I got out of the car at work this morning feeling kind of squirrelly. The…. D’s? Are we the D’s? If Mike is MQD and the baby is Baby D, does that make us the Ds?
That makes it sound like only my tits took a trip to IKEA if I say “The Ds went to Ikea.” And who are we kidding? The DD’s went to Ikea (we are reaching maximum capacity here in PregnantBoobTown. ) Continue reading
Tagged Chuck Taylor's, Converse, Ikea, Pregnancy, Pregnant, Skateboard
A long time ago, in a previous life time there were two seasons. Fall Tour and Spring Tour. Widespread Panic, of course. “Excitement on the Side” is actually a line from WSP’s “Bowlegged Woman.”
Long ago vacations were spent in a haze catching as many Panic shows as I could before I returned to work and my relatively more responsible life. And then I was pregnant (and I still caught a few shows) and then Emily was born and my life suddenly seemed too busy to take a week to run around and “see a band.” I caught a few shows here and there when Em was still under a year old. I can’t be the only music fan that rolled in to a hotel room full of people I hadn’t seen in forever and immediately set up a breast pump.
And then life went from busy to messy with my divorce. I guess some couples have “a song.” Jer and I had a whole god damn band. It was part of what we did together. We got new cars when we were pregnant with Em and immediately sticker slammed them and got matching WSP license plates, COCONUTS for me CHILYH2O for him. You give up a lot when you leave a long relationship: friends, furniture, your favorite sweatpants since they don’t actually belong to you. But I was determined not to give up my band! Continue reading
I don’t talk about MQD an awful lot here. In part because we are happy and functional. And that is neither funny nor interesting. And when I do it is to occasionally mention that he might not find me hilarious in some moment or another. Now this might give you the impression that he is not particularly funny. When actually he slays me on the regular. And roughly half of the time he does it on purpose.
The other night in a moment of classic MQD and Kelly interaction we were having a semi-silent faceoff regarding the television. I watch horrendous, awful TV often. Or rather when I watch television it is often horrendous. So I do my damnedest to not attempt to defend my viewing habits EVER and to make an effort to occasionally flip off the tube and entertain the old chap. After all he was married to me for all of about ten minutes before I got all pregnant and cry-y and wanting to eat ice cream and watch romantic comedies. The least I can do is let him hold the remote. Or gasp, turn off the TV if that is his desire. Continue reading
I maintain I have a pretty sunshiny view on life. This in spite of the fact that I am a pregnant woman, hence I am prone to making my complaints known (or as I like to see it making “gentle observations.”)
This morning’s observation: why in the FUCK does a bagel have to have a hole in the middle? Delicious whole wheat bagel with your 2.4 grams of fiber why must you complicate matters with your hole? I am a capable woman. A smart woman. And yet daily the spreading of my also oh so delicious grape jelly on a bagel is enough to make me want to kill a motherfucker. Why? Why the hole? You serve no purpose! (Incidentally I am a capable googler.) Continue reading
Your stuff. It’s just stuff, right?
When my father sold the house I grew up in I discovered that many of my old albums had mildewed in the basement. My 45 of Matthew Wilder’s “Break my Stride” was ruined. The notes passed between friends in seventh grade math class. They were illegible.
A lifetime of stuff was left behind with my marriage. Letters to and from my ex-husband, photographs of the almost ten years we’d spent together. The kitchen table that had been in the dining room of the home I grew up in.
But it was stuff. Just stuff.
I moved out of my home at the beach between Thanksgiving and Christmas, 2007. I took all the pieces of my heart, my little girl and my Snoopy and I moved. And I made a new home. In that home was what was important. A lot of love. And my books. And my shoes. And my Snoopy.
Books and shoes are not “just stuff.” They are my Things.
When I was a kid I had a terrible perm. And buck teeth. And then I had braces. And another less terrible perm. And then I got bigger and I had straight teeth and no perm.
Time passed and lots of things changed but two things always stayed the same.
I have had a bookshelf in my home. I have had size 10 feet and fantastic shoes.
In that bookshelf I have had every play I have ever been in, all of The Chronicles of Narnia, The Once and Future King, Shel Silverstein and quite a few Nancy Drews. On that shelf somewhere was a secret book safe that my mother made. It held the key to my diary, a letter to a boy that never knew how much I loved him. I have had more than a few pairs of flip flops, two pairs of combat boots, a couple of pairs of Chucks and some grown up shoes. And my first pair of Doc Martens.
I went to college an overachiever and decided I felt more at home behind the bar. I got married and divorced and married again.
I was enrolled and unenrolled in college, engaged and less than engaged in studying. The plays, the Chronicles of Narnia, the Nancy Drews… they made friends with the feminist theory books, and the Buddhism texts and then they all made friends with the breastfeeding and nutrition books. The book safe held a dime bag, Jer’s wedding band, a lock of Emily’s hair. The combat boots and the Frankenstein-like platform shoes made friends with the Dansko clogs and the Birks. The hundreds of pairs of flip flops.
And again, lots of things changed but some things stayed the same.
When you talk about a person you might say “Oh… well the thing about her is…” and you describe an attribute that defines them. I don’t know what that would be for me. I think “the thing about me” for a long, long time has been my Things. Not my Stuff. Just my things, my books and my shoes. At least it was to me.
And then this week our offer was accepted on a house. And suddenly we would be moving in to a new home. A home where our family of three would become a family of four. And I started to look around our house … imagining what I would pack. And I realized maybe I didn’t need my Things. Maybe my Things were just Stuff.
Before I could stop myself I bagged up more then half of my books to donate to the library. Romance novels, mysteries, biographies, paper backs and the like. I kept a box of my childhood books, the Louisa May Alcott, Ramona Quimby, Age 8. I kept the plays, because you can’t just go get them at the library. I kept a small assortment of sentimental books, the e.e. cummings we used in our wedding, the tattered copy of On the Road and The Beat Reader that I carried around with my composition book from coffeehouse to coffeehouse as a youth.
Even the books I kept, I think most of them will find their way in to the attic for safe keeping. I don’t think I need them to be on display, to somehow demonstrate who I am. I laughed and told MQD that since I am both married and knocked up I must not have much need to live by John Waters decree “If you go home with somebody, and they don’t have books, don’t fuck ’em!”
After I packed up the books I went outside to the laundry room that houses my stash of shoes. MQD poked his head out at one point “Whatcha doing?”
“I just got rid of more than half my god damned books, I might as well go through my shoes.” He smartly said “Do you wanna be alone?”
My Doc Martens. With their alphabet shoelaces. And the paint from some kind of scenery circa 1992. When they closed Commander Salamander in Georgetown a few years ago I was glad I still had my Docs. But this past weekend I decided a picture was enough. I didn’t need to save them forever.
For the last few days I have wondered if getting rid of my Things meant Something. Did I no longer believe that I was defined by my possessions? Did I ever believe that was so? Did I not want to move my Past in to the home that will become my Future?
Or is it simpler than that? A mother of one can keep her head above water and still manage her piles of crap. A working mother of two might be smart to have less shit.
In a few short weeks we will move into our home. Me. My husband. Emily & Fisher. Snoopy. The baby. And just a few Things. No Stuff at all.
“And that’s all I need… what do you think I am, some kind of jerk or something…”
Posted in Bad Mood, Family, Nonsense, Parenting
Tagged Books, Doc Martens, John Waters, Nesting, New House, Stuff
I wish this was gonna be about my most excellent Latin dance skills. But sadly it is not.
Ever since Karen wrote the other day about her thoughts and feelings on the pregnancy body I have been keeping a mental checklist of thoughts on my own. I really thought this go-round would be similar to my pregnancy with Em and that I’d find comfort in the fact that creepy weird pregnancy things that no one ever talks about would not sneak up on me. I mean, I have done this before, right? Evidently that is not the case.
In the few short days I have been thinking about this I have come up with more than a few delightful side effects of pregnancy that have astounded me all over again. Here they are in order of ascending grossness.
First sign of my struggle with the pregnancy body is that I stop looking in the mirror without my clothes on. The only bathroom in our house with a shower is not large, but it does offer two fantastic features. A window in the shower and a mirror that is not directly across from you. The window means you don’t have to turn the lights on in the morning, which I have always rather enjoyed and the mirror’s relationship to the bathtub means you do not have to actively avoid looking at your full-frontal naked self every morning when you get out of the shower. This is always a perk, in my book, but even more so pregnant. Consequently when Em and I hopped in the shower the other day after the swimming pool I was ill-prepared for her observation.
She is laughing. I am washing my hair. Like a fool, I ask her “What?”
“Your boobs look like they have a chopped off hot dog sticking out of them.”
I’ll give that a minute to sink in.
Damn, kid. She had ruined my illusion. The illusion I had of myself with perfectly normal boobs. I have seen enough boob both in real life and in umm… film and pictures to have a preferred boob style. And let’s just say that hot dog nipples and enormous areolas nine shades darker than the skin tone surrounding them were not it.
How had I forgotten about this? Sure, I have been gifted jugs a cup size larger than my normal of late, but in exchange I have had to trade in my perfectly normal nips (n squared, if you will) for this freak show. And don’t get me started on the gigantic blue vein that should pop up any day now.
Moving on… in order of ascending grossness, you are both reminded and warned. A week or so ago I realized I had an appointment with my midwife coming up and that I should probably remember to ask her if I can take a stool softener. I know I can google it. But I try to have one question. It makes me feel like a “good patient” to have a question at each appointment. Yes, I am that approval seeking.
While the constipation was unpleasant enough, it gets worse. The fact that I had begun to envision the “ring of fire” that comes with a baby’s head crowning every time I tried to produce a dime sized turd was making me both worried and furious. Worried that if these totally unsatisfying bowel movements were making me cry and imagine the pain of labor that I’d never survive an actual unmedicated labor. And furious that while I had been in the bathroom for upwards of twenty minutes the toilet still resembled a game of marbles. One in which no one even brought a shooter.
So, I did the only thing I knew to do. I drank a cup of real coffee. And it was delicious. And that morning’s drive to work was fabulous. I miss coffee.
Twenty minutes after I got to my office I thought I was going to die. I would be found dead. In the office bathroom. A dent in the top of my head where it had caved in from the sheer gravitational pull of the ferocious diarrhea I was experiencing. Oh and my shirt would be ripped open. Not (as you might expect) to give a sexy sort of Woman Ravaged on a Cover of A Romance Novel look (and you are supposed to have already forgotten about the hotdog nipples and the diarrhea in order for that imagery to be effective) but because I thought I was having a motherfucking heart attack and I needed to see if my heart was, in fact, beating on the outside of my chest from the caffeine.
Lesson learned. While the coffee did produce the opposite effect of constipation, it was no more desirable.
Flash forward to the next day. Same intestinal disaster. With the added bonus of vomiting. I am coming up on day five of this good time. This morning as I wretched in to a trash can and wondered if I might be able to get upstairs to the other bathroom before “the spirit” moved me again I looked down to the floor. “Thumbs Up!” said the cheerful giraffe sticker Em had stuck to the floor. I had no choice but to laugh. Thumbs up, alright. Up my ass if I am gonna get anything done today besides sit around in the bathroom.
So, that’s the top three things I have forgotten about pregnancy so far. Freak show hot dog nipples, constipation and it’s bitch of a sister diarrhea.
In other news, it’s Casual Friday for me. Pigtails, flip-flops, my favorite crooked glasses and my boombox belt buckle. While you may disapprove of my freaky nipple and poop talk, you have got to applaud my efforts at taking a picture of a belt buckle (that I can not see) with my phone. For you. I do it all for you.
I am standing at the top of the stairs wearing MQD’s flourescent green t-shirt with an image of J.R. “Bob” Dobbs. I am watching Emily as she stirs, approaching a state of wakefulness. Across from me, over the staircase is a framed picture with the same image.
Em stretches and opens her eyes. “We need to get up and get moving, shortie. We slept in.”
“What time is it?” she groans, sounding more like 15 than 5.
“It’s almost 8 o’clock.”
“We get up at 7, Mom… Oh my…” she trails off and climbs out of bed. She is walking towards me with the sleepy movements of a child. “I almost said God.”
She stands in front of me in the hallway. “You know God looks like that.” She points at my shirt.
I misunderstand her. “That is Bob, honey, it’s Dad’s shirt.”
“Not Bob, Mom. God. I think God looks like Bob. If you Believe in God…. Bob is everywhere.”
Right before my head explodes she continues. “Bob is on your shirt, and in that picture. Whoa.”
She amuses me endlessly. And from now on I will have her explain MQD’s membership in the Church of the Subgenius to people. Interesting to note that she thinks God looks like a 50’s tv sitcom father. Step up from the man with the long white beard, I suppose.
I have written before about my struggle figuring out “what I wanted to be when I grow up.” Rereading that now I can see that what started out as thinking on my issues with being insecure and with my body turned out to be just as much about my being comfortable with who and what I am today as it is about anything else.
What prompted my thinking about what I wanted to be when I grow up again? Ironically, another email from a friend. Facebook is a delight in that it allows you to stay in touch with the people that you genuinely enjoyed from other parts of your life. From not only your past, but from social and intellectual arenas that you no longer really belong to, but that you may very well still hold dear.
This is a roundabout way to say that I live vicariously through the lives of my friends from my youth that have pursued their dreams as Actors and Artists. For so many, many years that was what I wanted. I wanted to be an Artist, specifically an Actor. Yup, with a capital letter A. Many of my close friends have asked me when I lost the bug. Or when I stopped thinking about it… and I don’t really know when it happened. I know it makes me get choked up now, like thinking about falling out of love with someone. To me there is nothing more heartbreaking than the idea of falling out of love. And I guess there was a moment somewhere along the way that I fell out of love with Acting.
Like most things that are hard for me to talk about I have a standard response to that question. The “when did you stop wanting to do theatre” question. “When I realized I loved wallpaper.” Somewhere inside me I knew that I didn’t have the “it” that makes that life a real possibility. I didn’t want it more than anything else. I wanted wallpaper.
Wallpaper is not permanent. But I’d guess that anyone that has ever sworn and sweat their way through an afternoon with a steamer and a trowel knows that removing wallpaper is about as pleasant as a divorce. It sucks. And the whole time you are thinking “why the fuck didn’t I just paint?”
I know now that my “wallpaper” was marriage. And a Family. (See how Family gets an uppercase letter, just like Artist. That makes me smile, that I think it deserves one now. I didn’t always.)
Recently I have been feeling more and more comfortable with who and what I am. In part because I have been so fortunate in recent years to feel more joy than sorrow, certainly. But also because I have come to peace with the fact that this Family that I enjoy, this delicious new husband and this incredible daughter, they take work. And sacrifice. And love. And sweat. And swearing, just like wallpaper. And just like Art. It’s nothing to be ashamed of, this goal. This Family.
So, when an old friend, a friend from college who has no idea that I poke my nose in to her facebook pictures and look longingly at her insanely gorgeous headshots and laugh until I cry at her youtube videos, wrote me recently and said “you are such a beautiful mommy…..honestly, i sneak peeks at you and sweet emily all the time on fbook” I cried. Because this woman that I admire, that I secretly wanted to be when I grew up even when we were twenty-two years old and drinking 40 ounce beers while we water-colored our Costume Design final exams… she said she sneak peeks at me. And what she sees is a beautiful mommy.
And it made me cry. Because I smiled and thought “god damn right, I am.” And I was proud. That, my friends, is progress.
Thank you, Nina. You just get more and more fabulous.
So if I had a Magic 8 ball on my person at all times I know what I would ask it. Several times a day I look to the Universe to answer the question “Am I out of my fucking mind?” With my eyebrows scrunched together and a quizzical look on my face. Because really, sometimes I wonder. And by sometimes I mean a few times a day. In the last few weeks I asked myself this question daily when I got home from work. Or really every time I walked in to the living room.
I hate moth balls. And cats. I have two cats. But no moth balls. About three weeks ago I thought I smelled moth balls. So, naturally I blamed the cats. I checked the pockets of all their winter coats. No moth balls. So I assumed it was the new cat litter. Cat litter and the fact that we have pets that crap in a box IN OUR HOUSE can be blamed for all kinds of things in my Universe. It must smell like moth balls. The new litter.
So, I wait. And I try not to let the moth ball smell ruin my evenings. And by ruin my evenings I mean distract me from eating bowls of ice cream and watching shitty TV. The weekend comes and MQD changes the litter. Even though he most definitely can NOT smell the moth balls.
Monday rolls around and I come home from work. Open the door. MOTH BALLS. I am losing my mind. I must be. He changed the litter. My house can not smell like moth balls. Because this heinous scent must be the fault of the cats. I trudge on through my week. Avoiding my couch. In the living room. Where I enjoy relaxing. I am feeling angry and crazy. A bad combination. I live through the week. But it is touch and go.
Saturday morning comes. MQD and Em are doing their thing. Em is tearing apart her room. Changing her clothes every 45 seconds. MQD is downloading some music, because surely there has been music released since last week when he had a copy of everything ever recorded on his hard drive. I take this opportunity to do that kind of cleaning that is fueled by anger. I furiously sweep up dog hair. I mopped. I hate mopping. I vacuum. I shoved the couch back and vacuumed that sliver of rug that is mostly under the couch. I change the bag in my vacuum and clean out the inside of my vacuum cleaner. I pulled out the suitcases under the bed and got the cat hair off of them and swept under there. My entire downstairs smelled like Simple Green.
Success. It must have been cat hair that smelled like moth balls. MQD leaves for the grocery store and I sit down on the couch. Em is in her room. I am relaxed. I exhale. I inhale. Oh hell no, motherfuckers… MOTH BALLS. I smell them, this is no joke. I am filled with rage.
In a moment that can only be blamed on hormones I jumped up from the couch. Kicked the coffee table back in to the room. And flipped my motherfucking couch over. I was, of course, expecting to find a cat. A cat in a coat it had gotten from a thrift store. The thrift store having gotten this coat at an estate sale. Or maybe a cat in an ancient wool cardigan. Suspiciously free of holes. But there were no cats under my couch. In coats or sweaters. But what I did find there…. it was like I had asked the Giant Magic 8 Ball of the Universe if I was crazy and it had answered once and for all. “Oh hell no. No. You are not.”
Em came running down the stairs. Perhaps because I shrieked. Perhaps because I was flipping over furniture like a drunk in a barfight. “Go back upstairs!” I hollered. As if I had in my hand a MOTH BALL sized ball of plutonium.
So, I ran out on the porch. And I waited. For MQD to get home. With it in my hand. And I yelled, gleefully as he exited his car. “LOOK AT THIS!!! I found this under the god damn couch. I am NOT CRAZY!”
I thought about putting it in a jar. And saving it. Like my own Magic 8 Ball that always said the same thing. “You are NOT crazy.”
Sadly this feeling of euphoria only lasted a couple of days. I haven’t been sleeping very well so my early morning thought processing has been all over the place. I woke up this week thinking about how I really don’t think I can ever wear contact lenses again. At least not why I have my period. Because knowing that a menstrual cup works because of the suction it has around your cervix, and that contact lenses don’t fall out because they are in a way suction cupped to your eyeballs… I don’t think I could handle both at the same time. And I started imagining these opposing forces of vacuum seal… and my eyeballs would get sucked down my throat, my lady bits pulled up in to my guts and they’d meet somewhere around the center of my chest. Yup. Back to feeling like maybe I am just not quite right. At least things are back to normal.
I’ve been to hell. I spell it…I spell it DMV
~ Les Claypool
A typical Monday morning for me is a lot more Bangles and a lot less Primus. But I don’t typically go to the DMV first thing Monday morning. Walking out of the house with my lunch, my kid, my dog, a piece of fresh fruit for school, the mail that needs to go out, both doors locked, alarm on, cats fed, do I have my phone… that’s enough for me on an average Monday. But as of this Monday morning I have been married for six weeks. I have had an expired driver’s license with the wrong name for five. It was time to take the bull by the horns.
But why Monday morning? Because I had already given the DMV four shots. The first time I went very early in the morning, just after they opened. I went first to the courthouse for a copy of our marriage certificate and then immediately to the DMV. Nope, I still needed a social security card. No problem. Went to the social security office. An hour and half in to my wait at the social security office the muzak was making me anxious. I elected to drive very carefully and under the speed limit on my expired license until my social security card came in the mail. I filled out the form, put my marriage certificate and my birth certificate (an original copy from when I was a baby, how proud am I for never losing THAT!?) in to an envelope and sent it on its merry way.
A week or so later my documents were returned to me sans social security card. This seems like a strange waste of money but what do I know. And three days later my card arrived. Back to the DMV I go. This time in the middle of the day, the day that Em graduated when I had an hour or so free in the middle of the day. I thought that was an appropriate way to honor the little graduate. “Congrats on your accomplishment, welcome to the real world. You’re going to the DMV.” We went in, we got a number, we sat down. The tricky numbering system of both Letters and Numbers means you never really know how many people are in front of you. But it was shortly after eleven o’clock in the morning. And when I overheard a woman say that she had been there since 8:45 am I elected to call it quits. I would never make it out of there before Em lost her mind.
Trip to the DMV number three . Seven am. They don’t open until eight. I am almost giddy with excitement as I pull in to the parking lot and round the corner to see…. thirty two people already in line. Yes, I counted.
Trip number four , the suspense is mounting can you feel it? 3:00 pm, two hours before they close. Packed to the gills and no longer handing out tickets. Sigh, another weekend as a daredevil without a valid license.
I was not to be defeated. Enter Primus. Trips one through four did not have theme songs. This was clearly my problem. (Special thanks to MQD for reminding me of this stellar tune.) Nor did they have beach chairs. Or refreshments. Or books. I was first in line. It was just almost 6:30 am. For the first twenty minutes I was all alone. It was almost like early morning at the beach, only in a strip mall. The sun on your legs, but you can still feel the chill in the air from the night before. And then I was joined by the second person in line. I mustered every bit of “Please do not talk to me” I have and kept my face in my book. Ten, twenty minutes passed. “I thought I would be first in line,” he said. I only smiled. Success. He went out to his car to get a book. At approximately 7:30 a man asked me if he could get in front of me for $20. “Sure, and in front of all these other people… at $20 a pop, I figure that will run you between four and five hundred bucks.” And another big smile. That conversation didn’t last long either.
Eight am, on the dot, the door opens. I get my ticket A101. “Now serving A101 at desk 1.” This alone was reason to celebrate. My personal DMV employee having come straight from the 1984 Police Academy cast of extras was the icing on the cake.
Some highlights.
“How long have you been married? You’re the happiest damn woman I have ever seen at the DMV. ”
“Do you ever act like a total bitch? My boyfriend he just bought me four new tires and I was hateful to him last night, just hateful… I didn’t sleep at all thinking about it…”
“Only 35 years old, you’re real sexy. I’m not a lesbian, I have had the same boyfriend for 16 years, been with the DMV for 20. In Siler City for 17. But you’re really chesty for being so thin, that’s nice.”
She has me smooth out my pigtails before I take my picture. “Ooh, now that is a nice picture. You have a real nice face, m’aam. A real nice face.”
“You know this is a real stressful job, you have no idea. Now I need to read off of this card and quit cutting up… you practice writing that brand new name for a few minutes.”
I thought she was going to hug me when I left. With my temporary driver’s license in hand. At 8:16 am. The best Monday morning I have had in some time. And the very best trip to the DMV. Hands down.
In eight more years I hope to go back and say hello to her again. In the meantime, this happy gal with the nice jugs and the real nice face will be driving willy-nilly all over the place.
Excitement on the side 