I should be…
… cleaning the downstairs bathroom, but a quick update. I have a post in draft about Noah, really, but I want it to be better than I’m capable of right now. Also have to find the cord for the camera, again.
So I actually am, as it turns out, employed. Sorting out the details of what that means in terms of deliverables has taken about two weeks, and during some of that process I thought I was swiftly going to be unemployed again.
I am not really - err - thrilled with my new bosses (husband and wife team), but since all I have to do is come up with ideas, write about them, and hand them in, I can’t complain too much. Also, after watching a guy with silcone-based glue drying inside his eye fight with an ER triage nurse last week, I am acutely aware that writing is not dangerous in that way. And the kind of writing for which I am to be paid is dangerous in really no ways.
I feel a bit like I sold out my fiction again, because I have already figured out that this means serious inroads into any time I have that isn’t parenting. But the money and magazine writing career stuff is good in the short run; it’s also staving off an identity crisis. I add the job to my blessings, for now.
I have to hire a babysitter for at least part of the time (it’s hard to conduct interviews otherwise, for one thing) and that may help find fiction time again, but we’ll see.
I am still having issues with the whole babysitter thing, which I know are all irrational but remain heavy on my emotional radar. It might help if I could remember being babysat as a kid but the only memories anyone in the system will share are a) being left at a “friend down the street’s” house, a mother with 3 boys that pinched, hit, and spat and a father that would then smack them for doing so and b) being sent off with the Jehovah’s witnesses to proselytize for a couple of afternoons. Neither of these are particularly inspiring as far as hiring a babysitter goes. I was a babysitter and a pretty decent one at that, but that doesn’t help, as it turns out.
So mostly I get in touch with people and then eliminate them on some technicality before I even have to interview them. All this for a babysitter I should be able to hear 90% of the time. Intellectually I know that other people can and will care for Noah. Not like I would, because I’m his mum and they are not, but well enough. Not only that, Noah needs to learn that other people will care for him. And also I think 6-10 hrs a week of someone really playing just with him is only a good thing.
But.
I have no trust in the universe. I used to think I would be scared that the babysitter would abuse my son, but instead I’m afraid he or she will miss something and he’ll die. It’s quite crazy. Yes I should see if my therapist can’t help. Except (this is awful) I don’t think she takes it seriously enough, really. Although I’m not sure who in the world would take it seriously enough, unless they were in my head. I have to say that Lynn takes it seriously enough though; she’s all for forgoing babysitters until he’s 14 and doesn’t need them.
Between the two of us we can eliminate just about anyone as being even remotely suitable.
Yes, I’m definitely nuts about this one. Fortunately, I can probably offload some of it on Carl and get him to do the first screening. Then I can eliminate people on technicalities later in the process.
And yes, busy - busy not-interviewing babysitters, keeping the house clean for the family invasion this weekend, and writing three articles for next week. Not to mention oh, caring for Noah! Right! Which is actually getting to be more and more fun - today we spent an hour at the playground playing, because he does now!
But also more intense, because he is into everything all the time. And he climbs. He does not yet walk (well, not unless he is pushing a chair, a walking toy, or his high chair around. Yesterday I watched, bemused, as he pushed his high chair across the kitchen, into the living room, and down the hallway, all of which involved quite a few turns which he handled rather scarily well), but he has figured out he can push a box over to an Ikea Poang chair and climb onto the box and then onto the chair. He also figured out how to push-in-and-turn the knobs on my gas stove even though he has to stand on tiptoe to do it. (Yes, there is apparently a technological fix from the safety store. No, they’re not in stock anywhere in my neighbourhood. Right now duct tape is my best friend, plus constant vigilance! Gas + pilot + baby = BAD)
And his molars are cutting through, and his ankle is sore and itchy. Poor boo. He’s actually remarkably good with it, except at bedtime and so I haven’t been getting the evening time as usual. But tonight he made it down for 8:30, which is only about ohhhh 1.5 hrs late. I have resorted to Tylenol once. He is such a stoic kid. I can’t believe he had to have stitches already.
Oh wait, this wasn’t going to be about him.
So life has taken this challenging, busy busy turn. In the midst of which I threw this birthday party. And I’m glad I did.
But yes, busy and tired and wee stressed out. :-)
More later but!
He’s one year old! Today! Oh my god! I want to write a long post but I am still whacked.
I just had to share that Noah was completely repulsed by the grocery store cake. He could not believe we expected him to eat that… thing. We didn’t try ice cream, which I suspect would have had a better reception. I saved that for lunch today, his real birthday. :-) (I have nothing against ice cream in small quantities, provided it’s a good kind.)
I’m sure there’s a real life lesson in that. Somewhere. I just wish I were in my arrogant young twenties so I could think it had to do with all the wholesome whole foods he’s been fed this year, but I’m old enough to know that like sleep and temperment, it’s probably just more about where he was at yesterday.
And I still am sort of obliquely proud. Perhaps next year we will have the carrot cake.
He had grapes (all cut up, don’t you worry) for the first time though and he was in ecstasy.
Superhero birthday
[I start this entry with the note that I realize that future birthday parties will be about Noah. But this birthday party, the first, is more about Carl and I, because Noah could not care two beans about it. And neither of us are birthday party people - we tend to hide on our respective birthdays, in fact. But I talked Carl into a party for two reasons. One was to get in the habit of having birthday parties, because Noah will surely want them and we may as well start to deal with that cultural reality. And the second was to have a kids' birthday party for me, to get it out of my system, so that I don't subconsciously then try to hijack every party from here on in. It's a nice theory, anyway; we'll see what happens.]
Tomorrow instead of the simple and tasteful affair I had originally envisioned (my pick: champagne brunch with trendy cupcakes; Lyria’s pick: carrot cake and tree planting; system kids’ pick - pretty much, just keep reading ), my house will be transformed into a riot of Superman paraphenalia ($45 worth in fact) and I will pick up a grocery store Superman cake - you KNOW the kind, the white sugar icing kind with the red dye around the outside - and each attendee will take home a Superman lunch bag complete with Thermos because they had them on sale at the grocery store.
And I have rather way too much food and chips and pop and oh! my! god! if the Waldorf school ever catches wind of this we will be blacklisted forever.
And here’s the best. The next weekend we will do it all over again ’cause Carl’s family had to switch weekends. So it’s TWO sugarspun weekends!
These aren’t even the values I want to instill in Noah, the grocery store theme cake and the plastic banners and the ultra traditional birthday party. At least I don’t think so.
And yet, although this may be blatantly self-justifying, about a year and a half ago when Carl had moved to Ottawa and I was still in the process of trying to move there, we attended the first birthday for his cousin’s son.
It was really hard to be there, because our daughter not.
And at that party I ended up wandering around with the children rather than hanging with the adults, and I listened at some length while two of the older kids tried to explain over and over to the younger kids what was going to happen: no, NO, NO. FIRST he has to wear a hat and THEN you sing happy birthday and THEN he blows out the candles and THEN you can have cake. (Said over the - yes- grocery store white cake, which was perilously close to being manhandled by several wandering toddlers).
And this birthday wisdom of the ages was being passed from child to child with the solemnity you might give to concerns of the eternal soul.
And I had this Zen moment where I realized that a lot of the bargaining that had been going on in my head - about why I was selected by the universe to experience yet more grief and sorrow and unbearable loss - was based on rules that had just about the same weight as FIRST you sing happy birthday and THEN you eat the cake. (I didn’t smoke, drink, or eat unripened cheeses while pregnant! Surely that counted for something!)
And it wasn’t some revelation that those rules are wrong and that you should let it all go.
It was the revelation that these children would now be dreadfully sad if they didn’t get their own cakes in their turn, and their sadness would be true sadnesses even if the cake itself is so much petroleum product and trans-fat. And if their parents really did convince them that the vegan zucchini cake with whole wheat flour was really what they wanted, still the other children around them would ask them in that combination of innocence and cruelty why their cake was so weird. Because the birthday is the birthday, in our culture. It just is.
And that I was dreadfully and truly sad that in the modern world of What to Expect When You’re Expecting and so many medical miracles that my daughter died, and that even if thousands and thousands of children die in the world every day I still never expected it to be mine. First you have a full-term pregnancy; then you have a healthy baby. And that even if I could some day come to terms with that, I would still never be the person I had been before that happened and that the gulf between me and those people who haven’t been through that or something similar would always be there, not as acutely as it was at that particular event, but still. A simple kid’s birthday party would never be the same for me again. (And I have to say that even doing Noah’s party carries a bit of that; as much as I want his birthday to be simply joyful for him, and I hope we can do that in the future, in me it hits that loss, still.)
And that is simply how it is.
And so it is that when I saw the Superman-themed birthday cake in the bakery fridge at Dominion I knew that I had to have it for Noah (although I still held onto the cupcake dream for a while, even while buying Superman plates and napkins and banners).
Because that really is it in a nutshell isn’t it: the grocery store cake with the invincible bullet-proof man on it.
Tomorrow I will give Noah a piece of that artery clogging obesity promoting sugar and chemical laden cake and pray with all my power and will that he enjoys many, many more birthdays with cakes of ANY kind.
And there will be MUCH salubrious celebration of the incredible year we have had with him.
And still a sadness that Emily will not be there.
But NO Kryptonite!
Baby’s first ER visit
Well now we’ve been to the ER. My poor boy.
The picture displays the scene of the crime (of course I took this just now, not then. I clarify for the odd internet crazy person :)). Noah was pushing this walking toy around - and around - and around - in glee, because he is really focused on getting walking now. And Carl was taking a (rare) coffee break upstairs and I was talking to him when Noah tried to walk and reach down over the walking toy to get one of the spinny bits at the same time, and then the toy rolled forward and he felt down and went boom on his hands and tummy. And shrieked, which is unusual but not so unusual that I thought much of it, especially since he was heading into the morning nap.
So I picked him up to soothe him. And then I felt that feeling you really don’t want to feel on your foot, which is drops of something warm and sticky and - yes, blood-like.
So I checked his mouth and it was fine. And then I looked down his legs and his ankle, right above the heel, was split right open in a cut about 2 cm long and a fine bloody mess. Carl looked and we were both: yup, stitches.
He caught his ankle under the dishwasher there, where it’s an aluminum panel. I’d checked it for finger-slicing properties when Noah started crawling and decided it would pass but apparently it really is sharp enough to do something like that if you slam your foot up into it. Although the chances of that happening again are slim, this is the last time it will look normal as we are going to strap a few layers of duct tape under it there, unless we think of something better before tonight.
Carl grabbed the first aid kit (was I ever glad he happened to be right there) and got a sterile pad over it and I kept the pressure on for a bit (Noah stopped crying) and then he and I wrapped it up and grabbed up the diaper bag and the Ergo and went straight to the ER. The bleeding had pretty well stopped by then (it never got through the last layer of gauze) but it was really open and, well, frankly, I just wanted to get right there and get my baby better.
The ER was of course a bit of a zoo. Carl parked while I went in. I settled Noah in the Ergo and stood up while waiting to hit triage, which turned out to be a mistake as the triage chairs (labelled, but it took me a while to notice) were the placeholders in line, so we ended up two people back from where we might have been. But it kept him really calm and he couldn’t reach his ankle from there, so that was a good. We finally got triaged and went into the waiting room to find like 15 people in there, so Carl and I decided he might as well get back to work - he would have stayed for sure, but it didn’t seem to make sense for us both to stay given that it wasn’t (I thought) the kind of emergency that means big decisions, and I felt pretty ok given that, you know, my baby hacked through his ankle.
After that we actually only ended up waiting about 2 hours, in a variety of waiting rooms, which for a Toronto emerg even on a Thursday morning when doctors’ offices are open, was still pretty good. We did bypass a couple of people also there for stitches who came in ahead of us though, so I think babies must get bumped - which is very helpful for primary caregivers and probably cuts down on the wailing a bit.
Noah was amazing; he fussed a bit mostly due to overshooting his nap and because his ankle hurt, but then I nursed him and he fell asleep in the Ergo. I cannot say enough good about this whole babywearing thing, because it not only helped my arms but that really was his cosy/comfy spot and he nestled into it gratefully. I wasn’t really prepared for a lot of breastfeeding - I had a normal top on and the diaper bag was minus a receiving blanket ’cause I’d put it in the wash this morning, but I didn’t care. One guy did have trouble not looking at my tit, especially when Noah would occasionally whip off it to look around when a pager went off, but oh well, I hope he got a thrill. :) If you can’t nurse in emerg, I don’t know where you can.
I had to wake him up for the exam, so he was dopey and smiley at the doctor and the nurse. This is where I found out the tendon was fine, which was both a relief and a bit of a scare since I hadn’t actually thought of the tendon possibly being nicked or cut until then. That was in a way my worst moment: knowing the stitches were coming but also being blindsided about the injury that might have been. I’m glad for doctors that check all this out though. I realized at that point that nursing might have slowed a surgery down if he’d needed one, but it had never crossed my mind. Something to remember in the future though (well hopefully not).
Then the nurse really gently and warmly “bunnied” Noah which meant swaddling him with his foot sticking out, and he smiled at her the whole time. I was starting to wonder if he’d brained himself too until we rolled him onto his tummy and he got very upset. I had to help hold him down (I’d seen that coming but was glad for the swaddling) and that was hard. But they froze the spot and he just cried rather than shriek after that took effect, and then the ER doctor did the 3 - THREE! - stitches lickity-split and put a band-aid over and gave me the rules for washing/polysporin/etc., and we were done. Noah has to have them taken out in 10 days - they couldn’t do the dissolving kind because the ankle gets flexed so much that they might have torn too early.
As soon as I got Noah into the Ergo he subsided into little indignant hiccupy sobs now and then and by the time we got out of the doors he was back to himself, although very curious about the way his ankle didn’t feel right. Carl picked us up and we came home. I fed Noah lunch and then held him and he was wriggly because all morning! without playing!
So I put him down and he went straight for the walking toy and started in on the same living room - kitchen - living room circuit, at high speed and high glee. Obviously his powers of association are weak, or else he has mucho cajones. (Can you have “mucho” cajones?)
I, of course, followed him around like a crazy smothering mother while repeating to myself that you can’t tie your kids down for 18 years even when you want to.
Quite a morning.
Also in the ER were three mums of children in their teens, all of whom had sports-related injuries. I realized that it just probably does not ever end, these medical things. I did not know really how I or the system would react to Noah getting hurt like that and I am glad to find out that past first-aid training and the desire to be calm for Noah’s sake trumped any other reactions. We were rarely injured as kids - at least that we went to the hospital for - but when we were, my mum often would at some point get angry or hysterical (to give her credit, usually once it was clear things were going to be okay). I so far haven’t felt the slightest lick of either of those reactions and I’m a bit relieved about that. It probably helps to have dealt with a fair number of things in my work with kids at other points in my life, but still. Gratitude for these things is abounding right now.
Social life? What social life?
I’m copy and pasting this over from a blog discussion I sadly got into today. To set the scene: a mum says she’s lonely and her ’single’ (childless/free) friends have dumped her. In the comments someone ranted about how her baby-having friends weren’t able to have any consideration for her and go out with her without the baby, because she really wanted time with them without interruptions.
[There's life without interruptions, post baby????]
I stick this here to think on it later. And ’cause it’s too late to call, so I’m reminding myself to be appreciative, and sneakily trying to appreciate some people via blog. :-)
~~
I’m responding not to argue but just to express my experience. YMMV Juliana and I think you have a complete right to yours and I’m glad to hear it. Because it is something important in thinking about social isolation and friendships and things.
On the topic of coffee, though, it’s a hard one. [She had said what about a baby-free hour for coffee
My experience (I can’t say what’s right or anything, just what I’ve found) is that if my friends aren’t willing to give me the benefit of the doubt that when I say it’s hard to get out it is /hard to get out/ and not some selfish spiralling lazy-assed illusion I’ve created, we’re more likely to stay friends.
To go into some detail as an example - if you’re breastfeeding on demand, for the first I’d say 6 months (depending on your baby’s personality) you aren’t sure if the baby will want to nurse, so leaving the baby is hard.
If you’re working, you may need to spend a lot of time pumping &/or nursing to keep supply up, plus your time is even more compressed than it used to be.
So two hours - a half hour to get to the coffee shop, a half hour back, and an hour at coffee, can be hard. I’m not saying it’s unreasonable. Just that it may be harder than it appears.
(Pumping, by the way, and using a bottle - things I thought would be a breeze! - is something that can be really hard to do “once in a while” because in order to have enough milk to pump you have to either have been pumping at the same time every day for at least a few days, so that your breasts produce enough milk for the pump, or you have to pump just before you would normally do a feed, which means pumping 20 min before the baby is hungry which can be precision timing to do if you’re going out. You can’t just get a phone call at 3, pump for ten minutes, and run off… at least I couldn’t. Some women with amazing breasts might be able to. :) And introducing a bottle of formula here and there as an alternative works for some babies and for others it doesn’t - they won’t take it. Plus if the baby skips a feed or two the mum gets painful, rock hard breasts - think of having a small melon stuck under your skin. It hurts.)
These are the kinds of stupid details childless/free friends often don’t want to hear about (pumping… ewww). And yet that’s the legitimate reason, not a lack of love or respect for the friend.
I focused on just one issue here but it seems like so many parenting things are like that. Skipping a nap can mean the baby’s up all night; taking the baby to a sitter that’s not the usual daycare may mean no nap. It all cascades into chaos way faster than I ever guessed before I went through it.
Also parenting is crazy busy. I breastfed my son for this first year, and recently I realized I have spent no fewer than four hours in every 24 - and really more like six - breastfeeding /every/ day for the whole year. Just breastfeeding. I am suddenly grateful for friends who were willing to sit with me while I did, since that was almost a quarter of all the hours in the day.
Aside from work I can’t think of anything I used to /have/ to spend 4 hours every single day on.
But having said all that - if it’s really just an hour and the baby’s older, well then I do ENTIRELY think spouses/partners can and should cover for an hour.
For me the problem is those do tend to be “primetime” hours - late at night after a long workday, or weekend days. So again the devil’s kind of in the details - as long as my friend’s up for coffee on Saturday at 1:30 on a weekend my husband’s not on call - yay. :) 5:45 pm on Thursday, not so much.
Having said all that I do find it’s /great/ to get out without the baby now and then - and more and more as he gets older. It’s just less often than even I would like, and I have several friends, so if I can get out once or twice a month for a baby free meal/coffee/whatever, that means each friend might get that every third month… yikes I think I’d better go at least make some appreciative phone calls. :-)
On ghosts
So here’s the thing.
I think it is just true that I’m still cutting my teeth as a literary writer and that this rejection phase is a necessary one. I think I’ve come to terms (as much as anyone can) that having been in a sense a child prodigy at one point in my life but not having made it over the fence in the critical years to be a “young rising star” (because my life was falling apart due to multiple and abuse issues, and also general torpor laziness and lack of anything to say underneath the adolescent pyrotechnics) means that I just have to slog it out with my own lousy writing and get better, and write more and submit more, and be essentially a midlist emerging fiction writer. Someone who will probably get there eventually (and maybe I still harbour some illusions that “getting there” might entail a bit more than a $500 advance and a lot of remaindered copies, for some novel or collection, some day) but who is not going to be, you know, that guy that got published in the New Yorker, Zoetrope, and Harper’s all at once. (I heart him regardless of his success! :))
So I can really affably and truly say that really, this rejection thing is part of the process.
And yet this is the third serious rejection of this particular story, and one came with an offer into a programme. And I am halfway convinced that the reason there’s always someone at the table who says “what the fuck? I can’t believe you liked it” (in some sensible editorial way) is because this story has ghosts in it, and it never really makes it clear whether they’re literal or not. And not in a Turn of the Screw way either. It’s essentially um - floaty, the story starts off brutally realistic and then gradually wanders off into something like the astral mists. Deliberately. And although I can only speak as the ego who has to send it out again next week, I think it works well enough that if there weren’t always someone who really prefers gritty urban stuff, my story might have made it over the fence already. It may be a story that does its story well, it’s just that its story is weird.
(Of course this may just be because I feel a bit that way myself, about me. Confusion between art and self; never a good sign!)
Which is not relevant except my novel does the same at about the 2/3 point, and then it sort of twists back at the end - that is, it ends on an entirely realistic note and the wander off into the grey space between metaphor and reality can be read as a character’s breakdown. Or not. And it freaks me out a little bit to realize that a) I seem to have genred myself a little already, within the ‘lit fiction’ umbrella and that would be magic realism - not the vampire hunting housewife kind but its snooty cousin. And b) that if I’m right (please God, perhaps I might be wrong?) it may be even more of a struggle to get it read.
Which is all pretty much just monkey mind driving me to give up and wrapping my ego in cotton wool before pounding it with a mallet over and over, but, you know. I thought perhaps some creative angst would be a welcome break for you readers. So there it is.
Signing off!
Always a bridesmaid, never a bride
I am sorry to report to you that, after much consideration, we at [lit mag I would love to be published in] will not be making you an offer for your story. We liked it, and it made it all the way to our final meeting, but it got edged out by the competition. A near miss, as they say. I hope you’ll send this out to another good mag, because I believe it is eminently publishable, and most of our readers agree, but not all.
Yeah well, no hummus for the ones that disagreed. But isn’t the editor just a very nice rejection letter writer?
I do hope this story finds a home. But damn! This would have been one of my big ambitious moments, had all the readers agreed.
I suppose Noah and I are both cutting our molars. Mine are just metaphorical.
[edited to add: yes, it will be out to another magazine by Tuesday's post. It's the rule. :)]
Blueberries after dancing
This morning was cuddling and playing one year old style (roll the ball, roll the ball, roll the ball, laugh and clap). And lovely hanging out with Idaho.
Then although I had/have 82348723523 things to do, I took Noah to the local art in the park festival/sale, the one where last year we bought the painting that made me think of Emily, a scant week before I ended up going into labour (and sure enough, next weekend is Noah’s first birthday party and a week Monday his actual birthday). Carl has been working insanely (18 hr days and yes, I know how much sleep that is) and was still stuck en crise so we were on our own; it was a last minute decision to walk over there.
Walking over was nice, since last year I am ashamed to admit that we drove the 8 blocks. I was that pregnant and tired out.
We just happened to hit the African dance/drumming session (there’s a beautiful outdoor stage there) and I settled on the grass with Noah. He loved it. And he got up and danced! Standing up all by himself, he bounced and wriggled and clapped! I mean without holding on to anything at all! The boy could walk if it would occur to him. But I can truly say he got up and danced before he could walk.
Since dancing (badly) is one of my not-so-secret joys I felt giddy. Since the day that boy was born we have danced with him - holding him, with him holding onto things - and although I bet he’d've danced anyway I just felt this amazing energy out of it, good things from me and humanity to him. I hope I can hang onto that when what gets passed on is the darker side.
Noah was more entranced by the flowers in the park than the art, but that is just fine. The only thing I bought was an organic wild blueberry yoghurt parfait from some very earnest vendors and Noah and I shared it under a tree.
Life could hardly get any better than sharing blueberries after dancing, I tell you.
I would like to end it there, but there is more.
We came home and I was eager to show Carl and pulled out the broadway Lion King soundtrack to see if totally different pseudo-African music would help Noah dance the same way.
And then I remembered in a visceral rush how I used to dance to that most every day while Emily was in my womb, in the sunlit kitchen in our old house, because I wanted to dance with her too. So I cried. But you know? I’m glad she was so present in the day too, thinking about how that painting found us and her music. It was sad, but right.
And we dragged Carl out for a quick picnic dinner in the park - nothing fancy, sandwiches and apples - and it was good, still.
Link instead of write
Noah is all better; I am still digging my way out from under things. Future post: why am I so busy?
Meanwhile I have to steer you towards Bitch PhD’s Plan B t-shirt campaign, esp. if you are a U.S. reader. I think this kind of information sharing is cool, regardless of where anyone stands on abortion. I remember being told in a marriage preparation class that the pill - i.e. the standard sort of birth control pill - was abortion and how I almost wrecked all our wedding plans by blowing my lid. Have a religious view! But don’t base it on wrong factual information, ‘k?
Future post: why the Jehovah’s Witnesses are loving my house, speaking of wrong… good lord. Goodnight. More tomorrow, with luck. :)
Sicky
Noah actually ended up popping a fever (100.6 at its height, so far) and having a bit of diarrhea so no more blogging today for me and soon I will be standing over his crib seeing if he’s okay. Baby’s first fever; scary stuff! And, it never rains but it pours.
Meanwhile though I have a link you all must read about a personal tale of small (?) acts of anti-poverty.