Things have been stupid busy around here lately. I have a lot of stuff rolling around in my head and I’ve been doing my best to just disconnect from it when I feel myself starting to fixate and obsess. Patience is not one of my strengths, and it’s some of what has gotten me in a mess in the past. So I’m working on slowly formulating my plans for world domination rather than deciding on some random Tuesday evening that I must change and fix and sort out everything in my life by sunrise.
Remodeling with a toddler in the house is the psychological equivalent of being paralyzed and then placed into a nest of biting ants who don’t sleep. You can’t run, you can’t hide, you simply have to SUCK IT UP and pray that you don’t die.
Last weekend we ripped out the carpeting in the downstairs and put in hardwood floors. Well, Eli and his buddies did the actual work, my job was to simply entertain Joey outside of the house without naps for twelve hours straight for two whole days. And it was exactly as much fun as it sounds.
It only took us four years to get the floors done, but it was worth the wait. We had our hearts set on some beautiful wood that we picked out at Lowes almost two years ago. It was expensive, so we were saving up for it, and we’d visit the wood at the store at least once a month to keep our motivation to save for it going. But sometime last fall, after I quit my job and it was looking like we’d never be able to buy the wood, I tried to get Eli to consider putting in something cheaper instead. I said the word Pergo and he sneered at me as though I’d suggested we cover the floors in hay.
Things only got worse for the floors last fall when we put in new kitchen and bathroom tile and redid the entryway in slate. In order to put the slate in, Eli had to cut some of the carpeting out, but then there was no way to secure the loose edges so he TAPED IT DOWN WITH SILVER ELECTRICAL TAPE. And there it stayed, in all its glory, an electrical tape border running through the middle of our living room for almost a year.
Our carpets were bad. From what we can tell they’re the original carpets, which would make them 19 years old, and they were stained and frayed at the edges near the wall, and because of Joey’s fondness for spilling and slopping and spraying his food all over the floors like some kind of animal in the wild who needs to slaughter its prey before eating it (in Joey’s case, all cheerios need to be wrestled out of the bowl, flung far and wide, and only the ones who are strong enough to cling to his high chair tray are suitable for eating) our house was beginning to smell like a barn. And on rainy days, an outhouse.
The sounds of pounding, power tools, air compressors and baby screams are only starting to fade from my memory. There is nothing more frazzling than trying to feed lunch to a child who has not napped in two days, in a tiny corner of the kitchen that’s covered in wood shavings and dust, with a flooring stapler splintering the air and shaking the house every few seconds, the air compressor switching on and off outside on the deck freaking the child out so badly that all he can do is scream and throw his jelly sandwich at your face. Jelly side up.
So many times during those two days I had to clench my jaw and talk myself down. I had to work for part of one of the flooring days, so we had the babysitter come over for a few hours to entertain Joey. I’d hoped they would play outside, but instead they played in his room and trashed it so bad I could barely find the crib when I walked in the door. The toyboxes and shelves stood empty, and every book, toy, ball, puzzle, stuffed animal and weeble was strewn about as though someone had tipped the room upside down and shook it. I had a mini breakdown that day because I was tired and dirty, my couch was in the kitchen, we couldn’t watch tv or walk around anywhere without stepping on staples or nails or piles of wood dust an dloose boards, and now the messes were moving into the upstairs rooms.
I had a blowout with Eli because he approached the job like an outside contractor, trashing the place like it was a stranger’s house. Coke bottles tipped over and leaking on the kitchen counter and splashed all over my laptop, my plants knocked over and spilling soil, and a water spill that took out all of my papers on the counter in the kitchen, including a big stack of coupons and some pictures. I cleaned the kitchen after the first day, but then when I came home on the second day and it was in even worse condition, I had to pull Eli aside and say something.
Jaeme: WHAT THE FUCK HAPPENED IN HERE???
Eli: I…
Jaeme: You realize you live here, right? And you’re trashing your OWN FUCKING HOUSE!!!
Eli: I didn’t…
Jaeme: At least close the door when you cut the boards! THERE ARE WOOD CHIPS IN THE FUCKING TOASTER!
Okay but that’s all over now and the floors came out fantastic. Here are some pictures:
And here's a closeup of my beautiful flowers. I saw them in my neighbor's yard so I went out with my scissors and cut them down. I thought about doing it sneaky at night, but then I decided to hell with it, grabbed my big kitchen scissors and walked over in the middle of the day. The long yellow ones are from a tree.
Hmm, I’m broke, I have no time for anything, what to do, what to do? I know! I’ll go to medical school!!!
I’ve decided I will be going to graduate school if it kills me, which it probably will, because I’m sick of dicking around with a part-time paycheck, making part-time money to do a job that takes less than a part-time brain. I love my job, that hasn’t changed, but it’s starting to make me feel like a loser that I busted my brain in classes like organic chemistry, advanced genetics, and two semesters of physics when my daily work life involves scolding people because they’re sticking their elbows out, and that’s not the right way to do a tricep press!
I’m looking into programs right now, and congratulating myself for having the foresight to take biochemistry and statistics and abnormal psychology in undergrad, even though I didn’t need it for my major, because I just knew someday I would be looking into grad school and those would be prerequisites.
I will talk more about it when I get the details worked out, but I’ve made some decisions about what I will study, and what my career focus will be. The things that are uncertain right now are how the hell am I going to pay for more school, and also, how the hell am I going to study and work and raise Joey at the same time. Oh, and try to have a marriage. And I think I’m stuck on the time and money stuff because the solution is that I can’t. It is simply not possible. But me being me, I can’t accept that so I will continue to search for a way to make it happen.
How I put my CPR certification to good use.
Every week I have to lifeguard at the pool for a couple of hours during my shift at work. Which means I sit an office next to the pool reading magazines waiting for someone to drown so I can do CPR and call EMS. So far no one has come close to drowning so I’ve been able to read a lot of magazines. I usually read National Geographic because someone has a subscription and leaves them lying around, and I’ve discovered that it’s an excellent magazine. I've even started looking forward to reading it each week. Last week there was an interview with an ant researcher, and his answer to a question about spirituality and natural selection was so perfect I had to photocopy the page so I could remember it.
Obviously you find a spiritual sense in nature, a sense of wonder. How do you find meaning in a world that came about through random mutations and natural selection?
Well, the human mind has evolved to search for meaning. The universe is so beautiful and complex and surprising, and life is too. You remember Darwin’s line, “Endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved”? We see this far more than Darwin could. We see right down to the molecular level, how truly extraordinary life is as a phenomenon. There you have more to summon spirituality than anything provided by the late Iron Age desert kingdom scribes who wrote the Holy Bible. They created an impressive piece of literature. But they really didn’t understand the world around them or the stars above. They metaphorized them, put poetry into them—they did the best they could. But still and all, they fell far short of what humanity is capable of feeling in a sense of the sacred and of aesthetic beauty.
I love his answer.
Hey! You should have another baby!
Even more annoying than the people who would bug me about having kids before I knew it was even possible for me to have children, are the people who insist that now that my first baby is all grown up (at eighteen whole months), I need to have another one. I am so torn about having another baby probably because my last postpartum experience was a living nightmare that almost destroyed everything that’s important in my life. I know what I went through wasn’t exactly normal, and I know how to get help if it ever happened again, but I still get a little nervous when I think about those first few weeks and months at home with a new baby. And there are things I want to do in my life that might be difficult if we start all over again with another baby. And if I’m so selfish to think of how a baby would be an interruption in my life, then maybe I don’t deserve one.
Anyway, what kills me about people mentioning that I should have another kid is how nonchalant everyone is about it. Like it doesn’t take planning, financial consideration and thought. Just have a kid, it’ll be fine. I learned how not fine it can be the last time I just had a kid without knowing what the hell I was doing. But maybe (probably) it’s just me and I’m ovethinking it. But then I think about the reality of two little kids, one a baby, and how much it would cost to put them in daycare, and how it wouldn’t even be worth working, and anyways, how the hell would I go to school with TWO little ones running around? I know these are dilemmas everyone has to deal with, my own parents included, but what I don’t get is why does it seem so easy for some people, so easy in fact that they have families of two or even THREE whole children, when there are people like me who angst over it until it seems like having two children and making it work is about as unlikely and impossible as there ever being a successful human head transplant.
Am I psyching myself out? Or just being realistic? Do I have some kind of warped view because of what happened last time? By the way, this round and round stuff goes on in my head all the time. It’s a lovely little side effects of being post traumatically NEUROTIC!
POM POMS
The best toy I’ve ever bought for Joey is a big bag of colored pom poms. I had planned to glue them, along with some pipe cleaners, to popsicle sticks to make stick figure puppets. But before I could get the figures assembled, Joey got a hold of the bag of pom poms and started playing with them. He holds the bag and pulls them out one at a time while I say the color.
We do this through the whole bag until it's empty and the pom poms are spread out all over the floor.
Then I arrange them into groups because I like order, and I tell him to give me the orange one, or give me the purple one, and on it goes until they’re all back in the bag.
Then we do it again. And again. And again…until I get bored with it and start tossing them at his head.
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Well, that's about a month's worth of updating.
