Today I took The Bug over to Mr. Aran's office for some trick or treating. He got a goodie bag full of non-edible things, like stickers and finger puppets, and one measley box of Junior Mints, which we shared. There were four in the box. The Bug, in his ear of corn outfit, was the youngest child there and could not have cared less about the spider pinata, but he was beautiful and funny and big and it was so good to see Mr. Aran in the middle of the day.
Afterward, I figured we only had an hour before we needed to pick up Mr. Aran from work so we just hit Starbucks and Target. I spent twelve dollars on a frappuchino and a teether and a bag of tiny, tiny squirt guns that I will give out to any trick or treaters tonight, though I'm assuming we won't have any. The Bug started to fuss so we got in the car and went back to the office and I called Mr. Aran and told him we were outside, when he was ready to go. He was excited for about ten seconds, then he said, "But honey, I don't get off work for another hour." And then I realized I hadn't changed the time on the car clock for Daylight Savings Time.
So The Bug and I sat in the car together for another hour, looking at cars and listening to talk radio, which is a habit I've been trying to kick for about five years now.
***
We picked up some Zankou Chicken, amazing stuff. After I ate, I cracked open a fortune cookie leftover from last night, and the fortune said, "Forget the doubts and fears that are creeping into your heart."
I mean, what the pho?
***
Speaking of which, The Bug laughed his ass off throughout
this whole little movie. I just watched him, dumbfounded. My child has a sick sense of humor.
Also: the other day, I needed to do something so I sat The Bug in his swing in front of the TV and turned on Sesame Street. It was the first time he's seen it. Big Bird was doing his thing, trying to find Ernie, and they sang the "One of these things doesn't belong" song, or whatever it's called. The kid just
busted out laughing. He sat there babbling at Sesame Street until it went to commercial. I've never seen him respond to something he's never seen before like that. We wondered if it had something to do with inherited memory, if maybe Sesame Street was such a big part of our childhoods that he recognized it, or if he had a past life in which he watched Sesame Street, or if the characters are just that archetypal, or if there's some crazy subliminal kiddie message going on.
***
One thing on Sesame Street hit me just right. Ernie was teaching the viewing audience how to pat their heads and rub their tummies, simultaneously. Bert wandered in, and Ernie wanted him to join, but Bert didn't want to at first because he'd look silly. But Ernie told him that everyone looks silly when they first try something, and of course, by the end of the song, Bert was rubbing and patting with so much joy that he didn't realize it was time to stop.
I must have missed that episode when I was a kid, because I didn't learn that lesson until I was in my mid-twenties.
I counted on my calendar and today is The Bug's 98th day outside my body. Two of those days were in a hospital, and the rest of the time, I've been winging it. Right now, he's on his back on my bed, kicking it up.
***
There's a lot of trash to take out, and wood to polish and we're talking a bunch of laundry, but I hurt my back somehow. I did it a week or two ago but I haven't said anything because I've hoped it would be a lingering soreness, something that would just go away. But it hasn't. It did for a few days, actually, and I felt really triumphant and went to a kickboxing class, but I aggravated it again somehow, probably lifting The Bug, who has got to be approaching twenty pounds now. All the surfaces from which you pick up a baby are these back-breaking heights, where it's impossible to use your knees because you're bending over a railing or something.
So now I limp around, and everything looks impossible. Something falls to the floor, I look at it with hate for awhile, then ignore it. My apartment looks like hell because I can't bend over without a lot of pain, can't lift, can't stand for too long, can't get comfortable anywhere. But in Mister Aran's office chair, I almost get a little respite.
If this were a real job, I'd call in sick.
I'm trying to be patient with myself, because I have no choice, but it's hard. I've gotten my anxiety attacks back. Not in the full force of post-partum, but it's been tough. I can't even read books or watch TV in which people get hurt, because I feel it myself, and I can't handle that bad stuff happens in reality. I end up laying in bed unable to sleep even at my most exhausted, thinking about bad things that have happened, bad things that will happen, bad things that probably will never happen but might. Embarassing things I've done run on a loop in my brain until I want to kill myself in the horror of it.
I think of the reading at the last mass I went to, which was a few weeks ago: "Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honorable, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things."
Like I said, I try. I try. But the bad little gremlins live in my brain, and I have so much to lose now.
***
My left breast does her thing and is just fine, but my right is an overachiever. She's like that girl in class who raises her hand really high and goes like "Ooh ooh ooh!" She makes way too much milk and gets way bigger than her sister and when she gets too full, she makes me want to cry. I'm trying to pump out the excess, because that nipple is all
HOT
SEARING
SHOOTING
PAIN
right now, but it gets all blocked up and I can only get a few ounces and I just want to cry with the pain and hopelessness of it.
But I'm trying.
***
Update:
I hate that the best way to get the boobies back to normal is to breastfeed, but it's true. I slapped the kid on my overachieving girl and Lamaze-breathed through some of the worst minutes of my life and then it was over. All the lumpy hardness went away, and she's breathing easy.
***
I went to Blizzcon to share the Samus with the world for a couple of hours, on Saturday. Apparently, the crowd was bigger on Friday, but I got what I came for. I got to see a bunch of geeks in black tee shirts; skinny, gawky girls decked out in costume; slow-eyed booth babes... it was all good. I even met a few more FOH guys. They all looked like healthy, contributing members of society. I gave them all raucous hugs, they stiffened up and then bragged about it later.
Because I am awesome.
I read and commented on Jordan's blog regarding an article you can read
here. However, I commented before I'd read the actual article, and now that I have, my skin is a bit prickly.
Though the article is entertaining and does touch on my ew ew ew sensibilities as a white, liberal American, much of it is wrong. In a few different ways.
(1) God doesn't want kids.
I was watching some show on MTV the other night about interracial couples, and eventually, I had to turn it off. I am in an interracial relationship, but I've been around my husband's family so much that it sometimes shocks me to see the way many white families think, even church-going, Jesus-loving, supposedly Christian white families. It knocked me backward to hear one white father - almost grandfather - say, with absolute conviction, that he thought it would be better for the baby to have been aborted because life is hard for a mixed child.
I love that, by the way. Mixed child. Not all that far from half-breed, is it? And nobody ever says "mixed person," or "mixed adult." Everyone's just so worried about what box the kid is going to check on the standardized test, and whether they'll be tortured by the swingsets by other kids, because non-mixed kids have such easy existences, right? If you could save your kid from all that hurt and shame by killing them before they know what's happening, you'd do it, wouldn't you? I digress, sorry.
Anyway. I'm sure God, in all her logical, liberal, angry glory, is sitting in heaven rolling her eyes and sighing at all the mothers who dare give birth to more than their allotted share of children, which brings me to:
(2)
Why does this sort of bizarre hyperbreeding only seem to afflict antiseptic megareligious families from the Midwest?
Hey, Mark, you're an intelligent-sounding guy. I mean, you have a nice job writing for the Gate, yeah? You can string words together with the best of them. Why, then, has the simple fact that white, Midwestern women are in fact NOT the ones giving birth to the most kids eluded you? Ever been to Mexico, or the Philippines? How about Europe, where the fastest-growing population is Muslim?
Hell, let's keep it to America, even your own state: ever visited a black neighborhood in Los Angeles? They tend to vote Democrat, don't they? If we're casting our left-wing stones around here, why don't we talk about how underprivileged, non-white women are giving birth to babies left and right in these neighborhoods without the hope of fathers or steady income? Yeah, those same people who we liberal people hope to help out. If every white Midwestern Bushie pumped out a kid a year starting now, they would still never catch up to the non-white citizens of this land.
(3) Finally, Mark is simply a dick. I think and vote fairly liberally, but I'm ashamed of this guy. I would be surprised to hear that he had any children of his own. Phantom vaginal pain, Mark? Phantom indeed, since you don't know the first thing about having a vagina, and the pain of birth and the heart of a mother is different than anything you will ever experience, so kindly stop behaving as if you have a voice in that matter.
He fails, like so many fail, by being snarky.
Fahrenheit 911 could have been great if Moore had cut the goddamn sing-songy assholish voiceover, too.
***
Do I sound this way because I have a kid now? You bet your ass. Before you have kids, you can afford to think that maybe everyone isn't entitled to children, that the population should be controlled and regulated, that there should be tests for parenthood, and you can tell yourself that you believe this way because it's in the best interests of children. But then you have one of your own, and you start wondering who would be doing the regulating, what their interests would be, who would be paying them off, and if you would pass the test. Having a kid makes you fiercely aware of what's in your kid's best interest, and everyone else's interest comes second. That's the nature of things, people; it's how things are throughout history and the animal kingdom; take that as you may.
So if this insane family in Arkansas gets to have sixteen, twenty, fifty kids so that I can have The Bug, I say good for them. The more the merrier.
I'm not saying, by any means, that they aren't creepy as fuck. Maybe that lady should quit pumping out kid after kid and get to know the ones she has. People do not have the moral right to more kids than they can raise. I'm saying Mr. Morford is mean, angry, perhaps misinformed, and has no right to say what God thinks of anything.
I feel like shit, but I'm too tired to be angry about it.
***
Yesterday, Mister Aran and I went to the wedding of a friend. It was down in Newport, fifty miles away, and on the way it started to rain, plus we left late, so we ended up coming into the ceremony late, my boots clonking against the wood floor.
We love the friend. We don't know the new wife very well. She's an actress, and sometimes it's hard to know when actors aren't acting. We're very good with the friend on a one-on-one basis, but his friends all seem... old. Even when they're not old, they seem old. Our conversations are always held across this wide expanse of age.
Nobody seems to know where to seat us at their weddings. They always end up throwing us in the back corner with their other assorted random friends. Then they were out of coffee. Then we were scolded for plucking at the harp. And because we are grown up now, we left.
We went to a B&N for coffee and perusing. We found a board book about opposites for The Bug. I bought some decaf vanilla tea. On the way home, it stormed. It doesn't often thunder and lightning in Southern California, even during hard rains, but last night the horizon lit up and the thunder threatened to crack the sky in half. When we got home, The Bug was beautiful and asleep and it took all I had not to squeeze hell out of him.
***
I finally got to bed a little after eleven. I was exhausted. At 12:45, the dog started barking.
He's my inlaws' dog, and he isn't housetrained, and we have the cat, so this dog stays out on the patio. And now, even though he is just a little dog who is scared of the thunder and lightning, I hate him.
From 12:45 until 5:00 a.m., I sat with the dog. Most of those hours were spent outside, in a thick yellow hoodie sweatshirt and sweatpants, petting the dog so he wouldn't bark and wake up the entire neighborhood. Mister Aran got up and demanded that I return to bed and ignore the barking, just sleep in another room where I might not hear it so loudly, but this wasn't an option and that pissed him off so he decided to be awake and play on the computer. So I stayed outside with the dog until the baby cried, and while I fed him the dog barked and barked and BARKEDANDBARKEDANDBARKED and when I finally got the kid to sleep despite all the barking, I went back outside and soothed the dog again, and it was cold. It wasn't freezing, not enough to complain about, but it was cold, the kind of cold that seeps into your clothes and into your pores and runs through your body with your own blood.
At three something, I thought maybe we could put the dog into a bathroom, and I was going to bring this up to Mister Aran, but I looked into the window and there was no blue computer light, no WoW flashing, and I knew I was alone, not just in the apartment but in the world, too. I sat back down, read my book. The rain was so loud that I thought there were cars coming, or people talking, but it was just the rain.
At 5:00, the rain let up a bit, the dog settled to some extent, and I collapsed. I was so tired that when the kid was ready to eat, I just laid him in bed with me, something I don't really believe in doing. We half-slept together until 10:30, when the dog started barking at a fresh thunderstorm. It's after noon now, and he is still barking. There has been a bark every two seconds all this time.
I just refuse to fucking go out there. I feel like I did my time. If the neighbors want to complain, which they have in the past, let them. Let them come and take the dog away. Let him loose in a field somewhere, like my dad used to threaten to do to our pets as kids.
This is the fatigue talking, I promise, but I'm just. So goddamn. Tired. And I want to strangle the bark out of the dog, which isn't even mine.
If nothing else, last night solidified my cat-person status.
***
Sometimes, I can feel the thunder. It shakes me. That's how close it is.
I need to get away from the barking, but it's too hard to leave right now.
I'm feeling picked on today, for no good reason. Mostly, I hate my apartment's management office. I'd go into detail - the water turning off all the time, the erroneous missed payment notices, the complaints about nothing at all that must be argued - but it's boring shit.
***
I got my feather dusters and timer from FLYlady yesterday. I thought they were silly to tout feather dusters as beautiful, but they were right - my dusters are gorgeous and on display. In my bathroom, but still.
***
I guess I'm not done bitching about the management. I have a lot to do, but when this sort of crap happens (in this case, a notice about our balcony), I get so tense that I don't want to do anything but hide, lose myself in message boards. I have a bag full of paperwork to go through, too, that's making me sad, and the damn OxyClean didn't work this time on a stain. I guess I didn't let the clothes soak long enough. Add to that the bill I keep getting from the hospital pediatrician and my mood is going sour.
***
Good news: after struggling all morning with a too-big skirt, I tried on some of my other clothes and found that they actually fit. I've dropped a half-size or so. My teeny shorts from Pacific Sunwear fit now, so I'm currently showing way too much leg. I remember trying them on, the elation when they fit! Holding them out in front of me, they still look like they belong to someone far smaller, possibly a cheerleader. I guess their shorts are even smaller still.
***
God, I feel so bitchy! A glance at my calendar reminds me, though, that I didn't work out or have sex yesterday, and these are habits that drastically improve my mood.
***
Kickboxing is going swell at Bodies In Motion, but I went back to my old kickboxing studio in Signal Hill to train last Saturday, and came away sore as hell. It'd been almost a year since I'd hit actual Thai pads and mitts - and held them for others. Stabilizer muscles I'd forgotten I had shrieked for two days.
My teacher, Trav, has called me on my ego twice: once during my first class, and once last weekend. I came into his class a few years ago with some small knowledge, mostly in boxing but with a roundhouse slightly better than your average beginner, too. He asked me, mid-class, where I'd trained before. I let my eyes get big and told him, "Nowhere." It was true that I'd never been formally trained in kickboxing, and indeed Bodies In Motion can't be called a true kickboxing gym, but Mister Aran had shown me a few things and I'd had the repetition that Executive Kickboxing classes give. I really just wanted him to be impressed, dammit; is that so wrong? For him to believe that I was a natural?
Apparently so, because he set his expression and replied, "Again - where did you train before?" And I had to admit I wasn't just a wunderkind.
Last weekend, I was telling him about Bodies In Motion and he said, "You like being the best in the class." Arrrrgh. Not even Mister Aran calls me out on that particular sad, ugly part of my psyche. But it's true. In many of the classes, I am better than all the other students. I really shouldn't draw energy from that, especially since my conditioning is pure shit these days, but I do.
"Ah," thought Brendan, sitting at his Ikea-esque cube in the farm of cubes, feeling rather like a salmon, peering on occasion out at the staircase in the lobby beyond the dwarf that looked less like comfortably carpeted stairs and more like an
upstream battle, "she's turned on us; she is no longer interesting in the slightest; she doesn't write about gaming or porn or shitting anymore. She's a SAHM; in time, she will start using other annoying terms like DH (dear/damn husband) and the DS, DD, DC, MIL, FIL, that follows; she will cry about PMS, laugh at romcoms, delight in the new Helen Fielding, link to iVillage articles, call her period AF (Aunt Flo! How charming), discuss the worthiness of good ole bleach and Ajax - doesn't Meg Ryan have a new movie out soon? Oh goodness, I'll definitely IMDB that, LOL! LOLOL! ROFLOL! ROFLMAOLOL! ROFLMAOHFTCFLOLOLoloLOLOloloLOLOOOL!!!1!!!111!one!"
...as his finger deftly right-clicked the samoose link on his Bookmarks list and rolled the cursor down to
delete
I'm getting into the library again. The other day, I found out you can donate used books to the library, and today I'm packing up all kinds of books. When we moved a few months ago, I threw out maybe half my books, and still my collection spills over into other rooms and closets. Most of what I have, I love, but will probably never crack open again. It makes me feel better to think that they'll have a new home at the central Glendale library. I stole a book from there once, just never returned it, and I saw that book here today. I still don't plan on returning it.
Going through all the books, choosing to keep only those that I would absolutely read again, dusting off dead spiders and seeing others scurry out of the way, I ran into some of the little stapled-together rags I used to buy off poets in Orange County.
R.A.C. was one of the best. She moved to New York soon after I discovered her, and then one night I saw her on that HBO poetry jam show, but only the very end. A good poetry reading can make your whole body lift off the ground, fly out the window, discover other planets. Bad poetry readings make you want to crawl under the tile and die.
R.A.C. made me fly. I had to bring Mister Aran to see her, then she made him fly, too. I hope she's doing okay. I remember she had a son named Holden, and a daughter named Piper. I wish I could introduce her to my son, now. I wish I could take him to see her read. Her work is fantastic on the page, but I can't imagine it without the sound of her voice.
I believe this is the poem she read on TV:
*after school, special*(for my daughter who asked, "why do teachers need answer sheets?")every day
I walk up to your classroom
and don't get so much as a nod.
I'm not on the parents' phone list
and never get asked to help at any classroom parties.
on the first day of school, I could hear the creaking hinges
of mouths swinging open as I marched my daughter
towards room K-2.
suddenly, I was back in junior high
where I was forced to walk through the buzz
of fourteen-year old hornets stinging the back of my neck
with infinite glares and immeasurable shit talking.
"there she is, the quiet girl with the leaking wrists,"
"the tomboy without the nerve to suck dick."
true, I was the only kid in honors classes
who pledged allegiance to the movie
Taxi Driverand all things Judy Blume, but imagine how I felt
as my teachers sat back and
watched my young, dumb
head get ransacked daily by my peers.
so yeah, I have my opinions
about the Tustin Unified School District.
and if my daughter's artwork really scares you
bad enough to accuse me of being an irresponsible parent
with no concern for my daughter's education
you better get some evidence other
than the ink on my arms and the Crayola mayhem
she screams to the page, you need to look deep, sucker
'cause they say it's what's inside that counts
and inside me is a ticking time bomb
only willing to count to three.
so fuck your recommendations for a child psychologist
and fuck you and your threats to call social services
'cause I went straight to the source and I said,
"Piper Jane, explain these drawings, please."
and what she told me is so beyond what I know you are
capable of teaching I knew right then and there -
I am not the asshole in this situation
but sure, I'll explain her artwork.
I'll enlighten you.
the tall broad shouldered body without a head-
that's her daddy, who doesn't think about her enough.
and those red clouds swirling around, aren't clouds.
they're the roses she throws to all my friends in heaven.
and the cat with the tail snapped off
and its claws nailed to the floor?
is a cat with the tail snapped off
and its claws nailed to the floor.
but the woman with the hole in her chest-
that's me. see, I made the mistake of telling her how a
certain someone broke my heart once. so now she keeps it
in a special hiding place, won't even tell me where it is.
I know I look more FSU than PTA.
in the morning I'm trying to sniff an outfit
from a pile of laundry on the floor
while you're pissed at your housekeeper
for fading your skirt.
my nanny is any poet brave enough to hold my child while
I'm onstage. my income is handed to me in a hat.
but I can tell you my daughter's favorite color. it's purple.
favorite book, The Giving Tree.
favorite movie, James and the Giant Peach
her first words were naw-naw
and she eats sand when she thinks no one is looking.
I know I drag her to more poetry readings than she'd
probably like and she can quote my first chapbook,
verbatim.
but now that I've told you all about my child,
why don't you
tryand tell me a little something about yours.
go ahead.
enlighten me.
Last night at Trader Joe's, I saw two sorta celebrities:
Craig and Trenton from the Bravo show "Sports Kids Moms & Dads." Trenton was wearing his football pads and uniform. He was dirty and disheveled and beaming. He looked like a happy kid. It was weird, because I've seen this kid cry. I've yelled at Craig from the comfort of my living room. He's your typical asshole guy who has amounted to exactly zero in his own life, so he pressures his kid into realizing his lost dreams.
It could be that they cut the film to show him at Maximum Asshole Level. I know that happens. But it still upset me to see this kid weeping because he wasn't good enough for his dad. I wondered what it would have been like to call him on it, right there next to the sushi display.
