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gluesticks, glitter and grief

Last night I bought a Foamies snowglobe for Joey and I to put together today. The kit comes with all of his favorite things like glue and stickers and glitter so I figured it would be a fun project for us to do.

And it was, except that by the time we got to it we’d already spent the morning at a kids craft fair where the kids get to go around to different stations, manned by middle-schoolers, and make Christmas decorations. By the time we left the fair we were both covered in glitter and little clumps of glue, but we had a bunch of ornaments that I will be able to embarrass Joey with when I show them to his high school girlfriend one day. Like the rage angel ornament with the body of a pinecone and a face of scribbled fury. Joey wouldn’t put a bow on his angel, nor a halo, and he has been walking around the house with it all day making it growl.

I thought the craft fair might exhaust his creative energy for the day and I could save the Foamies Snowglobe for another time, and we could spend some quality time watching Christmas cartoons this afternoon instead.  But he is three, and three year-olds never forget. So when we got home he wanted to do the Foamies project and I couldn’t say no because I’ve been using the project as a bribe all morning to get him to do the things I want him to do like brush his teeth, put his clothes on and stop screaming at me from the backseat to “LOOK, MAMA!” while I am trying to drive the car.

I let Joey work on the tree, while I assembled the snowman. I rolled it in glitter, which was a big mistake because after that the head wouldn’t stick to the body, the hat wouldn’t stick to the head, and the fucking scarf kept falling off no matter how much glue and pressure I used to get the damn things to stay together. After ten minutes of picking glitter covered snowman pieces up off the floor, I took a knife to it and rigged the whole thing together with toothpicks. And then Joey touched it and the whole thing fell apart again. So the snowman has been kicked out of the project for not cooperating.

My parents came over during the snowglobe project to visit with Joey and it was pretty interesting to watch my mom fuss all over Joey while at the same time maintaining her vow of silence against me. We had a fight this week, and I am now on her Do Not Talk list. This happens every once in a while and I used to get angry about it, but I’ve finally come to accept that she is insane and her moods and fits have nothing to do with me.

You’re probably wondering what I did to piss her off. Okay, here goes, but this is a horrible story so feel free to skip this part.

My mom called me at work on Wednesday to tell me that a close friend of the family’s two and a half year-old grandson had choked on a piece of candy and was in the hospital. There was very little brain activity and he would probably not make it. The grandmother of the baby had a heart attack when she heard the news and was also in the hospital, and the father of the baby, who was with him when it happened, was in the hospital under sedation because he couldn’t handle it and was a suicide risk.

She shocked me good and I couldn’t speak for a moment because that’s a lot of horrible news to hear in one minute. And I was at work, the last place I would want to receive news like this.  I am not close to the family this happened to, but I have known them my whole life. And I am a parent of a young child myself, and this automatically makes me more sensitive and empathetic to the things that happen to other children, especially if the thing is a freak accident that could just as easily happen to my own child.

When I was able to speak again I asked her what the hell was wrong with her that she needed to call me at work to tell me something like that. I told her she was insensitive, reckless with people’s feelings, unthinking, selfish and inappropriate. I said a lot of mean things to her, but most of it didn’t have anything to do with her calling me that day. It had more to do with the fact that I’ve been biting my tongue for so long when it comes to her that all I needed was a really good jolt for it to all come flying out. 

I hurt her feelings and upset her but I can’t apologize. Maybe now she’ll stop calling me every time she hears about another child abducted or abused or murdered to share the horrible details of the story with me and remind me to keep my own baby safe. As though I wouldn’t think of protecting Joey without her constant reminders. As though I don’t know about all the horrible things that can happen to a child in this world.

It's just that sometimes ignorance can be bliss and rather than focusing on misery, most days I'm just trying to find some fucking peace.

cliff notes

I let my account lapse for a bit but today I reactivated everything. And now I’m really writing to myself because who would possibly still check in with me after that kind of abandonment?

Quick update before moving on:

Work is still going great after all this time, Joey turned three last week, I’m starting grad school in two months, last week my therapist determined that I am healed and only need to check in with her every six months or so for medication monitoring. My marriage is still going strong despite Eli’s frivolous spending this month that included a new huge screen TV, updated cable package with high-def and the purchase of tickets to see The Contender finale in Boston that ran into the hundreds of dollars. Cats are all still alive, I was diagnosed with early glaucoma in my left eye, and I’m currently on antibiotics for a finger infection to rule all infections that makes it impossible for me to touch anything with my right index finger without pain ripping through the entire right side of my body. I’ve suffered two crippling migraines over the past six months, and I’ve developed a new respect for my own head and its fragile constitution. The treadmill is my new drug of choice and I run on it every day until I burn at least three hundred calories and achieve the euphoria of believing I am superwoman.

I’m going to update more because the days are going so fast now and I need to slow it down once in a while or before I blink I will be old and all I will remember of this time is that I was busy. I find it nearly impossible to dwell these days, so probably that’s why I’ve taken a break from coming here.

Next time I will tell you about the time I tried to take Chantix to quit smoking and how it’s always important to listen to your own intuition that questions whether it is a good thing to take two brain drugs at the same time no matter what your primary care physician says.

I need Alice

So we’re thinking about hiring a housecleaner. Typing that sentence made me cringe because I hate thinking of myself as a person who needs to give money to another human being to clean up my messes. It infuriates me that I cannot keep my home free of dirt and dust and mildew and rotting food without giving up something I love, like the nightly game of slide tag I play with Joey after dinner that can go on for an hour sometimes with us running back and forth through the house in our socks chasing each other while we pretend to be dinosaurs (unless someone accidentally loses control and clips the wall, cutting the game short and requiring intervention of lots of hugs and a frozen bag of peas pressed delicately to the head). And every week when I have a whole day off from work I am faced with the choice of doing something fun like taking Joey outside to run around and play, or putting him in front of the TV so I can disinfect the bathrooms.

Eli and I were both off yesterday and we spent the entire day cleaning. The only time we took a break from cleaning was to run errands and eat. And it sucked. I was angry all day long, but especially during the few minutes when I was hovered over the toilet scrubbing pee off the outside of the bowl. And when I get angry I pick fights with Eli.

J: Your aim sucks

E:That wasn’t me...

J: Are you saying it was me?

E: …

J: Are you seriously accusing me of PEEING AROUND MY OWN ASS???

 

And then Eli starts laughing, but I am still mad.

We also have a two year-old running around making messes faster than we can clean them up. If you had asked me two years ago how many individual cheerios I’ve picked up off the floor in my life I would’ve probably said something like two. Now the number is up in the billions and I just can’t keep up.

For example:

 

The child has more toys than cells in his body, yet groceries hold more appeal than anything in his toybox. Somehow things like eggs, sugar and loose pieces of cereal are his favorite things to play with. Maybe it satisfies some kind of toddler multitasking need, enabling him to snack while he plays. On this particular day I was otherwise occupied in the kitchen, probably scrubbing hardened banana scum off the inside of the sink, when Joey took advantage of my distraction and smuggled a brand new loaf of bread off the counter. You can't really see it in the video but he had taken a bite out of each and every piece and was happily digging his sticky little hands into the bread as he stacked. He ruined an entire loaf of bread and as his punishment I sent him to school with sandwiches made from pita bread the whole next week. Which he loved so it wasn't really a punishment at all and if I really wanted to teach a lesson I should've replaced the bread with pressed vegetables.

Anyway, I think I am going to keep the housekeeper thing to myself for a while, around family and friends who are likely to judge and condemn me for being a lazy slob. Which I am, of course. I would just like no one to think that I'd rather spend an entire evening constructing a jail for Mr. Potato Head out of mega blocks than scrubbing jelly handprints off the windows. That's no kind of homemaker.

countdown to doomsday

I am impulsive and I have a habit of doing things without completely thinking them through. The latest example is the course I found on the internet that directly relates to the work I’m doing and could possibly answer some questions and solve some problems I’m having with my experiments at work. I casually mention it to my boss, who agrees that it is definitely something I should attend, and suddenly the ball is rolling. The admin starts setting things up. She gets me registered for the course, she books my rental car, she arranges my expense account and books the hotel. And then she calls me at my desk on Wednesday to let me know she got a fantastic deal on the flight and will I be needing the service to get to the airport? And that’s when it finally dawns on me. The class is in Chicago. And I have to fly on a plane to get there. By myself.

I’m terrified of flying, even though I still do it when I have to. I just grit my teeth and let my body cycle through its ridiculous anxiety routine through the whole flight, to include heart racing, palm sweating and periodic impulses to stand up and start screaming. And then when I arrive at my destination, I'm so fucked up I need many drinks and a big nap to get my shit back together.   

And this is when I fly with someone. I can’t imagine what will happen when I try it alone. Which of course I will because I refuse to let anyone at work know that I’m afraid of flying. This would be a career ender since I’m pretty sure science happens all around the world and isn’t isolated solely to the Boston Metro area.

I have some anxiety pills left over from my post-partum days and with them I hope I can medicate myself to a beautiful state of calm enough to fly yet still conscious without going overboard and having to be scraped off the floor of the plane when we land.

And while I’m on the topic of doing things that I know will lead to intense psychological pain, Eli and I were watching a soothing documentary before bed the other night called Countdown to Doomsday. And one of the doomsday scenarios was about robots becoming intelligent enough to take over our planet. “The luckiest of us might end up in zoos, while the vast majority of humans would likely become pets.”

Jaeme: I want to be in a zoo!

Eli: I want to be a pet!

J: A pet? Why?

E: Because I could just lie around on the floor and sleep…

J: ????

E: And… have robots that love me….and give me treats…

I don’t think Eli wants to be a robot pet as much as he would really just like to be a cat. He doesn’t realize that the robots would not let him lie around in the sun all day eating fancy feast. They would enslave him and make him do horrible things that he hates. Like cook. Or clean things.

 

talking about my uterus at work. again

I need you Dear Diary, because I’m doing it again. One of the best uses for this journal is that it is a place where I can dump all the idiotic shit that rattles around inside my head constantly without finding myself one bright Monday morning sitting in a meeting about capillary electrophoresis and slipping into a conversation with my boss that ends up with me describing what a contraction feels like. To my MALE boss. We were talking about donuts and of course that made me remember how I would eat a donut every day for lunch when I was pregnant and how for the next hour it would feel like Joey was going to rip out of my stomach straight through my belly button, only to find out when I gave birth that I was not actually hosting an alien fetus, but instead having perfectly normal Braxton hicks contractions.

I share those things with you.

Everything is fine with me. Everything is the same since I last wrote except that I am no longer the new girl at work, and Joey is talking in full sentences like a real person.

So it’s hard to start working in a new place, especially if the environment is ultra-conservative like the one I work in. It took months but I am finally at a point where I can work independently once again and schedule my own time and workload without everyone freaking out and hoping I’m not some kind of loose cannon who could bring the entire corporation crashing to its knees. I know how it works. Everyone wonders what the hell the new girl is doing with all her filthy new ideas and experiments. What if she uses one of them and ruins everything!!! She’s new! She doesn’t know how we do things! What will the FDA think????

A lot of my time at work is spent pondering the question, WWTFDAD (What Would The FDA Do). When I scribble a comment in my lab notebook, I try to imagine how an auditor would interpret my message and I end up clarifying so much that I run out of room for all my explaining. I actually had to attach a formal memo to a data sheet about a simple instrument calibration when my comments went too long and I ran out of space. When I have to recalculate an area because I decided to move my baseline slightly to the left, I write an entire paragraph into the audit trail in my computer explaining why. My motto has become No Red Flags, and so I am always thinking: WWTFDAD?

I have a recurring nightmare that I am not following correct protocol for doing normal things that I don’t even do at work like taking a shower or eating dinner or setting my alarm, and I get busted in an audit and they take away all my patents. It’s absurd but then sometimes so is my job.

At least I don’t have to worry about Joey ever having work-related stress. At school today they traced an outline of each of the children’s bodies onto a huge piece of art paper and hung it on the wall. And at the top of each child’s body outline they listed the occupation that the child hopes to someday pursue. One kid wants to be a truck driver. Another kid wants to be a mailman. One of the little freaks wants to grow up to be a princess. But they’re two and three years old, so it all makes perfect sense. So when I look to my child’s outline to see which occupation he thinks would make a great career, I half expect to see something like garbage man or guy who drives a plow. Imagine my surprise when I look at the words above my child’s outline and it says: “The letter O”.

I guess from watching Eli and I run around here high on work stress all week long, we've ruined engineering and science for him. I guess I'd want to grow up to be a vowel too.

 

biochemistry vs the fancy giraffe

I’ve worked for almost three months straight without taking any time off, but next week is the beginning of vacation season. We’re not going away anywhere and since I have the week of Christmas off, I have some time to burn before the end of the year. So I’m taking a few days off here and there and for the next few months I will be rarely working a full week. As for what I plan on doing with my time, I know it’s fall and then it will be winter, but this place needs some serious spring cleaning. My home is getting gross and I’m afraid that one day I will lose Joey in a random pile of dust bunnies.

Joey’s school is working out great now that they’ve hired a new teacher. Now instead of crying when we drop him off, and coming home with no information for us about how his day went, leaving us to assume from his physical state that he spent the day rolling around in a pile of dirt, he comes home with art projects and sings songs around the house that we’ve never heard and gets very excited on the mornings when he goes to school.

I can't describe the sheer delight I experience when Joey comes home from school with a new piece of art. He has brought home little paper puppets, a picture of himself pasted into the middle of a paper plate decorated with leaves, and an amusing assortment of simple pictures like a fire engine or a duck, that he has lovingly colored in himself with markers.

The giraffe is my favorite. I can't look at it without laughing because it is so delightfully absurd. I've decided to take it to work and put it up at my desk, because some days I need to be reminded that life is not all that serious. And when people ask me how old my son is I will say that he is ten.

In terms of balance, Eli has been taking a lot of responsibility for Joey lately, and I’ve been focusing on work maybe a little too much. And perhaps I need to dial the intensity down a notch. Or eight. So that’s what’s going on around here. To sum up the last few weeks: I can’t believe I lived so long without owning an iPod, watching a good superhero show can perk me up after a shitty day, and there is no such thing as too much coffee. Or sex. Oh, and on a related note, you haven’t felt mortification until you’ve gone to the drugstore to purchase a pregnancy test with your tired toddler who keeps running away from you and pulling things off the shelves and finally throwing himself down on the floor while the cashier stares at you the whole time in horror, likely making silent judgments in her head and wondering why a person who can’t keep her kid from tossing tins of altoids around in front of her register like confetti would even attempt to bring another child into the world.

When it comes to drugstore chemistry, and two exhausted parents of a toddler, one line is good.

I write sins not tragedies

Today I’m downloading music for my iPod because next week I will be spending a lot of time at my desk. Now that I’ve gotten into a routine at work, I'm realizing how much time I spend at my desk. I spend about one week in the lab doing the normal chemistry stuff, and running my experiment on the instrument. Then the next week I'm at my desk working out the results. Each experiment involves a thirty page report with all my calculations, graphs and integrations, and I’ve found that the only way I can tune out everything around me and concentrate is to pop my headphones into my ears, blast something soothing like Beastie Boys to drown everything else out, and just work. If I don’t do that I start to get fidgety and then I make excuses to get up and go for coffee or get into conversations with my coworkers and before I know it, the day is over and my proteins are just sitting there all raw and uncalculated. If I’m wearing my headphones no one bothers me and I can get into my own world. The only problem is when I take my headphones off, I feel disoriented and twitchy, kind of like I just slammed my head into the floor.

I’m downloading a bunch of Weezer and the new Gnarls Barkley and also a really old Blind Melon CD that I know I have somewhere but cannot find. And maybe a few select tracks from Justin Timberlake and Christina Aguilera. One of the interns at work burned me a CD last week with a bunch of Bright Eyes and Panic! At the Disco on it, and now I’m all LET’S GET THESE TEEN HEARTS BEATING FASTER FASTER!!! and so I am downloading some Panic too.

Jesus fuck I’m too old for this shit but I love it so.

Speaking of too old for…please don’t judge me by what I am about to reveal, let’s just chalk it up to the female version of buying a sports car to counteract the feeling of getting older. There is a boy who makes my coffee every morning, and for months I've just looked at him, admired his body in my head and went on with my day. But today when he touched my hand to press my change into my palm and looked into my eyes it was electric, and I briefly, BRIEFLY, entertained the thought of inviting him over while Eli is at his poker game tonight. It wasn’t even like a whole thought, more like a thought flash, like…have you ever seen the commercial for Britney Spears’ perfume where she sees this guy who is basically walking sex, and suddenly images flash through her mind of what it could lead to? I was tracing his biceps with my tongue and SexyBack was playing in the background and I know that thoughts alone do not make me an unfaithful whore, and really it’s almost completely about this guy’s amazing arms and how I can’t deal with that shit in the morning without having an impure thought or two.

Considering there are four coffee shops within driving distance from my house, I suppose a change wouldn’t be bad. Because right after the bicep lick the thought flash turns into a nuclear explosion, sort of like what would happen if I ever put my tongue on another guy’s arm.

life is good

I see the phrase everywhere. On clothes, on hats, on bumper stickers. Life is good. And every time I see the logo on someone's car or clothes I think that either someone is very naïve or simply trying to convince themselves of something that they wish was so. Because if we’re going to be truthful about it, life cannot be summed up so simply. Of course there are parts of life that are amazingly good, but life overall is difficult and in every life there exists some degree of pain and suffering. I don’t know of a single person whose life is simply good. Maybe if you’re a cartoon.

Don’t worry, I’m not depressed again. The medicine is still working and my life has been going amazingly well lately. But I would never proclaim to the world that life is good because I’ve seen the dark side.

I tape Oprah every day because I don’t want to miss a good guest like Will Smith or Brad Pitt. So that’s how I ended up watching the show about people who tried to kill themselves and survived. The person who made it through the best was the woman suffering from postpartum depression who tried to jump off a bridge. Police officers were able to pull her back over and she’s fine now. But the kid who blew his entire face off with a shotgun and the girl who got her legs ripped off by a train have a few more physical scars.

When I was depressed, I never really thought too much about ending my life, but it did cross my mind. When you’re in pain and desperate for relief but you can’t imagine ever feeling better, it’s just natural. But eventually I got obsessive about an escape plan, not an escape from life overall, but an escape from my life. I figured that if everything was so miserable I could simply change it up and then I would feel better. I realize this kind of thinking is just as sick as suicidal thoughts, because no rational person wakes up and decides that everything in their life is wrong and they need to escape their entire identity and start all over new to feel better.

It still bothers me to hear people talk about postpartum depression. I have some distance now but I remember how it feels. And I can’t help but think how close I came to losing everything. I have no doubt that something chemical happened in my brain after I had Joey, but I don’t really think depression is strictly a hormonal problem. There is such a lack of support for new moms that it surprises me more women don’t flip out after giving birth. You’re suddenly alone with a new baby, everyone is at work and going on with their lives, and you’re not going to work and you’re not sleeping and all of it happens immediately after your body is so violated that all you want to do is just take a little nap because hello! Just had a person ripped from my loins! You pretty much exist to make milk and be puked on and each day feels like a month and you can’t imagine going back to work but diapers and laundry detergent don’t grow on trees and you need a job to afford things like pureed bananas and books on how to get your baby to sleep longer than fifteen minutes at a time. But going back to work means you will be leaving the sole reason for your existence for the past three months with strangers who will charge you an extra mortgage to do something you’ve been doing for free for weeks and weeks, and you know they won’t do it as well as you do, because how could they! How does a person not lose her shit? HOW?

I guess this is my way of saying that I’m not having another baby until society decides to wake up and show a little fucking respect for motherhood. And since I don’t see that ever happening, I will be content with my only child. I’m just glad I got a great one.  

so random, can't think of a title

I’ve been walking around pretty self-righteously for a few weeks because I suddenly have a JOB. But in reality, my job so far has been trying to work out how many coffees I can drink to obtain maximum wakefulness without causing the vitreous humor in my eyes to start vibrating in front of my retinas. I have a lot of administrative work to do before I can get into the lab. On Friday I completed a fifty page test on the biostatistics software I will be using to analyze my data, and I have to do this for pretty much every piece of software and every instrument I will use before I can get a password. For some of it I even have to attend classes, as I found out my first day after orientation week when I went to my desk, opened my calendar and saw that I was scheduled to attend a three-day class in the computer lab. The work isn’t difficult and it fills up the time, but I’ve never spent so much time sitting at a desk before. I guess I’m a lab rat at heart and I’m not happy unless I’m chopping up rat spleens or at the very least handling toxic chemicals that could potentially alter my DNA.

Maybe it’s because I took a break for a year, but I was in a conference on my second week about one of the products in our pipeline, and it suddenly struck me that what I do is really fucking weird. In my last job it was routine to come in every Tuesday, get my supplies ready while waiting on the call from shipping that my box of blood had arrived, and then spend the rest of the morning holed up in a back lab washing the cells and getting them ready for incubation. One of my products was derived from human blood cells and the bags came in fresh from the donation site. If you’ve ever given blood, you know what the bags look like. And it became such a part of my routine that it never really occurred to me that it is not normal to spend four hours every Tuesday morning sitting in front of a biohazard cabinet cutting open blood donation bags (of course only after lightly massaging the bags to break up any clots). The only things I cared about on Tuesdays were that I’d remembered to bring in good CDs and that the person assigned to be my helper for the day (usually a temp) wouldn’t fuck things up or be slow and make me late for lunch. It wasn’t until I brought Eli in with me one Sunday when I had to feed and split my cells that I realized exactly how odd my work is. I showed him my incubator and let him look at my cells under the microscope and then I showed him my chemicals. He just looked around the lab and then at me as though finally comprehending exactly what it is I do everyday and how it may explain some of the curiosities that have developed in my behavior over the last few years.

But I won’t get into that because it’s pointing out the obvious to give examples of the many ways I am strange. 

One of the positive benefits of my job is that tonight we’re going out with friends like normal adults, and we didn’t even have to save up! I’m still having a hard time with the daycare situation, especially after signing my very first accident report this week after Joey decided to try out a belly flop on his mat during naptime. He throws himself around in his crib all the time, and he delights in the way his body bounces on the mattress when he hurls himself from one side of the crib to the other, but his mat is not soft like his mattress and instead of bouncing, he slammed his head hard into the floor.

This has all been a huge adjustment, but things are slowly getting better. I’ve had second thoughts almost every day since I started back to work, but then I go to sleep and wake up the next morning and I know that this is the right thing for all of us.

I’ve been having extremely vivid dreams again, but they’re not necessarily all bad. Like the one I had the other night where I had to take a shower with my boss. Aside from not being able to look at him without blushing the next day, it was relatively easy to get over and much less painful than the nightmares I have where everyone is being killed and there is bloodshed and mayhem. I broke my sobriety again last weekend when Eli and I went to the beach for dinner with some friends and we ended up on the strip at a dance club until the wee hours of morning. Our babysitter thought we were dead and when we finally rolled in around 2am, Eli pointed to me as I stumbled into the house covered in sparkly fish stickers that I had peeled off the walls of the bathroom at the club and stuck all over my body, and told our young friend, “See this? Don’t ever do this to yourself!”

There are a some standard things that happen whenever I drink too much. I always need to go dancing, I always flirt too much, and I always need to bring home souvenirs. I also never want to go home. Because of all these things, I'm pretty sure Eli doesn't want to date me anymore.

I need to take a shower now because I promised Joey we would go to the park this afternoon. I don’t know when I will update again, but thanks for sticking around.

resisting mr. mom

My laptop is dead and I’ve decided that no matter how tempting, I will not use my work computer for this. I work in a highly regulated environment where everything is tapped in the interest of preserving company confidentiality, so before I do anything questionable I always run it through my head and try to imagine myself explaining it to a conference room full of people. Which is why I still visit certain blogs and I also read celebrity news at work--a girl’s gotta live! And I have no problem defending my right to E! celebrity news in the workplace. But updating my journal at work is not something I ever want to explain to anyone because it is too weird.

Anyway, work has been great. I went to my first teambuilder this week, and imagine my surprise when I realized that the word “teambuilder” meant I had to take a whole day off work and go to a baseball game, drink beer and then go to lunch at a bar with more beer. As I’ve probably mentioned before, I hate baseball. But I love beer and being outside in the sun and also bars and free food. So it was a very nice field trip. And much better than running around an obstacle course, or sitting in a room all day sharing feelings with my coworkers, which is what I always thought teambuilding was about. 

Yeah work is going really well, but adjusting to the new schedule around here has been difficult for all of us. Joey hates daycare, Eli hates that he has to take more responsibility for things around here because I am working, and I’m just trying to figure out how to do this without everything falling apart. In our household I have always had the least important job. And by that I mean that my job is usually the one that pays least, sucks most and is not essential to our financial security. But now that has changed and I am less willing to take everything else on by myself so that I can feel better about not contributing as much financially. So on Friday morning, after Joey had been up all night screaming his face off because he has a cold, Eli and I had it out about who would stay home with him. Eli was all set to go to work and I guess he just assumed that I would do like I always do and bend myself into a pretzel trying to work everything out. But I had a meeting and a training class and a project to finish, and also I have been at my job for only three weeks. We talked about this a lot when I was looking for a job, how things would be different and we’d both have to make some sacrifices. But as soon as the first conflict came up we’re suddenly having a fight straight out of the 50s.

I thought we’d worked it out earlier in the week when Eli announced one night before bed that he had an early dentist appointment and that I would have to take Joey to daycare in the morning. We have an agreement that he drops off and I pick up, and I’ve set up my schedule at work to accommodate that. So Eli had a dentist appointment that would totally fuck up the schedule and instead of picking up the phone and rescheduling it, he decided that I would just rearrange everything to make it work. I felt my blood start to rev up and instead of saying something mean I just said, “No.” This pissed Eli off and we got into a heated fight about why I am such a bitch and why he is such an insensitive fuck. It went on for hours, but it finally came down to the fact that Joey only goes to daycare two days each week, Eli’s dentist has him on some kind of year-long dental schedule that requires he go there like once a month for continued work, and how fucking hard is it to just pick up the damn phone and reschedule for a day that will not fuck up everyone else’s life???

“Why didn’t you just say that?” “Because you should KNOW THAT ALREADY.”

It was awful and I went to work the next day feeling all kinds of ugly things about my marriage. But when I got home that night I walked into a spotless house, there were a dozen roses in a vase on the table and there was beer chicken and corn on the cob cooking away on the grill for dinner. And if I continue on the path I am currently on, and things work out, I would be so happy to take over financial responsibility for the family and let Eli stay home and be my househusband. Because there is nothing better than coming home to a clean house and a nice dinner that I didn’t cook. I think a lot less women would be on antidepressants if we all had our own househusband to look after things while we’re out in the world. It’s our turn, man.