Due to Extenuating Circumstances

Adventures in Unplanned Parenthood

Archive for the tag “#humor”

21 Sep 2015

Big Mac Attack

Mac fact: he has asthma. It’s exercise induced but weather extremes, moisture, mold and dust can also aggravate it. We have about 87 little gray inhalers around; I keep one in my car, he has one in his truck, one in his desk, a couple in jackets, I think there’s one in the shed. Those little fuckers are everywhere, would be the salient point.

For Baby, it is Big Boy Bath Time. Instead of putting Baby in his tiny plastic tub, we thought it would be nice for me to get in the bath with him and hold him because he feels like hell. The poor little guy has a bad cold. He’s cranky, stuffy, and weird goobers are coming out of every hole in his face. I briefly considered grinding up Sudafed and putting it in his bottle, but then I remembered I’m a good mother.

Thus, the Earth Mother playbook has been opened. Massages to keep the sinuses draining, humidifiers at night, steam to loosen mucus. I’m a fan of conserving water when possible, so here was my brilliant plan: turn on the shower as hot as it can possibly go, then sit with the baby in the steam. We’ll wait on the floor while the steam loosens his congested nose. As the water goes into the tub, it will have cooled a bit and when we’re all done having our spa treatment we can sit in the tub together as the water will have become a pleasant and soothing temperature. Perfect.

So I get the kid down to his diaper and we sit, breathing in the steam of the hot shower. The door is closed and I’m taking advantage of the acoustics to belt out of some my greater hits, which includes a rousing rendition of Habenera from Carmen where all of the words are replaced with “duh duh duh DUH, duh duh-duh duh. Duh duh duh DAH, buh buh buh BUM.”

I strip down, take off baby’s diaper, and test the water. Feels great. Get in, lower the baby onto me, and then, I am guilty of only slight hyperbole here, the world ended.

The baby starts howling in a way that makes me question the existence of God. What on earth could be happening here? The water is definitely not too hot, I remembered to test it by normal human standards, not my own (because if I’m not lobster red at the end of a shower there was no point at all, hygiene and socialization be damned). There’s no soap so it can’t be in his eyes, I removed the Oscar the Grouch washcloth I loved and apparently was, in the words of one reasonable friend, “straight up terrifying.” Why is he screaming?

Well, Mac had the same question. So he runs into the bathroom, practically knocking the door off its hinges to get to his child who’s being ax-murdered in the bath. He’s within inches of heroically saving his son from the unseen nightmare that’s causing this alarm when…shit. I had been steaming the bathroom for a good 20 minutes. Mac suddenly looks like I tipped him out of his bowl for fun just to watch him flop on the carpet. He looks for the inhaler we keep in the upstairs bathroom. Naturally it’s not there, because God is mad I questioned his/her existence up there in the fourth paragraph. Mac hurls himself towards the stairs, scrambling to get the inhaler he knows he has in the downstairs bathroom. Meanwhile, the blast of cold air Mac let into the room just hit the tub and…shit.

The baby is now scared, screaming and cold. He lets loose the nastiest, foulest, most watery stream of poop you can imagine. He didn’t poop, his butt was just a conduit for waste water that never made it to the “condense/solidify” stage. And I’m in the tub covered in poo-water that’s swirling in the tub and turning my warm big boy bath into a giant germy sewage dump. Mac comes halfway up the stairs, doing his Puff the Magic Dragon act on his inhaler. He takes one look through the open bathroom door, sees the look on my face and…shit.

Mac is laughing so hard he can’t keep the damn inhaler in his mouth. All I wanted was to gently Earth-Mother-soothe my sick baby into a deep, restorative slumber using steam, a little Bizet and loving caresses in a nice warm bath. Now the baby is screaming, Mac is dramatically clinging to life on the stairs wheeze-crying and I’m soaked up to my cellulite in poop water.

Next time the baby gets ground up Sudafed in his bottle and I don’t care who know it.*

This won’t really happen.**

**probably.

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10 Sep 2015
1 Comment

The Crown Drools

I wouldn’t claim to have NO prior experience with babies– Robin and AJ are both moms, I babysat as a teen, the usual stuff you do to come into contact with babies. My experience was wide, but not deep. Mac had far less experience, insofar as he has a very small extended family and also, this is said with love, for about 15 years of his adult life he looked like a hardcore punk rock Disney villain come to life and no reasonable mother would leave so much as a rutabaga with him.

This is why we were a little surprised the first day the baby let a big stream of clear, viscous fluid stream right out of his face and onto the floor. This was unprecedented. He hadn’t been eating, it wasn’t coming out of his nose, it didn’t seem related to crying or being distressed in any way. I had heard of drool, sure– but this wasn’t a little dribble coming from one side of his lips. This had actual volume and mass.

The strangest part was that it didn’t stop. There was so, so, so much. OK, so drooling is associated with teething. That could be exciting! He might be getting a tooth! MILESTONE! We had a good root around Baby’s mouth, figured it would come in the next day or two, and Bob’s your uncle. Whoa. Watching too much British telly. TV. Anyhow…no tooth. Weird. Surely liquid in this quantity is a harbinger of something. This was varsity squad liquid expulsion from a walk-on.

By the end of the evening, we had changed his pajamas twice because they kept getting soaked. It finally dawned on me that this must be why people gave us bibs. We had assumed bibs were for eating only. Want to laugh at some new parent math? We had been given about 25 bibs. We kept the cutest 12. Why 12? Because the baby would eat three times a day and we would do laundry every three days. Don’t you see how clever we were being? We only needed nine bibs and with 12 we had THREE WHOLE EXTRAS. Oh, don’t stop laughing yet. We only kept the cleanest looking ones. Because we were going to pre-treat every stain, then put them in the laundry, and remember to take them out of the dryer right away so the bibs would always look clean and freshly pressed. Yes. We actually had these thoughts. This was also during my “I’ll never give up on cloth diapering” phase, “I’ll NEVER complain when the baby cries because we were so close to having no baby to hear crying” phase, my “the baby will never eat food I didn’t prepare myself” phase, and (the 80’s hair of embarrassing phases) “the baby will hear Spanish everyday so he still think the world sounds familiar and comforting outside the womb” phase. For the record, we did come back to that one, but I’m pretty sure it’s only because the best childcare in our area happens to be run by Mexican-Americans.

By the next morning Mac and I can’t believe the drooling didn’t abate. Hell, it got worse. Baby had the Niagara Falls coming down his dimply little chin and pooling around his neck fat. Of all the things I have Googled concerning this child, ‘how much drool is too much?” isn’t even in the top ten. But it did make the highlight reel for that day, if only because it auto-completed to “how much do Newfoundlands drool” and I didn’t realize they were talking about the dogs. I spent a fair few minutes laughing at the idea of an entire section of Canada unable to wear a nice suit or get married without a formal little bib to catch their uncontrollable streams of saliva.

So, that was 5 months ago. We now own 30 bibs. Most of them are quite ugly. They are mottled little cloth things that have shriveled up from washing and being velcro-ed to each other for days. There are two bins on our kitchen table: Clean Bibs, Disgusting Bibs. He has drooled for 5 straight months without a single tooth in sight. He happily accepts the bibbing ritual and even laughs if you lift up his neck fat to make sure you’re catching all the good stuff. It’s a good thing he’s used to them, because he leaves a visible drool path in his wake we have dubbed the Snail Trail. He has even drooled directly into my mouth and at this point I hardly notice. Well, I DO notice, but it doesn’t freak me out. Much.

If you were wondering what to call a baby who drools this DAMN much, here is a handy list of nicknames for you to try. I can’t claim all of these, our brilliant friends have chimed in on the act. Use them in good health.

  • Droolia Childs, Drools Verne, Droolie Andrews, Raul Droolia, Droolia Roberts, August Strindberg’s Miss Droolie, Drool of the Nile, The Crown Drools, LL Drool J, Ja Drool, Count Droolcula, and Mark Spits.
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23 Aug 2015
3 Comments

Return Policy (or, How My Mother in Law Won the Baby Shower)

One of the tremendous benefits of being adopted after birth is that you get to attend your own baby shower. My sister and my mom’s best friend Mrs. W threw a baby shower for Baby and it was magnificent. Mrs. W had an elephant theme, cupcakes, she even took the time to tape over every little “mom to be!” with “Welcome baby!” on each decoration. Robin had some fun games, like throwing a baby shower for a baby and nobody in the room is allowed to say the word “baby.” Friends and family came from all over and made it a truly joyous occasion.

Everybody gave us wonderful gifts. Clothes, toys, gear, contraptions, things that did stuff. The generosity was astounding. It felt like everybody was telling me Baby was cherished and celebrated, that his arrival was joyous for the village that would help us raise him. I also got to hear that it’s OK to say raising a baby is very hard work. I think adoptive moms are afraid to say so because we worked so hard and felt the need to appear perfect. To appear worthy of motherhood. That worthiness doesn’t jibe with wanting to lay on the floor and cry because you can’t clean the house, diaper the kid, go to work and make food all at once. Only one of those things can be done at a time, and sometimes it feels none of them are being done very well.

The baby was all dressed up in his baby finest for his shower. I mean, come on. A vest. And a TIE? Can you even believe this child? Of course you cannot.

2015-03-25 19.38.06

The other guest of honor at the shower was Mac’s mom. You may remember that Mac was born and raised in Canada, where people are so polite their government’s Nuclear Option is a strongly-worded letter warning the next strongly-worded letter may contain foul language. Mac’s mom was a nurse, now she enjoys hiking, sewing and belonging to church groups. That said, my mother in law is still pretty steely under the polite. She once made the newspaper by climbing onto her nurses’ station and putting out a hospital fire raging inside the ceiling. After she was done I bet the hospital wrote an apology for getting the firefighters out of bed for nothing.

Anyway, she and Mac’s dad were down to meet Baby for the first time. Baby was three months old and especially, especially precious. It may have taken 5 seconds for them to fall totally in love, but I am probably running very long on my estimate.

This is why it was ultimately not a surprise that she won the baby shower. I don’t mean the games, I mean she won the entire night with a single sentence. We were all sharing stories about (surprise!) babies. That in and of itself was fun, both because it was a great way to hear stories from friends but also because everyone tried so hard not to say “baby.” We had lots of perspectives: the older generation told my generation about when we were born, we talked about when our kids were born, the adopted people talked about their homecoming stories, the adoptive moms told of endless paperwork and waiting. One of my friends asked if anyone had been unkind about the process. I told her that yes; as much as it beggars belief, some people say shitty things about adoption.

What did they say? Well, let me see. I heard “you know you won’t be his real mom, and you should just accept that.” I heard “if you were supposed to have kids, you would.” Or what about “isn’t it a little like getting a used kid?”  Then I told of one woman who said to me “Don’t you think those babies are better off with their own people?”

All of the women in the room looked shocked. They cringed. They looked at the baby sitting among all his presents, in his vest and bowtie. The thought that he was less than mine, or not “one of us.” And my mother in law looked around the room and proclaimed “I think I know what I would have said to that woman.”

“BITCH!”

And that, dear readers, is how my mother in law won the baby shower.

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09 Aug 2015
1 Comment

Señor Arbuckle

Attention! Due to extenuating circumstances, the meal plan has been altered. Supplementing the traditional “three squares a day” are Extra Breakfast, Second Breakfast*, Elevenses, brunch, the Long Lunch, the Business Lunch, the None of Your Business Lunch, tea, high tea, High Noon Tea (if you don’t bring me a cup of tea I will shoot your ass), the Late Tea, early bird special, rudely unpunctual bird special, and Midnight Snack.
*denotes service available outside your local shire starting 5/2015.

The baby is going through a growth spurt. Not the kind where his little jammies are a bit too tight. The kind where our doctor asked, in all seriousness, if he was throwing up any of his food because she had never heard of a baby this young drinking 11 ounces at a time and keeping it all down. But he does. Over and over again. We feel bad because we are feeding him so much more than we’re told we should. The problem is, if we stop he screams and screams until he gets his bottle back. We cannot fill him up. He’s not even to his third month and we’re buying the amount of food recommended for 6 month old children or those greedy mean chihuahuas that women carry around in handbags and you know they could rip your face off. I mean the chihuahua could rip your face– nope. Just thought about it. As to whether I meant the chihuahuas or the women I’ll let the ambiguity stand.
Every ounce the kid gains goes to his face. It looks like I’m raising the Mexican Fatty Arbuckle. His cheeks look like we decided for some reason to store an egg’s worth of Silly Putty on each side of his face. His forearms have little rolls of fat. I find rolls of fat I didn’t even know the human body could make. I delight in showing my friends how you can part his roll of neckfat to find another, deeper roll of neckfat. His neckfat becomes my pride and joy. See how fat MY baby is? I go through an odd phase of showing everyone I meet just how fat I can make a baby. You’d think I had invented caloric intake.

His burps can be categorized thusly: hic-cough, ate at Taco Bell, frat boy, Homer Simpson, and Zuul. You do not want Zuul. Nobody wants Zuul. The worst is when the Zuul burp wafts formula smell at you. I seriously thought nothing could smell worse than formula that I had to mix at three a.m. while sick to my stomach. At 3:15 that same morning I knew I hadn’t thought it through. Thankfully he doesn’t spit up that much. When he does, he seems to be an all-or-nothing kind of guy. I used to think loving my baby was such an intense, visceral kind of warmth I could truly feel it spreading. Now I know better: that warm gushy feeling I get when I hold Baby starts at my heart and spreads steadily all the way from my chest to my arms and stomach, then stops at the band of my underwear where it pools because formula-drool is super-viscous before it crusts over.

This leads to a whole other tactical problem I had yet to consider: the nursery has a little bassinet, a changing table, stacks of onesies and jammies, a shelf of stuffed animals, but no laundry hamper. We forgot that outside the casino hotel laundry would be expected. You can get away with a LOT in a casino hotel that just doesn’t fly out here in reality, but that’s another article. Tune in next time when Mac and Sarah re-evaluate the importance of clothing, self image and sanity.

only_zuul

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07 Aug 2015
3 Comments

Destiny’s Niño

I want to share with you a small fact about destiny that I bet you didn’t know: it has been fated since the beginning of all time that I would have a Mexican child. There was no getting around it. If you think I can make up this fate, keep reading. 

There is an old wives’ tale that newborn babies smell like something really special. It’s not the shampoo, or lotion, or anything you use around the baby, it’s just the way the baby himself smells. One night while I was lying next to the baby I took a good long sniff of his hair. It was very strange to me to discover that the old wives’ tale brought out three distinct phases of terror in me. The terror was that fate is real. The Greeks were right. You cannot outrun your destiny, not ever.

Phase One: It was TRUE. What other pieces of wisdom have I foolishly dismissed over the years just because I didn’t see empirical evidence to back the claim? Why was I dismissing the information that may not have been based in science as I understand it but had historical and cultural implications? Oh god. Was I not a feminist because I demanded a hypothesis of behavior rooted in the physical or social sciences and that avenue clearly wasn’t open to women when this wisdom began and oh my lord have I abandoned everything it means to be a woman in a misguided attempt to be a jaded humanist???

SLAP.

Wow, your imagination can run away with you when you’re tired and emotional. I didn’t shit all over the sisterhood, I just didn’t believe babies have a unique smell. Now I do. But that brings me to the second issue:

He smelled, I am not making this up, like crunchy and butter cinnamon-y goodness to me. My first thought was “toast!” I probably thought that because, and my thoughts on this are well documented, I really, really love toast. I think toast is fantastic. Plus that would even make sense, because my mom used to make me special cinnamon toast when I was a kid, I associate it with mothering and love, and blah blah blah. But the baby didn’t smell exactly like toast to me. He smelled like _________. Oh, man. OK. I’ll try again. He smelled like a, uh, uh, a…. ________________.

He smelled exactly like a —————. This is terrible. I can’t do it. Please don’t make me do it. Uh, OK. Bravery. Peace. Inner calm. What would Leslie Knope do? Boldness. Honesty. Integrity. Just say it.

He smelled precisely and utterly like a churro to me.

This was a nightmare. Did it make me racist? Am I insane? Have I somehow transposed memories of a time when I was in Mexico to having this Mexican child and then it all got swirled in my brain? Have I had a stroke? Am I dying? Nope. There’s no way of getting around it. That kid smelled like churros. He did. I was the only one that could smell it but I stand by my madness.

Which brings me to the third point, the hilarity of my fate. Before I met Mac, I dated a man from Mexico. We met there and had only seen each other in person in Mexico although we had a long distance romance for awhile. He was the major relationship I had in my early 30s. I’ll call him Juan, because if I tell you his real name everyone in all of Mexico will be able to find him. His parents had a hippie streak and gave him a name that would be as distinctive in Mexico as Moon Unit Zappa or Blue Ivy Carter is here. Juan is a great guy, it’s just that he needed to live in Mexico where his heart is, and I needed to live in the US, where my heart is.  Sorry, I don’t like to lie. Ireland is where my heart is. However the fact remains that my job, family and psychiatrist all live here and that, especially the last, is not insignificant. Juan had a house in Mexico but living there wasn’t right for me. So we parted and it hurt but we moved on and remain friends.

The hilarity is this: I ate churros quite a few times with Juan. They are damn delicious and go great with hot cocoa. Maybe I did make a subconscious connection. Maybe I do like cinnamon. Maybe I have a serious smelling disorder linked to motherhood and I should ask my psychiatrist about it. One glaring, ridiculous fat fact remains:

I broke up with a Mexican man, to live in the US. In the US I married a Canadian. The Canadian and I have a Mexican son.

You can’t fuck with fate, people. I was gonna have a Mexican kid no matter what.  And he DID smell like churros. So there.

 

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05 Aug 2015
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The Garage Sale and My Coke Habit

**a short break from our regular blogging duties to enjoy a piece I submitted to a site a few weeks ago. They didn’t want it but asked to see more of my writing. To celebrate this small victory I am leaving the original submission here. Enjoy and share.**

I made the mistake of having a baby and a garage sale at the same time. To clarify, I didn’t go into labor on a card table in the driveway, although that would have been one way to upstage the lemonade stand across the street. No, I was merely in simultaneous possession of a baby and a garage sale, just not my faculties. If I had been, I would have remembered to put my personal soda supply inside the house before the Well-Meaning Neighbor stopped by. You know that neighbor. I bet you have one, too. She’s not nosy, intrusive, inquisitive, snide and smug. She Aggressively Means Well.

“Hi, Well Meaning Neighbor.”

“Hi there! Wow, look at that baby, he is so big! And wow, you really needed to have a garage sale! What’s in the back? Well wow, you guys sure have a lot of Coke in your garage!”

I’ll be honest: it made me kind of happy when you just said Baby instead of his actual name, because I know from experience this means you don’t remember it. I’ve played the overly casual “so, how do you spell your name?” card twice on this block alone and I’m comfortable with the fact we just don’t care enough to remember each other’s’ names. I have yours narrowed down to a common name that begins with N but not Nancy.

Not-Nancy, I’m also letting the overuse of “wow!” slide because I’m trying to break the “amazing!” habit. I recently watched myself for 45 seconds on a reunion video and realized there is a very real danger I’m going to turn into someone who sounds 13, or, worse, perky. But, Not-Nancy, we’re going to have a frank talk about my Coke habit.

My Coke habit is the direct result of the garage sale condition. That stems from the baby you can’t remember the name of (and good job using context clues to take a stab at identifying gender, by the way). Our garage looks like a disemboweled Walmart for one regrettable reason: we were the last in our group to have a baby. We adopted very suddenly and needed help. When the call went out for baby things, They Came. Like benevolent plagues of Egypt, a thousand friendly mommies ripped open the seams of their basements to disgorge months, years, decades of baby-related detritus they will never want again. The top layers were fabulous items I was thrilled to use for Baby. The underlayers will forever haunt me.

Onesies of uniforms worn by now incarcerated athletes. Bits of plastic toys with tooth marks and bizarre discoloration around the edges. Alarming harnesses with Swedish names and buckles to fit body parts neither gender would possess. Shoes for feet that can’t walk. Mismatched socks and hats with odd fuzz on them. Formula samples expiring years before we began the adoption process. Two doorway jumpers with parts missing and no way to test how critical those parts might have been. Last, but certainly not least, a mountain of clothing that was perfectly cute but for a summer baby. I have enough on my mind without dressing a Christmas baby in a “Surf’s UP!” tank top then facing my social worker.

What does this have to do with the Coke? I’m glad I imagine you asked. Right now, I’m making a house ready for a baby, working, maintaining a semblance of control over my finances and fighting the urge to rapidly defenestrate the next person who chirps “savor each and every moment!” The Coke in my garage is what is keeping me upright because coffee is awful, I can’t afford speed and nobody will tell me what Seal Team 6 uses to stay awake on missions. The calories are a good idea as mealtimes have been reduced to whatever I can eat while I’m making a bottle. The corn syrup is a godsend because the word corn implies I have eaten something plant based. In fact, the more corn syrup I have in my system the better I feel about my choice to drink Coke. I live in Nebraska so supporting local corn growers might provide the karma I need to offset the enormous amount of diapers I’m chucking into Mother Earth. Hell, I’m gonna ride this one all the way to its logical conclusion: high fructose corn syrup isn’t just keeping me alive. It’s keeping America alive. That’s right. I went there. If you don’t support Frosted Flakes, Pop Tarts, Oreos, NyQuil and Hershey’s Chocolate Syrup, then you’re not the kind of American I want on my lawn. You don’t deserve to judge my garage, my mess OR my Coke habit.

Not-Nancy, I am going to sit here and drink this Coke while I figure out how much of my husband’s stuff I can sell before he notices. If you aren’t here to diaper my kid or lay out of season onesies on a card table, then just keep walking. And if you’re walking past the gas station, bring me another Coke.

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04 Aug 2015

My son’s homecoming

After three weeks in the hotel, Baby got cleared to go all the way back to Nebraska. It was the first week in January so we’d have a few days to settle in before the semester started. Time was a factor because we had been commuting back to Nebraska one at a time to do work while Baby stayed in Iowa. You’ll remember that we would be charged with Very Bad Things if the baby had spent even a second outside of Iowa before the Interstate Compact was completed. So I would like to state, here on this public forum, that Baby’s homecoming was the very, very first time he had ever crossed into Nebraska. He absolutely never slept in the backseat when we needed to deposit a check so my bank account wouldn’t be in tragic overdraft and that bank account was definitely never, not ever located in Omaha and frankly, I think it’s strange you would even ask.

The baby’s homecoming was everything you’d imagine a long-awaited homecoming would be. My mom loves putting up decorations and she loves being a grandma. Homecoming for the baby was her Super Bowl Halftime Show and she was going to go big or die trying. There was a big sign on the way into the back door, decorations in the living room, huge welcome banners and sparkly decorations saying It’s a Boy! The baby got carried into his brand new nursery and knew he was safe and loved. It was a spectacular homecoming. I hear. I wasn’t there. I was with AJ in Virginia visiting a pain specialist who performs some magic where he injects things near my spine and it stops pain where my spleen is. Hold on there– nope. I just googled where the spleen is, and it’s not there. Regardless, it stops pain in my front which is nowhere near my spine.

Upon my return I was overwhelmed by the generosity of friends and acquaintances. People knew we were blindsided. We had no furniture, no nursery decorations (except four adhesive soccer balls Mac has been saving since 2013. No, really). The Baby had clothes and diapers but we needed someplace higher than the floor to make these activities happen. My parents and Robin chipped in the immediate necessities like bassinet and diapering station which they set up and put in the room that was always-going-to-be-the-nursery-except-it-was-an-office-because-people-facing-infertility-have-complex-emotional-needs-balancing-hope-with-realism.

I was also overwhelmed by my husband’s face. Let me tell you something. Mac has had a challenging life. He has faced serious medical issues, his career involves long hours, he nursed someone through terminal cancer. He has stared into the abyss and the abyss was a little taken aback.

Mac was a single father for 5 days. This cannot be overstated: Mac, with the help of my family, was a single parent for just over 120 hours. I arrived from Virginia at the 121st hour. I walked in with my suitcase, saw Mac, and immediately reached for my phone. My husband had died and I felt someone should tell his mother. That man has never looked so haggard. He stared eerily into my soul, said he was happy the injection went well, and then said “I am going to sleep.” Not “I’m taking a nap,” “I am going to sleep.” There was no preface or qualifier or time limit. He meant it. He went into the bedroom and came out in March.

We’re home. I’m home. The three of us are in our home. All I have to do is organize a few things, make sure Baby gets fed and changed, and then step right back into work and my social life.

Stay tuned to find out how easy that has been.

2015-01-15 00.19.03

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03 Aug 2015
2 Comments

Blunder Woman

I’m taking a quick break from the beginning of the saga to move us into real time. Last night I babysat my sister Robin’s 4 year old son. She and her husband have raised the their son according to the gospel of The Big Lebowski, their son is therefore named The Dude. In fact, if you ask him what the Dude does, he will tell you in all sincerity that the Dude abides.

So yesterday I’m babysitting the Dude for a night. We start off with watching some TV. It turns out there are an ENORMOUS number of superhero cartoons now, stemming from about 33 different franchises. You have Marvel, DC, Transformers, Ninja Turtles, Ninja Robots, Ninja Lego Robots, an animal one where everyone looks like they were ripped off from Big Hero 6, and one especially dedicated to the Incredible Hulk and his agents of SMASH. Then all of these have spinoffs, crossovers, special episodes, recurring characters that ghost into similar shows within a franchise, and the partridge in the pear tree. The pear tree transforms into a flying dragon Lego and the partridge is the anime spirit of a long-dead warrior who is at war with Loki. Or some fucking thing.

After all of this we went outside for his favorite activity. His favorite activity is Outside Superhero Water War. I squeezed myself into Robin’s workout gear (she is Mila Kunis, I’m Christina Hendricks) and the Dude went commando because the one pair of swim trunks I could find were so big on him the only thing keeping them up was his junk. That’s too much hanging, yes really, on one four year old’s junk. So I chase after him with the spray Coppertone, him yelling “I don’t WAAAANT it!” and me screaming “I’m not going to have my sister asked how you got burned testicles, Dude!” Then we filled up full-sized water balloons and threw them at the fence until the Spiderman declared war on us.

The way it works is this: a plastic Spiderman, sitting in a chair, is attached to the sprinkler head. The water is turned on and that means the battle has started. Our main weapons are water guns. Sprinkler Spiderman, as any sprinkler supervillain would, shoots water at us. We go at him, using all sorts of positions and tactics only the Dude understands, squirting water back at him. Eventually this makes us the winners, which means we’re superheroes. We have backup weapons we use when the guns aren’t enough. I got a home base plate made out of plastic to use as a shield which was valiant of the Dude as I recently had abdominal surgery. He even showed me how to hold it for maximum protection (the key is to keep the point that would face the pitcher down. Or up. Just not side to side. What is this, your first day, Sarah?) He used a sword. I didn’t mention to the Dude we could permanently vanquish Spiderman by cutting the sprinkler feed because, dammit, I do have a heart. No reason to kill this kid’s superhero fantasy.

I don’t want to brag, but at 39 I can still bring the kickass against an evil foe like Spiderman.

That’s a lie. I was too wussy to get my leather sandals wet so I was barefoot and squeezing out of my sister’s clothing like slightly congealed toothpaste. My wrists hurt from shooting the tiny waterguns, my cellulite screams when it sees the sun and I have big oozing thing coming out of my navel that the surgeon assures me will be just as nice as the other 13 scars I have down there once something called a “hyper-inflammatory stress response” goes away. Auditioning for the Marvel franchise is right out, would be the point here.

But this isn’t about that. I’m with a naked four year old who absolutely believes that when I shout COVER ME COVER ME COVER ME he is doing something of vital importance while I refill my water gun and maybe have a sip of this wine my sister got me that’s bright pink and tastes like melted Jolly Ranchers. The Dude lives in the land with the anime dragon things, and the Transformer robot-killer car things, and he is fighting the good fight. I’d be a crappy aunt if I didn’t at least try.

Wine down. Refill pistols. Return to the scene of the battle. Locked and loaded, I put one gun straight out, bend the other over my head and shoot like my life hangs in the balance.

The Dude turns to me, and with a reverence I have never heard before, says “nice move, Sarah.”

Watch your ass, Ninja Lego Hulk Dragons. I’m coming for you next.

Posted in Uncategorized and tagged ,
31 Jul 2015
1 Comment

A shameful confession in selfish co-parenting

That first stage of parenting settled in and we were aware we had to look out for Baby’s every little need. I worried someone had finally given me my big chance and I was going to screw up the most perfect thing I had ever been given. I would only use bottled water for the formula since I had no idea if hotel sink water is clean. The sink is right next to the toilet, for god’s sake. I worried about SIDS. I worried he missed the sound of his birth mom. My overarching worry was that I’d hurt him. He’d fall when I bathed him. He’d choke. I’d drop him or cut him. At one point I remember thinking “what if I rip out his umbilical cord by mistake and he bleeds and it won’t stop?”

“Fear of horrendous mothering failure” would be the basic message, here.

At this point we have been living in the casino hotel for about two weeks. We have a good routine, if possible at that stage. Diaper station happens on the coffee bar, laptop is on the desk, minifridge stocked with grocery basics to avoid eating out every meal. The pantry (top shelf of the coffee bar) is where we store food. Eddie’s essentials: formula. Sarah’s essentials: chocolate and granola bars. Husband Mac’s essentials: Pop Tarts and scotch. Mac, actually of Scottish ancestry, drinks nice scotch to celebrate big life moments . He will only eat Pop Tarts if we are on a trip out of town. At the intersection of “having a son” and “we’re in a hotel” is my husband, having Pop Tarts and a 14 year old single malt.

The days went by in a pleasant haze of staring the baby and accepting the congratulations of our friends and family as our adoption was made public. We got cards, our students shared wonderful stories of how they cried when they saw the news on Facebook. Mac’s auntie started knitting a sweater for the baby. My in-laws Skyped with the three of us and never, not once, looked at their son or myself. They said, quite rightly, that he was a very beautiful baby and looked quite intellectually advanced for his age, too.

Then one morning I went to pick up the baby and discovered he had been mauled by Wolverine. My first thought was that this meant Hugh Jackman had been in my hotel room in the middle of the night and I’d missed it. That would really suck because like most women my ultimate fantasy is to have one night with Hugh in a hotel room. In my fantasy he’s arranging a a sitdown with his agent so I can sign a seven year deal to write as well as appear onscreen. I assume yours is much the same.

But what the hell happened to my child’s face? It was Death by a Thousand Papercuts. Then I see he’s not wearing mittens. That meant the scratches were from his nails. Right! This is one of those new parenting things I AM actually equipped to handle. One of the things we got as a gift was a little baby grooming set. There was a comb (pointless, his hair stood straight up all the time), snotsucker (pointless, the stupid little bulb was so hard to squeeze I needed two hands thus leaving no hands free to corral raging, angry newborn head) and a nailclipper. This is awesome, because after diapering, umbilical cord care and foreskin hygiene it was a relief to do something to the baby that I had at least done to myself.

This confidence lasted exactly nine seconds. Seven seconds to pick Baby up, one second to grab his chubby little fist and one more second to discover babies are not born with human fingernails. They are born with microscopic razors a millimeter thick that could scratch a diamond. I try to position the clippers but he suddenly moves his hands. What if I cut him? What if I miss? I can’t even see a pinky nail. It looks like a grain of rice. What the hell are my options here? I’ll bite my own nails but not his. Will I? Oh hell, I’ll try. Nope, I can’t get my teeth to work on something that tiny.

This is when, I’m not proud of myself but it’s true, this when I stopped. I didn’t even try. I put his mittens back on and did that whistling thing people do when they’re trying to act like there’s nothing to see here, officer. See, I knew eventually Mac would see the nails. Mac would try. If there was going to be a fingertip bloodbath it wasn’t on my conscience. This is, you will have guessed, exactly what happened.

One morning I bolt upright out of bed frantically heading towards my baby because I can hear he’s being murdered. I rush around the corner and Baby’s wailing while my husband is holding him. In the saddest, most heartwrenching little voice you’ve ever heard from a grown man Mac says “I cut him.” He felt miserable. He had taken the world’s tiniest sliver of flesh from my son’s finger and there was a little drop of blood. I think my husband would have cut off his own finger right there if it would undo this nightmarish scene.

And this, dear readers, is my shameful co-parenting confession. My very first thought was not to look at the finger or comfort my husband. I sort of did those on autopilot but they weren’t my first thought. My first thought, in its entirety, was

OH THANK GOD I AM NOT THE FIRST ONE TO MAKE THE BABY BLEED.

Posted in Uncategorized and tagged , , ,
29 Jul 2015
2 Comments

A short list of things that confuse me

There are times that I look around at the university where I lecture and think to myself “are we all sure I’m the person who is supposed to be up here?” Don’t get me wrong; theatre and how it intersects with culture is genuinely my passion. I have spent more than 20 years learning about it, doing it and writing about it. Passing that on to other people is freaking great. Generally speaking, I feel anyone who clearly remembers life before the internet has a place on the college campus; we are living history and what we went through will genuinely be forgotten by next Tuesday if we don’t tell people about life BPC (Before Personal Computers).

That said, there are things about baby gear that confuse the hell out of me. I don’t just feel curious, or befuddled, or even inadequate. Baby gear makes me feel DUMB. To wit:

  • why do baby bottles have rings? The ones in the hospital that you throw away every two ounces like you are a rapper in a video don’t have rings. But the at-home model does. Why can’t we just shape plastic like the ring is attached?
  • Without looking it up, tell me the differences between cloth diapers that are AIO, pre-fitted, pocket, hybrid and/or 2 in 1. For extra credit identify what a “leg gusset” is and explain why a diaper has something that sounds like part of a saloon whore’s costume.
  • Nipple sizes. Newborn, 2, 3…two what? three what? If you’re thinking of looking directly at a full bottle and squirting it to see if that edifies you, please take a picture. I’d like very much to know what the expression on my face was.
  • How does my baby know when I’m standing? We can jiggle him for a solid hour while he cries. Jiggle and walk, jiggle and walk. We jiggle him until our hands are numb and there’s a disturbing tic in my eye every time I move my shoulder. ANYTHING to keep him from crying. The second we sit to jiggle? The baby unleashes the hounds of hell directly out of his face. How did he know we sat while we jiggled? HOW?
  • He spent at least 36 weeks in utero hearing Spanish. Do I sound weird to him? If not, why not?
  • Finally, I own this and use this and it still confuses the hell out of me how I got here.
  • nosefrida-the-snotsucker-nasal-7898
Posted in Uncategorized and tagged , , ,

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