“Good night, kiddo. Sleep tight. I love you, and I am so proud of you. ” I kissed her on the forehead last night.
“Good night, Mom. I love you, too. And I am really proud of myself!”
I was going to let her sleep in a few extra minutes this morning. But as I walked upstairs to her bedroom and saw her light on, I smiled. There she was. Dressed. Hair done. She was ready.
She was ready. And off she went.
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 am not very good at “trying not to get excited.” Last night at about 9:15 we submitted an offer on a house. Not just any house, but “the one.” The House that could become “the one that got away” if it doesn’t work out. And now we wait.
I have said to anyone that will listen today that I feel like I asked a girl to prom and she just stared at me. Not yes, not no. Just nothing. I understand the dance. The Negotiating Dance. But I don’t enjoy it. I can’t. I am too busy trying not to get excited.
So when we sat down to dinner tonight I didn’t expect to get hysterical giggles. Maybe I should have. Nobody makes me forget my troubles like the goons I live with.
MQD bursts out in to some spontaneous air drums and Em rolls her eyes. He says “You’d better get used to it. I am gonna be embarrassing you for at LEAST fifteen more years.”
“You wish,” she replies.
MQD tends to adopt the same teenage manner of speech in response to Em’s. “Do you even know what that MEANS?”
“Yeah, it means you HOPE you can embarrass me for fifteen years….”
“So, what are you gonna do?” he asks her.
She pauses only briefly before she busts out her own sick air guitar. Duh. What do you think she is gonna do to combat your efforts to embarrass her with your air drumming? Show you up with her fierce air guitar. Puhleaze.
A week after we got married we were pregnant. Last Thursday we started looking at real estate and this morning we put in an offer on a house.
Last night we went to kindergarten orientation. I cried twice. Once when she waved from the tippy top of the great big climbing apparatus on the playground and again when she took my hand as we were leaving.
Considering the speed with which we like to get things done in this family … I think it is perfectly reasonable to feel like Em might graduate from high school before the end of the month.
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 don’t talk a lot about the reasons why Emily is the best kid ever. (And before you convince yourself that I am already screwing up the new kid in-utero, know that we have addressed this. Em will be the “best kid ever” and Baby D, as Mike as dubbed him/her will be “the best baby ever.”) But damn that kid slays me daily.
I have found myself, at sixteen weeks pregnant, smack dab in the midst of “no longer first semester crippling tired” but still exhausted. Definitely pregnant looking, not just fat as hell, but not yet comfortable with the emerging pregnant body that I had somehow managed to totally forget was going to appear. And so hormonally driven to the point that when I got home from work yesterday evening and MQD was making dinner and turned to switch his ipod over to The Gravy Boys, playing Happy, a song we danced to at our wedding I pulled my hands back from him (hands he’d taken in his, lovingly, presumably to dance with me) screeching “I have BANANA on my hands, I can smell it! It’s disgusting.” I’m a peach recently. (And incapable of linear thought, evidently, but stay with me. )
So, that’s me the last few days. I sing the praises of the Husband on the regular, like a proper newlywed, but back to Emily. That kid has kept my cranky at bay quite a bit lately. Last night, amidst my grumpiness, we snuggled up on the couch the three, (four, no five, cats and dogs love sharks, who knew!) to watch some Shark Week. I promptly fell in to a catatonic sleep. I could hear Em & MQD go upstairs to read a book and get her tucked in to bed. I could hear MQD come back downstairs and go in the kitchen. I was willing myself up off the couch to deliver my kiss goodnight and failing miserably when I heard her little feet coming down the stairs.
Anyone with children knows they sound like a herd of elephants when they walk around the house (pitter patter of little feet, my ass) unless they are returning downstairs after being put to bed. Then they are quiet as mice. The magic of being a parent allows me to sleep through being stepped on by the dog, sat on by my 40 pound kid and Shark Week “turned up to 11” and still sit upright when I hear the little lady has popped out of bed and is sneaking down the stairs. Just as I started to say “Em, go back to bed, I am coming right up” I see her face. Something about her eyes stops me and I don’t say a word. She puts her arms around my neck and said “You’re so tired, mama, just go to bed. I came down here to get my hug and kiss. See you in the morning, now you get some sleep.”
Determined to stay grumpy I stumbled towards the bedroom. As soon as I lay down, however, I smiled. That kid. She is kinder than I even aspire to be.
In keeping with the spirit of my Bad Mood That Will Not Cease I developed a crippling hangover style headache about five minutes after I went to bed last night. So, I got up, grabbed an ice pack and hit the couch. MQD had (again, lovingly, dammit this family is making me look like an asshole!) joined me in bed to hold my hand, asking me “Is there anything I can do?” moments before falling promptly to sleep. He can fall asleep in record time. Quite possibly even faster than Fisher. There is nothing more irritating than being tired, incapable of falling asleep and surrounded by slumbering loved ones. And besides, only when everyone is asleep can I watch truly shitty television in secrecy. And eat ice cream from the container.
All of that to say when I woke up this morning I wasn’t thrilled to be awake. After just a handful of hours of fitful sleep I pried my eyes open to say goodbye to MQD before he left for work. “Is Em up?” I asked “Yep. I brushed her hair. She is putting away her laundry.” Music to my ears!!
Not only do I have the kindest child on earth, I also seem to have spawned a kid that loves to organize. When she was overtired after a trip to Disney and a a few long days on vacation, what did she do? Retire to her room to organize her suitcase. When she is cranky from a long day at the pool and no nap where does she run off to? Her room, to organize her markers. While some parents might awake on a Saturday to the sound of silence, bolt out of bed and run to find their kid, dreading the disaster they will most surely find, I wake up late on a Saturday to find her cleaning her room.
I popped my head in to her room before jumping in the shower to see her smiling, organizing her socks. “This top drawer gets so messy. Before I put away my laundry it needs to be more organized.”
She is kind. She is tidy. Reasons one and two Em is the best kid ever. Reason number three is short and sweet. That kid is funny.
I was in the bathroom putting my make up on when she came up the stairs, slapping her knee and shaking her head. When she was three or four I taught her to say “a real knee-slapper” in response to someone’s joke. Probably around the same time I taught her to roll her eyes, when I first began to believe sarcasm was a quality to be cultivated in a child. She still rolls her eyes, much to my chagrin. But she also still slaps her knee, much to my delight. So, knee slapping away, she is coming up the stairs. “What’s so funny?”
“How many times do you think Fisher had breakfast today?” I pause, unsure of when the punchline is coming. “Well… Two! maybe even three!! I fed him while you were in the shower. I just saw he is eating AGAIN, so you must have fed him when you went downstairs to get dressed. Oh man, I bet Dad fed him this morning, too…” and she strolls back into her room to finish tidying up, giggling to herself.
It was not particularly funny, the dog eating twice, possibly three times this morning. It was her delivery. She could give a rat’s ass if I thought it was funny. She was amused. She shared. But mostly it was for her. Cracking herself up. Just for her own entertainment. Takes after her mother.
Em is a delightful reminder. Be kind. Clean up after yourself. And most importantly, entertain yourself. No one else is as funny as you.
Unless you live with these clowns. These two make me happy I never get rid of the crap in my “costume box.” Silver lamé and a fur buff make for some pretty hard core fun.
Sometimes there is enough swirling about in the head and the heart that the only way to make sense of it is to write it all down and see what comes out. And sometimes there aren’t really words to express what is brewing in there.
In 1976 I sat on my grandfather’s lap.
In ’79, maybe ’80 I liked to sit in his office that smelled like maraschino cherries and paper.
Somewhere around 1982 I fully understood we were not allowed to sit in his car unless we had washed our hands. It was 1987 before I knew for sure he could not rub a penny in to his forearm and pull a dime out of my ear. But only 1985 when I figured out how to make the “butterfly” fly away and come back again.
Pop-Pop took a spill recently, not the first of them, and I daresay if he can get himself up and at it again it will not be the last. But as I rounded the corner at the nursing home to see him on his exercise bike I smiled. He had an orange exercise bike in his basement office on Long Island. It was the first exercise bike I had ever seen. I tried to keep that smile on my face as I got the words out of my mouth “Pop-Pop, it’s Kelly…” not knowing if he’d recognize me.
He smiled at me. And at first I thought I’d made it up that he looked a little exasperated with me for introducing myself. But over the remainder of my visit he smirked when Mom told him I was pregnant, and “having a baby.” As if to suggest that “of course I was pregnant with a BABY, Sherlock.” He comes and goes, in and out. Tired. But in the moments that he is 100% there he is exactly the grandfather I had my whole life. He responds to everything you say with a sly smile and a joke that makes you laugh even if you’re not positive it was not at your expense.
I wanted two things out of visiting him. I wanted him to know that we were there and for him to meet Em. And I wanted Em to meet him. She dutifully showed him his own butterfly trick. The magic trick he had taught me. Although he had the resolve to wait until I’d figured out how he did it for the most part before he showed me.
He knew we were there. We were leaving and he looked at Emily with those blue eyes that are as blue today as they have ever been and kinda snarled at her and laughed and suggested that she put her “dukes up” and I laughed and said “Oh, now he wants to pick a fight with you, while we are leaving, Em!” He smiled again before he closed his eyes and drifted back to wherever he goes when right now is too tiring, too painful, too… right now. But before he closed his eyes she giggled. And I knew she got to really meet him.
In the middle of our trip we did the only thing that makes sense to do. I am sure I am not alone in the opinion that a nursing home can feel like one of the most difficult, most challenging… saddest places on earth. So where do you go to balance things out? Disney World, of course.
There was a moment during a show in front of Cinderella’s Castle that I turned to look at Emily. I snapped a quick picture and I wish I had gotten one of myself. I think I looked roughly the same. Only I had big, fat tears rolling down my face. Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty and Belle, spinning around the stage singing “Dreams really do come true…” it was too much for this sappy girl.
I haven’t written much about MQD’s and my wedding or about the overwhelming sense of joy I feel every time I am reminded that I am pregnant. There just really aren’t any words. Emily’s face in this moment… like she is looking at something that is absolutely 100 % everything she dreamed it would be. That’s how I feel every morning lately.
I was painfully aware of this all weekend. I made it. To the part where my dreams come true. And somehow I can’t stop thinking about anything but that if I don’t slow down and feel it… I’ll blink my eyes and be reaching out to hold the hand of my great grandchildren before I know it. If I’m lucky…
Clarissa she is not. But Em is in the know.
There is a lot going on in her five year old life, and she is taking it all in stride. With the impending arrival of a sibling there has been plenty of talk of babies and new life. I let her watch The Business of Being Born not too awful long ago and she ate it up. She is curious and occasionally worried about me. I think she is right at the age where she can grasp just enough information to make her want more but not she is not quite ready to wrap her mind around the rest. MQD and I are perfecting the art of simply answering the question that was posed. Not too much information, not too little. We will be the Goldilocks of Sex Ed by the time it is all said and done.
About half of the time Em opens her mouth it starts with “Can I tell you something?” So yesterday in the car when she asked that very question it didn’t prepare MQD or I for what was coming. “Did you know you will actually have to watch your wife? Actually have a baby out her vagina?”
This is when I started furiously typing on my phone. Typically advice that Em dispenses is good. But the advice she gives MQD where she refers to me as “your wife” is classic. “And this is important to know. It is serious. It might hurt Mom a little bit.”
And for dramatic effect she begins to get choked up… “And it will come out of her vagina like magic. And you might be a little nervous, Dad. And a little excited. I’m just telling you. It is important that you know this stuff. You might start crying. And maybe we can at least read my baby books. I have two baby books. We can read them so you will know how it is.”
I had tears running down my face from laughter. I just want to make sure I get in the right line at the midwife’s office. I want the magical vaginal delivery, please.
Sadly, all conversation this weekend was not about Life.
I am not counting weekends between now and the middle of January yet. I don’t need to. It won’t be long before MQD has a shared Google spreadsheet “Things to Do Before Baby” with budgeted amounts of time and money in their own columns. But my Cook and Clean genes have been in overdrive. And I can feel the Becky Home-Eccy in me taking over.
My keen sense of smell had me in a frenzy again on Sunday. I woke up early, as I always do when I don’t need to actually go anywhere. I read in bed until 7:45 when my “Take Vitamin” alarm went off on my phone. I realized I should probably go upstairs and make sure Em was still alive. As I ran up the stairs I had the “I smell CAT PEE” shakes. I hoped it was the litter box with a fresh deposit. But as I hit the top of the stairs I knew I was wrong. As soon as I stopped at the landing and looked towards the guest room I knew.
Before the “I smell CAT PEE” frenzy took hold I did open Em’s door. To find her naked and cleaning her room. “What are you doing?”
“Well, I woke up really early and I figured if I cleaned my whole room right away it would make you really happy. And then we can just do fun stuff the rest of the day.” Girl after my 0wn heart. Her room was damn near immaculate. But even a total lack of legos on the floor, even all dress up clothes in the toy box, all markers in their box WITH lids was not enough to stop the CAT PEE frenzy.
A month ago it was on our bed. Cat pee. But maybe one of the cats got locked in the bedroom? Last week it was cat pee on the couch. But it was on a quilt, and easily washed, and perhaps since I had stopped nagging MQD about the litter box it hadn’t been dumped this week? And now it was in the guest room.
I turned to go back down the steps and stopped two steps down to open the window at the top of the stairs. I sniffed and dropped to my knees. And smelled CAT PEE. On the landing. When you are pregnant and already striking the pose of a keening old woman it is tempting to throw your arms in the air and begin to wail. I mean, in case anyone was filming a Lifetime movie about this poor woman and the CAT PEE I really ought to give them their money shot, right? But I’d have had to bury my head in my arms. On the cat pee carpet. And I just couldn’t be bothered Lifetime movie or no.
At first I was furious. And then I thought we’d just have to bring another litter box upstairs, if Stan can’t make it down the steps. And then I was broken-hearted. If you’re not following along at home, it was a mish mash of Kübler-Ross’ Stages of Grief. The last being acceptance. My sixteen year old cat that bites. That has never been particularly friendly. But that has lived with me in every home I have had since I was 20 years old.
She is unpleasant, as she has always been. But she has never peed in the house. I think it might be Time.
So, hours later, after the purchase of rubber gloves and oxy-clean and Spot Shot and Arm & Hammer carpet sprinkle…. I laid down on the carpet next to that damn cat. And then I cried like an old woman at an Irish wake.
Stanley and I reminisced. About the late nights on Mount Vernon Avenue in Williamsburg. And the time she scared my roommate, Greg B, so badly that he actually called out in the middle of the night for someone to rescue him from her. I reminded her about that creepy puppet I kept in a cabinet that she hated. She’d stare at the cabinet for hours. Switching her tail back and forth. We laughed about how she hid for almost two weeks in our master bedroom closet when we moved to the beach and how she hid again when we brought Em home from the hospital. I apologized for letting Fish chase her when he was a pup. But it was so damn funny to watch her big, fat ass hiss at his tiny floppy puppy face. And I apologized for the laser pointer shenanigans. Because that’s just really not a very nice game.
As we reminisced I realized that there isn’t much in the way of memories in the last few years. She comes out from under the bed every now and again to holler at the youngins. Hiss at Fisher. She jumps in bed with Em on occasion. But that is likely all the human touch she gets. Since we don’t tend to hang out much under the guest room bed.
I assumed she came out to eat when we weren’t home. Or rather I’d been hoping she was eating. But lying on the floor surrounded by the Lysol cat pee smell I knew what I was looking at was the end. And she bit me on the face. And it made me laugh. God damn that cat. I never really liked her, even as a kitten, and now she was making me cry.
So, the latter half of the weekend we talked to Em about death. She wants to have a party for Stan. With cat treats. And give her extra snuggles. The strange conversation we had about how when someone is really, really old they can die “any minute, right before your eyes” is perhaps worth writing down. But I can’t now. I need to go ahead and call the vet while I am already crying about that god damn cat.
Stan, you’ve been my “god damn cat” for almost sixteen years. You have seen a lot. Heart break, marriages, divorce, birth. You have not consoled me on one single occasion. But I knew you were around. And I guess I got used to the idea. That you’d always be around. I kinda thought you’d just live forever. It’s not the first time being wrong about something has made me cry.
Sitting in my lap on the floor in the guest room, Em put her arms around my neck and kissed me. “Mommy, we can get another kitty cat, another little girl cat.”
And with big fat heavy tears of sadness rolling down my face I hugged her back and said “Oh, no, honey. Mommy hates cats.”
I’m gonna miss you Stanley Manley.
If you thought this would be a post about Sexy Time you will be sorely disappointed. While The Jerk is my favorite movie of all time, sadly this morning I found that my special purpose is not so scintillating.
It seems from the moment I got pregnant I have been consumed with noting just how fast Em is growing up. Perhaps it is my hormones driving me to see that my “baby” is really quite capable of taking care of herself, so that I can shed a little of the guilt that comes with imagining trying to take care of an infant without taking anything away from the baby I have loved for the last six years.
If I am lucky when I wake up in the morning Em is still asleep. I revel in climbing in to bed with her and feeling her warm little body against mine. So many years of co-sleeping behind me, I miss her morning face. Her squinched up sleepy eyes as she awakes. And most of all the face she makes when she realizes that I know she is awake and she can’t fool me with her groaning an stretching. Occasionally I let her sleep in and she strolls in to the bathroom to chat with me while I shower. And more occasionally she is already awake when I get upstairs.
This morning she was up, lights on, door closed. This is a new thing for her, and one I am trying to respect. “Are you up, Em?”
“Yup, I’m getting dressed.”
Yesterday she received not one, but TWO new outfits in the mail from my mom AND a new pair of shoes. New shoes are to Emily roughly what they are to me. Nirvana. I certainly understood why she was up and ready to roll so early.
When I got out of the shower I hollered in to her room again. “Do your new shorts fit?”
“Yup, I just need to tighten the elastic.” If you have children, in particular one built like a bean pole, you are familiar. But for the sake of the three readers that might be reading that do not have kids I will explain. In most kid’s clothing these days there is elastic inside, with buttons, so as to tighten the waist to a particular size. To accommodate the bean poles, the kids that get taller every year but no bigger around. For this, I am grateful.
“You don’t need my help?”
She exits her bedroom, new outfit in place, socks perfectly folded down, new shoes tied. “Nope, I am going in three holes on each side. Fits perfectly.”
“So you don’t need me at all, do you? You’re all grown up?”
“No. I need you. ” An almost imperceptible pause. “To make sandwiches. And to pay.”
And there we have it. My Special Purpose. To make sandwiches. And to pay.
Damn kid, good thing she’s cute.
There are things you do differently with experience. Even if you do them exactly the same, the second time you do it with conviction. You are more certain that this path is the right path. Or perhaps you are more certain that you stumbled down the right path the first time quite by accident and that you will surely stumble down the path that is right again.
“No two pregnancies are the same!” say the cheerful women in the grocery store. And the midwife. And the woman at Em’s school. And my mother! (So, of course it is true!) This has certainly been the case. Everything about this first few months has been different. I think in large part because this time I know.
I know that this little being I am cooking will change my life in unimaginable ways. That I will love them in a way that I did not know was possible. That I will continue to feel their every movement, anticipate their every feeling long after I share my body with them.
Knowing this brings with it a fear I never had with Emily. I was never particularly afraid of miscarriage or a birth defect with Emily. Because I only loved the “idea” of a baby then. I could get pregnant again. And at 29 the red flags of “advanced maternal age” were not lurking behind every corner. But this time I know that I don’t want to get pregnant again. I want THIS baby. And I certainly do not want to shoulder the guilt of feeling that it was MY age that brought pain in to their less than PERFECT life. So there is Fear.
And with that Fear comes a deeper reverence.
I know I can do it. That is different this time, too. There is fear, certainly. But there is more Confidence than fear. My body grew a little human that grew up to be a sassy little thing that I adore. And my body will very likely not let me down. I can do it. I know this.
And I know it will not last forever. When I came home from work those first few weeks and could not imagine cooking dinner I knew that I’d not spend the next nine months on my couch. And I knew that my baby would be just fine if I did not eat anything but Cheerios and peanut butter jelly sandwiches for a week straight.
I know that I am not actually losing my mind. My first pregnancy I wondered if I’d ever be able to watch an SPCA commercial without hysterics. Or if I would ever be able to get out the door in less than five trips. I know now that my hormones will level out and eventually I will go back to just having quiet tears roll down my face all the god damn time instead of full on bawling. I will get out the door to get to work in only three trips, just like normal.
I know that I probably won’t pee in my pants. And that I won’t have to pee every 30 minutes forever. This is of particular importance to me today. The toilet in my office is broken, so I have to run next door to pee. And this is different now than it was when I was pregnant with Em. I’d never have been able to pee in a bathroom that was closer to a conference table filled with four people than it was to the sink. And I’d definitely not have been able to have done it three times during one 90 minute meeting, but this girl has got to go! And my first pregnancy did change that. I can pee anywhere now. Any time. On command, it is quite a skill.
Lastly… I know my shoes won’t fit in a few more months. And I love my shoes. So while I may comfortably settle in to wearing the same damn pair of jeans every day and a black shirt of my choosing I will be wearing fanfuckingtastic shoes until I am either too afraid I will topple over or I can’t jam my big fat pregnant feet in to them.
Excitement on the side 
