2012
Four Bears in the Bed
When I think of older siblings regressing in advance of an impending newborn (yes, this again), I imagine them asking to be carried, fed, dressed, and allowed to communicate in a series of goo-goos and ga-gas even though none of the above has been necessary for many months or years. I can hear their little voices tweaking out “I’m the baby!” and I can see their still chubby knees flushing with pink after a semi-convincing performance of infant crawling technique across the floor.
Wombat’s regression move of choice is not so typical or innocent as all that. He prefers to hide under my dress. In my dress. While I’m wearing it. As in, head all up in my ladybusiness, which is (a) all the more awkward because, at 3.5 years old, he’s exactly crotch height, and (b) all the more uncomfortable because El Mompth is 38 weeks cooked and HEAVY and the cause of some, uh, tenderness in the netherness, meaning I don’t need a spastic preschooler flailing around that close to the Danger Zone. I should never have allowed myself to follow Freud down the rabbithole and imagine that this was Wombat’s way of regressing—it’s clearly a dramatization of his wanting to get back in through the out hole, ja?—but I did and it’s done and now it’s all I can think about.
Ignoring whatever Oedipal implications may be at play here, though, and aside from the fact that Wombat tells everyone at daycare what color my panties are (“Mite! Okaasan pantsu kiiro!”; I don’t know Japanese, but I KNOW WHAT THAT MEANS, CHILD), it’s just not that fun having a kid up your skirt, you dig? This is where I’d advise someone in a similar situation to “Wear pants, duh,” but listen: Pants ain’t happening. Pants are not a part of Plans A through Z. Pants forsook me, and so I have forsaken pants. And yet…in some moments pants seem like the only solution to keeping my younger child in and my older child out. I am heaving the heaviest of heavy sighs.
Anyway, after a few weeks of “ha ha, that’s cute, now stop it,” I’m now firmly committed to being a hardass about the skirt-as-tent thing. I’m instituting a lock-down from the top down. ’Scool, though, since I’m happily indulging his other requests, including to snuggle into bed next to me when he wakes up early (even though there is NO ROOM with Simon and me and Mompth and the body pillow and two extra-clingy cats) and also to be carried for short stretches when he insists he’s “not a very good walker” and reaches up his arms to me the way he did when he really wasn’t a very good walker.
Last night we went on a tour of our hospital’s labor and delivery ward, and the second-best part was holding Wombat up against the window so he could watch a brand new baby boy get his diaper changed in the nursery. “Awwwww! Isn’t he so cute!” Wombat cooed, and “Awwwww! We totally have to have another kid after this one” I heard murmur from the hearts of all the first-time mothers on the tour.
Now, it’s no easy task to hold/carry 35 pounds of kid on top of (literally on top of) 40 pounds of baby weight, but aside from it being necessary for either Simon or I to keep him out of reach of all the hospital equipment (we hear beep beep, beep beep, but kids hear touch me! touch me!), I really don’t mind carrying him when I’m able because that’s one tangible way I can express how so very proud I am—for lack of a more accurate word—to be the mother of these two boys. Holding him up to see someone else’s new baby boy in the nursery was more than adequate payoff for the back and hip and vag pain I suffered for the rest of the night as a result.
I’m especially proud for having been brave and/or temporarily insane enough to be giving this second boy to the first, because as jazzed as I am to welcome a new person into the family, I’m more excited for Wombat than for any of the rest of us (except for maybe Mompth himself, whose muffled refrain these days is surely “I’m crowded! Roll over!”) I’m nervous about what a new baby will do to our routine and our relative freedom, but I’m shocked to report that I’m not (yet?) feeling protective of my relationship with my firstborn. As a person who is ever on the precipice of tumbling into bottomless nostalgia—the type of person who mourns the passing of an era while that era is still happening—I can’t believe I haven’t become overwhelmed with grief about the end of Wombat’s singlehood, about our time together as special pals who don’t have to share our mother-son relationship with anyone else. “You’re my favorite little guy,” Simon tells him at least once a day, but now “And when Mompth is here, I’ll have two favorite little guys.” (Damn it. I’m writing about how cool and unaffected I am by the coming change, but now I’m making myself cry about it…)
Still, although when it comes to adding another person to my life I’m a mix of every good and bad emotion there is, the remaining fact is that inflicting (inflicting!) a sibling on Wombat feels like 100 percent the awesome thing to do. He’s going to be such a great brother, you guys. As his parent, it’s not my job to be his friend, but that doesn’t mean I can’t make one for him.
So we all rolled over and, fingers crossed, no one fell out. All of us in the bed and the little one said (or will say, eventually), “Ah-goo,” and the hearts of his three adoring onlookers—Mama, Daddy, and his best big brother friend—explode in a burst of rainbow confetti and we are crowded but, oh, so happy happy happy.
2012
Gamechanger
A friend of ours who seems to be on the cusp of babymaking asked us recently “Does having a kid really completely change your life?” My short (and obvious) answer was that it mostly depends on what kind of life you’re living before kids come along. If you’re out clubbing and drinking yourself into a stupor until 3 a.m. every night and spending the first half of every morning reading your important work emails through a hangover, then yes, having a baby will change things. Maybe not as much as the person who’s used to staying home and going to bed at a reasonable hour, actually, since the former will at least be accustomed to not getting enough sleep, but overall I think the Change Factor really does depend on what kind of life you’re going to be inserting a new needy little person into and, perhaps more importantly, how you feel about that. (Will you miss your wild nights and resent your child/partner for it, or will you wholeheartedly embrace the new order of things without a look back? Or will you fall somewhere in between—maybe wistfully wishing for your former life while sucking it up and being the type of parent your child wants and deserves, even when you just don’t feel like it?)
“I worry that I might be too selfish to have kids,” our friend said. “I want to do what I want to do, you know?”
Ah, selfishness. Skipping lightly over the old argument about whether it’s more selfish to have children or not have them (both!), again I think it depends on the ways in which you’re selfish, and also how willingly you can accept that a healthy amount of selfishness as a parent is, indeed, healthy, both for you and your child, as well as the family unit as a whole.
I’m pretty selfish. If I’m eating a cookie and Wombat wants it, I will either begrudgingly give him a bite or tell him to go get his own. I do not have the martyr gene that would light up my brain with endorphins if I gave him the whole cookie. I do not fear him loving me any less if I don’t cater to his every demand. (One thing you will never hear said in this family, even as a joke, is “The kids run the show here! They’re the bosses!”) Furthermore, putting aside the fact that I really like cookies, isn’t this an opportunity to teach a kid about boundaries, about respecting people and their property? Some might argue with this next statement, but last time I checked, moms were people too. Good citizenship starts at home!
So I’m selfish, but mostly (I hope) on a micro level about relatively minor things, none of which will do lasting damage to my children and our relationship. The problem that comes up when discussing selfishness and parenthood is that people sometimes overgeneralize and think that Doing Something for Yourself is the same thing as Being Selfish. It’s not.
Last year Simon won a series of consultations with a professional triathlon trainer, and last week he finally cashed it in. In the course of their initial interview, the coach asked him what his goals were, and right up near the top was “I want my sons to see me doing something good for myself and my health. Something independent. Something that makes me happy.” Now, you might argue that being in a band fulfills enough of that criteria, and while it does, it’s also not the case that Simon should have to choose one or the other in order to consider himself a devoted family man (at least not as things stand right now; Baby #2 might change that, but we’ll see). That he wants to get up at ungodly hours to pedal himself into a puddle of sweat is no skin off my back so long as he doesn’t make too much noise pouring his coffee while I’m trying to sleep.
And what’s better for the family: for Simon to be home every night to read the boys bedtime stories, or for him to be gone every once in a while with the explanation that Dad is out getting his exercise or playing in a band like a super-awesome rockstar? Whenever I’ve skipped town to go to a blogging event, I’ve missed my family, sure, but I’ve also felt like I was doing something great for all of us by getting away. Absence = fonder hearts and all that, plus, when I’m away, the boys do fun things like set up tents in the living room, and when Simon’s away, Wombat and I eat cereal for dinner in front of the t.v. Yay!
Basically, I say that if you like going to baseball games before you have kids, you can still go to baseball games after you have them. Maybe you don’t go to ALL the baseball games, but you CAN go. (Or at least you should be able to if you co-parent isn’t psycho.) Maybe you don’t get to go when your kid is a newborn, and maybe there comes a point at which you have to (get to?) take the kid along, but—and however basic and women’s-magaziney this line is, it’s still TRUE—having a kid shouldn’t mean giving up the things you love. (I’m glad Simon’s not really into alligator wrestling or happily employed as a food tester for some dignitary in danger of being poisoned, because those things I might make him give up the way my mom pretty much made my dad give up hang gliding when I was born.) (He was self-taught and using a glider from a mail-order kit! That can’t be safe!)
When I think about all the activities Simon’s into, I sometimes wonder if I’m doing enough myself. Should I be doing more “me stuff” to show my kids what an independent woman looks like? Should I take a dance class? Should I join a photography group? I certainly could…but I don’t really want to. I blog, I craft, I watch t.v. Those are the things that make me happy. The prospect of spending evenings and weekend swith my family pretty much trumps anything else, but the kicker is this choice (choice!) comes out on top not because it should but because it just does. In that way, I suppose becoming a parent did change my life in that it changed my priorities. But it changed them naturally, it didn’t force me—kicking and screaming—to change them, see. The difference is huge.
When Wombat tries to take my cookie or wants me to get up and play with him at 7 a.m. on a Saturday, do I have any trouble saying no? No. NO. Do I feel guilty about that? Sometimes a little. And when I don’t feel guilty, do I then feel guilty about not feeling guilty? Sometimes yes and sometimes no. Becoming a mother didn’t make me magically unselfish in every way, from the big stuff to the small stuff. As a wise man once crooned, “I would do anything for love, but I won’t do that,” where for me “that” can mean no, MY COOKIE. Being a parent also means the very mundane task of being the adult and taking care of shit that needs to be taken care of. So no, I won’t leave my full shopping cart in the middle of the aisle because my child has suddenly decided he’s bored with the grocery store and would prefer we relocate to the nearest park posthaste. Parents have to suck it up a lot, but sometimes kids have to learn to suck it up too.
Kids join our lives. That bears repeating in all caps. KIDS JOIN OUR LIVES. The extent to which we fold them into what already exists versus mold everything around them can make a huge difference in how a [selfish] person adjusts to being a parent. That’s not the way it is or should be for everyone, of course, and I know plenty of people who truly do feel like they were born to have children, and to parent them at the expense of their own personhood (and happily so). I am not like that (nor is Simon), and I think the trick is to recognize which type of parent/person you are and then be as true to that as possible, while also keeping your kids’ best interests in mind. There is (should be!) a lot of overlap in the Venn diagram of “Me” and “Parent.” Anyway, I think a slightly selfish parent can go a long way toward creating a not-completely-selfish-and-spoiled child.
Having a kid certainly changes the game, but it doesn’t completely change your life (unless you want it to/let it). And while being a parent is forever, not much about the day-to-day experience of being a parent remains the same for very long, so if something sucks, it probably won’t suck for that long or that hard in the grand scheme of things. It’s all temporary. All of it, the good and the bad. The stuff that’s tough now won’t always be so tough. The easy stuff sometimes gets much, much harder. Newborns are hard, but so are toddlers and preschoolers and teenagers and adult children. They’re also all awesome in their own way. Hopefully the process gets easier over time, as you get to know your child better, as well as become more familiar with yourself as a parent and the family dynamic as a whole, and with this comes greater confidence in being able to take whatever comes your way, even if a lot of the time you feel like you don’t know what the hell you’re doing. It doesn’t get easier, it just gets different. You will get different too.
Does having a baby completely change your life? Yes and no. No and yes. Does having a baby completely change you, sometimes in ways that make you want to change your life. Yes. Yes. That’s called being alive. That’s called living.
2012
In the Golden Afternoon
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Whenever I spend enough time in the sun to get any color (i.e., for the sunblock in my moisturizer to be baked off my face and rendered null), I can never tell if my hair also got bleached lighter blonde or if having a slightly darker (pinker) face is just making it look that way. Regardless, I’m a little pink and possibly a bit blonder, and here’s how we spent Sunday afternoon:
(On the way to our final destination, Wombat apparently stopped to get some botox lip injections.)
See that little patch of beach in the lower left? That’s where we’re headed.
I can see my house from here! (No, you can’t.)
Holly reserved a picnic spot at Kirby Cove and invited some friends for a potluck. The best way to describe the location is: “Ridiculous.”
The best way to describe the food is: “I couldn’t stop eating and now I’m having two babies, one of whom is made entirely of pasta salad.”
There were a pack of kids there, which I thought would be great for getting Wombat out of our hair (he is still being…challenging), but as it turns out, he preferred being in Auntie Holly’s hair to everything else, and I have quite a few pictures of them in the midst of special one-on-one Wombat/Holly activities that included flying a kite, running down the beach, getting in some good, uh, “face time”(?), and playing house high on a hill where no one could reach them. (“Holly was the mommy and I was the daddy!”)
He also put his jacket under her feet before massaging them, which is only upsetting because he never does that for ME.
Massage snub aside, it was a glorious day of eating and lounging and absorbing every last molecule of everything great about living in the Bay Area.
Like I said: RIDICULOUS.
Here’s thirty seconds of the day (and a few more photos here).
At T-minus sixteen days until Baby Day, if this is the last social event we’ll get to all summer, you won’t hear me complain.
