Background Noise

fever games

Hooray we’re all sick!  I knew this was coming but I never imagined it would be so gross. There’s enough snot in this house to fuel a snotmobile driving cross-country, east to west coast, and back again.  I know there is no such thing as a car powered by human snot but if there were I could open a fueling station in my living room.

I don’t know if the fever earlier this week fried Joey’s brain or if I’m just delirious from lack of sleep, but this kid has been doing some weird shit around here today and I have to keep reminding myself that he is only a year old and he is sick and strangling him is not the answer.  He hasn’t been interested in playing with his toys and has instead created some fun new games that mostly involve self-injury and whining.

Puzzle concussion.  This one is simple.  You just walk around holding a wooden puzzle base out in front of you and every few minutes stop, tap the base against your forehead until there’s a solid thump and then smile and keep walking. Joey did this about ten times this morning, just walking around in the living room in circles, slamming a puzzle into his head.  A better mother would have taken the puzzle away but he was enjoying himself and when he is happy he is QUIET AND NOT HANGING FROM MY PANTS WHINING.

Toss the oatmeal and scream for pizza!  Joey wouldn’t eat his breakfast this morning.  Overnight he seems to have developed a hatred for oatmeal.  As I approached his face with a spoonful of delicious oatmeal, he’d scream, throw his hands up to cover his face, knocking the spoon out of my hands and into the curtains.  We did this three times and then I figured it probably had to do with his nose being stuffy, so I didn’t push it and just gave him some milk.  A half hour later I am scrunched up in the corner of the kitchen in front of the microwave, trying to cram a cold piece of pizza down my throat so I can take some Advil when Joey, sensing that mama is happy for a moment, comes flying into the kitchen and hangs off the bottom of my pants whining for my food until I give him a bite.  And then another bite.  And then another until all that’s left is crust covered in boogers.

Walk the door.  This one is another simple game.  Go to the basement door and walk it back and forth, back and forth, back and forth…until you push too hard and it latches.  Then scream until mama drags her sick body off the couch and opens it again for you.  Repeat until it gets boring, then growl and chew the hinges.

Fuck the cheerios!   He was screaming for ten minutes, that kind of scream that cuts through your soul, and I couldn’t figure out what he wanted so after trying everything, and before taping his mouth shut, I decided he was hungry and held out a handful of cheerios.  He took one look at them, wound up, and smacked the bottom of my hand, sending the cheerios flying through the air and all over the kitchen floor.  Then I swear he sneered at me before he walked away still screaming.  And I have to be honest, if anyone else in the world tried that shit with me, I would’ve grabbed the little bitch, pinned them to the floor and shoved those fucking cheerios down their throat.  Instead I just sat on the kitchen floor in a pool of cheerios and thought of ways to rupture my own eardrums.

Brush the world!  Find mama’s belly button has evolved into a game of press my drooly toothbrush into mama’s belly button while she is trying to rest, and then brush her belly good, side to side and up and down, making sure to remove all plaque.  Then on to the kitties, who love having their faces cleaned and don’t mind at all a toothbrush rammed into their eyes while they sleep on the couch.

Stagger and scream.  Babies get clumsy when they’re tired and sick.  The kid has been staggering around like a drunk all morning and tripping on everything, falling down and then crying about it like he doesn’t have EIGHT INCHES OF DIAPER PADDING TO SHIELD HIS BUTT.

TV off/TV on. This one is pretty self-explanatory.  But the real key to mastering the game is knowing that precise moment when it’s best to abruptly end the program.  You do not turn the TV off during a commercial.  You do it at an important moment, like when they’re just about to start the final dance in Dirty Dancing.

It’s all rubbish!
Things I have found in the trash this morning:
Tivo remote
my socks
child’s toothbrush
cell phone
my new Napoleon Dynamite pen
cat collar
stuffed duck

You wouldn’t mind, but today is my birthday.  And the kid knows it because I sang it to myself this morning while I carried him downstairs at 2am for another round of nose drops and suctioning.  I have to keep remembering that there is a positive side to today.  Instead of lying in my bed healing my sick body, I am burning massive calories.  And I don't care how sick I am, I am not wasting my babysitter tonight.  I am going out like a normal human being where I will eat dinner without a person hanging from my leg and then I will drink enough wine to erase this horrible day.

dwell

So when I went to talk to my doctor the other day I told her that after Christmas I started to not feel as well.  I’ve been having some anxiety, I’ve been a little short-tempered and I’ve been dwelling in my head a bit too much on things that should not be important.  I’m not sure if this is happening because of exhaustion since my feelings of less than well-being coincide with Joey’s sleep strike, or if I need my medicine adjusted.  We’re going to look at it again next week and see what’s up.

I think it’s most likely post-holiday, sick baby mama exhaustion.  It’s normal to feel anxious when your child is sick.  And everyone gets a little impatient with things when they’re not sleeping.  And I shouldn’t freak out that someone was able to penetrate my medicine barrier during this time and hurt my feelings.  The medicine is just not strong enough to ward off everything.

It’s the dwelling part that bugs me.  The fact that I have the most supportive family and friends a girl could ever wish for should completely overshadow the mean of just one person in my life who takes every opportunity to show me that she’s a bitch.  I shouldn’t even know about the things she says, because she doesn’t say them to me.  She says them to Eli because she is his sister, and he doesn’t dwell on any of it because he thinks she is a lunatic.  The things she says just roll off of him because he has known her for thirty-five years. But me?  I tend to dwell.

My brother and I have a good relationship.  I care about him a lot but I would never step in and try to let my concern for him make his wife feel like a piece of shit.  I would never try to interfere with their relationship by calling him up and trying to mother him with insincere concern for his well-being during a time of difficulty.  Because no matter what a person may see from the outside, you never know how a relationship is if you’re not in it.  You can try to imagine but you’ll never really know.  And if you’re screwed up yourself, with a big long track record of bad relationships and bad decisions, the things you imagine come from your mind being tainted by your own fucked up life experiences and don’t necessarily apply to anyone else’s life.  Yeah, Eli’s wife went a little crazy and things fell apart a bit, but don’t assume from that that Eli needs your help or suggestions.

Try focusing on fixing your own life because IT’S A MESS! 

And this next part may surprise you, because of the logistics, but I talked to Eli’s mom about what has been going on.  I wanted to make sure that she didn’t feel the same way about the situation, and me.  I wanted reassurance I guess, because the demons in my head whisper the negative things to me, and sometimes I beat myself up a little and think that Eli doesn’t deserve this shit.  He shouldn’t be married to a person who has such a hard time with things. 

Eli’s mom told me first not to take anything that Eli’s sister says or does to heart.  She is a mixed up person.  Then she told me that she understands what I’m going through, what Eli and I have been through together, and that she loves the person I am and is happy for what I bring to Eli’s life.  She spent some time reminding me of the good things that they notice about how Eli and I are together, and it felt so nice because if there is one person in the world who truly cares about Eli and wants what is best for him, it is his mom.  It makes me feel good that she understands.

I just feel so disappointed by what’s been going on.  I have a fantastic relationship with my brother’s wife, and we do things together a lot.  She has become so much more than some woman who is married to my brother.  She is my friend.  And I’ve always tried to have the same kind of relationship with Eli’s sister, but I’m just starting to understand what Eli has been telling me for years: it’s just not possible with her.  It makes me wonder how women who are going through the same time in their lives, trying to balance family and marriage and career, why do we have such a hard time supporting each other?   

My brother’s wife has a much better relationship with my mom than I do.  And I have a better relationship with Eli’s mom than his sister does.  Why does that happen?  Do similar genes just repel each other?  Why do women have such fucked up relationships?

I don’t know.  Family is crazy and I've been thinking on it too much.  I can’t imagine how it would be if Eli and I had more siblings or more crazy mixed in than we already do.

shhh

I worry that the keys are making too much noise as I type this.  I don’t want to walk on the stairs in case they creak.  I hold my breath when I walk by his door in case my breathing is too loud.  My child is finally sleeping and after the awake marathon he just endured, he needs this.  And so do I.

Taking care of babies can be trying.  But taking care of a sick baby will send a person right to the edge of her sanity, especially after a few days without sleep.   At first it’s heartbreaking, watching the little guy sniffle and sneeze and drip boogers all over himself.  So you hold him and rock him and rub his back and let him cling to you and whine through the night.  If you're lucky, Titanic will be on HBO and it'll be at the part with all the excitement, at the end when the boat is sinking, and this will distract you both as you watch Rose and Jack fight for their lives in the freezing ocean.  You'll sit on the couch in the middle of the night holding your baby in your arms, letting him watch a terrible movie because he likes watching people die, while he drips on your clothes and rubs his sticky hands on your face or in your hair if he wants and it doesn’t matter because he’s sick and you’re his comfort.  But after three long days and sleepless nights and terrible movies, you start wanting more than just for the illness to go away.  You want to seek out and kill the person who knowingly brought disease into your home.

I hate myself for even thinking about my own discomfort when my child is sick, but this week has been exhausting.  After the first day I was a little tired.  On the second day I started hearing phantom babies crying while I was in the shower.  And on the third day my own crying in the shower blocked out the phantom babies and I realized I had to get out of the house for a bit to clear my head.  And what better place than my shrink’s office?  I was just lucky that I had an appointment scheduled for yesterday, and my parents came over in the afternoon to look after the little one.  It helped so much to get away from the crying for a little while, even though I could still hear it in my head while I was out.  But when I returned home, Joey had spiked a fever and it was time to stop fucking around and call the doctor. 

He has an ear infection and a cold.  I’m relieved because I was thinking that it was surely some sort of exotic baby disease I’ve never heard of.  Or tuberculosis.  Perhaps bird flu. But it’s just a cold and he’s sleeping now.  The delightful sleep that only antibiotics and good strong cough medicine can deliver to a sick baby.  And I think I’ll take a nap too because I’m exhausted but my mind is finally at peace.   

I'll miss you sweet pills

This is how I spent last night:

I have a special mug for tea and every night after the baby goes to bed, I make a big double batch of Sleepytime and hit the couch.  The mug is enormous.  To appreciate how large it is, you need to see it next to normal-sized cups.

The middle cup is my Hulk cup that I use for coffee in the morning.  It is an oversized coffee mug and the perfect size for lots of coffee but not so large that the coffee will turn ice cold before you can drink it.  The cup on the right is my Henry Rollins cup.  It is a standard sized coffee mug, and the only thing I use it for is caffeinated tea or coffee in the afternoon when I don’t want to get wired.

I started the tea routine when my doctor suggested cutting down on the caffeine to help with my anxiety.  Herbal tea relaxes me before bed and it is a hot drink, which I like.  And when I combine the tea with my before-bed pill, most nights by 9pm I’ve lost all muscle tone in my body and I am ready for sleep. 

The tea will continue to be a part of my routine, but I have to say goodbye to the pills pretty soon.  I’ve been counting them down for a couple of weeks now and watching them slowly dwindle in the prescription bottle.  The medicine I take at night is highly addictive and I’m approaching the end of my prescription.  I take a very small dose, only .25mg, which is barely enough to get a kitten stoned, but I’m reluctant to stop because I’ve been feeling great and I worry that any disruption to the routine will bring back the chaos.  I don’t want to ask for more pills because I know they’re not good for me and asking for more will make me feel like a drug addict.  On a talk show about housewives addicted to prescription drugs recently, my nightly pills were mentioned as a key player.  And I just don’t need that shit because one thing leads to another and before you know it you’re getting loaded before you head out to the park, sneaking your kid’s Ritalin and killing pharmacists to get your hands on their Oxycontin.  I watch Dr. Phil, I know how it goes.

But as far as being a housewife, I have that covered.  I accepted a part-time position last week and when the new year begins, I will be officially employed again.  I finally have a plan for the future that will not involve me sitting in my car for hours on the highway every day, praying for some asshole on a cell phone to mindlessly plow into me and put me out of my misery. 

So if I ever end up on Dr. Phil, it will not be as a star on the dysfunctional housewife show. And if I need any help to just say no, I will consult the little one.

sick baby

My son came down with a cold the day after Christmas.  It hasn’t really affected anything except his face.  He is stuffy and sneezy and can’t breathe through his nose.  Oh yeah, and there are boogers everywhere.  This is only the second time he’s been sick in his life so we’re still a little new to this and I think he’s handling it better than we are.

As hardcore as this kid is when he’s not battling a cold, this illness has shown me what a trooper he really is.  He wants nothing to do with our remedies.  He scoffs at the Vicks baby rub, he doesn’t want a thing to do with the saline nose drops, and as far as the tissues go, he’d rather just let his nose run down his face while he plays and then wipe his face into the carpet or a blanket or against the oven door as needed to clear the boogers, almost as an afterthought. 

Yesterday when I was strapping him into his carseat so we could go to the store, he sneezed twice in my face and the second sneeze produced such an enormous amount of mucous, that a huge booger bubble formed out of his right nostril.  He didn’t even hesitate before grabbing the bubble with his hand and dragging it down into his mouth.  I stared at him in horror and he looked up at me with a smile, like, what? It’s good!

Sometimes I forget he’s gooey and I go in for a quick kiss.  And as I pull away in disgust, my mouth slick with baby snot, he looks at me like, ha mama, you eat my boogers too! Told ya they’re delicious!  And forget the bulb aspirator.  He sees that thing coming and his body becomes infused with the flexibility of a thousand ninjas, and he will squirm until my clothes and hands are covered in his snot, until I finally give up and remove the aspirator from his sight.

My mom told me to wash my hands a lot so that I don’t catch what he has.  It’s so painfully clear to me that she forgets what it’s like to care for a sick baby.  I could scrub my hands to the bone, and wear latex gloves all day long, but I’d still be immersed in the sick.  The only thing that could’ve saved me is a head-to-toe biohazard suit.  I just hope that a few days from now when I get sick, I can handle it with the same level of dignity as my baby. 

Mr. Pibb + Red Vines = CRAZY DELICIOUS

Christmas always makes me nervous.  Not fearful nervous, but overwhelmed and twitchy.  I think it’s the stimulation overload.  Once all the presents are unwrapped, all the food is eaten and everyone goes home, I’m left in my house on Christmas night with stacks of new things and I look around and I don’t know where to start.  Do I bust out the Play Doh or my new cookbook?  Should I read something new, watch a movie or listen to a CD?  Should I go shopping tomorrow with my gift cards or introduce my new clothes to the closet?
Too much.

I have a hard time going from famine to feast.  Last week I went to the library I was so desperate for reading material, and now I have piles of new books to read.  I was down to my last ten bucks yesterday and now I have spare cash.  I was wearing maternity underwear because I had no money for new bras and girly underthings, and now I have a card that will let me shop for new stuff free at Victoria’s Secret.

Oh, wait, that’s what I wanted to talk about.  Eli told me a story last night about how one of his friends went to Victoria’s Secret to buy his wife a present for Christmas.  And when he went in he was assigned a personal shopper.  This VS personal shopper turns out to be a beautiful woman with a smokin’ body who TRIES ON AND MODELS ALL THE LINGERIE FOR HIM.  I’ve never heard of such a thing, but it’s actually brilliant because I bet guys eat that shit right up.   I think Eli told me a guy secret that I shouldn’t know about because I then told him that I don’t want him to buy me stuff from there ever again.  It’s bad enough not having a perfect body, but knowing that some Double-D bimbo pranced around in front of my husband wearing the same bra that he will then come home and see me in is too much pressure for any girl.  Especially a girl who has early alphabet boobs.

Our Christmas had a special theme this year.  On Christmas Eve, we’d finished everything early so we sat on the couch to relax while the baby was napping and watched an episode of Saturday Night Live on Tivo from a couple of weeks ago.  I have to take a moment here to celebrate Tivo.  And especially reflect on how important it has become in our lives, especially since the baby moved in and forced us into a schedule which means going to sleep at a reasonable hour and not being able to watch the shows we like when they’re on.  Tivo has become the fourth member of our household, and I love it almost more than the pets.  Tivo makes life beautiful but all the cats do around here is pee in the sink and lick my mouth while I’m sleeping.  And those things suck.

Anyway, have you ever seen Chris Parnell rap?  He’s brilliant.  So when this short came on SNL, Eli and I sat there mesmerized because it is the best thing we’ve seen on TV in a long time, maybe ever.  We watched it three times and still wanted more, but then people started to arrive and we had to turn the TV off.  But it didn’t matter.  Parnell had already invaded our brains. 

All night, whenever Eli or I caught each others’ eye or had a private moment alone in the kitchen, it went a little something like this:

Eli: Chroni-
Jaeme: WHAT?
Eli: -cles of Narnia!

Jaeme: Chroni-
Eli: WHAT?
Jaeme: -cles of Narnia

This has been going on for three days now and it’s showing no signs of stopping.  Watch it and you will understand.

giving birth is easy! (if you're on drugs)

It’s Christmas!  So today I am going to recycle something that I wrote a year ago, a few weeks after my son was born.  It’s the story of how I became a mom.  Don’t worry, no blood and guts. To kind of get the mood going, I thought I’d start out with some pictures of my belly when I was pregnant and then go from there.

31 weeks

and 38 weeks

(see how my stomach is just kind of hanging off the front of my body?  Believe me, it felt as creepy as it looked)

November 2004

It's been three whole weeks now and it still hasn't completely sunk in yet that I am a mom.  Mostly what I can't believe is how much energy I put into fearing childbirth and how little time I spent thinking about what happens after.  I think I was convinced, even until the very end, that something would go wrong.  How does a person who is pregnant for nine whole months still not get that at the end of it there will be a baby?  Even in the hospital when they were explaining the security system to me, and they showed me the wrist bands that Eli, the baby and I would be wearing for our stay, I kept thinking, yeah, well, at least they're there if we need them.

Complete denial.

I took every labor story I've ever heard and focused only on the ones with the worst outcome.  It was easy because it seems like once you're pregnant everyone likes to scare you with the worst stories they can think of to tell you.  No one tells you about the friend they have who had a short, painless labor.  It's always the stories about jaundice, episiotomies and emergency c-sections.  Toward the end I was positive that something would go wrong with either me or the baby.  And I know that this is what happens when you don't deal with your shit.  I had an ectopic pregnancy two years ago and I never really worked it out.  I mean, I thought I did but really what I really did is tuck it away in a dark corner and tried to never think about it. 

At my 12 week exam, during a conversation about my medical history, I told one of my doctors about the ectopic.  She asked me if I'd had any therapy for it and when I told her no she suggested that maybe I attend a meeting to talk about it with other couples who have had a pregnancy loss.  And all I could think about was how stupid I would feel sitting there pregnant with all these people who maybe couldn't have children, and mourning over a baby that was never meant to be for us.  I thought I should just try to focus on this pregnancy; the one that was working out.  But now I get what she meant.  Maybe if I had dealt with it and worked through it I wouldn't remain convinced that the worst case scenario will always and forever be my outcome when it comes to reproduction.  Maybe I could have spent months gleefully planning for my baby and shopping for my baby and talking about my baby without the moments of cold fear that would grip my heart until I could barely breathe reminding me that I was just kidding myself. Don't ever get too secure because something is going to go wrong.

Anyway, I had my baby and it was the most moving, emotional, painful, and important day of my life.  I don't know if it was the drugs (natural birth is for suckas!  I had every drug they would give me.  I got a sleeping pill the night before, drugs in my IV, an injection in my ass and then when that still wasn't enough I topped it all off with a big fat epidural), the short labor (3.5 hours), or the enormous realization that my body, over the period of a few short months, had made a whole new person, but when my baby was born I lost my mind. 

I was hoping I wouldn't be a screamer, but you never know what kind of things you'll do in labor until you're there.  Turns out I am not a screamer, I am a crier instead.  I swore a couple of times under my breath and I told the nurse not to bother calling the anesthesiologist for the epidural, and being sweet she said, "why's that, honey?" and I said, "because by the time he gets here I WILL BE DEAD!"  But then the pain became so fierce I didn't have the energy to carry on and throw fits.  I curled into a ball on the bed and wept.  I just checked out.  It's kind of funny to me now to think about it.  I was not strong like the women who give birth on TV, I did not grit my teeth and just breathe through the contractions like a champ.  I didn't even yell and scream and try to hurt Eli like I thought I would.  No.  I broke the fuck down, and I wept through my whole labor.

My labor was induced so maybe that's why it was so excruciating.  I've heard of people who aren't affected by pitocin, but it turns out I am not one of them.  I was happily eating a bagel in my hospital bed at 8 am when they started the pitocin.  Eli went home to have a quick shower since we'd stayed in the hospital the night before for cervix ripening and fetal monitoring.  There was a medical student assigned to me and she stayed with me in my room and talked to me while Eli was gone.  We talked about having babies and school and our medical histories.  I told her about my ectopic, she told me about her miscarriages.  It was all very surreal but it kept my mind off what was happening.

Which was nothing, really.  My doctor came in at 8:30, frowned when he saw the smile on my face and told me he was going to take my smile away. He broke my water and immediately I started to have cramps and from that point on everything quickly got horrible.  I'd brought all kinds of things with me to the hospital to help me get through labor.  I had a birthing ball, magazines, books, a deck of cards...I briefly thought about bringing my Playstation, but I figured they wouldn't have the right hookups for it.  It's painfully obvious to me now that I had no idea what labor is like.  You don't read or flip through magazines during labor.  And you certainly don't play fucking cards. The only thing I was able to do while I was in labor was try not to die.  That's it.  My birthing ball never even made it out of the trunk of the car.

Right after my doctor broke my water, the nurse suggested I try to sit in the rocking chair and suck on a popsicle.  I know I wasn't in too much pain at that point because when she asked me which flavor I wanted, I was able to give her a hierarchy of my favorite popsicle flavors from most to least favorite (red, purple, green, orange). I staggered over to the chair (I will spare you the details of what happens when you stand up after having your water broken, and just say that it was quite the journey from bed to chair), she handed me a red popsicle and that's how Eli found me when he showed back up a few minutes later.  The look on his face was priceless.  When he left I was sitting in bed with my bagel, watching TV in no pain at all and when he came back an hour later I was doubled over in the rocking chair fighting through a contraction.  I think he thought I was playing a joke on him.  But I dilated 6 centimeters in the time it took me to eat half a popsicle and toward the end someone took it away from me which was smart because I probably would have tried to use it as a weapon.

When the nurse suggested an epidural soon after, I was confused.  For some reason I thought I'd have to have contractions for at least a few hours until it was epidural time.  I had no idea how fast things were moving and I was convinced I was supposed to have pain all day and then my baby would be born in the night.  Anyway, I'm glad she had the good sense to call for the epidural when she did because when the doctor showed up to do it only a little while later I was out of my mind with pain.  I was convinced that a contraction would hit while he was putting it in, I wouldn't be able to sit still and he would sever my spinal cord.

Anyway, after the epidural started to work I came out of my pain coma and I was able to talk to the people around me again and I got so relaxed I even fell asleep for a few minutes.  And because now I know, I will never understand why anyone would ever turn down an epidural.  Before the epidural, I didn't care about anything except turning my mind off from the agonizing pain I was in.  It turned me into an animal.  I didn't care that I was having a baby, I didn't care that my life was changing forever and I was about to meet a whole new person that I grew in my body for nine months who would be my child, my SON!!! I wouldn't have cared if the bed, the hospital, the WORLD, exploded into a fireball all around me, all I could think about was this pain ripping through my body and that it was definitely going to kill me.

He was born just after noon and he was perfect.  I know every mother thinks their new baby is perfect, but mine really was.  Okay, maybe he was a little slimy and blue for a minute or so, but he avoided that squashy, scratched up, conehead business so many new babies suffer after a long labor.  Since he was born so quickly he didn't spend too much time getting smashed up in the birth canal and he was beautifully symmetrical right away.

Eli and I held hands and cried while they cleaned him up.  We couldn't take our eyes off him and his cries were like sweet music.  They are becoming less sweet the more time he spends outside the womb and we spend most of our time now trying to figure out ways to make him stop it.  Anyway, the hormone dump hit me pretty hard after the birth and I spent a week or so just staring at him and crying.  Or thinking about him and crying.  There was even one night when the little sucking noises he was making as he chewed on his pacifier sent me into a flood of tears.  I couldn't get my mind around the fact that I made a person.  And for the first few days along with the intense weepiness, I also went through the worst, most hideous anxiety about his safety.  I was convinced someone was going to hurt him or drop him and I even almost smacked my own mother when she wasn't paying enough attention to him when she was holding him and he looked like he might roll off her lap.  I was like a mother hawk ready to swoop in and kill anyone who even breathed on him the wrong way, and thinking about it now I wonder why no one took me aside and told me me to SETTLE DOWN or at least had the decency to slip a muscle relaxer into my diet coke.

The mood swings are leveling off slowly.  We even went out to dinner the other night and left the baby with my parents and I didn't die of anxiety.  And as I start to come out of this post-partum hormone nightmare I am realizing what an ass I've been and how hard I've been making this on myself and everyone around me by being crazy.  It's getting easier though each day as the baby gets a little less fragile and I get to know him a little bit better.  I'm sure the beginning is rough for everyone, because if you're a decent person, you want your baby to be happy.  But there is nothing worse than sitting in your living room at 3am with a screaming 5-day old baby and wanting more than anything in this world to be able to make him feel better but not knowing what in the hell it is he wants and trying to reason with him tell me what you want, anything, I will do it, just please be more clear with me because I don't understand you! but he won't cooperate and just keeps on screaming until he makes you cry right along with him.  So as a last resort you pull him out of his blanket and pick him up to hold him against your chest, close to your heart, thinking that maybe it will remind him of the womb and calm him down and as you lift him close to you and you touch his back you realize his sleeper is soaking wet because he peed through the side of his diaper and it leaked all over and he's cold.  Hmm.

This is what it's like.  And everyone tried to tell me and prepare me for it, and I took care of the pretendbaby egg in high school so I thought I knew what's up. But what I didn't get was how much I would love this baby and how much I would care about doing right by him.  I tried to imagine every scenario and how I would handle things before he came, but the babies in my imagination were much less complicated.  And quieter.

3-in-1

The best part of my shower is my shower gel.  It’s a huge bottle full of thick green gel and I read the front of the bottle every time I’m in the shower with it.  This is what it says:

It’s a bubble bath!  It’s a shower gel!  It’s a shampoo!  It’s a big, fat LIME in a big, fat bottle.  It’s the LIME that ate Brooklyn.  Wall-to-wall LIME.  A gigantic, storewide LIME.  It’s the biggest LIME to ever hit Hollywood.  A LIME of historic proportions.  An all-star LIME extravaganza.  The LIME of the century.  Standing room only LIME.  A larger-than-life LIME.  Sea-to-shining-sea LIME.  A LIME to end all LIMES.  One LIME to rule them all.

All the other bottles in my shower are boring, always going on about healthy hair and gentle cleansing and advanced microsphere technology.  If I ever start my own bath product line, my packaging will be just as important as the product inside because everyone needs something good to read in the shower.

the other side of rage

My parents have the little guy today so that I can finish getting everything done for Christmas.  He is their first grandchild, and he’s only been around for a year, so the blush is still on the rose.  They think it is charming when he runs around screaming, pulls the ornaments off the Christmas tree and licks the appliances.  

So I was at the grocery store by myself at 8:30 this morning.   We’re hosting Christmas Eve with my family and a Christmas Day brunch with Eli’s family and I’ve been so wrapped up in making sure we have presents for everyone that it only occurred to me last night that maybe everyone would like to eat stuff while they’re here, too.

When I pulled into the parking lot I got to thinking about the last time I went to the grocery store alone.  It was on a Sunday about a year ago, shortly after I’d given birth, and I just needed to get out of the house alone for a while.  So I went out to buy some groceries, and Eli stayed home with the baby.

I pulled into the parking lot and the place was mobbed.  Jaywalkers everywhere, people walking right in front of my car, and I remember thinking to myself, man, I better go slow or I’m going to run one of these crazy fuckers down.  I didn’t realize that my caution was causing a slow rage to build in the driver of the car directly behind me.  I made my way across the parking lot, and just as I was driving in front of the grocery store, the fucker behind me started whaling on his horn.  I turned around and there’s this dipshit leaning out the window of his car, SCREAMING at me.  I didn’t get to hear what he was saying because my window was up, but by the way everyone in the parking lot just froze and stared at us, I had a feeling he wasn’t wishing me a pleasant shopping trip.

He tailed me all the way to my parking spot, horn blasting the whole time like a psycho, and it was like something out of a fucking nightmare; I couldn’t believe what was happening.  Now, I should pause here and remind you that I am about the most impatient driver you will find on the road.  The words ROAD RAGE were invented for me, and many a day I’ve almost broken the steering wheel off in my lap over another drivers’ inability to GET THE FUCK OUT OF MY WAY.  I’ve screamed myself hoarse at other drivers on the road and once I got so worked up that I felt something pop in my head and thought I gave myself a stroke.  I am never the slow one causing problems.

But this guy was P I S S E D  O F F.  When I pulled into my parking space, he pulled up right behind me, blocking my car in, and that’s when I got scared.  I immediately thought something bad was about to go down so I grabbed my cell phone and called Eli.  My hands were shaking when I called him because while the phone was ringing I started thinking about the things that could happen. Maybe the guy has a gun and he’s going to shoot me in the head.  Maybe he’ll just assault me physically.  What if he takes a bat to my car?  I told Eli what was happening and he told me to call the police.  Just as I hung up with him to do that, the guy pulled away, parked in a spot directly behind me and got out of his car waving his hands in my direction and shouting.  My heart stopped when I saw him.  He wasn’t that big but he was bigger than me and he looked mean.  Just as I punched in 9-1-1 on my phone, he walked past my car and into the store.  By this point I was freaked out and crying.  I was still in the midst of post-partum hormonal hell and he had scared the shit out of me.  The old me would have gone into the store and confronted him and maybe caused a nice loud scene.  There’s no way he’d try something violent in front of other shoppers.  Or I could wait for him in the wine aisle, break a champagne bottle against the shelf and use the jagged edges as a weapon.  But I didn’t have the kind of rage in me to go that far.  I thought about rage and how powerful it can be and maybe he was in that red hot scary place I’m so familiar with, and he would not care about assaulting me in public.  I didn’t want to get cut.

So I pulled out of my spot and drove home.  And as I drove, my fear began to subside and my anger started to build.  Who the fuck is this prick that he thinks he can intimidate me like that and then just go about his shopping?  What if I had the baby with me and he had to witness that kind of fucked up scene where mama is crying and calling the police because some dickwad is screaming obscenities through the window of our car over nothing other than the fact that he’s an impatient FUCK.  All I wanted to do was buy some fucking bread!

By the time I got home I was out of my mind with rage.  I wanted a knife and a gun and a spray bottle of toxic chemicals, and I wanted to return to that parking lot and wait for that bitch so I could cut, blind and then kill him.  Eli took one look at me, mascara dried in streaks all over my face, shaking with fury and rummaging around under the sink for the oven cleaner and he asked me exactly what happened.  I told him and he asked me what the guy’s car looked like.  After I told him, he went to the closet, put on his coat and told me to stay there.  He’d be right back.

He was gone for a long time and in that time I sat at home and freaked out.  I debated calling the police because what if this guy hurt Eli?  You see this shit on the news all the time, and I couldn’t handle being responsible for that kind of mess.  But then Eli returned home and told me what happened.  He parked his truck next to the guy’s car in the parking lot and waited for him.  When the guy came out with his groceries, Eli got out of his truck and walked over to him.  Now here’s the part I would’ve loved to see.  Eli is a big guy.  He’s 6’1 and has an intimidating presence. People usually don’t fuck with him.

He asked the guy if he remembered a little while ago when he was riding up the ass of an Altima, honking his horn and screaming at the driver.  The guy stuttered a little bit, and Eli continued, “The person in that car was my wife, and you scared the shit out of her.”  Eli was ready for anything to happen.  He thought maybe the guy would be belligerent and try to start some shit.  Instead, he apologized and kissed Eli’s ass, saying he was sorry if I took things the wrong way.  He didn’t mean to upset me.  The guy spoke with a stutter.  Eli told me he said to the guy that he was at home trying to enjoy his day off, and then he had to come down here to straighten things out and he doesn’t like that shit. On his day off.  That’s my favorite part of the story, the part that makes me want to throw my arms around Eli and drag him to bed.  He’s so tough he busted out mobster attitude on some guy in a parking lot on my behalf.

I was so relieved that the story had a happy ending and no one got hurt.  And I like to think that the guy might settle the fuck down next time he gets the impatient urge to act like an animal in public.  I thanked Eli for going down there and defending me like that.  And he just looked at me and rolled his eyes, “Jaeme, he was a scrawny little Italian guy with a speech impediment.  You could’ve taken him.”

irreconcilable differences

The thing about trying to negotiate a job through email is the compulsion to click the receive button every thirty seconds. I’m waiting to see if HR will agree to the money I want and I am supposed to hear through email sometime this week.  So here I am at my computer, compulsively click click clicking my way to carpal tunnel.  And then when I do get an email, as will happen throughout the day, I frantically wait for it to download so that I can see it’s just ticketmaster again reminding me not to miss all the great shows I can’t afford or someone trying to sell me Viagra.

Maybe I can take my mind off the clicking by writing something.  Going with the theme of things Eli and I have been bickering about over the last couple of weeks, I have a topic: Reasons why I am an extremely difficult person to live with.  According to Eli.

Coffee coffee everywhere!
I love coffee and coffee is messy.  I make coffee every morning and I leave trails of coffee drips all over the counters and the tiles and sometimes it drips into the grout and leaves a stain.  And the grinds.  There are coffee grinds all over the kitchen, even though I am very careful when I measure out my coffee.  Every once in a while I’ll throw an old filter filled with wet grinds in the trash and then Joey sneaks it out later when I’m not looking.  He loves the grinds, and in the time it takes me to run to the living room to check out a breaking news story on TV, he has those fuckers out of the trash and flung around all over the kitchen floor.  I don’t know how he does it so fast, but I suspect he snaps the filter around in the air like a lasso, and when I return to the kitchen I am faced with a baby covered in coffee, playing happily in a sea of grinds.  It's like living in a Starbucks.   

My hair ruins everything.
I have a lot of very long hair.  I think it’s because I have a lot of it that I’m able to lose so much without any noticeable thinning.  It’s a little ridiculous that I have caused more household accidents with my hair than with my hands.  And that’s saying something because I have a wicked temper.  I go through two blow dryers a year--the loose hairs get sucked into the back and clog up the dryer, overheating the motor--my hair almost claimed one of Joey’s toes when he was a tiny baby when a strand somehow got stuck in his footie pajamas and wrapped around one of his toes, cutting off circulation and turning it purple, and we had to buy replacement parts for the vacuum when over the course of a year enough of my hair had wrapped around the roller to knock the belt off its track causing the whole mess to catch on fire. 

Of course there are the other less-destructive hair issues, like every towel in the house covered in hair, even after they go through the wash, and having to pick your wet body clean after drying off from a shower.  My hair just kind of weaves in with the fabric of the towel and stays there forever.  Eli was at work once and he felt a nagging tickle on his neck all day that wouldn’t go away.  When he finally reached back into the collar of his shirt, he found a clump of my hair in there.  And of course, the shower with the drain that always has to be unclogged and the shower wall that looks like another head because that’s where I keep all the loose hairs I pull out while shampooing.  I expect Eli to taint my shampoo with Nair one of these days when he finally gets sick of the fourth cat that is my head.

Let there be light.
It is Eli’s thought that when you live in a place long enough, you develop an intimate sense of your surroundings.  It’s similar to how blind people are able to memorize the layout of their homes and move around in them without crashing into stuff.  We’ve lived in our house for over three years, yet if I try to navigate the house in the dark, I end up walking into the refrigerator with my face or falling down the basement stairs.  I must be more visual than instinctive, which is why I am a big fan of lights.  I turn them on and leave them on because I am also no good at finding the switches on the wall if I need to return to a dark room.  This abuse of light annoys Eli, but it doesn’t really send him over the edge. The thing that sends him over the edge is messing with the switches.  We have multiple switches for several lights, and if I end up mixing them up so that up is off and down is on, Eli will go up and down the stairs, flipping switches and grumbling until everything is back to normal. Okay, sometimes I mess with the switches on purpose.

Bed hog.
I sleep with two regular pillows, one small moshi pillow and a little quilt that has to be between my body and the sheet.  I started sleeping with the moshi pillow when Joey was two months old and began sleeping in his crib.  The moshi is the substitute baby that kept my arms from feeling so empty at the beginning.  And now it has become a habit.  When I was pregnant, I added a body pillow to the mix, and the pillow was literally the size of another whole body.  This left less room for Eli and I suggested, kindly and out of concern for him, that he may be more comfortable on the couch.

Waking the beast.
I have a horrible time making the transition from sleep to wake.  Especially after a nap.  I take naps on the weekends sometimes when Eli is here, and because I could sleep a whole day away during a nap, I give him specific instructions before I lie down:  You must wake me up at 3. No later than three.  Please don’t forget about me.

But when he comes along to wake me up, I’m argumentative and mean and very very difficult.  We have our best fights when I’m straight out of a nap.

My love of trash.
Right now Eli and I only have a couple of shows we love to watch together.  Lost and Property Ladder.  Unfortunately, my absolute favorite show, aside from Lost, is Project Runway.  I love this show with unholy abandon.  It is magical.  And rather than just accept that Eli does not care about fashion, and would rather scrape his eyes out of his head than watch the catty designer fights I love so much, I try every week to get him to see how wonderful this show is.  I beg him to watch it with me, I catch him up on backstory, I explain how cool it is when the designers get eliminated, I reveal that there is a model sub-competition going on simultaneously, and WHAT’S NOT TO LOVE ABOUT ALL OF THAT?   I just really want someone to share my excitement about a show that no one watches.

This list could go on for probably thirty more paragraphs, but I just got the email I was waiting for.  Some time I'll tell you about Eli's annoying idiosyncracies.  Like how he eats candy like it's his job and deconstructs my stir frys, making little piles on his plate of undesirable ingredients sorted by color.