Independence Day

Which is today. Hooray! And THE. SUN. IS. OUT. If you don't live in New England you have no idea what a big deal this is. You know how you'll get a few days of rain in a row, and even if you like rain, after a while you think "enough already, let's have some sun!" Well we hit that point probably six weeks ago. And the rain never stopped. But today? AHHH!!! As soon as I finish posting this I'm going out for a good hard run.

I haven't posted in a while and I've got a few things on my mind.

1. My current mood about a second child:

Whatever. I'm so done with tracking my cycle and forcing sex and getting my hopes up and then getting my period. I have started to renovate my kitchen and I'm focusing on that. Also, for the first time since-- well, ever, we actually have a small financial surplus! Nick wanted to put that money towards a trip to Aruba so that we'd get to see the sun sometime this year. It was a very tempting prospect during the eternal rains, and we priced several options. Unfortunately, the trip would have used up the entire surplus. We decided to not go. That way, if I get pregnant, we'll have money for my maternity leave (I always think of my non-American readers when I reference that, and yes, a little smoke comes out of my ears). If I don't get pregnant, then that money will grow and we can really take a nice trip next summer. We'll have the option (financially) to either fly to Omaha first, leave Sascha with Nick's parents, and go on our trip from there; or we can take the trip with her, when she's older and easier than she is now. It's win-win. I am thrilled to finally have a cushion in the bank. During the first two years of our relationship, we were so broke at times that we had to sell our CDs for grocery money, and since then we've been paying off credit card debt, so this is a dream come true.

Anyway, so I'm tired of thinking about getting pregnant. I'm not going to prevent it (until October or so, when the school year timing would be bad-- and please, everyone stop telling me to disregard that, you are not the one who has to teach on no sleep), I'm just done worrying about it. My body is annoying me and I want to know why, if my ovaries are not actually sending an egg every month, why I am not just going through menopause. Let's just get it over with already. I've got moustache cream, I'm ready.

Oh, and my kitchen! I'm painting the cabinets white. I've also cut out the center panels of 6 of the 8 top cabinet doors and I'm going to replace them with frosted glass. Then the walls... I've got a few colors in mind but I'll see how I feel when the cabinets are done. Something greenish. Then I'm going to replace half the counters with butcher block... which makes me teary with excitement, like an adolescent girl at a Jonas Brothers concert. I can only do half because the other half has a weird angle which will require professional labor to cut & fit it, as well as a new sink, and that little $$ cushion ain't that big. So, half.

2. Funny kid story: at the park today, Sascha was calling "Hey Nick! Hey Nick!" and after we cracked up and got her to call him Daddy again, she paused, then turned to me and said "Hey Abby!" Little smartass. Good Christ she is going to give us a run for our money.

3. This is for those of you who are over, let's say, 30. When was the last time you tried to do a cartwheel? I'm 37 and fairly active. I can run a dozen miles and I lift weights often. Well! We were at the playground today and I hopped on a swing. Nick started to push me kind of high and it was the weirdest sensation, almost painful. I was laughing hard enough that no sound was coming out of my mouth. It is bizarre what a typical American adulthood (sitting in front of a screen) can do to your body. I may have strength and stamina, but wow, range of motion? So then Nick tried it-- same result for him. We both tried hanging upside-down by our knees-- whoa again. The hardest part was getting our legs up to the bar. And getting down. It reminded me of a few months ago, when my four-year-old niece asked me to do a cartwheel. I said sure, no problem, then... AI!! It had probably been a decade since I last did that, and it was a rude awakening for many of my muscles.

So today I resolved to start whipping myself around more often. We'll see how that goes... Yoga would be good, except I hate it. It's boring. I get way too impatient.

(Had to cut this short because kid wouldn't nap. Shocker.)

Ho-hum

Not much going on here. I've kinda been caught up in a whirlwind of school finishing, my cousin visiting, and Nick leaving for L.A. for a few days. I never thought school would end. The last few days were torture. But my cousin was here during that time which made it bearable. She comes from a very musically talented family, so we were treated to live accordion & guitar often. It was great. I highly recommend cooking while someone plays accordion in the kitchen!

And Nick is out in LA visiting our best man for a long weekend. I bought him the ticket back when winter was neverending and I figured he needed to see the sun. Little did I know it would be chilly and raining for a solid month before he left so he would still need that trip in June. It's raining now. Of course it is. A friend of mine said he's going to build an ark soon. Nick and I are toying with the idea of going to Aruba in August so that we'll at least get five days of summer. I don't know... we have the money to do it, but it would pretty much use all of it. So we can either have savings, or do the irresponsible thing and go to Aruba. I'm on the fence. But all this rain is making me loco.

So I've been a single parent for a few days, and it's actually working out well. I've been putting a lot of effort into doing things with her, like going to the park, so I'm more tired than I would be if I stuck her in front of the TV (which, don't get me wrong, I'm still doing for an hour a day so I can catch up on Facebook and cook dinner). I'm not sleeping as well without Nick home. Two nights ago, I couldn't sleep even with a Tylenol PM. When I finally started to drift off around midnight, we got a huge thunderstorm that sounded like it was directly on top of our house. And it lasted for hours. It woke up Sascha (who has slept through smoke alarms) and gave me an excuse to bring her into my bed. The storm and her thrashing kept me awake until 3, but a few times she snuggled herself into me, and reached for my hand. I got 3.5 hrs of sleep that night but it was worth it.

Today we went to pick strawberries and I taught her how to take the stem off before she ate them, and she went to town. The strawberries babysat my kid while I picked. But I am wiped. After she goes to bed, I am just cooked, which blows because that's the perfect time to clean bathrooms or whatever. But every night I end up choosing the whatever. Tonight I have to make that be a shower, since I haven't showered in three days. I really want to get into bed with a glass of wine and "Mamma Mia" but it's already so late. (What. 9 IS late. Shut up.) (also, ignore the time at the bottom of this post-- I still can't fix that stupid thing.)

I'm too exhausted to write more so I'll finish with a story from the neighbor's birthday party we went to tonight. First of all, she got on this swing-- it's like a see-saw swing? this thing-- and figured out how to do it herself, so I could actually leave her alone, and go in the house to have some grown-up time, and she didn't scream. Which was a miracle. She played with the other kids, even through the rain. She came in as I was saying my goodbyes, and I picked her up. She was a little damp (it wasn't raining hard), but after a minute some water started streaming down my arm, coming from her. I was like "what the hell?" wondering if she was really that wet. Well, no, but her diaper was waterlogged, so she was peeing down her leg, down my arm, and onto my neighbor's kitchen floor. Everyone laughed but I was a little mortified. Fortunately the neighbor has a good sense of humor. She has to; my dad is her gynecologist.

Meh, false alarm

I haven't written in a while because my body was sending me weird signals, and I didn't want to speak too soon. My tits blew up like beach balls. Now, I'm not one to name body parts, I've always thought the practice was annoying, but I couldn't help but christen them Rock of Love Bus 1 & 2 (the link is in case you are reading from another country and don't have access to that particular slice of American culture). Because no matter how professionally I tried to dress, I still looked like a stripper. I might as well have had huge flashing arrows pointing right at my chest. And they HURT. Even though my period was well over a week away, I was like "hmmm...." and smells started to make me sick, and I got tired, and... I got a strong hunch that I was pregnant. I bought the test but refused to take it until my period was officially late. Well today it was officially early, naturally on a day when I wore a brand-new bright white skirt and my most delicate, lovely white lace underwear. No accidents, but still. Damn. I also had no protection on me so I had to do that awful 8th grade wadded-up toilet paper trick. (My apologies to any men who might be reading. You learn something new every day.)

Of course, I am focusing on the bright sides here: For the time being, my body still belongs to me. I can drink when I go visit my sister next month-- I can drink right now! I can still run. I just bought four pairs of shorts & skirts from Target that are ridiculously vanity sized (call me a sucker, it still strokes the ego). It's one more month that I get to feel good instead of feeling like crap. Sick, tired, bloated crap.

But.

I had been getting really excited about the prospect of a February baby. The timing with the school year would have been perfect-- I would have just been finishing up my sickest time when school started, and it would have been safe to tell everyone. The first few months after birth, when I was recovering and insane, I'd have been missing the very worst part of the school year (the stretch when there are no holidays for months and winter feels like it will last forever). I told Nick that I am disappointed but not devastated, the way you would be if you applied for a new job you wanted and didn't get it, but you still had your old job. Tonight I was watching Sascha jump on the bed, thinking about how hard we have tried to have another baby; how all last summer we paid extra close attention to my fertile days and still had no luck. I wonder if I'm actually infertile and she was just a one-time fluke. I would be okay with that if that's true. I guess I'd just like to know so that I can stop hoping and wondering and saving up my sick days like a squirrel collecting acorns for winter. I could get rid of the boxes of maternity and baby clothes in the basement. I could take days off to paint my toenails and watch daytime TV every once in a while.

But the idea that I was pregnant made me ridiculously happy.

So, it's onward and upward again in two weeks. Sigh... Sascha is in bed belting out "Hey Jude" at the top of her lungs. I'm going to go have a brownie and a biiiig glass of wine.

Guacamole is Depressing.

This afternoon I attended graduation at my school. It was just lovely, and got me all nostalgic and wistful (and stunned to think that mine was twenty years ago!).

Later, I was mixing up a batch of guacamole to go with dinner. It got me thinking about the small group of teachers I was talking to just before I left today. They're all about my age, and none of them have kids. Staring down into the bowl of green mush, I thought, guacamole is for people like them. People who can spontaneously go out for margaritas after work. It's "fun" food. It's socializing food. It represents the raucous Friday nights we used to spend with friends at El Torito in Sherman Oaks. It has no place on a table where a toddler refuses to eat and then throws a tantrum for an hour before a fed-up and exhausted Nick throws her into bed, screaming, without brushing her teeth.

Guacamole is depressing.

My problem with Dooce

My sister asked me why I have "mixed feelings" about Dooce. In case you've been living under a rock in a cave on Mars (or you don't have kids), Dooce is Heather Armstrong. She writes a blog (let's face it, it's THE blog) about motherhood. When she had her first baby 4-5 years ago, it knocked her on her ass so hard that she did time in a mental hospital. For that, I respect (and can relate to) her. She recently published a book about her experience and went on Oprah. Good for her. (Honestly, I am not being sarcastic there.) She is weeks away from having her second baby.

Here is the exact e-mail I sent my sister:

Hmmm. I don't know. I mean, I like her; I totally think we would be friends in real life. I'm just jealous. It's very low and base and immature, but I'm jealous because she's so freakin' skinny and so freakin' rich. And she's rich from doing exactly what I do too, except I have to work. I've made six dollars from my blog since last August. When I first started reading her blog [about a year after I had Sascha], I went back to the pregnancy posts and was (A) delighted to find that someone else felt exactly how I did, and (B) horrified that she had written almost word for word what I did, in several posts, and she is freaking loaded from those words. It's just depressing.

[a sidenote: I have put off writing this post because I intended to link her posts next to mine for a side-by-side comparison, I've just been too lazy to go through them.]

I have nothing against her personally, she's very cool and smart. And funny. I'm really REALLY interested in how she feels about the second baby considering her breakdown with the first, which (although I don't read her all the time) I haven't seen. A lot of her posts are hard to relate to because of her money-- look how we decorated, look what we bought, we took a family vacation, etc. It's turning into GOOP-- are you familiar with that website? It's Gwenyth Paltrow's site all about how fabulous her life is, basically. And I'm fully aware that my mixed feelings stem from jealousy, so I know this is a problem with me, not her.

When she has a second kid, she's not going to have to go back to work-- to teach, no less, not get to slump behind a cubicle-- when her kid is still waking up 3x a night. She won't have to recover from surgery. She will be able to order groceries online and have them delivered. She will snap back to her stick-figure body in about ten minutes. She can afford a professional doula to help, if she wanted to. She's not getting one that I'm aware of, I'm just saying that these are all things that would help me tremendously in the process of having a baby.

In short, she writes a blog about how motherhood is hard, and it's difficult to relate to her now because her money makes things much less hard. Again, not just the money, but having my body do what it did (betray me with the breastfeeding, blow up for three years) was really, really hard for me psychologically. Seeing that come easy to someone else, well, that's hard.

I know I'm verbally digging myself into an ugly, selfish hole that's making me sound like a horrible person, but meh-- I can tell you these things. [and now I've just told the rest of the world, heh.] When I think about my first 6-8 months with Sascha, I could make myself cry-- easily-- remembering how bad it was. Looking forward to that again, as much as I'd like a second child, is.... well, I'm in therapy for it. There are aspects that are unavoidable, like the c-section and the loss of sleep, but a lot of the other stuff would be much easier if I was bringing home $400K a year for doing something I'm already doing. You know? I could pay someone to help with the regular workings of life-- errand running, housecleaning, etc.-- while I focus on trying to heal, stay awake, and get my kid to breastfeed. And then focus on crying over my crap ability to do any of those things. Lather, rinse, repeat...

There you go. There it is. Sorry, Heather. I do like you, promise.

Under My Skin

Three things:

1. The murder of that doctor in Kansas, George Tiller. I can't stop reading about it (Salon.com has several fantastic columns), and I am thinking about it constantly. Recently, a friend of mine told me that she was pregnant several years ago. She found out the baby had some kind of horrible genetic disorder when she was 5 months along. She had to have it terminated because the baby wouldn't have made it to term. If it had, it would have lived a few days, tops. She was heartbroken. She wanted that child. And she still had to pass through a gauntlet of protesters calling her a baby killer on her way to do the deed.

I'm 37. I'm nervous about getting pregnant at my age. You generally don't find out something is really wrong until you're in your second trimester. And the more I read about this guy, how he worked in one of three offices in the country that perform late-term abortions, the more nervous I get-- to the point where I've wondered if it would be worth the risk. To read the things the right wing is saying about him... I just can't wrap my brain around it. He helped women who were desperate, who had no choice, like my friend. He was a father of four. My dad is a father of four, and an OBGYN like George Tiller. I can't stop thinking about this guy, how brave he was, and his poor family.

2. Sascha's still shutting me out. It's all about Daddy. I mean, fine, she's two, I get it, she's gonna do stuff like that. But man, it sucks. "No no! Mama go that way!" (i.e., "beat it, lady") is what I get when I try to intrude on their dinner or diaper changing or whatever. It sucks. That pushes me into the "pro" side for having another kid, because another one might actually like me. She's not supposed to be like this for another 11 years or so.

3. Today at work, this one teacher said to me, "Oooooh!! Abby! Number two?" I was truly confused by this, so I said "huh?" She said, "are you expecting?" I made some lame joke but I felt like I'd been slapped. I know I was wearing one of those flowy-type shirts (that I will probably never wear again, thank you) that isn't the most waist-flattering, but daaaamn. I just finished losing all that weight. I haven't been this thin (or as it turns out, "thin") in over three years. I feel great and really proud of myself, and now this woman makes me reevaluate and skip my wine tonight. I'm embarrassed to admit that later on I actually shed a few tears over it. Of course, Sascha had just accidentally driven her head directly into my nose, so the pain of that cracked the emotional dam.

So. Those are the three bugs up my ass right now.

I'm ovulating this week. I'm aware of it, but I'm not feeling terribly optimistic. I would tell you to blow on the dice for me, but somehow that sounds kind of dirty.

*thud*

That would be the sound of me falling off the fence again, back on the side of I Want Another Baby After All. (Really, you should just stop reading if you're tired of this debate. I'm kind of tired of it too to be honest.)

A few days ago I saw this video while reading Dooce. (I have mixed feelings about her, so I'm whispering her name. That is the subject for another post.) Other women have said these things to me before, namely "it was easier because I knew what I was doing," but for some reason it sunk in this time. These are women who have no vested interest in whether I do it or not, so hearing a totally unbiased opinion helped. (I'm so tired that I initially typed "unbiast apinion," which looks like Middle English. What can I say, it's Try Not To Die Friday.)

So for this very moment, I want another. If I got pregnant this coming month, my due date would be around the end of February, so I'm... ehhhhhsort of not 100% jazzed about the idea of either (A) taking ten weeks off unpaid-- ouch, or (B) going back to work when the baby isn't sleeping through the night yet, like last time. Maybe I can figure out a happy medium, like taking off one month unpaid and going back for the last month or two of school. It's not the six months of suffering I dealt with last time. I'm also worried about putting all this effort into my garden and then being too nauseous to eat anything when it's all ripe in August.

Of course, maybe I should try to actually get pregnant first instead of planning out my maternity leave, since I was so wildly successful at it in the last round...

Hope this made sense. Going to bed.

Bring on another baby!!

That's a joke, of course.

The recent stretch of angelic behavior from her has come to an end. It's been about a week now, since I spanked her on Mother's Day (oh yes I did. Because there simply wasn't a more appropriate day for that to happen).

The tantrums. Jesus wept, the tantrums. Thursday, she threw screaming fits from about 4-7 pm. In and out of time-out, in, out, in, out, ad nauseam. Three hours. At the end of a workday. My arm muscles are getting a workout from lifting her in & out of that thing. Last night, which was Friday, commonly known as "try not to die [from exhaustion] night" in our house, we were treated to another three hours of hysteria which intensified to the point of Nick and I both losing our shit. I finally tossed her into her crib and walked out, and "said" to Nick (it was more like a shaky shrill panic than speaking), "Do not go in there, I don't care if she cries for two hours, I am DONE with her-- do not go in there and prolong this any further."

Five minutes later, she was asleep.

Five minutes after that, I was asleep.

This can't be normal. It just can't. There wouldn't be a human race if this was normal because NOBODY IN THEIR RIGHT FUCKING MIND WOULD DO THIS.

And I still managed to wake up at 1:45, thinking about her being an only child and feeling sad and guilty over the image of her sitting alone in the back of the car on long trips. Also thinking about how much of my life is getting neglected because all I do is deal with tantrums and time-outs. Remembering e-mails I haven't answered. Phone calls I haven't returned. Things people need from me that I haven't done, like a syllabus for my summer camp. Progress reports for my students were due yesterday. Didn't do them. And forget about the state of my house. Look down a few posts to that garden one, where I was building that fence? It doesn't look much different from that, it's still all dug up and crappy and unfinished. The neighbors are making snarky comments about our lawn, which shamed me into signing up for a cheap dose of nuclear waste to be spread on it, going against every thread in my environmental conscience. Argh, it kills me! But it looks like something from a Stephen King book.

And it's all. Because. Of the tantrums.

They're over nothing. Example: She sees an orange in the fridge and wants it (this is a whole challenge in itself, deciphering what she wants through her rising-panic babble). Because this orange does not instantly materialize in her mouth, she throws herself on the floor screaming and kicking, hitting the fridge and me on the way down. Time out, during which I cut up the orange. When she calms down, I bring her to the table where her orange is waiting. Something about the sight of the fruit makes her instantly apoplectic. Resume screaming, fishtailing her body and head-butting me in the chin. Time out. I assume she's having blood sugar issues, so someone else (not Mean Mommy) tries to feed her crackers. Her response to this offering sounds like someone is pulling her fingernails off. Lather, rinse, repeat FOR THREE HOURS. Bath? Must have been made of boiling sulfuric acid. Brushing teeth? Kittens will die. And so on.

Part of the reason I can't sleep is looking forward to another day of this. Except today, I don't have work to take me away, like Calgon. I have to spend the whole day with her. We've gotten three hours of tantrums a day, but we've only spent 3-4 hours with her on those days. That's an exhausting tantrum/time-out game for 80% of our time spent with her. Eighty percent.

How do people do this? And love it? I might lose my mind today. I mean, I lost it last night, but got it back with my hearty and satisfying five hours of sleep.

Off to pick my cuticles bloody and wait for it to begin. Of course, now I'm starting to get sleepy again, 45 minutes before Sascha's due to wake up.

(ETA: I've said this before, but no matter how many times I fix the clock on this thing, it still comes up as way off-- even the minutes. It's actually 5:20 am.)

PTSD, or something like it

Okay, I will admit to being a drama queen by calling it PTSD. I know that's too strong a term, but...

A few days ago, my co-worker brought in her new baby, about two weeks old. Seeing a tiny newborn again brought out an unexpected reaction in me. It wasn't melty desire; it didn't make my ovaries ache. No, it was, uhmm, dread. Fear. I sort of stood there with a half-smile, half-grimace on my face, absentmindedly clutching my chest, asking her how it was going (the answer: hard). I totally didn't expect that reaction from myself. I went bounding down the hall, all excited to see her, and then stopped as though there was some Evil Baby Force Field around it. Cue the tightened chest.

Then last night I started reading Vicki Glembocki's book, The Second Nine Months. I've never read anything that hit closer to home, that described so accurately how I felt when I first had Sascha. She even uses lines verbatim that would run through my head, like "this is my life now." By the time I read the part where she was struggling with breastfeeding and admitted to herself that she was doing this for herself, not the baby, and she got in the car and cried about it? It was too much for me. I went into the bathroom and sobbed quietly, doubled over, face buried in a towel. Her descriptions were so spot-on that they were painful. I'm only two chapters in.

So here I am, still sitting on the fence of One Child Or Two. Seeing that newborn again, hearing that cry... Reading about the isolation and fear and difficulty of the whole experience... I can only compare it to a stint in a Turkish prison. Physical pain (constant, through entire torso, for about two months)? Check. Can't go anywhere, and you don't see your friends anymore? Check. Torture (= no sleep)? Check. Relentless? Round the clock? Feels like time stopped? Check. Don't understand the language (crying) or how to respond to it? Check. Grooming is sorely neglected? Check. Maybe you starve in a Turkish prison, but you feel compelled to diet after you've just had a baby when you discover there's suddenly a semi-deflated blimp hanging onto your skeleton.

Ladies and gentlemen, the miracle of life.

I just don't know if I can do it again. And of course in the book, like in my life, she encounters plenty of women with more than one child who just sigh and go "yeah, it's hard." But hard isn't the word. The English language doesn't have a word for what it is. And if it's the same sort of "hard" across the board, then there is only one conclusion: I suck, and am completely not cut out for motherhood. I want so badly to see the upside of it, to know why other women go back for more (and more, and more). Even now, when Sascha is in a great phase and I'm crazy about her, I'm not sure that I've recouped my losses from the past three years yet.

So do I have another? It boils down to this: two children = short term Turkish prison, long term glad I made that decision. I know I would be glad. One child = short term happy, long term regret. The answer is obvious, I think. But facing that prospect, the short term? Makes me shudder and dread.

But at least I would know to fill my freezer with casseroles this time around.

In other news, I am a single parent this weekend. Nick's grandmother died, and he is flying to be with his family for the funeral for four days. I am sad for their family, but I know it will be wonderful for them to have some time together. There is actually something nice about funerals. It's real quality time. On my end, I'm gearing up for an interesting weekend. I know I can handle it, even if she throws tantrums for four solid hours like she did last night, but it's going to be interesting. I am hoping that there will be a night when she can't sleep and I'll have to take her into my bed for a girls' sleepover. Ahh, that kid.

What my blog wants to be when it grows up

Oh my god!! I have found my twin!

(Well, another one... recently I contacted Vicki Glembocki, who was on the infamous Oprah episode that got me in 31 flavors of trouble, and discovered a very kindred spirit.)

Through Salon, I discovered this article that hit so close to home that I stopped breathing while I read certain parts. Specifically:

"...a Good Mother wasn’t supposed to be bored and miserable. She didn’t stare at the clock in Gymboree, willing it along with all the power of a fourth-grader waiting for recess, or hide the finger paints because she couldn’t stand the mess. If I wasn’t enjoying myself, then I was a bad mother."

"It’s the fact of being unfulfilled that triggers our most intense guilt and shame. Because a Good Mother not only sacrifices herself for her children but also enjoys doing it. A mother who isn’t satisfied, who wants to do more, who can imagine more, is selfish. And just as the Good Mother is defined by her self-abnegation, the Bad Mother is defined by her selfishness. "

Buh!

Then, through that article, I found her... Crabmommy. Go there and read her manifesto on the sidebar. It's everything I've been trying to say for three years. I kind of want to throw in the towel right now, because she's doing my job for me.

(Also, she's sticking to one kid. What. I'm just sayin'.)