Pukus Maximus

I'll warn you right now: this post is not for the faint of gut. If you have a weak stomach at all, you probably just want to skip this one.

I got puked on yesterday. Hardcore.

My daughter has only thrown up one other time in her life. Sure there was plenty of spit-up during the infant days, but the only other incident involving actual barf was a couple of months ago, when a wicked cold caused her to cough so hard she upchucked on our freshly-shampooed carpet. Other than that, our house has been pretty much a puke-free zone.

Yesterday, we went out to dinner with another couple, some friends of ours who love Piper but have no kids of their own. We were at some Southwest-themed bar & grill, eating burgers with jalapenos and hot sauce slathered on top. Piper seemed to be happily munching on her fries, kid-size burger (minus the jalapenos and hot sauce, of course), and chocolate milk. Her appetite had been a little off for a couple of days, but she'd already sucked down most of her chocolate milk and was plowing through her fries, so I figured it was nothing. She said she had to go potty, so I took her to the bathroom. We came back, and her eating slowed down. She asked to sit on my lap, so I took her out of the booster seat and settled her on my leg. She snuggled into me like she was cold, so I took off my gauze scarf and draped it around her. I held onto her and continued eating one-handed.

She turned to the table and seemed to be looking for something. I gave her my phone, which she'd been using earlier to play a spelling game. I asked her if she wanted another drink of her milk and she whispered, "Yeah." So she took a sip, put the cup on the table, gave a funny little cough, and hurled down the front of my shirt.

We are talking gallons of chocolate-milk and french-fry puke here, people. Right in the boobs. She heaved again, with a loud belch, and unleashed another torrent of vomit onto me. She immediately started to cry and ask to go home and change her clothes. I grabbed my one paper napkin and dabbed pathetically at the mess. Dimly I heard my husband going "Phone! Phone! Phone!" and I realized that I was still clutching my iPhone, which had taken a direct hit and was dripping with puke. I handed it off, grabbed some more napkins, and gave an emphatic yes to whoever asked if we needed some real towels. One of our friends was looking a bit green and scooting out of the booth really fast; she's a nanny for two four-year-olds, so she has seen her share of messes, but she'd just taken a bite of chicken wing when the eruption occurred and very nearly gave the old heave-ho herself. Our other friend was asking the waitress for towels.

I stripped Piper out of her dress and left her wearing just the tank top and leggings beneath; it didn't help much, because it was all covered. She was crying and I was trying to reassure her. I worked quickly and calmly, trying to clean up her, the booth, and the table. I ignored the fact that my jeans were soaked through and there was vomit dripping down my shirt. The blonde-early-20's-college-student waitress, who had been remarkably absent for most of our meal, suddenly appeared and asked for the towels even though I was clearly not done with them.

"I'm sorry, could you just put that towel on this plate?" I guess I couldn't blame her, I wouldn't want to touch some kid's puke either.
"Yeah," I said, "just a sec." I worked even faster to wipe down the booth, the table, and everything else within reach. I gave up the dirty towel and reached for a second, which was soggy with the remnants of someone else's table-dirt.
"If you could just put the towel right there on that plate, that would be great," she said again, watching me as I scrubbed at the vinyl seat-back.
"Um, okay, yeah," I answered again, giving up the only wet towel I had. I reached for the dry one and had no sooner dabbed at my shirt than she asked for it. I relenquished it, which left me with only a pile of puke-soaked paper napkins. The waitress disappeared through some secret doorway, and was not seen again. Ten bucks says she doesn't let her birth-control prescription run out for a good, long while.

Luckily my friend appeared with a pile of wet paper towels from the women's restroom, which I used to clean up Piper. Ryan came back with my cleaned-off phone in one hand, and his undershirt in the other. He offered it to me, but instead I stripped Piper out of her wet tank top and pants, and put it on her. It was enormous, but she stopped crying. Our wonderful, dear friend took her to look at the pinball machines while I continued to wipe down the booth and table. I was finally able to asses the damage to myself and quickly concluded that nothing short of a long, hot shower was going to fix this. I gingerly took off my t-shirt (getting that thing over my head without dumping chunks in my hair was quite the feat) and sweater, leaving me with barf-soaked jeans and a barfy tank top for the ride home.

I was sort of laughing as I worked, because really, what else could I do? It was like a scene from a sitcom or something. Less than five minutes earlier, our friend had complimented us on how cool we were. "You guys are parents, and good parents - your kid is awesome. Piper is an awesome kid who's fun to be with," he said. "But you also still seem like yourselves, just with a few extra responsibilities. And that's cool. You guys are very cool."

Three minutes later, my "awesome kid" covered me in a river of partially-digested french fries and corn-syrup-laden dairy products. Real cool.

I was apologizing like crazy to our friends, who seemed a little shell-shocked but mostly surprised at how well I handled it.

"You're just...just taking it all in stride," he said. "That's amazing."

I had wiped down the entire seat and gotten pretty much all of the mess up, and without towels there was nothing more I could do. I balled up the sodden clothes and wrapped them in my sweater, tied the whole thing shut with the sweater arms, dabbed at my pants once more, and scooted out of the booth. Piper was giggling in our friend's arms, proudly holding two rubber bouncy balls wrestled from the clutches of the $0.25 prize machines in the video-game room. As we walked to the car, I realized that not only were my jeans soaked, so were my underwear. And I stank. Ye Gods, I stank.

When we reached our vehicle, my husband asked, "Uhh, do we even have plastic bags in the car?"

"Yup, we certainly do," I said. "Because your wife is awesome." I opened the door, retrieved the pile of plastic grocery bags I'd stashed in the car, and tossed the ball of puke-clothing into one, then tied it shut. I spread more bags on my seat and put one on my lap so the seat belt wouldn't get vomit on it. We rode home with the windows open, until Piper started howling "I'm COLLLLDDDD! I'm cold cold cold!" from the back. Then we had to shut the windows and I was left to ride in a cloud of my own stink, holding the seatbelt away from my vomit-covered chest.

As soon as we got through the door I hit the shower with Piper in tow. I stripped off my sodden tank top to find that not only had the vomit soaked through my bra, there were chunks of my daughter's dinner in my cleavage.

Yeah, I thought as I herded my daughter into the shower and started scrubbing her off, real cool.

All You Need Is Love

Happy Valentine's Day, everyone.

P.S. The hearts she is holding are these Martha Stewart crayon hearts. We made them together, and it was kinda fun, but for future reference, it is not a good project to do with a 2.5-year-old. She didn't have the dexterity to twist the crayons in the pencil sharpener, and I must've said "HOT IRON DON'T TOUCH NO NO HOT HOT DON'T TOUCH BE PATIENT NOT YET BACK UP NO NO NOOOOO!" about fifty times.

But she loved them when they were done ("It's a heart! We make a heart shape!"), enough that I put them up in the windows and she asked to have them back about an hour later. She carried them around for days, and also for future reference: melted crayon shavings are not meant to be loved on. Unless the edges of the hearts are sealed with tape, you will have wisps of crayon-crumble all over your house, in your car, in your bed, and melded to the interior of your vacuum canister.

P.P.S. "All You Need Is Love" is pretty much Piper's favorite song in the world right now. We watch Yellow Submarine every day (yeah, I do actually mean EVERY SINGLE DAY, I have the entire movie memorized now) and that's her favorite part. This song came on when were in the car, and she was clutching those hearts, and she started giggling, and...well, my heart just about burst.

Don't Take My Sunshine Away

Right now, Piper listens to what we listen to; we almost never get the "for kids" kind of stuff (no, not even the Radiohead lullabies). The grandparents have sent some of those albums like The Children's Choir of Nowhere, Montana Sings Beloved Children's Classics or Favorite Childhood Songs, Personalized! but our brief experiments with these items always end with Piper covering her ears and howling "noooo!" So, because we are too lazy to do much other than Google the occasional band making an appearance on Yo! Gabba Gabba this week, mostly she listens to our music. She discerns among artists and has favorites and dislikes. She can sing entire songs from memory (Death Cab for Cutie's "The Sound of Settling" is a particular favorite for this).

As we drove to the library today, listening to Sparklehorse in the car, I suddenly realized that it won't always be this way. Of course I knew this, but this was the first time I really, really thought about it.

One day, she will flip through my cd collection and roll her eyes in disgust at my PJ Harvey and Portishead Japanese import singles. She will stop shouting "Oh, this is my favorite Beatles song!" every time she hears "All You Need is Love" and she will stop singing along with Ryan Adams and Wilco in the car. She will eye my taste for flannel-clad '90's bands and shake her head, the way I do at my mother's continued adoration of country-pop cheeseballs.

Sometimes she runs to me and hugs so tightly, our chests press together, and I can feel her heart beating, secure in its cradle of ribs and flesh. My heart answers hers and for a second or two they seem to match beats. The call of one heart to another, the feel of her tiny arms wrapped around my neck, the smell of her shampoo, and it's so easy to forget that she will not always be my tiny treasure. She will not always fit in my lap and my life in the ways she does now. One day she will big big, away, gone, tending her own life, her own record collection.

But for now, I have this: the spin of a disc in the player, the sound of her voice from the back seat, and "Could you play that song again please Mom?"

Anytime, kiddo. Any time at all.

Another Belated Holiday Post: Gift Tags

I meant to post this on December 15: What to do if, say, you have gifts to wrap, and your 2.5-year-old wants to help, which, of course, is not much help at all?


Bust out the stamper set you were saving for her stocking, cut up some index cards, and let her make some gift tags. This will keep her busy and also stop you from frantically searching for the pack of gift tags you are absolutely sure is somewhere in your house but does not turn up even after you trashed three rooms looking for it.


She will have a good time. You will get gift tags with blobby, inky monster stamps on them, which delight your gift recipients (particularly those of the grandparent variety). You will get your presents wrapped without her "help."


Even your household pets can get involved.

Isolationist Tendencies

I hadn't realized, until we were traveling in Michigan, out of our little bubble of home/park/mall play area/Ikea how much we've shielded Piper from most popular culture. It wasn't (entirely) deliberate; we only have network TV (and used to have HBO, but my $@$(@*%^*^ feelings about Time-Warner are irrelevant to the topic). We rarely actively expose her to the things that are considered "kid stuff" in American culture - no jangly just-for-kids music, no 23-minute commercials for toys cartoons on broadcast-TV. I, for the most part, can't stand that stuff, and she doesn't seem to miss it. I actively dislike almost everything Disney has put out in the last 15 years and I really disagree with the values their animated features present, so we avoid those too. I'm too dweeby to keep up with whatever the hipsters' kids are listening to this week, so we just skip it all.

She knows a few of them, of course; short of cutting ourselves off from the outside world altogether it's hard to keep them out. She knows who Strawberry Shortcake is, thanks to a box of my old toys. She loves the dancing monsters of Yo Gabba Gabba, the British dog Kipper, and her best friend is an 18-inch fully-jointed Spider-man action figure from a thrift store. All of this is stuff she figured out on her own, from watching or listening. We try to keep the rest of it away from her attention, because we feel that there's no reason for her to know the name of every single cartoon character out there (and because she can't ask for what she doesn't know about).

When we are out somewhere and she sees one of the many, many licensed-cartoon characters on some piece of plastic crap from China, sometimes she'll take particular notice, but it's only in a general way. She doesn't know the word "princess" (she calls them "costumes"), let alone the name of each and every specific Disney one. My MIL tried for a long time -and still occasionally does- to refer to Piper as "our little princess, what a princess, she's such a pretty pretty princess" and I nipped that shit in the bud. Every time my MIL said it, I got queasy with visions of frilly pinkness and incessant demands for toys.

Piper has her own names for the things she sees, and we are happy to let her keep using her imagination on them. She calls Elmo "that red monster," Barney is "big purple dinosaur" and she thinks Dora is Strawberry Shortcake (except she says "Straaabery Portcake and it's so cute I want to punch myself).

Which is why I felt uncomfortable A LOT when we were hanging out with people who would correct her words for things, would say "No, that's Dora" or "that's not just a monster, that's Elmo" in a store. If she asked "who's that?" or "what's that?" about something instead of asking her back "Who do you think it is?" or "I don't know, what IS that?" like we do, they'd say, "Oh, that's Dora and here's Diego and here's 17 other characters from some cartoon..." or "That's a princess costume, princesses wear pink sparkly dresses and tiaras and look really pretty..." I cringed a little and wondered if she'd soon be asking for every toy Nickelodeon currently licenses. My dad let her watch an hour of Wonder Pets and the very next time we walked into a store, she started pointing at the toys and asking for the toys by name.

More than that, it saddended me. When she pointed at Sponge Bob and said "Hey, look at that weird yellow monster guy!" and she got "No, that's Sponge Bob Square pants, and he lives in a pineapple, and here let me sing his theme song for you..." back from the adult she was talking to, I almost cried. I wanted to hear her thoughts on "the weird yellow monster guy." I wanted to hear what she had to say. And now it was gone, lost because someone felt the need to correct her imagination.

I know I can't keep this up forever. I am certain, when she gets to pre-school or kindergarten or playgroup or whatever, that some other little girl will give her a strict crash-course in The Ways Of All Things Princess, but for now I am pleased that she prefers the toys others have made for her and wooden blocks to tv-based toys with flashing lights and noises. She likes monsters and coloring and loves the giant bin of our old Duplo Lego pieces my mom brought down from Michigan. She likes dolls, but I don't call her "little Mommy" or assume that it's something coded into her cells because she's female. She likes to carry dolls and stuffed animals around, take all their clothes off, and give them drinks from her cups. She gives her babies a bath by holding them down in a bucket of water. I'm not ready to assume she's a nurturing soul just yet.

I am also certain that whatever little child gives her The Princess Lecture will also educate Piper about activities are "for girls" and "for boys." No matter how much we fight it at home, I'm sure what other kids think she should be doing will seem more important to her. So just as my heart fills with joy to see her playing equally with trucks, dinosaurs, dolls, and blocks, I've started to feel a sort of pre-sadness for the day when this innocence slips away. I know that one day soon I will bring out her dinosaurs and trains, and she will look at me and say scornfully, "Mom, those are for boys. I can't play with those. Now, where's my princess dress?"

Just Another Day at Tragically Ordinary

Yesterday it was nice enough to go outside in shirtsleeves, so I battled the fierce wind, a curious toddler, and an unruly tarp to get the leaves raked up and and carted away from the front of the house. I was sweeping the front walk when I realized that Piper was awfully quiet. I dashed around the front of the house and found her standing in front of a bush we've never quite identified but which has recently sprouted clusters of tiny red berries. Piper looked at me and it was that look that every mother knows, no matter what form it takes: the I Have Done Something look.

"Did you eat one of these berries? Did you eat these?!" I asked, gripping her arms. She didn't appear to be chewing, but she was holding her mouth oddly, like she might have just swallowed really fast.
"I did," she said quietly.
"Oh, God. Did you really eat one?! Let me see inside your mouth!" she refused, and what followed was me trying to pry her jaw open and her shrieking and squirming away from me. I asked her twice more if she ate one, and every time she responded with the quiet and remorse-filled "I did" that usually means she did, in fact, commit the deed in question and knows she's in trouble.

I raced inside and booted up the computer.

While I was Googling "poisonous plants of North Carolina" and "NC Poison Control" to figure out what kind of berries Piper may or may not have eaten while we were outside (can you really trust the word of a 2.5-year-old?), Piper peed in her pants, took off all her clothes, ran around naked, then peed on the carpet.

While I was on the phone with Poison Control, she opened the fridge and climbed up the shelves, got some stuff out, and left the fridge door open.

30 minutes after THAT, she ate half the (cooked) bacon I was going to use for dinner sandwiches, and ran around touching everything with bacon-greasy hands.

And my husband wonders why I'm so irritable.

That's My Girl

Piper dragged a huge bucket across the living room.

"I'm going to drink my pumpkin latte," she announced as she picked it up and carted into her room. "I be right back."

She wandered out a minute later, pretending to drink out of the bucket and smacking her lips. "Aaaah," she said. "That's good latte."

You betcha, kiddo.

You're Like Fleas

A lot of my childless friends say to me "Oh, Piper so cute and fun! It makes me want one!" To those of you who think this sounds like fun: Here is a warning. Sometimes she is fun, but other times, like tonight, I want to run away with the circus. Tonight I was committing the cardinal sin of attempting to scan through my Google Reader, and she really wanted my attention. She’d already spent the previous couple of hours stomping all over the presents I was wrapping in the living room, unloading the box of Christmas ornaments and throwing them around, demanding food (bananas, peas, yogurt, cookies, crackers, and noodles, by turns) which I’d get for her, then she’d take one look at and scream “NOOOOOO!” before asking for something else. Even though Ryan took her out for an hour or two earlier, I was about at my limit for shenanigans.

However, 18-month-olds are not always the best judges of when Mommy has had enough, so instead of sitting with me and looking at LOLCats or playing in her room, she was climbing all over me, shrieking, pinching me, and hitting me in the face with a copy of Goodnight Moon, demanding that I read it to her RIGHT THIS SECOND. After the third time I deposited her on the floor and she started to climb back onto my lap, I was so exasperated I yelled “PIPER! Stop! For the love of God, you’re…YOU’RE LIKE FLEAS!”

I don’t even know what that means, but at least she got down. She’s unloading the DVD cabinet right now, taking all the discs out of their individual cases and either leaving them on the floor or attempting to put them back in other boxes. *sigh*

Unexpected Consequences

You get a lot of advice before you get your first kid.

Some of it is well-intentioned but stupid: “Sleep now while you still can.” As though you can hoard and bank sleep for months beforehand, as though restful, quality sleep is akin to pennies in a piggybank.

Some of it is just stupid: “Crib bumpers! You have to have crib bumpers! The baby will hit its head and get brain damage if you don’t have them!” Yeah, because so many generations of babies who did not have crib bumpers were desperately brain-damaged. Never mind the strangling and suffocation deaths every year from these things, it’s the ridiculous threat of brain-damage that should be driving our bedding purchases.

Some – very few – of the thousands of “helpful” comments people make when you say you’re about to become first-time parents are true. Of course, you don’t realize this until much later, after you are up to your neck in poop, plastic toys, and temper tantrums. One of “the things people say” has turned out to be true for us, in a way that we had not quite anticipated.

That gem of wisdom? “Becoming a parent changes everything.” That’s an approximation, of course, an amalgamation of all the variations on that thought that were so earnestly dished out by well-meaning folk (most of them parents themselves). It is, however you say it, true.

Before you have an actual child in your house, waking you up at night and demanding more of your energy and time than you ever thought possible, you are apt to laugh at these people. “Oh, come on,” you think. “It won’t change everything. Some things, sure. I’ll get less sleep. I’ll have less money. My clothes will be a bit more stained, and I’ll be intimately familiar with another person’s bodily inputs and outputs. I won’t spend my Saturday nights sucking down Cuba Libres and smoking American Spirits on the back patio of the hippie bar.”

You tell yourself that you will be exactly the same person you are now, just with a child in tow. Preferably a clean-faced little cherub who behaves well and whom you can afford to dress in tiny, cute, stylish clothing. It will be hard, of course, but you will always be certain that the work is worth it, buoyed by the strength of your love. You and your partner will watch this little person grow and help it become a wonderful human being, a majestic model of kindness, brimful of forward-thinking views, and probably the finder of the cure for cancer.

Of course, when the sleep deprivation or the crayon-drawings all over your walls or the anguish over “New Math” or the teenage door-slamming comes, as it inevitably must, it’s easy to poke fun at the person you were pre-kid, to say “Psh. Poor, clueless bastard. You thought you had it all figured out, didn’t you? Yeah, cure cancer, bring world peace, haw-haw.”

But there are also moments of total wonderment at the person you have become. You marvel at your distance from that chick who would walk down any alley in the dark and routinely got into cars with strangers, or how different you are from the college boy who spent his free Saturdays at “band practice” in someone’s smoke-filled basement. Sometimes it just smacks you in the face, this feeling of that is not who I am anymore.

This whole diatribe is rooted in an afternoon-tv showing of Trainspotting. I was idly flipping channels one day when Piper was six or eight months old, and Trainspotting was on. I can remember going to see that movie for the first time, I can remember how we obsessively watched it in college and memorized the dialogue. I have watched that movie at least twenty times in my life, and loved it every time.

Every time except this one. It got to the part where the baby is sitting on that disgusting floor, surrounded by passed-out junkies. She is filthy, it looks like she hasn’t had her diaper changed in days, she’s crying and crying and crying. Just sitting in the middle of the dirty floor, with nobody paying attention to her.

I felt like somebody had punched me in the gut. I felt sick; I almost sobbed out loud. I had to change the channel, I could not watch any further. I was perplexed. I turned the channel back, and again there was that horrible, sick feeling. I could not look at the screen, at that crying baby, for more than three seconds. I had to turn it off again. I thought about what happens to that baby later in the movie, and I swear to God I almost threw up, right there in the living room. I felt a physical urge to reach into the screen and pick up that poor, doomed junkie baby. Instead, I picked Piper up from where she was scooting around the floor drooling on stuffed animals and I hugged her so hard she squealed in protest. I put her back down, feeling at once shaky and edgy and agitated, like I’d ingested large amounts of caffeine on an empty stomach.

I also felt confused. I loved this movie, right? What the hell was wrong with me? I had always mocked people who talked about experiences like this, who sobbed for the children left motherless and the mothers left childless by some far-flung natural disaster or talked how about their mommyhood had ignited an urge to mother all children. I snickered, I rolled my eyes, I snerked at these mommy-zombies. Puh-leeeze, I thought. Spare me. Now it appeared that the sappy, overly-sentimental mommy-shoe was on the other foot. My foot.

I told my story to Ryan, and instead of laughing at me or calling me a mom-bot, he said “Oh my God, you are right. I just remembered what happens to the baby. I don’t think I can watch that movie ever again.” And then we both looked at each other: What the hell was going on here?

It happened again when I was discussing my bicycle. I have a very nice bicycle, which is my favorite color (blue), very cool and retro-looking, and still in Michigan. We don’t have a shed or garage to keep our bikes in, so they’re languishing in my parents’ rusty garden shed until we figure something out. I am so desperate for a mode of transportation that I have asked my parents to bring my bike when they visit later this month (preferably instead of, not in addition to, another carload of useless crap). I plan to put a baby-seat on it and ride as far as I can on our not-at-all-bicycle-friendly roads.

I was thinking about this, about how nice it will be not to be trapped in the house all the time (we have one car, which goes with Ryan every day on his 25-minutes-each-way commute) and how I’d have to get Piper a little bike helmet. And then I realized that I’d have to get one, too.

I used to look down my nose at people who wore bike helmets for casual riding; if you were a crazy mountain-biking mofo like my cousin, who frequently comes back from rides with body parts bloodied, broken, and otherwise damaged – well, I could see where a helmet would be an advantage. If you were a long-distance biker, sharing the road with a lot of cars on a regular basis – yeah, okay, I get it. But the slow cruises around the neighborhood, or the trips to the nearby grocery store? Only obsessive freaks wore helmets for that stuff. You know, losers.

Might as well paint a big fat L on my forehead, then, because caution is about to become my middle name. I laughed out loud at myself, and explained the situation to Ryan this way:

“I would never take Piper on the bike without her wearing a helmet, not even around the block. But what about me? What if we’re riding to the new elementary school up the street to use their playground and one of the many local asshole drivers runs us off the road? There’s not even so much as a shoulder for us to ride on, let alone a bike lane. It wouldn’t take much to send us into a ditch. She might be just fine in her tiny little helmet, but what the hell good does that do if I’m laying there with my head split like an overripe melon? What would happen to her?”

His eyes got big. His mouth made a little round O. “I hadn’t thought of that. Oh my God, you’re right. Holy shit.”

“Yeah.”

Holy shit, indeed.

32 Weeks

Counting off these early weeks of her life, I can't help but notice that soon we will be at the point where Piper has been out as long as she was in. I think that will be a big milestone for me. I'm not exactly dreading it, but I think it will make me a little wistful. I suppose every parent feels like this at some point or another; I wish we could slow down, or stop for a while, let me catch up and remember each thing better. I wish I could go back and take more pictures/video of her newborn days. One of things I remember most clearly about her when she was first born were her tiny, spidery, old-lady hands, and I do not have a single picture of those precious (albeit slightly creepy) digits. She used to make a certain squawk when she was hungry, and I do not have a recording of it. I wish I'd handled her colicky, screamy nights better (although that one is not entirely on me, as I got much not-quite-wanted "help" due to our living situation). I wish I'd been less stressed-out during her infancy.

That infancy, while technically not over, seems to be drawing fast to a close. She has always been resistant to a lot of the things a "baby" is supposed to do: being held cradle-style, lying like an inert lump, eating baby food. She has always wanted to be up, to be out, to make her own way in the world. She wants to be a big girl, I can see it. It's in the way she takes the spoonful of her favorite meal (chicken & homemade-from-scratch noodles) from my hand - no Mama I can do it myself. I want to do it. It's in the way she wants me to hold her hands and walk her around all day long - I have to get there faster! Right now! It's in the way she refuses almost all of the pureed gak that babies are supposed to dig and reaches instead for what I have - What is this crap you're feeding me?! Yours looks yummy. I want that! So quick to grow up, this little girl.

I have given up on most "baby" food - once in a while I can coax her through some rice cereal (only if it has applesauce and tons of cinnamon) or squash, but for the most part she steadfastly refuses the stuff that comes in jars and is so smooth and bland it hardly tastes like anything. She prefers foods she can do herself, finger foods like these things. I was foursquare against any sort of processed or packaged foods, but my mom brought these home for her one day and they were such a hit I haven't had the heart to outlaw them. She's so happy to be able to pick them up and eat them herself, and they're so airy they melt in her mouth and I don't have to worry (as much) about her choking like she did the time I gave her bits of my pita bread or chomping off a bite too big to chew, the way she did with a graham cracker. Not only that, but her preoccupation with feeding herself means when I need some hands-free time (like, um, right now), I can plunk her in the high chair with 10 or 12 little star-shaped puffs on the tray and she goes to town, happily (and, thank the gods, quietly) chowing down.

It's hard for her to feed herself other foods that she can/will eat - things like sweet potatoes, blueberry muffins, and the all-time favorite chicken & noodles mentioned above. I can mush them up a bit and use the spoon, but a lot of the time it ends up everywhere but in her mouth. She has four teeth, but they're all in the front (like a beaver, heh), and she can chew (erm, gum) things pretty well, but chunks of food big and solid enough for her to pick up are usually too big for her to chew without choking. I've been wanting to try Cheerios as a finger food, but I've been afraid they were solid enough for her to choke on. When we were out with some other moms and babies the other day, she tried some and seemed to like them, so we'll give it a go.

Her favorite activity is to have someone hold her hands and "walk" her around. She does most of the work - hold up her own weight, moves her own legs, picks the direction - she just doesn't have the balance down yet. I think she's gotten taller or stands more upright recently, because as of a week ago I don't have to stoop quite so far. She loves to chase the cats while she's walking, and when ever she sees one she will book in that direction. She doesn't do anything to the cat once she catches up to it, she just sort of stands there like "well, run some more, wouldja?" As soon as another cat walks by, we're off again. It should make for some fun times once she can walk on her own. I plan to let her chase the cats as much as she likes, all day long if she wants to. Hopefully they'll wear each other out and make my life a little calmer by day's end. Dream on, I know.

She can crawl, mostly. It's not the classic hands-and-knees crawling, it's more of an Army-crawl/scootch/inchworm, using her arms to pull and her toes to push herself along. It's amusing to watch and very, very fast. I cannot leave her unattended at all anymore. She can rocket to the edge of the bed, the top of the basement stairs, or the business end of the vacuum cleaner faster than I'd ever have imagined. I have had more mini heart attacks in the past two weeks than in my entire life up to this point. And she just keeps getting faster.

She eats paper. Really eats, like takes big bite out of it and chews them up. I am constantly digging soggy chunks of paper, cardboard, magazine pages, and wrapping paper out of her mouth. Anything even vaguely paper-like that comes near her, she will eat. She even bit chunks out of the plasticky-foil wrapping paper my sister wrapped her Xmas present (a baby signs book & flashcards) in. Earlier this week, I found her yanking books out of the book-case and chewing on them. She sucks on strings and unrolls balls of yarn. She picks at the carpet and puts any debris she finds in her mouth. Actually, she puts everything in her mouth.

All of these things have caused us to mark a very different kind of milestone here at Tragically Ordinary. Several weeks ago, I was puttering in the kitchen when I noticed a suspicious amount of quiet in the living room. I bolted around the corner to discover Piper, with soggy pieces of bank statement hanging from her mouth as she picked at a staple embedded in the carpet next to the basket of yarn she had dumped over and tossed about. I realized that it had happened, much sooner than I thought it would: I now have to worry when it gets quiet. I thought I'd have at least twelve months before this would happen. But no, here we are.

Happy Friggin' New Year

Max left the night of the 30th for North Carolina, so I rang in the new year on the phone with him. Piper, who was of course NOT SLEEPING, celebrated by pooping at midnight exactly. I'm totally serious. It was a mess that required 10 baby wipes, 2 changing-pad covers, a new pair of pajamas, and 15 minutes to clean up.

We are all sick here. My nose has been running for days, a near-constant trickle and drip. I've resorted to wiping it on my sleeve several times so I don't drip snot on the baby's head. Piper also has The Plague (as we've all taken to calling it), and the accompanying stuffy/runny nose. She uses me to wipe her nose, leaving glistening trails of baby snot on the shoulders of all my shirts.

I sincerely hope y'all are have a better new year than I am right now.

If I Were Smarter...

...I'd be in bed right now. Instead, I am up writing and blogging and reading and poking around on the Internet. I cannot do this during the day because Piper has decided that I must not be more than four feet from her at any point during the day, that naps are for suckers, and that the key to true happiness is to have someone hold your hands and 'walk' you around the house. She can support her own weight and has the walking motions down pat, but she can't get to a standing position or balance herself, so someone has to hold her up as she walks. I have to admit, it's pretty fun to have her chubby little hands clutch my fingers as she jaunts from room to room, toddling after the cats with delighted squeals and making a complete circuit of the first floor over and over. What's not fun is walking around hunched over for thirty minutes at a stretch, creeping around the house at a snail's pace, "walking" the baby through the maze of holiday-decoration-filled boxes my mom has dragged out in the past three days, trying to make sure she doesn't eat anything glass and every lap around glancing at the basement door and thinking about the 10 loads of laundry piled up down there.

It's hard to keep up with her from day to day, she changes so much. She's always doing something new, and it's difficult to remember it all, let alone write about it. I like to write about her, to try and record everything that's going on with her and put down the tiny moments that make up our life together. A few weeks ago, I read back through some old stuff I wrote when I was pregnant, and it seemed so very far away. Me? Pregnant? I was pregnant? It seems like a lifetime ago.

The truth is I love my baby, and I love being with her every day. I never thought I'd be one of those people. I keep talking about going back to work soon, and eventually I will have to, but right now the thought breaks my heart. It breaks my heart to think about not being with her all day. Even days like the past three, where most of the sounds issuing from her cute little mouth are whines and cries and howls and I drive myself crazy trying to either figure out what's wrong or distract her so that she will be quiet for five minutes before my head explodes. No toy is fun, no activity is amusing, even the once-beloved swing and Exersaucer inspire screaming and full-body thrashing whenever I take her near them. She cries if I put her down, she gags on her rice cereal and peas and sweet potatoes and looks at me as though I am trying to poison her. She fights sleep, throwing herself around in my arms as I try to persuade her to nap or at least go to bed sometime before midnight. My arms and shoulders ache from holding her all day, from picking her up and putting her down so many times. Yesterday I made chicken enchiladas one-handed.

Even on these days, when I am exasperated and tired and realize I haven't had a shower in three days and I just want to work on knitting Christmas presents and maybe finish a damned cup of coffee...even on these days I love her and I would rather be here than answering someone's phone or discussing user-friendly implementation strategies for the latest system upgrade.

I haven't been away from her for more than four hours since she was born. That was only because my mom dragged me out shopping one day when Piper was seven weeks old, and what was supposed to be a one-hour trip out for some birthday cards and Campbell's soup turned into a four-hour odyssey through first the dollar store and then Wal-Mart, with me dragging behind my mother as she perused every single greeting card they had and Max calling every half-hour to tell me that although he'd tried everything three times, the baby was still screaming and if I didn't come home soon he was going to float her down the river in a basket made of bulrushes. After the third call in forty minutes where I could hear Piper screaming in the background, I finally told her that we had to go right now, just buy your brother the card with the shitting monkey and get it over with before the neighbors call Child Services on my husband for stabbing our baby with red-hot pokers.

When we got home, I was out of the car before it had even stopped rolling, and I bolted into the house to find my stressed-out husband holding a red-faced baby who was shrieking so loud the neighbor across the street commented on it the next day. I took her and soothed her and nursed her (ahh, the power of boob) and promised my husband that we would take her with us next time, rather than disappearing into the great wide open and leaving him with a pissed-off infant.

I have been out a few times since then, Max and I have gone out to the movies or dinner once in a while, or I run errands alone. I don't leave her for long periods of time, partly because I don't want a reapeat of that day, and partly because I don't want to be away from her. There are, of course, times when my husband comes downstairs and I say "pleasewatchthebabyI'mtakingashowerrightnowokaybye" because I cannot put up with one more minute of listening to the ceaseless moan-whine and I don't want to dig chunks of soggy, chewed paper out of her mouth for a fourth time in two hours. It usually only takes thirty minutes of hot water and fruity shampoo and fluffy towels before I'm ready to go back downstairs and discover where the cache of oh-so-tasty paper is hidden or make another attempt at convincing her that smushed-up peas are really edible and not something to rub in your hair or grind into your clothes.

I like my little girl, and luckily she likes me right now. I treasure every slobbery kiss, every hug that invovles pulling my hair or poking me in the eye. I know that before too long there will be school and sleepovers and boys and iPods full of music I will call "noise." I'm enjoying this closeness with her for as long as she'll let me.

Lactation Education

At church a few weeks ago, Piper was hungry and crabby after the service, so while Max got coffee and chatted with some friends, I took her into the "infant room" of the child-care wing to nurse her. Usually I'd just take her out to the car, but I was feeling both brave and too tired to drag her all the way out to the parking lot, not to mention she was yowling like a wounded Yeti while climbing all over me and pinching my arms. We were rapidly approaching meltdown. The baby room was close, likely deserted, and quick.

The lights were off, the room was empty of people. I sat down in the sole rocking chair and wrestled the baby into position. A little boy of probably three or four came in and started playing with some of the toys. I stayed were I was, since it didn't bother me to have him in there and he didn't seem like he even noticed I was nursing. He got out a game that resembled Connect Four, except it was dog-shaped. I saw that it was actually more like Tic-Tac-Toe, and you had to use the dog's tail to flip the red or blue chips into the slot you wanted. He played by himself for a minute, and then he decided he wanted company.

"Hey, can your baby come play with me?" he asked.
"Um, not right now," I answered.
"Yes she can," he said. "She can come down here and play this game with me."
"Well, maybe in a minute," I said. "She's eating right now."
I suddenly had his full attention. "She's eating?"
"Yup."
He looked puzzled. He came closer and leaned over me, peering directly at the spot where Piper was guzzling milk. "Is that baby biting your boobie?" he asked in a voice of concern.
I stifled a laugh. "No," I said, "she's not biting me. There's milk in there."
He looked completely astounded. "There's milk? In there?"
"Yes, it's milk, but it's not like regular milk. It's special milk for babies."
"Oh." He paused and looked back at his game. "Well, when she's done can she come down here and play?"
"Okay." And true to my word, when she was done I put her on the floor and she watched him flip the little red and blue discs around until I stood up and said we had to go.

I bet that kid's parents got quite the earful on the car ride home.

Little Stinker

My child is sleeping in her swing (oh blessed instrument of peace) and snoring. Little baby snores.

Earlier, she managed to smell up the entire living room with a diaper so stinky it had to go immediately into the garbage cans outside, it could not be left in the pail until the nightly trash run. And that was nothing compared to Sunday's fun, when she pooped so much it blew out her diaper, soaked through the 3 layers of clothing she was wearing (including her socks), soaked the seat of her Exersaucer (which is how I disovered the cloth part comes off and is machine-washable), puddled beneath her feet, and soaked through both of my shirts when I picked her up.

Don't even get me started on her farts. She's always been gassy, but not particularly stinky. For some reason, in the past month she's started to smell like a locker room full of frat boys eating cabbage-and-bean burritos.

I will never lose her in a crowd, because I can smell her from 15 feet away.

24 Weeks

It's unbelievable to me how fast we are zooming up to the 6-month-mark. Every day Piper gets less and less like a baby and more like a miniature toddler. She is still changing every day, and every day she gets more fun and interactive. Of course, this also makes her harder to entertain because she needs more stimuli - simply plopping her in front of the picture window and letting her watch leaves blow around isn't cutting it anymore.

To that end, I broke down and let an Exersaucer enter the house. I tried hard to avoid it, but just couldn't hold out. She likes to stand up, but can't do it on her own, so someone has to hold her up. I love my kid, but I can't sit there and hold her up all day, I have other things to do (like eat, shower, and oh, I don't know, the 14 loads of laundry piled up in the basement). Hence the Exersaucer. It's not like she stays in it all day - I can get 5-20 minutes of stuff done once I put her in there, and then it's on to the next activity.

When we do hold her in a standing postion, however, she has the mechanics of walking down pat. She will happily march between the two of us or do little crazylegs-marching-dances in place. When she's playing alone on the floor she can spin herself in circles and creep towards objects. She's getting pretty fast at it, and I have to constantly patrol the living-room floor to make sure things like knitting needles, stray leaves, and people's shoes (she likes to suck on the shoelaces) are picked up. She pushes herself up on her hands now, and I feel that the legs aren't very far behind. Everyone's still betting she will be crawling by the end of the year.

She's gotten very vocal this week - enter screaming. She's been shrieking for a while, but has now developed that high-pitched ultra-loud little-kid scream of delight. Occsionally it is a scream of less-than-delight, but mostly she screams for the fun of it. Which is hilarious, except when it's 1:30 in the morning and she just wants to climb all over me and scream in my ears. And that kid is LOUD. If we're in the living room, she can be heard all the way at the other end of the house upstairs. I'm pretty sure they can hear her outside, even with the windows shut against the cold. Actually, I'm pretty sure they can hear her in Toledo.

Between the Exersaucer, the (3) baby gyms, all the bright-colored toys and books scattered everywhere and the constant screaming, the living room is starting to resemble a Chuck E. Cheese's.

When she's not screaming, she's babbling. This week it's "d" sounds, a constant stream of "a-da da da da...a-daadadaDADADA!!" Max loves it because it is that much closer to an actual "Dada" even though he knows she's not using it in context yet. She still makes the "mamamamma" noise when she's hungry or she wants me, so we are still counting it as contextual. She will sob "mamamama!" while holding her chubby little arms out to me, and of course it melts me into little puddles. The worst heartstring-tug came a few days ago, when I was trying to let her cry herself to sleep. I plopped her in the crib with a blankie and some toys, but she wasn't having any of it. She started to cry, and I had to practically sit on my hands not to pick her up. I tried patting her back and shushing, but she looked right at me and sobbed (with real tears dripping down her face) "nununononooo mama!" Just about broke my fucking heart.

12 Weeks

Twelve weeks old. Three months. This little person has been out and about for twelve whole weeks now. I looked at some pictures from her first three weeks, and could not believe how tiny she was compared to the robust little being who now fills my days and nights. In the past two weeks, she’s had a language explosion. There were a few noises here and there, a little cooing or babbling, and she loved it when we had “conversations” where I would mimic her, but her game is at a whole new level. She’s making noises now that resemble parts of actual words, vowels and consonants which we receive with delight. We’re pretty sure she says “hi” already, because as first-time parents we are convinced our baby is a genius. She says it to people when they walk in the room or come up to her, and she says it when she sees the smiley face on her favorite toy, so it appears she knows how to use it and therefore we count it as a real word and not mere noise. Even my skeptic of a dad, who politely laughs when I tell him my baby is a genius, is convinced.

In the past few weeks, her personality has emerged loud and clear. She has a “blankie” now, which is really just a cloth diaper, i.e. a square of white gauze material. Not the thick kind, but light and loosely-woven. She waves it around, she chews on it, she plays peek-a-boo with it. She has to have one wherever she goes, clutched in her chubby little fingers. She latched onto it over a month ago, during a phase when she was starting to grab things and loved to have fabric in her hands. Her quest to hold handfuls of fabric resulted in her grabbing the skirt of anything even vaguely dress-like we’d put her in, and hoisting it over her face. If only we could’ve taught her to say “free show!” while she lifted her dress, we’d be YouTube superstars right now. One day she grabbed the gauze diaper I was using to wipe spit-up off her face, and refused to let go. The free shows immediately ceased. While it would’ve melted the heart of a knitting relative if she’d latched onto one of the many hand-made blankets bestowed upon her by distant aunts and grandmas, I am happy enough with her choice. These diapers come in packs of 12, they are machine-washable and easily replaceable. I can only hope she chooses more comfort objects that make my life just a little more stress-free.

A development that has melted my heart in the past month is clinginess. Sometimes, she just wants her mama. No amount of “oh, Grandma’s baby needs ______” or “here, she wants to bounce” or “she wants _________” from the self-appointed baby experts will suffice. It has to be me. She can’t really reach for me yet, she’s not that coordinated, but when I hold her after one of these episodes she clings to my shirt like a baby koala. It doesn’t happen very often, because I am blessed with an easygoing baby, but when it does a tiny, selfish part of me smiles. You see, for the longest time I was convinced that Piper didn’t actually care who I was. I was also mostly-convinced that she actually preferred my mom to me. My husband repeatedly told me I was nuts, but I just felt like “oh, THANKS. I went through all that crap, crawling around on the floor of our apartment for two weeks because I couldn’t walk and then having a c-section and then getting raw, bloody nipples from breastfeeding and you don’t even like me best?! What the fuck?!” I know parenting isn’t all about getting what I want or rewards or whatever, but it’s nice to finally see a return on my investment. I’m banking these moments against the inevitable teenage “eww, stay away from me!” phase.

So now when she quiets down immediately after being passed to me, I hug her and smell her head (shut up, I know y’all are baby-head-sniffers too) and at last feel like her mother.

On Motherhood

A question I get asked a lot lately is "How do you like motherhood?" There are variants, like "So, how's motherhood treating you?" or "How are you doing with this whole mom thing?" or "How do you like being a mom/having a baby/having a kid so far?" I never know how to answer these questions. "Um, I don't know, how do you like breathing?" Because it is a lot like that. Things come automatically. She is here, she is my child, I care for her. These are facts, irrefutable and unyielding. I don't think about it any more than I think about breathing. She slipped into our lives like a key into a lock, all the parts falling into place as the tumblers turn. Besides that, there have been so many changes in our lives over the past two months that it's hard to ponder them individually.

Many times over the past ten weeks my husband has looked at me in wonderment and confessed that I am handling all this much better than he thought I would. These tiny confessions do not anger or upset me, because I know that these statements actually mean you amaze me and I love you fiercely. Children were never on my radar, and neither one of us knows exactly how he was able to talk me into this whole adventure in the first place. He thought I'd have more trouble coping, adjusting, getting into a groove - whatever you want to call it. But it all comes as naturally to me as breathing.

My brain has instinctually recorded and translated her cries, given me a crash-course in Piperspeak. I can tell from the other room when she is hungry, overtired, or scared. I almost always know what she wants or needs, and it is a way of knowing that goes to the very core of my being. This has led to a few crazy-making moments when someone else will be holding her and she starts to cry, and the other person will say "oh, she's wet" or "I think she wants to go outside" or "She just wants her Grandma" *coughmymomcoughcough* when I absolutely know that she's hungry. But I am nice, I do not snatch the baby out of the arms of the other person and say "You're doing it wrong" even though I really want to. I let the other person try their solution for a few minutes. I let them try and pretend that her red-eyed, real-tears-dripping, banshee-howl crying with Extra Vibrato For That Pissed-Off Feeling means she really did want to go outside or be hugged extra-tight or have an extra blanket put on or whatever it is the person thinks she needs that is totally the wrong thing. I let all the Amateur Baby Experts take their turn. And in the end, many of them hand her back to me and say "she needs to eat" or "she's hungry" in some super-authoritative voice, like I was the one holding things up in the first place. Which sometimes makes me want to cry, but I suck it up because I am a nice person and I know that everybody wants a little baby time and I'm trying not to be a bitch by refusing to share.

I love my baby, but I do not say things like "I didn't know what love was until she came into my life" or "I can't imagine my life without her" because they are not true. I was told to expect an overwhelming rush of love, something strangling and drowning-deep. I am still waiting for that. It's more a creeping kind of love, a growing sort of love that is as matter-of-fact as her existence in our lives. It is there, every day, just as she is.

Which is not to say it's all sunshine and roses. In the early weeks, I was so tired and in so much pain (psychological as well as physical) from getting her into the world that I sometimes wished I hadn't. It wasn't that I didn't love her or that I wanted her gone. I just wanted to feel normal again, not sore and exhausted and stressed, and I couldn't help thinking that my life would be much easier at that moment if I hadn't just had a baby. I knew what to do for her, how to take care of her, but that didn't mean I liked doing it all the time. I already felt pressure to be a perfect mom, and our move back to Michigan was looming, with all its attendant financial, familial, and emotional concerns. My C-section left me wounded in body and spirit and there was no time to rest and recover.

Some nights when I was up late watching Six Feet Under DVDs over and over because I was lonely and breast-feeding her every twenty minutes for six straight hours, I would question my ability to do this. If I was thinking things like Oh God, please don't be hungry again and shut up shut up shut up, please PLEASE PLEASE just stop crying and fall asleep already at two weeks, how would I handle toddler tantrums or teenage rebellion? And the thing about kids is: there is no break. Before this, I just had to get through finals week or tough it out until my benefits kicked in or finish that project or wait until we got back from our trip, and then I could rest. Then I would get a break. But with a child, there is no break. There is no done, there is no out, there is no over. It seems like the most obvious thing in the world, but when you are up late with a crying baby and wondering if you'll ever feel like yourself again, facing months until you can sleep through the night and years before you can take the plastic thingies out of every electrical socket in the house and many many years before your house will be cool, quiet, and nap-friendly in the middle of a weekend day...it can drive you mad. It can crush you if you're not careful.

When Piper was only hours old, I sat in my hospital bed and held her as she slept. I had just successfully breast-fed her and was riding the high of my new mama-hood. Oh, yeah, I thought. I can do this. She sighed contentedly, her belly full of warm milk and my arms wrapped around her. I looked down at her tiny face and then looked at my husband, and we spoke of how small things would now mean so much, how we would live for tiny moments. A smile, a laugh, an A-plus spelling test, a prom picture, first steps, watching a bicycle stay upright as she pedaled down the street. It would all start with this moment, sitting there in my shoulder-snap hospital gown, the place where the surgeon had separated her from me throbbing a little as I cradled her tiny body in my arms.

That’s what life is like now; a series of moments. Every day they come and go and I live each one and then try to remember it, hold on to it, keep it with me as long as I can.

The Tides of Yesterday

We are close. We are so close, my due date is only two weeks away. Somehow I don't feel quite ready. I don't think Max does either. We are comfortable with the idea of bringing a baby into our house, but not quite ready to actually do it. People have "helpfully" been telling me things I should do to bring on labor, and I have to explain that I'm trying to avoid that right now. We need these two weeks.

When my parents had me, their first child, they were not ready. They were young and unprepared to start with, and on top of that I was born by emergency c-section at 30 weeks' gestation. My mother said she "got a headache, got a nosebleed, had a baby." So as unprepared as I feel right now, I can't imagine how much more disorenting and frightening it would be to come into parenthood so abruptly. Our child is at 38 weeks' gestation; by this time in my own life, I had already been out in the world complicating their lives for two months.

When we took our hospital tour a few months ago, our group stopped in front of the NICU window. There were only a couple of tiny babies on the other side of the glass, but one incubator was pulled up close. A doctor and at least two residents were clustered around it, working intently at doing something to the baby inside. As they moved around the artificial womb of plastic and rubber, I caught a glimpse of the baby's foot waving around. It took me entirely by surprise. That little baby's foot looked like the tiniest thing in the world. I wondered how old it was, how far along it had been when it was born. I wondered if my foot was that small when I entered this world.

I have read blogs of parents with NICU babies and wondered about the circumstances of my own birth. I know I was in the hospital for a number of weeks; I know I weighed around three pounds when I was born. I know it was pre-ecclampsia that caused the doctors to rush my mother into an OR. I have seen a few pictures of my tiny body, wires and tubes snaking out from my small form like extra limbs. I know they told my mother that I would always be behind the other kids, I would be slow and would never really catch up mentally or physically and that my mother has spent all the years since then laughing at that diagnosis. I know I have never been a very good sleeper and my mother has always thought it was the result of spending my first weeks among the lights and noise and bustle of that NICU. But lately I have begun to wonder about other things. Did my parents come visit me every day? Did they bring toys to put in my plastic cradle? Hats to put on my tiny head? Did my mother and father come, sit with me, hold me when able, rock me in the stiff hospital-nursery chair?

I have never had the courage to ask these questions. I don't even know how to bring the subject up. Whenever we are discussing babies or preemies I hold my breath and wait for a new scrap of information, a nugget of story I have not heard before. I cling to these snippets, and wait for the day when I can piece it all together. This is one of the times when I regret the unspoken rule in our family that does not allow for direct questioning about past events. If someone offers information, you listen, but we are not people who probe and push to get it. Even with the birth of my own child looming, I do not have the courage now to ask my mother if she was as terrified at the prospect of motherhood as I am right now.

The Crying Game

Dutch's post about tears and children's books made me think of something that happened a few weeks ago. It was a Sunday, and we were nearing the end of a weekend-long move-the-furniture-around-and-clean-the-carpets binge. While we waited for the living room to dry so we could go over it one more time, we started fixing lunch and flipped channels. That silly Steve Martin movie Parenthood was on, and we stopped flipping to watch. We exchanged glances, because we both realized that in a few weeks, we would be part of this club, we would be parents. It was a little weird.

When it got to the end part where everyone's at the hospital waiting for a baby to be born, and there's babies and kids and moms and dads everywhere, we both got a little sentimental. I suppose we can't be blamed, there are like twenty babies or something in that final scene, all tiny and cute and being held and adored and receiving misty-eyed gazes from loving members of the Buckman clan. Anybody would be doomed. It's all so cheesy and the life-affirming-ness of it clubs you over the head like you're a baby seal. There's no escape.

I could hear Max sniffle next to me, and I felt my eyes grow warm and watery. I clenched my jaw and told myself I will not cry at this stupid movie, I will not, it's so hokey I will have to be ashamed of myself forever, but I lost the fight. There were fourteen babies too many, I could not fight the tide of parents beaming at their drooly little wonders while changing diapers on a hospital waiting-room chair. A tear slipped out and trickled down my cheek, and I wiped it away fast, before Max could see. He was sniffling and rubbing his eyes, and he reached over and hugged me tight and buried his face in my hair. I tried to fight off the waterworks I could feel building, but it was no use. Some of them got out. After Max let go, I raced into the kitchen and pretended to finish lunch. I didn't want him to see me getting all teary like, you know, a girl.

He wandered in and, between bites of carrot stick, made a comment about how it's funny that he's much more emotional and sentimental than I am, especially where this whole baby/pregnancy/parent thing is concerned. "I'm the girly one," he laughed. "I'm the weepy emotional wreck."

I just smiled and handed him his sandwich, then pretended to be fussing with my hair as I checked for stray tear-tracks on my face.

Mothers and Daughters

As much time as we spent hoping, for various reasons, that this baby would be a girl, there were a few things that I either brushed over or avoided thinking about altogether. The first of these was that, when it was all said and done, I would be someone's mother. This made my eyes cross when I thought about it too much. Being a mother meant something very different from having a baby. Being a mother meant sitting up nights with a sick, unhappy child; it meant nagging about homework and chores; it meant school activities and decisions about colleges and wondering if your twentysomething child will ever find their place in this world. I am well into my twenties and my mom is still my mother; it's not something that ended when I was born or got my two-year molars or learned to tie my shoes. My brain would whirr and click like a confused computer when I tried to grasp all this. When I was a kid in Sunday school, our teachers told us that God is infinite, and the human mind is too puny to grasp the true concept of infinity. At seven, I had no problem with infinity. Goes on forever? Check. God is everything, everywhere, all the time, this time and all times before and after? Not a problem. Turns out it was the thought of being someone's mother that caused my brain to grind to a screeching halt.

The other thing that was difficult for me to think about was being the mother of a daughter. My own relationship with my mother has always been a difficult one; we were frequently like those huge fighting elk and goats you see on Wild Kingdom: bashing heads, locking horns, each trying to drive the other into submission, until we let go, circled 'round and did it again. My dad frequently had to seperate us and send us to opposite corners of the house. The dishes not being done properly or speedily, my choice of friends, the way I dressed, my choice of college major, the boyfriends I chose, the jobs I applied for, my choice of wedding invitations - anything was cause for a fight. The fights didn't stop as I grew older. If anything, they grew more intense because the issues had been building up for so long. Once I was old enough, I learned to just pack up my car and move out of town to end a fight, because I had lost all hope of ever forming a truce.

When I found out that I would be the mother of a daughter, I thought of all those fights. I wondered if one day thirteen or fourteen years from now, this child and I will scream at each other across a kitchen and my husband will have to step in and send us to our rooms. I can only hope not, I can only strive to parent in a different way than my mother did and try to avoid the same pitfalls. And who knows? Maybe I'll learn something along the way. Maybe I'll finally be able to admit out loud to my mother that yes, she was right, when you are a teenager, dating someone four years your senior with no job and no permanent address is not the best idea.