fletcher woke from his nap, crying because he, and the bedding and his clothing and his stuffed animals were covered in — you guessed it! Shit! Hours later, after I’d stripped and bathed Fletcher, then stripped and Lysoled the crib, washed all the bedding and the soiled clothing and stuffed critters, there was another, um … blowout. And I had to do it all again.
Just so you have a little better understanding about why I was — maybe callously, then again, maybe not — dancing the joy jig at the JetBlue gate, let me explain that the Great Vomit and Shit Storm of ’08 occurred while my wonderful husband was away for six weeks on business. Six! Weeks! For six weeks, I held the fort in the Shit Swamp without complaining (though you can see I’m making up for it now!) I figured Stewart could hold his own against a little projectile vomiting for what? A few days?
But just to make sure he didn’t get too bad a drubbing — and because I figured Fletcher would probably go to school after all — I called the nursery school director and left the longest list of In Case Of Emergency numbers — Stewart’s cell, the nanny’s cell, my parents’ cells, my sister’s office and cell and a few other random folk who could be counted on in the case of an unexpected relapse — in the history of childcare. The list went on (to quote playwright/screenwriter Tom Stoppard) for the length of a Bible. Okay, maybe I wasn’t immediately available, but I was still neurotic.
Then having done all I could by remote, I got on the plane. And I turned off my phone. And basked in the sweet, sweet silent bliss of no one asking for juice. Or help with the potty. Or one more episode of Sid, The Science Kid, Pleeeeeeze , Mommy before bedtime. Or to hose down the vomit-covered car seat
Two and a half hours later, when we landed at Kennedy, I checked in with the nursery school director. “Fletcher’s fine,” she assured me. When I got into my hotel room, before my first business meeting, I checked in with the nanny. “Fletcher’s fine,” she reported, then raced off to accompany him on some adventure, involving Play Doh and dinosaurs. And later that night, I checked in with Stewart. “Fletcher’s doing just fine,” he promised.
So, ‘twas just a touch of carsickness. A combination of too much chocolate milk early in the morning and a bumpy, twisty, turny ride on a turnpike perpetually under construction. As they say, “Shit (and vomit) happens.” But this time, I’m sure as hell glad it didn’t happen to me.
Double-Shot Tuesdays -- June 23rd Edition >Double Shot Tuesdays>Double-Shot Tuesdays
I’m taking a page from Scary Mommy. She (though I’m sure she’s not alone in this) has instituted Flashback Fridays on her wondrously funny blog in which she recycles a past crowd pleaser on Fridays.
Nice. But given as I’m time pressed with actual writing that’s keeping the lights on in our house, Wells Fargo from repossessing our Volvo, and my kidlet in Montessori school — and since my early stuff has hardly gotten wide distribution because I started blogging before I learned the virtues of the Share button — I’m going to offer TWO — count ‘em! — of my personal favorites that people who are not my mom (or otherwise related to me by blood or marriage) have deemed good reads.
And yes, I realize that last sentence borders on the Faulkner-esque. Thank you, Grammar Police. As a side note, I’m sure that my eighth grade English teacher is still shocked and amazed that people — and by that I mean bona fide magazine editors — actually pay me to write stuff, given that in middle school I could not diagram a sentence to save my life. Ms. Eighth Grade Grammar Teacher, you’ll be happy to know that 30 years later, I can spot a misplaced modifier at 50 paces … even if I can’t map it out.
But now without further ado … and in that true pop radio tradition of giving airplay to two songs in a row from The Same Band, here’s my double-shot tribute to Tuesdays.
Read ‘em and … well, please SHARE them, DIGG them, and by all means COMMENT on them or send me EMAIL about them.
Thanks!
How New Moms Bond
So, my new friend — we’ll call her Brooklyn — was telling me about her fourth-degree anal tear. “…and the doctor’s down there for what seems like ever, making these sewing motions. I’m like, Hey, whatcha doing down there? And he says, Oh nothing …. But when the anesthetic wore off, like Oh … my … God! I didn’t think I’d ever want to get pregnant again.”
Did I mention that she was telling me this while hugely pregnant … with her third?!? Hey, guys tell war stories. Women tell birthing stories. It’s how we bond with other new moms. Park a stroller in a food court, at the playground, under a shady tree with your newborn and if there’s another new mom within 50 yards, she’ll parallel park her Bugaboo and after a few pleasantries — How old’s your baby? Is she sleeping through the night yet? – will launch into My labor was hor-ri-ble. Let me tell you … And she’s off to recount the kind of extremely graphic details that you’d only be privy to if you were, say, a regular watcher of those reality birthing shows on Discovery Health. Within minutes you’ll know more about your new pal’s vagina than if you’d hooked up with her at Dinah Shore. Read more …
Circum-Decision
You know how you take certain things for granted and just assume that your worldview on a particular subject is universally shared by all … or at least by the man you married and who supplied the other half of your kidlet’s DNA? And then you find out that that’s totally not the case … that in fact, said DNA-Contributor has a completely different take on something that’s so diametrically opposed to yours that you can’t even believe anyone would think that way.That pretty much sums up my pre-baby discussion about circumcision with Stewart. I had taken it as a given, in the way that I take it as given that the sky is blue, the grass (when we remember to water it) is green and that Paris Hilton will eventually do something even more crass and unbecoming than flash her hoo-ha at the paparazzi. In other words, we’re having a boy, so, duh, he’ll be circumcised.
Stewart apparently, was of a different mind altogether.
Here’s me: So after the baby’s born, we’ll get him circumcised in the hospital.
Here’s Stewart: Um …I don’t think we should. What????? Read more …
Double-Shot Tuesdays -- June 23rd Edition >Double Shot Tuesdays>And There Were Three In The Bed …
Every time I get into bed at night I think of Roy Scheider. Not that way. I mean, yeah, he was hot — especially in All That Jazz. But I’m thinking of Jaws. You know when he’s out at sea with those two other guys, and he gets his first really good look at the shark and the enormity of just how fucked they are hits him full on. And then he says: We’re gonna need a bigger boat.
I know what he means. We need a bigger bed.
When Stewart and I bought our stupidly expensive, ludicrously tall queen-size mattress with the six-inch pillow top, and the gorgeous cherry-wood sleigh bed frame to go with it, I certainly felt that even with the bed’s shortcomings (too soft for my back; so high that when I was pregnant, I needed a step ladder to climb into it), it would at least be big enough for two slender adults and three cats. Okay, so the cats are pretty huge for house cats, but still. There was plenty of room for all of us to pile in. And then came …
Ah, ah, ah … with this essay’s provocative title I bet you’re thinking (hoping maybe?) we seduced our nanny into a permanent ménage a tois. Nope. So sorry to disappoint. The third in our bed is our child. And now, I wish with all of my interior design-challenged heart, that we’d splurged on the California King. Perhaps someone with more Mom Miles under her high-waisted jeans than I have can explain why it is that kids insist on sleeping perpendicular to whoever else is in the bed with them. My kid roams the bed at night like some pint-sized Ferdinand Magellan and flip flops more than John Kerry campaigning for the White House. And for one so small — not quite 3 feet and under 30 pounds — he takes up waaaaay more than a third of the mattress, leaving Stewart and I pushed to the edges, clinging to the sides like some ancient cliff-dwellers.
(Is anyone else having co-sleeping issues? Share your comments below or email me.)
Honestly, I still can’t quite believe it, but somehow in the six months after Fletcher graduated from crib to big kid bed, our bed — the marital bed! — became the family bed. I know … I know. At best, you’re thinking we’re some kind of hippy-dippy ’60s-wannabe parents who went to Oberlin College and wear tie-dyed hemp clothing while making our own tofu and whistling Kumbayah all day. At worst, you’re thinking: You guys are wimps!!! Spineless wimps!!! Hint: I hate tie-dye. Which leaves …. Yes, I know! We are wimps!
Not in a bazillion years would I have ever thought I’d have a family bed. Growing up, I’d often crawl into my sister’s bed when I got the willies at night. But my parents’ bed? Absolutely off-limits. No kids allowed. Period. End of story. Might as well have been Area 51 for as close as I could get to it. I carried this bias into adulthood, in the same kind of knee-jerk way that even though I don’t keep kosher, I still can’t stomach eating a slab of ham or drinking milk with a burger. Once, back in my magazine days, when another staff editor casually mentioned that she had a family bed, my reaction to this revelation was immediate, visceral (and mercifully contained in interior monologue): Your kids sleep in the same bed with you and your husband? Gross! And then: How do you guys have sex?
So, you can see I was an unlikely candidate for group snoozing. After all, we weren’t nomads living in a yurt somewhere. We were three people living in a house with four bedrooms, for god’s sake. There was plenty of space to crash. And in the early days of Fletcher’s arrival I was adamant about the whole separate bed thing. During the long stretch of 2 a.m. and 4 a.m. feedings, I kept Fletcher close, but terrified of the SIDS risk that comes with co-sleeping, always in his own little bassinet parked on my side of the bed. Even when we eventually moved him upstairs to his own room and his own crib — at 8 months, which was not soon enough for my husband and still too soon for me — he did okay on his own. Well, all right … he did okay after our steadfast nanny loaned us some backbone and helped us sleep train him. (Which, by the way, if you’ve never sleep-trained an infant yourself, it’s an agonizing process, known as Ferberizing, that requires nerves of titanium, ice water in your veins and construction-grade ear plugs to get through.) But after five days of steeling ourselves against Fletcher’s howls of abandonment, we were home free and sleeping soundly.
And then the whole megillah unraveled when we swapped his crib for his new “big kid” bed.
Naturally, the first night in the new bed went off without a hitch. That should have been my first clue that the situation was way too good to be true. Instead, I was lulled (naively I see now) into an utterly false sense of He loves his bed … This will be an easy transition! Uh-huh. How many ventures have been doomed by such gross under-estimations? Sure, Fletcher loved his new bed. In the daytime. When he could jump on it. Or off of it. He’d even nap peaceably in it. But at night, he wanted nothing to do with it. Once the novelty of the new bed wore off (about 24 hours after he got it), we found ourselves faced with a brand of toddler defiance that makes Daniel Craig look like a wuss. “Go ‘night, ‘night in Mommy and Daddy’s bed,” he’d insist.
Now here’s a bit of insight that I’ve gained through my anthropological study of toddlers, otherwise known as living with one. They may have the attention span of a Tsetse fly. But when they want something, then they’ve got the tenaciousness of a Jack Russell terrier, the lung capacity of an opera singer and the endless tears of Tammy Faye Bakker. And by the way, their ability to last you out rivals the decomp rate of a Twinkie. (Sure it’s easy to say Let ‘em cry it out when it’s not your kid wailing. When it is your kid wailing as if he’s Caesar to your Brutus, letting him cry it out is like being slowly filleted with long knives.) Even when I knew I was being played for a sap, I’d still crumble. And so that’s how we got sucked into taking turns laying down with Fletcher in his new bed until he fell asleep.
Of course, I could still pretty much count on being rousted from my bed nightly by the 2 a.m. cries of MOMMY! … MOMMY! MAAAAH-MEEEEE! That would be my cue to sleep-sprint up the stairs, scoop him up, and take him back downstairs to our bed. It was so predictable, I was practically on autopilot. But once potty training got under way, our nightly dance grew more complex. Now, there were trips to the bathroom to factor in. Diaper changes. Even wholesale switch-outs of sheets and pajamas. Sleep walking? Not anymore. I was double-espresso awake. And after the umpteenth week of fractured sleep, I was so dog tired I would have sold the kid to the gypsies for a solid 8. Like a Gitmo psych ops expert who deprives terror suspects of sleep in order to break them, Fletcher was wearing me down, down, down, down, down.
Now for those of you rolling your eyes and tsk-tsking at the gullible, newbie parents, I’m aware that we were cultivating a little Sleep Nazi. Our Munich came when Fletcher got sick and we let him, feverish and miserable, back into our bed to convalesce. The plan was to return him to his own bed after his recovery. But when that time came, he dug in. We gave him an inch, and he wanted Eastern Europe … aka our bed. And mounting our own resistance was turning bedtime into an escalating battle of wills.
Then at school, Fletcher’s teacher, Miss Evie, a sweet young gal with silky black hair and a spray of red stars tattooed up her neck, took me aside for a chat. Fletcher seemed weepy and out of sorts. He was hitting, kicking, acting out in ways that were completely uncharacteristic of the sweet-tempered child she’d come to know. Was anything going on at home? She asked in the way that one inquires if there’s been a death or a job loss. Were we, perhaps, beating him regularly? Her tone wasn’t exactly accusatory. But she let me know that whatever was going on at our house, it was spilling over into the classroom. And she’d taken note.
Now on top of exhausted, I was also concerned. Once upon a time when I was working on a magazine article, a children’s sleep specialist had shared with me that profound sleep loss in children is often mistaken for ADHD. In many cases, he told me, kids behaving badly were being doped up with Ritalin when probably all they needed was some more shut-eye. That gave me pause. With that in mind, as long as Fletcher was sleeping, was it really that important that he sleep in his own bed?
So I tried an experiment: That night when Fletcher made his nightly bid to sleep in our bed, I let him. And whaddya know? For the first time in I don’t know when, there was no 2 a.m. potty break; no Mommy! screams in the middle of the night. He slept like the proverbial baby. And so did we.
In the morning, he was in a great mood. And that afternoon, I got a thumbs up from Miss Evie.
After that, really, it was a no-brainer. To borrow from Robert Evans: the kid stays in the bed. When I confided to my friend Stephanie (who’s got two boys of her own) that I’d succumbed to this unorthodox sleep solution, she nodded, understandingly, but cautioned that whatever I was doing at this critical point, I’d just better be prepared to do it for a long, long, long, long time to come. She knows from when she speaks: For years, she slept with one child while her husband slept with the other. But, really, I don’t expect this situation to last all that long. At least not compared to the time it takes, say, water to carve out a canyon or for mountains to form. Meanwhile, it’s not lost on me that we all sleep better now that we’re sleeping together like nomads in a yurt.
And as for sex … well … thank goodness we’ve got three other bedrooms.
Double-Shot Tuesdays -- June 23rd Edition >Double Shot Tuesdays>Toys R Us Has Exploded In My Living Room
I’m a woman of some talents, but home-making … cooking … cleaning … decorating … alas, those skills are not among them. I was reminded of this singular shortcoming, recently, when hanging out with my cousin Jaimee. She’d just had a baby, and when I was in New York, I stopped in to see her and meet Logan, the newest member of our family. Jaimee lives in D.U.M.B.O, which is not, as you might suppose, a Disneyfied city like Celebration, Florida, but actually an ultra-hip Brooklyn nabe located Down Under The Manhattan Bridge Overpass. Get it?
This nabe, like many once-downtrodden Brooklyn areas had gentrified from a place where you wouldn’t want to walk alone at night (unless you were in the business, say, of providing blowjobs to slumming Wall-Streeters) to a chic neighborhood jammed with fab new condos, locavore restaurants and moms navigating $1000 strollers. Jaimee lives in one of those new fab condos. Looking around, I had some serious decorating envy. Jaimee knows just where to put a frame, hang a picture, place a vase so that everything looks, not fussy, but effortlessly … casually … elegant. And even with all the tumult a new baby creates — and all the extra gear a new baby comes with, which could really warrant its own apartment — her place was still picture perfect. Not a photo frame, glossy art book or a candlestick was out of place. As if the style mavens at House Beautiful had just parachuted in to prep her living room for a cover shoot.
Now since watching my own tot morph from stationary baby lump to active, running, bouncing preschooler — whose favorite activity is seeing how many times he can jump from couch to couch and back again without slipping, falling and splitting his lip open — I’ve come to realize that one’s kid status is reflected in the state of one’s living room. Totally tidy with various objets arranged … just …okay … there … no … there …so? You’ve either chosen to remain childless … or you’ve already shipped them off to college. Or — behind Door Number 3 — you have an infant who hasn’t yet reached the crawling, grabbing, throwing, tearing, climbing stage.
“Your apartment is so gorgeous — ”
I wanted to break the news gently as we sipped hot tea on Jaimee’s crystal blue, still-stain-free couch. “But you know …when the baby starts crawling and pulling up –”
“I have to put it all away, don’t I?”
Jaimee sighed. Her eyes swept across the beautifully appointed living room. I could see her mentally calculating: How long could she maintain the splendor before it would have to be packed away in boxes … and where it would all stay until the risk of anything shattering in the hands of a curious crawling, walking, climbing child, who insisted on playing ball in the house despite numerous reprimands not to, was past. Like when Logan was old enough to vote. I suspected it wouldn’t be too long after Logan learned how to scramble around the apartment that her elegant living room would start looking a lot more like mine …which is to say, as if Toys R Us exploded in it.
I should have taken pictures because I cannot even remember what our lovely living room looked like before we installed the brightly colored play kitchen — which came with hundreds of little plastic dishes and fake food! — parked a line of ride-along trucks and front-end loaders against the back wall and set up the train table by the French doors. Our shelves, once full of grownup DVDs like The Sopranos, Sex and the City, The L Word, Six Feet Under and Band Of Brothers are now packed with kiddie flicks like Finding Nemo, Madagascar, Over The Hedge and the complete Baby Einstein oeuvre. The art books on our coffee table have been put away, replaced by puzzles and busy boards. Wicker bins flank the TV, a repository for dozens of electronic toys that all beep, sing, chime or squawk as well as cars, trucks, trains, Ninja Turtles, Power Rangers, Transformers and other assorted action figures too numerous to count. We did buy a new living room chair not long ago. It’s red, fuzzy … and has Elmo’s face on it. It also shakes and giggles like a mental patient when you sit in it. Fletcher picked it out himself.
At first, we tried to contain the onslaught. “Fletcher’s space” started as a generous baby blanket on the living room floor with a small plastic bucket filled with things that spun, rolled, crinkled and otherwise entertained a wide-eyed infant with no place else to go. I suppose he could have played in his own room, which we’d so lovingly decorated before his arrival with heirloom furniture that had been my husband’s when he was a boy. But then — and here we have no one to blame but ourselves actually — we couldn’t keep one eye on the baby and the other on all The Daily Show episodes we’d DVR’d. Because, yes, playing with things that crinkle and spin may be endlessly entertaining for an infant, but keep that up without reprieve and you’ll soon be hitting the Grey Goose harder than an out-of-work hedge fund manager. And drinking before 5 is probably not the best example to set for your little one (though if you hide the vodka in the cranberry juice, really, who’d be the wiser?) And puh-leeze …. don’t even get me started on those Baby Einstein DVDs. C’mon. Someone behind this baby product goldmine had to be nipping at the electric Kool-Aid in college. With their hypnotic, spinny, whirly, swirly, kaleidescopy images set to Bach, Beethoven and Mozart, these DVDs positively cry out for a Timothy Leary Special, or at least some psychedelic mushrooms.
Let this be a lesson: Addiction is bad. While we fed the TV monkey on our backs — and our preschooler learned to request Jon Stewart by name — his toys multiplied exponentially — faster than closet hangers — until our living room, which once had just a few random toys strewn about, morphed into a giant playroom with some couches and a TV.
I still fantasize about getting my living room back, especially when the new wave of Pottery Barn and West Elm and Ikea catalogues hit the mailbox. “Not for a while yet,” says my sister Shari. She waited a full year after her youngest, then 6, doodled on her velour chaise lounge — with marker! –before getting her new living room furniture.
Recently we tried to clean up the superfund site that our living room has become. We moved some of Fletcher’s toys upstairs to his room, and Stewart gave up the fantasy that the big empty room he’d earmarked when we bought our house would be his “playroom” with a full wet bar, pool table and dartboard and gave it over to corral the toys. But somehow, all that did was s-p-r-e-a-d the mess. It’s like The Blob slowly overtaking our home until eventually it will all be just one … big … toy … pile. Maybe we’ll be able to dig out when Fletcher goes to college.
Still, I suppose the colorful, homey clutter of toys is better than the alternative: When I was a kid, our living room was “for company,” and my sister and I couldn’t even pass through as a short-cut through to the kitchen. (Once my mother got new carpet, she didn’t want to wear it out by actually walking on it.) So I grew up with “Not through the living room! Go around!” ringing in my ears. I can count on one hand with fingers left over the number of times I was allowed to be in there. Once was my father’s surprise 35th birthday party. The other was … my baby shower, when I was 39.
A few weeks ago, we visited my friend Sonia who I’ve known since first grade. She used to be an emergency room doc in Hawaii. Now she’s a (mostly) stay-at-home mom to 5-year-old twins in Tampa. I’m trying to adopt her attitude. Says she: “Anyone who’s coming over knows we have kids so they’ll just have to get over themselves and step around the toys.”
Which is why I nearly passed out form shock when we walked in and found the living room immaculate. Not a toy in sight. Spit spot. Mary Poppins couldn’t have done better.
It lasted about 10 minutes.
In the time it took for Sonia and me to share coffee, bagels and some gossip in the kitchen, our 2- and 5-year-olds had completely ransacked her living room. Not a square inch of carpet was visible beneath the spread of cars, trains, tracks, electronic musical instruments, marbles, plastic food. In other words, it looked as if a mega-ton Toys R Us bomb had exploded there.
We felt right at home.
Double-Shot Tuesdays -- June 23rd Edition >Double Shot Tuesdays>Behold These Truths
These truths — aka Murphy’s Laws of child-rearing — became evident once I had a kid:
A child will only nap when the $15/hour nanny is sitting on the couch twiddling her thumbs with nothing to do.
Children will sleep until noon on school days unless forcibly awakened; but will be up at the ass-crack of dawn on weekends and holidays.
The amount of time your child spends dawdling in the morning is directly proportionate to how desperate you are to get out of the house because you are really, really, really late.
A child will only have to go potty after the show has started and you’re sitting in the dead center of the row; and then he’ll have to go twice before intermission.
A child will always get sick in the middle of the night when your only option for medical attention is the emergency room, filled with stab-wound victims and MRSA infections. The child whose fever hits 103F at midnight will register a cool 99F immediately after you get to your pediatrician’s office.
A child will whisper his first word ever in the privacy of your own living room so that you have to strain to hear Juice! But the day he learns Fuck, he’ll shout it loudly … in temple … so the entire congregation understands him.
The child who clings to you like a deer tick and sobs inconsolably at the utter betrayal of your leaving him at daycare while you — selfishly! — go to work … to the gym … to run errands … that child will be all smiles with not a care in the world as soon as your car pulls out of the drive way.
Double-Shot Tuesdays -- June 23rd Edition >Double Shot Tuesdays>A Butterfly Flaps Its Wings
Anyone who doubts the validity of chaos theory has never had a child … or been within 50 yards of other parents. Even if you cannot believe that a butterfly flapping its wings in China could possibly have an affect on the weather anywhere east of L.A., hang out in a playgroup for a while. You’ll see the theory holds water. Let me demonstrate. Forget the butterfly, and try this on: A three-year-old snacks on Xanax in Orlando and I’m unable to go my cousins’ double baby shower in San Diego. And no … it wasn’t my three-year-old. This particular three-year-old belongs to … let’s just call her Grossly Negligent Parent* because … well … she is.
So it’s a spring morning in May, just a few days before I’m supposed to jet to San Diego. My cousin Jill had married a nice guy named Jesse and a few months later Rachel married Jill’s brother Dan. Now Jill and Rachel were pregnant and due within a few weeks of each other. We hadn’t been able to be at Dan and Rachel’s wedding because they got married in a tiny little slip of a beach town in Mexico and Fletcher hadn’t been immunized yet against whatever germs he could pick up there. I wanted to do my cousinly duty and at least show my face at the shower.
I’d just dropped Fletcher at nursery school and was on my way to breakfast when I got a panicked phone call from a girlfriend. GNP’s toddler had just swallowed an an indeterminate amount of Xanax and been rushed to the emergency room by ambulance. She was babysitting GNP’s newborn while GNP was at the ER. Could I come help?
Now follow this thread, because it’s important. My friend, let’s call her Andrea*, had been driving her toddler Henry to the pediatrician for a routine post-ear-infection check. She’d spun her car around, called her husband out of a meeting to take Henry to the doctor in her stead and headed over to NGP’s where she was awaiting my arrival.
For a while we just stared at the snoozing newborn (unless it’s yours, they’re really not that interesting at this stage) and debated how a three-year-old even got his pudgy little hands on the Xanax to start with. Did he grab them from the various bottles scattered around the bathroom sink? Or did he drag a bar stool over to the kitchen counter, climb up and find an unsecured bottle in one of the cabinets? Either way, it was easy to see why the precocious tyke would scoop some up and pop them in his mouth: In the landfill that passed as the kitchen/family room, there were brightly colored candies strewn everywhere. On the table, still sticky from untold meals past. On the floor, which I didn’t even want to contemplate the last time it had been mopped. In that mess, a couple of pastel-colored anti-anxiety pills could easily pass for candy to a toddler eager to put everything his mouth … and not too particular about where he grabbed it from.
Then Andrea’s husband called from the pediatrician’s office. And that’s when things really got interesting.
Oh, Henry’s ears were fine. But a cursory peek in his mouth, an after thought really on the doctor’s part, had revealed a blister on the roof of his mouth. The doctor’s diagnosis: hand, foot and mouth disease, a fairly contagious virus, common among the under 10-set, that produces fever, skin rash and painful mouth ulcers.
I quickly connected the dots. Henry had hand, foot and mouth (HFMD). He’d played all weekend with Fletcher. Fletcher was exposed. Not to mention the entire nursery school class, which is probably where Henry had picked it up to begin with. I wondered from who … which parent had allowed their ill child to go to school and thus infect everyone else? Fletcher didn’t seem sick. Neither did Henry. A quick check of the Centers for Disease Control web site indicated that it took a few days for the virus to show itself. I wondered if they were incubating. I also wondered how this was going to play in San Diego. My guess was not well. I would have to call my aunt and uncle. It wasn’t fair to bring Typhoid Fletcher into their midst and expose my pregnant cousins without at least a warning. Maybe Stewart would watch him at the hotel while I went to the baby shower.
Meanwhile, Andrea called the nursery school, which immediately initiated the kind of massive clean up not seen since the Exxon Valdez. (Even across the room, I could hear the school director’s shock radiate through Andrea’s cell phone.) I went home to do my own sterilizing. I stripped Fletcher’s bed. Lysoled the air mattress the kids had been jumping on. I gathered up every last plastic toy Henry might have handled and tossed it into the dishwasher and ran it on the “pot scrubber” setting. Later that afternoon, I took Fletcher over to his own pediatrician for an emergency checkup.
This is me, slightly panicked: He’s been exposed to a little boy who’s thought to have hand, foot and mouth disease. We’re leaving in two days for San Diego to go to a baby shower. Will Fletcher get sick? Could he infect others?
There way no way to tell, she said, looking at his hands, feet and beneath his diaper. He didn’t look sick. But if he was going to get sick, he’d probably come down with it right around the time my cousins were unwrapping their baby gifts. And yes, he could be contagious.
Just perfect.
I called my aunt and uncle. No need to panic. It’s probably nothing. Just a precaution… And I proceeded to fill them in.
After a quick pow wow, they phoned back: Don’t come! Not to the shower. Not to the house. Not to the city. Don’t even cross the state line.
Hell, I could tell they didn’t even want to be talking with me on the phone. I could practically hear the snap of blue protective latex gloves going on as we talked. God forbid the girls carrying their grandchildren might be exposed. Maybe it was overkill. Then again, who was I to argue? We didn’t attend Rachel’s Mexico wedding because I worried Fletcher would pick up some rare disease simply from breathing the air. (To my Mexican readers, that’s not intended as a slight on your fine country … just the ridiculously overly cautious precautions of a germ-phobic mom.)
I cancelled our trip.
Over the next few days, I religiously checked Fletcher’s hands, feet, around his diaper area, several times a day. Nothing. Not one little pustule erupts. For which I am alternately relieved, thankful … and, after it becomes clear that he does not have HFMD, profoundly pissed off.
Andrea calls me the following week. “I hate to tell you this — ”
Well, like Fletcher, Henry never developed any other HFMD symptoms. That’s because Henry never had hand, foot and mouth disease. That telltale blister on the roof of his mouth? The one that caused the pediatrician to leap off the deep end and call out the HazMat team? Once the shock of the diagnosis wore off, Andrea remembered that Henry had had pizza the night before his doctor’s visit. Hot pizza. Hot pizza that had burned the roof of his mouth. It was the kind of inconsequential detail that Andrea would have remembered if she’d been in the doctor’s office that horrible, chaotic morning instead of Henry’s dad. But she wasn’t because she was watching NGP’s newborn because NGP was in the ER with her three-year-old who’d eaten Xanax.
That’s right. And what of the Xanax Kid … the one who kicked off all this chaos? He’s … fine. He was under observation for a bit at the ER. NGP got a stern lecture about leaving controlled substances laying all over her house. And they were sent home. For which I am relieved, thankful and profoundly pissed off. When you think about it, the whole thing played out a bit like It’s a Wonderful Life — only in reverse. We are all connected in a Capra-esque, Facebook kind of way, and one person’s bone-headed mishap will ripple out to wreak havoc on many other people’s lives.
Of course, one moral of the story could be Don’t send a Dad to do a Mom’s job at the pediatrician. A better one: Keep a tighter lid on the Xanax.
*Names have all been changed to protect … everybody.
Double-Shot Tuesdays -- June 23rd Edition >Double Shot Tuesdays>How New Moms Bond
So, my new friend — we’ll call her Brooklyn — was telling me about her fourth-degree anal tear. “…and the doctor’s down there for what seems like ever, making these sewing motions. I’m like, Hey, whatcha doing down there? And he says, Oh nothing …. But when the anesthetic wore off, like Oh … my … God! I didn’t think I’d ever want to get pregnant again.”
Did I mention that she was telling me this while hugely pregnant … with her third?!? Hey, guys tell war stories. Women tell birthing stories. It’s how we bond with other new moms. Park a stroller in a food court, at the playground, under a shady tree with your newborn and if there’s another new mom within 50 yards, she’ll parallel park her Bugaboo and after a few pleasantries — How old’s your baby? Is she sleeping through the night yet? – will launch into My labor was hor-ri-ble. Let me tell you … And she’s off to recount the kind of extremely graphic details that you’d only be privy to if you were, say, a regular watcher of those reality birthing shows on Discovery Health. Within minutes you’ll know more about your new pal’s vagina than if you’d hooked up with her at Dinah Shore. Some moms even have pictures! Ask my sister. She loves an opportunity to whip out the photos — snapped in the delivery room — of her youngest wearing her uterus “like a turtleneck” during her C-section. My husband told me about it. I couldn’t look.
But even allowing for a lower TMI threshold for family members, mostly I know this because when I was a newbie mom, first going to Mommy & Me, a total stranger plopped down next to me with her infant, introduced herself, then by way of making conversation told me about her entire tortuous birthing experience as our babies sat between us drooling like Saint Bernards. It’s enough to make you wish that they held Mommy & Me at a bar … during happy hour … with two-for-one shots. But I was so desperate to meet other moms with kids my son’s age, I sat and listened. (Still, I gotta say, even that was better than baby sign language class where one mom waxed on about the frugal virtues of rinsing out and — gack! — reusing swim diapers. Seriously, if you’re pinching so many pennies that you reuse disposable diapers, perhaps classes in baby sign language aren’t the best use of your income.)
Anyway, moms swap “war stories” with their comrades in cribs because, short of … I don’t know … the Iron Man or maybe the Iditarod, labor and delivery is the penultimate endurance challenge, a necessary rite of passage that women experience before they’re let into the club, taught the secret handshake and awarded the extra set of eyes that all Moms have in the backs of their heads.
I don’t mind sharing, exactly. I’ve listened with rapt attention to my girlfriend Amanda’s story about how the first, and then the second and even the third epidurals didn’t take so she had to be knocked out cold to deliver her baby. My cousin Rachel shared with me how the delivery nurses practically jumped on her belly after her son was delivered to get the afterbirth out, which apparently, by law, has to come out within 30 minutes or it turns into a pumpkin … or something. “Another minute and she said she’d have to stick her whole arm up there to get it.”
All right, then.
The fact that I’m often speechless hearing these things has nothing to do with the gross-out factor. I’m a fan of the late Bob Flanagan. And if I can watch a grown man drive a nail through his penis and then bleed all over the video camera documenting this “performance art” then a little placenta isn’t going to put me off.
No, I’m often speechless because I usually have nothing to add. Hard to believe, I know. After all, I did have my own baby. But my own story is so lame, I feel like I skipped a crucial part of pregnancy and missed out on being tested on this essential proving ground. I didn’t come through labor battle bruised, but triumphant, with kid in hand. So when other women tell their tales — with some degree of pride now that they’ve gone through childbirth and survived — I can’t really relate. It’s like I trained for the marathon, suited up on race day, and then glided across the finish line in a chauffer-driven Town Car.
But oh was I prepared to go the distance! I was eagle-scout prepared! I showed up to the hospital on D-day with a steamer trunk full of props meant to get me to the point where I could then get an epidural. Yes, I am a total wuss when it comes to pain. I’ll pop a Darvon at the first glimmer of a headache. My girlfriend Stephanie stiff-upper-lipped-it through two natural deliveries because she didn’t trust anyone putting a needle into her spine. While I do understand the fear of a crippling spinal injury, I’m also the one who needs to be sedated to have my teeth cleaned, so there was no way I was getting to 10 centimeters without some high-octane pain killers. I also brought a stack of rock CDs, a birthing ball, back massager, energy bars, juice and one of Stewart’s socks filled with rice that could be warmed up in a microwave and applied to any body part that hurt.
I used exactly none of it.
I never once felt a contraction; never got to push. My water never even broke. In fact, the most painful part of the whole experience was when the nurse (who had to have done her training with Dr. Mengele) took four passes to get the IV into my arm. One reason I’d have never made it as a heroin junkie — I hate needles.
But I digress … So why was I even at the hospital with a steamer trunk full of crap and a frickin’ IV in my black-and-blue arm? Well, they say the camera adds 10 pounds. I guess ultrasound makes you look fat too because Fletcher was reading about 8 pounds when my OB took a peek at 40 weeks. “He’s only going to get bigger if we wait another week,” my OB warned. “That’s just going to make things more … uh, fun for you.”
Some days I have trouble expelling tampons. And not even the super-size ones. I couldn’t imagine pushing an eight-pound anything out of my … well, you know where the standard baby exit is. I agreed to be induced. Which is how I ended up in the maternity wing at Celebration Hospital with an IV in my arm, fetal monitor strapped ‘round my belly. Apparently, I contracted like crazy all night long. But I never felt a thing. And never dilated. Not one single centimeter. Zero. Zippo. Zilch. Fletcher obviously inherited the lateness gene. Poor kid … he gets it from both his parents. I’m perpetually 20 minutes late for everything. And Stewart … well, friends from college affectionately refer to the zone he lives in as “Stew time,” which is to say, somewhere behind the international date line.
The next morning my OB offered me a choice: Go home and come back in a week. Or have the baby in an hour by C-section. An operating room was open. We had 15 minutes to decide.
Whoa!!!!! I can’t even tell you how mind-blowing that is. Now, it seems like a no-brainer. But then, it was Morpheus offering Neo the red pill or the blue pill in The Matrix. There was my extreme aversion to having my body cut open to consider. I get queasy if a paper cut bleeds. And the terrifying thought that our lives were really about to change big-time. Even driving to the hospital the night before, it still all seemed unreal. We’d been parents-in-training for what seemed like … ever.. Now, in a few minutes, we could be parents … for real. Were we ready? (A question that maybe we should have asked about 10 months ago.) Are you ever?
We chose the C section. Forty-five minutes later, they laid Fletcher on my chest.
Maybe if I’d left the hospital and come back later, I’d have a more dramatic birthing tale. (Or ended up on our local news: Woman gives birth on I-4. Leather seats ruined. Film at 11.) They say it’s not the destination, it’s the journey. With childbirth I suppose it doesn’t matter how you get there, so long as you go home with your baby. Still, I have a theory that being able to conjure your labor/delivery experience is a good hedge against the other barbs of motherhood, a potent reminder that since you’ve already survived the crucible of childbirth, whatever curve balls Life throws your kid later, you’re likely to survive those too. Hopefully just paper cuts. Unlikely though.
