I'm going to post this, then I swear to god I'm going to bed.
It's been hell. The last week, I have slept not at all. There has been not nearly enough sex, and my ass seems to have gotten bigger despite my constant gym time and my newly discovered climbing wall prowess. Last night, I could feel in my arms the will to throw The Bug across the room. I've actually smacked him on the diaper twice, once in front of people, because he bites. The smack doesn't help anything, or hurt him at all. I swear it's a reflex I didn't know I had.
I just need sleep. I need for him to sleep. I've taken to praying for it. He has to learn, has got to learn to sleep for longer than two hours at a time. I don't know how I'm supposed to not kill everyone in my path, with my hands.
How do chicks with no help do this? I know of
ladies with husbands away at war and families in other countries. How? How? How?
Today at four a.m., Mister Aran took over with The Bug. I think he was truly worried that I'd hurt someone. Later, my father-in-law took The Bug to some place with putt-putt and batting cages and an arcade. I had nearly four precious hours alone, which I used to lay back, nap, read, play video games, write...
Oh wait. No I didn't. I used the time to call the insurance company, vacuum, do laundry, grocery shop and cook.
When Mister Aran reads this, he'll be pissed.
Sometimes, when I'm nursing The Bug, I think about how beautiful he is. And then I doubt myself, because everyone thinks their child is beautiful. That's the reason we allow them to shit on us, literally and figuratively. But The Bug may honestly be a beautiful child, even more so than normal. People do randomly stop what they're doing in public to look at him or talk to him, and since I took little interest in kids before I got pregnant, that could be normal or not. I don't know.
So I try to picture him with the eyes of a stranger. I think, are these ears really perfect? Then I obsess on his ears until they look like oddly folded flaps of skin, until his very humanness is under consideration. Then I imagine that I'm an alien looking at my first human. What would I think of a nose? Or fingers?
But that leads me to the difficult realization that I'm still nursing him, as a now-alien, and that would mean wondering more about my own alienness, whether I have milk or battery acid coming out, and so I switch to imagining that The Bug is an alien, and I'm the human, and then I ask myself, if that were true, would I continue to nurse him? If aliens lived among us and one needed me to nurse him to survive, would I do it? Even if I wanted to, could I nurse something purple and globulous with tubes and little mouths everywhere? And, if there were mouths everywhere, which one would I aim for? Would he be able to use both breasts at once? Would that mean he had two stomachs? Or one tube that branched off to all the different mouths? And what would that mean the mother would look like? Would she have corresponding breasts everywhere for the baby's mouths? And if so, where did all of her own mouths go?
In the middle of this internal diatribe, I look down and The Bug is awake, silent, looking at me like he knows what I'm thinking, and he knows I'm insane, his eyebrows all pursed as if to say, "Your thoughts are so fucking loud I can't sleep."
What's really weird is, this has happened to me more than once.
There are wires missing from all the computer speakers. I think they're packed in boxes still. There are boxes all over this place, hidden. So I have no speakers. Lo and behold,
Sabrina starts posting audio blogs. I may have found my impetus to unpack once and for all.
I don't know what I'm doing, here. I know I'm going to die - this reality hits me every once in awhile, usually in the dark, that
I, yes even I! will die someday - and so I have to do something now. I've made another in my image, which is a good start. At least my lips and ears will prevail, and something of my attitude, at least the part that is a grumpy bitch when I first wake up.
But dammit, people keep bringing up the writing. The writing, the writing! I laugh, always, and I mumble something. I hate talking about the writing. For a few years I think I didn't talk about anything
else. Now I don't want to talk about writing, or what I'm thinking of writing, or if I've given up writing, or if I'm planning on taking writing classes. But Ariana brought it up today, on the phone.
I'm not the type of girl who gets on the phone just to chat, and none of my good friends are, either, so I threw Ariana a bit today when I called. She kept trying to figure out why I had called, and I kept lobbing over these sounds like, "Eh" and saying, "I don't know. I'm just bored." So she asked about people, made sure me and Mr. Aran and The Bug were okay, then asked when I was going to write. Maybe she just wanted me off the phone, at that point.
Ended up telling her that it's what I'll do, what I'll always do, but at the moment I'm just doing Bug things and working out. But what I won't admit out loud is, things are a-germinating. And when I start to work again, it'll be really fucking serious. It'll be six a.m. type stuff, when nobody is allowed to be anywhere near me for an hour or two, and shit will get done. Good shit. And I won't talk about it this time.
I found out yesterday that Celeste hasn't read any Tom Robbins. Christ! She should be, right now, thanking her lucky stars that she met me. Life is about to get much more interesting.
I gave up on Brendan.
What's the worst thing that could happen?
What have you got to lose?
Parenthood provides an immediate answer to those questions.
Here is an Iraqi child, waking up begrudgingly for school, one leg thrown out of his bed. Here is another, chewing on a strand of her own hair, nervous because she is the smallest and her father the poorest in the town. At this moment, they are walking around, dreaming of the future, but a number of them - some particular number, we will know it soon - will shortly be obliterated.
Likewise, a particular number of American and Iraqi soldiers are at present living and breathing, with fatherhood ahead of them, perhaps, grandfatherhood, a particular number of nights of mad lovemaking, excellent dinners, neighborly feuds, swims in the ocean, ahead of them - and all of this is to be forfeited, and for what?
...
So in the end, because my information and my intellect are limited, I have to base my opinion on images, reminding myself that, in a world of infinite variety, real-world corollaries of these images actually exist, at this very moment: A vase still holding flowers, a child still singing a nonsense song, a dog still barking at the moon, a building still standing, a son still alive.
Speed up the tape: The vase explodes, the child drops, the dog is flung into a stone wall, the building falls. The father sits in a chair, chewing his lower lip, remembering.
-George Saunders
It's strange and isolating to be a gifted kid. Not that I have experienced that; I was isolated by fundamentalism and my own desperate desire to belong, but I've read about the other kind, where you're so smart that most people can't relate to you.
I have experienced it secondhand through my husband, but I'm feeling it much more now, with my son. The Bug hasn't yet written a sonata or won a game of chess, but he's ahead in many physical ways. He never had trouble eating: he latched on to my breast twenty minutes after he flew out the chute; he took to all manner of bottles hungrily; he opened his mouth for the spoon early; he started sprouting teeth at three months and now is working on numbers seven and eight; and within an hour of his introduction to finger foods, he was shoveling little puffy stars into his mouth like a pro. Perhaps because of this, he has grown at an astounding rate, and is wearing 12-18 month clothes at 7.5 months.
Other moms, forcing their children's lips apart with the spoon or fighting for a latch at three in the morning, do not want to hear about these things. At the grocery store or at the park, they'll ask how old he is and their jaws drop when I tell them. "I thought he'd be at least a year old," they say. If they ask about his eating habits, I'm getting good at downplaying it, or at least moaning about how difficult it is to carry him now. If they still look distraught, I mention that he still refuses to sleep through the night.
Taking care of a kid is lonely, often boring work. You get this nice idea in your head of another mom with a kid the same age as yours. You'd have coffee with that mom in her sunny kitchen, talk about the puffy eyes that come with sleeplessness, discuss the finer points of
Project Runway or
Sex and the City while your kids play together in the living room, quietly, like sweet little mice, then nap together while you and the other mommy sneak a glass of wine.
Celeste is closest, but she has no kids. That isn't really a problem, because The Bug loves to nestle into her chest for hours, and she is one of those people who isn't spooked by babies, which is awesome. Ariana, The Bug's godmother, has a nine-year old boy but she also has a new family and a tough work schedule, so I never see her as often as I'd like.
I scan the mommies at the park. There was a very sweet lesbian couple, though by sweet I mean one was sweet and the other looked at me meanly from the corner of her eye and said nothing as we talked. There have been several Japanese and French mommies, who speak their corresponding languages to their children and smile. There are the Irvine mommies, who have nice dye jobs and wide smiles, and here is where I come closest to a mommy-mommy friendship, but always fall short because I can't figure out how to communicate properly. They use phrases like "age-appropriate" and usually are already in pairs, and even when we converse, we ask all about the other's kids, their ages and names and development, but we never find out one another's names. It's sad. I'm sure these ladies had their own interests and accomplishments before having babies, but there's no semblance of that now.
***
This may or may not be on a completely different note, but here are two things I saw on Sesame Street that made me laugh entirely too hard:
The Cookie Monster ate a Picasso and then said, "Me like it, but me no understand it."
and,
Baby Bear and Telly were writing a book together, but arguing about which direction to go. Baby Bear said, "Surely we can do this together!" Telly replied, "Don't call me Shirley."
This is why I won't sign your petition to raise the cigarette tax, you annoying cockgobbler.
Two very conflicting but awesome things have happened in my life in the past month or so. First, I'm back at Weight Watchers with some regularity. Second, I've made new friends.
Weight Watchers, I've decided, is only great at my particular branch, and only with my particular leader, Connie. Connie is hilarious. At her meetings it is standing room only. I would write some of her jokes here, but they would lose their punch. I'll just say this: she's wry, she plays it straight, just a tad self-deprecating - okay, not just a tad. When she talks about hiding the food in the couch cushions because she heard someone coming, everyone in the room laughs but also nods sadly at themselves. Getting the ugliness out into the open is the only way to deal with it, and the best way to let the ugly out of the closet is to laugh about it. That's what Connie does for me.
I'd like to hover around seven pounds under my goal. This is the weight that gets me into the jeans that cost $270. There were whole years, when I was bigger, that I didn't buy clothes. The experience was too harrowing, and I hated myself. My mom buys clothes maybe every ten years. She has shirts with holes in them that I remember borrowing when I was about thirteen, during those two minutes when it was fashionable at my school to wear big shirts and tight jeans. For those of you who don't know how old I am, that was eighty-four years ago. Whenever I see my Ma wearing those shirts today, I give her shit without thinking. I forget how it feels.
Connie goes into this: how fun it is to lose weight, how people come up to you and exclaim, and how new and exciting the program is. Then comes Lifetime, and it's just... you. Nobody cares anymore. People who meet you for the first time don't know what you used to look like, and you feel a strange urge to tell them. It's also not appropriate anymore to explain about the program when you order egg whites and dressing on the side and no sour cream, please. Instead, you have to lie and say you just prefer your meal that way. Like the "Thins," as Connie calls them.
"Watch the Thins," she says. "It's very interesting, and frustrating. They often talk between bites. And they chew before swallowing."
Whenever I come into the meeting despairing because I haven't hit the weight I really want, which is about six pounds away now, Connie tells me, "It's free. That's all that's important: free." She's referring to the fact that Lifetimers don't have to pay until they're two pounds over goal. In the meeting last Saturday, she called me "Our little Lifetimer" and asked, "How much did you pay today?" I replied, "Nothing. I'm free. I'm free!" It was very Shawshank Redemption.
***
My new friends are conflicting because where I have learned to curb my food intake and get into the $270 jeans, which is what I thought I was supposed to be doing my whole life, Celeste and Jason are decadent and fun, kind and forgiving and accepting. They're not new friends; I've known them a few years now, but I've just started really getting to know Celeste because she joined my gym. She "kicks the box" with us about three times a week. She's strong and awesome, and tries very hard, unlike most of the girls in the class, who drop their hands in despair and huff these enormous sighs until the instructor pays attention to them. Then we go to the showers and giggle to one another so loudly that Mister Aran can hear us from the men's locker room.
Celeste is big and gorgeous and sexy, so full of life and so happy that I am ashamed of my attitude. She seems so happy to love and be loved, to eat great food and drink great wine. Also, when I first lost the weight, I heard that Jason asked Mister Aran, "Your wife used to have an ass, didn't she?"
I suppose what I'm getting at is, I thought I was doing what it took to belong with the Thins, like maybe there was a magic keycard that would let me into the club, like that Family Guy episode where Peter surgically gets good looking and is escorted to the front of every line, and allowed into the shimmering, golden palace where the beautiful people hang out and laugh the way thin people do. It didn't happen - the thin girls in the locker room still just look at me funny when I compliment their $270 jeans. Meanwhile, Celeste is always ready for the kind of hug where I get lifted off the ground and launched into joy.
I am wearing my pre-preg designer jeans
and as long as I never sit, I'll be okay.
I still love you guys
It's come
in vogue to hate on Gabe and Tycho, but my very soul has felt bubbly and good since I welcomed
their new book into my home. I love the descriptions. I have it in the bathroom and it's very hard to leave there now, which is fine, considering the bubbly thing has created a few gastrointestinal difficulties lately.
I love you boys! Keep up the good work! SAMUS DEMANDS IT.
