Can I take a minute to talk about NOT THE ELECTION?
Cool...
So, I'm going to assume that if you're one of the three people who read this blog (hi mom!) you probably know what you're doing Tuesday. You have either read a lot of stuff and avoided as much hoopla as possible; or perhaps you ate up every last crumb of hoopla, watched all of the debates in a cloud of disbelief, and still have no idea.
The first and last serious thing I will say about it is,
Please vote. Just show up and do it. Please.
Anyhoo, so the important topic.
Pantsuits.
Specifically HRC's Pantsuits (capitalization required).
There's been a lot of commentary on the Pantsuits, a lot of joking, a lot of friendly ribbing about their many colors, styles, and shoulder pad presence.
There's been the use of the Pantsuit as parody, as symbol, as solidarity, and as goofy fashion choice.
What nobody seems to be acknowledging is this:
WHAT THE FUCK ELSE IS SHE SUPPOSED TO WEAR?
Think about it.
When you're a male politician, you wear a suit.
You pick your color. You pick your tie. If you're feeling dapper, you have a pocket square. Maybe you choose a tighter fit, or a skinnier tie, or a single breast or a double breast. Maybe you get a slim leg trouser or a wide leg. Perhaps you get daring and go for pinstripes. There's lapel width to consider, collar starch levels, cuff links versus buttons, etc.
The point is. When you are a male politician, you wear a suit. One might even call it the official uniform of the position.
So why is it so weird that this woman who is running for President would wear a suit?
Why is it her Pantsuit, which has not changed much in the way of style but only in color, is the strange emblem of her candidacy?
Remember back in '08 when Obama was running for his historic role as the leader of the free world, and that amazing Shepard Fairey Hope Poster became his emblem? It represented hope and possibility. It became parodied, satirized, and ubiquitous in the same way as the Pantsuit, but it was a portrait of the man! It showed a serious contender for this role in the country's future. While not commissioned by the campaign the work of art obtained approval from Obama and became a symbol of the change this country was ready for. Wasn't there even a facebook app or something so you could change your profile picture to match the style of the poster?
Now, eight years later, we have another historic candidate running for the position. She has set her sights on becoming the first woman president, and I don't know...maybe it's because she's older than Obama, not as sexy (let's be honest sex sells everything), and has spent a considerable amount of time in the political limelight already for good or for worse, but the symbol chosen for her campaign is her OUTFIT. Her clothing, people. What the ever loving hell?
This is a wee opinion piece. It is not meant to convince anyone on whom to cast their ballot this Tuesday, but I believe the subject is a reflection of a serious discrepancy between two historic candidates.
But Jess! You might be yelling, the unofficial Trump emblem is his hair! The unofficial Bernie emblem was his receding hairline and glasses! These things are superficial too!
They are, yes, but there's been a long history of presidential candidates physicality being used both for or against them as suitable for the job. There's also this amazing thing that men are allowed to do in our society which is insist that their looks don't contribute to their ability to do a job, something women applying for employment anywhere are still somehow not allowed to do.
Sure, Trump's hair is parodied, but like Clinton, he's kind of embraced the the circus. Besides, it's been his look for decades.
HRC came to the Pantsuit game when she got serious about her public image as a politician. As FLOTUS she sort of put a nineties spin on the Jackie O wardrobe sporting matching jackets and skirts in many hues. She wore respectable hemlines and big sunglasses, pastels and boucle, but almost always a skirt. Funnily, if you compare HRC's wardrobe to anyone else's the closest political match is Margaret Thatcher, former British Prime Minister. Hmmmm...
Yet, since pursuing her own political career became the Clintons' goal, she has shifted to the suit.
Yes, just suit.
Why not Pantsuit?
Because last time I checked all suits came with pants. All of them, and being, as previously established, a suit is the unofficial uniform of the serious politician, what else was she going to wear if she wanted to be taken seriously?
If you enter the words Hillary Clinton Pantsuit into Google, your top search results are how much they cost, followed immediately by commentary on their variety of colors, and in third place an article on PopSugar addressing their Glamour.
Tell me, in the history of any Presidential candidate, have we ever demanded to know how much the dude was paying for his Armani?
Don't tell me Trump is showing up to a debate in a $400 Brooks Brothers situation, and how much were Obama's suits? George W.'s?
Nope. Nobody gives a crap if Joe Biden's wardrobe cost more than the annual budget of Iceland, but the minute a woman takes the stage as a serious political contender, all roads go directly to her clothes.
Personally, I don't care if the President wears a foil hat and a pair of leather chaps if he or she can do a decent job running the country.
Women police officers, women in the military, women in uniforms are assuming a position with a certain image to uphold. They don the clothing to maintain the authority, respect, and dignity of the position they hold. When a woman runs for President, it makes perfect sense for her to wear the uniform of the position for all those same reasons. Color, style, fit, cut, none of it has any more impact on her platforms than the little U.S. Flag pin on her lapel.
All the discussion of the Pantsuits does is reduce another powerful, professional woman to her fashion choices, which has always served as a great way to undermine any real potential of her being taken seriously. We can't possibly have a woman President! I mean, look at her!
Imagine how much flack she would have received if she'd kept wearing skirts? Nobody would take her seriously. She's be lambasted for "using her sexuality to sway votes" as if Obama shooting hoops in a dress shirt with the cuffs rolled up didn't make excellent use of his figure...
Anyway, while I understand people like the Pantsuit as symbol (I'm With Her flashmob reference anyone?), it saddens me that with so many slogans, images, and emblems to choose from in this historic race, the woman candidate has been boiled down to her boiled wool.
Maybe we should be looking at her resume, rather than her jacket label?
Just a thought.
Sunday, November 6, 2016
Thursday, November 3, 2016
The Day I Became A Stereotype
Back when the babe was first old enough to play, do tummy time, and wasn't spending ten hours a day screaming with colic, I made a few goals/rules.
I was going to do as much stimulating, educational play as I could with him, at the very least three separate hour long sessions. We would not turn the television on during the day. I would only turn it on after 6pm, and then , only when he was nursing so it didn't damage his brain too much.
I was going to eat three balanced meals a day with him to encourage him to have healthy eating habits, and hopefully never develop the disordered relationship to food I struggled with for so long.
So my days are a lot less like my goals and a lot more like this.
5am-Baby wakes up and starts climbing and squealing. I rush him out of the bed before he can disturb my Beard too much, because he has to get up and go to work in an hour and a half. I sit at the computer and nurse the baby for forty five minutes or so, an episode of Supernatural on Netflix, typically.
5:45am: We rug up and take the dog out.
6am: I put the babe in his high chair with a toy while I make him breakfast, usual a few spoonfuls of pureed fruit and oatmeal. Between feeding bites of mush, I drink half a pot of coffee.
7am: I put the baby in the Pack and Play. He screams for ten minutes then sits and amuses himself for twenty. This cycle repeats for an hour. I scramble to use this hour to do work. The herrband leaves for work in there somewhere.
8am: I put the baby in his bouncer and shower. Sometimes I am ambitious and try to do mommy and me yoga videos from youtube. It's usually about ten minutes of frustration trying to keep the cat away from the baby and the baby away from stuffing whatever hideous thing he's pulled out of the carpet into his mouth. As soon as the big tears start and the howling begins I know it's nap time.
Nap time is my chance to get errands done and fresh air.
I strap the babe into the ergo, put my wet hair up in a bun and grab anything I can think of that needs doing, bills that need to be posted, library books that need returning, money traded for laundry quarters, whatever. I have to remember what it is while the baby struggles against the carrier and yells and sticks his fingers up my nose and in my eyes because he is crankiest right before napping.
I run out the door. Is the baby wearing a hat?
No.
Fuck.
I run back.
Put hat on baby.
Did I lock the door?
I have no idea.
I'm not going back.
If we get robbed we get robbed. I don't care anymore.
About ten minutes down the street, the baby falls into a heavy sleep, and I breathe a sigh of relief. I run my errands. If I'm feeling fancy, I buy a latte or a chai. I walk by the ocean and berate myself for not enjoying autumn more. I think about all the things I should be doing but am not. I wonder how I'm supposed to get a real job after taking a year off with the baby in a country that insists doing so indicates my laziness and unworthiness of gainful employment. I work myself up to and talk myself out of several panic attacks. Sometimes I call my Dad for help with that.
10am: Home again. The baby wakes.
Shit.
I haven't eaten anything yet today, and after all that coffee and running around I am ravenous.
Bung a banana and a yoghurt into the blender with a handful of twigs or cardboard bits or unidentifiable green shredded thingies scraped out of corners of freezer.
Drink concoction and chase it with large spoonful of peanut butter eaten directly from jar, all while baby is hanging from nipple.
Baby is really awake now and requires attention.
11am: try to do another hour's worth of work while he screams and briefly entertains himself in Pack and Play.
Noon: Strap baby back in high chair. Feed him puffs, sometimes bits of banana, or spoonfuls of yoghurt. Enjoy having my skin all to myself for ten minutes.
Herrband calls to check in. He reminds me of several things I was supposed to do today and have completely forgotten about (calling pediatrician to switch appointment date, email his mother about baby's changing clothing size, cancel this subscription to that thing). By the time the phone call and the reminding is done, I have a choice, get more work done while baby naps at boob (because he refuses to sleep anywhere else), or strap him back into the carrier and run out the door for another hour.
The decision always ends up being whatever gets the most done. If I need to do more work, then it's boob time. If I need to get groceries, or if the Beard has reminded me of an errand that I forgot to take care of that morning, then on goes the baby and out the door I fly.
A couple of times a week, I actually have nothing more to get done of a grown up nature, and I get to meet up with a friend. We get coffee, or lunch, and we walk a bit. If the baby wakes up, we play with him and I feel significantly less subhuman and lonely.
Most of my friends are still childless, however, and have exciting lives. I'm often by myself with the baby from the moment the herrband leaves until he walks through the door. There are some days that go by so quickly it's all I can do to keep up. Other days, I find myself sitting in front of the television, pinned down by a slumbering, nursing baby. I've already done everything I can think of, and my sleep deprived brain is rapidly disintegrating. I am physically incapable of napping, so I put on a movie.
I can't focus on the movie about half the time I'm watching it though because I am having terrible guilt about how none of my parenting goals have been accomplished. I am exposing my kid to too much screen time. I am not contributing enough to our household financially. I grocery shop twice a week. Food costs are stupefyingly high and somehow we still have a completely empty fridge, and I don't even buy organic!
I should buy organic anyway.
My kid is going to have three eyeballs because I am feeding him GMO infected, pesticide soaked food.
My kid is going to have three eyeballs, breasts, and be addicted to screens, and we will most likely be destitute and homeless all before his second birthday because I am a horrendous mother.
I decide I am the worst.
Sometimes this decision prompts me to read a chapter in a book I should have finished reading months ago, back when I read books quickly because I could concentrate on something for longer than three minutes. Most of the time, though, I just silently berate myself while the movie plays.
If there is any food nearby me, I inhale it because sitting still will always remind me how hungry I am. It could be a bag of chips, a bowl of fruit, or a thanksgiving turkey, if it's within arm's reach, I will destroy it.
I have become a stereotype I think.
I read the mommy blogs. I watch the clever Buzzfeed videos. I know it's all designed to make legions of women feel less guilty about not being able to live up to the shining paradigm of motherhood the media brainwashes us is the expected norm.
We're all supposed to be wearing leggings, embracing our postpartum bodies, letting our hormone addled emotions fly, whether we're in public or screaming unreasonably at our partners.
We're supposed to drink obscene quantities of coffee and joke about how we don't remember the last time we showered. We're supposed to go to yoga classes, but be terrible at them.
There's this terrifying mediocrity we're meant to aspire toward. This flawed ideal that can't be too flawed, but can't be too perfect because then you're not likable.
And maybe that's why I struggle with it so much.
I can't stand not showering. I really miss running when the weather is nice.
I hate how cloudy I feel when I'm really sleep deprived, and I hate how forgetful it makes me.
I am struggling with intuitive eating and listening to my body's cues because my body's cues do not take precedent over my baby's needs. This means that occasionally I find myself standing in front of my kid while he plays in the high chair funneling a bag of tortilla chips into my mouth because I forgot to eat all day.
Afterwards, the flush and rush of shame is the same as it always was when I was bingeing and restricting as a lifestyle, but I have to breathe and tell myself that it was my body's natural response to the situation and I am not going to go back into the depths of my ED just because I ate a bag of chips.
Then of course, I realize the baby has been screaming for the last ten minutes because he threw his spoon to the dog, (oh shit, did I remember to feed the dog today?) his diaper is wet, and I have been having a self hatred/self love stand off instead of being caretaker.
I soak in my guilt as I clean him up and change him and pour extra dog food in the bowl.
A lot of times, I can't fall asleep at night because of how guilty I feel.
Please tell me I'm not alone in this.
I'm so tired. I waited all day to be lying in the dark with my baby, in my bed. I have a solid four hours before he'll wake me up, and I. CAN'T. SLEEP.
My brain races through the day's activities playing them over and over and correcting all the decisions I made that it deems shitty.
That bill you were going to pay? You forgot it.
You watched The Little Prince instead of a documentary on climate change while the baby slept.
You didn't do the laundry.
You forgot to email your mother in law.
You baked cookies instead of making a proper lunch for the baby and let him eat cheerios while you had a hot cookie and a cup of tea for the first time in six months.
You didn't go outside.
You forgot the baby's hat when you went outside.
You got mad at your one friend who made plans with you because she forgot and scheduled a dentist's appointment for the one hour your baby was going to let you hang out with her. You want to forgive her because you would have done the exact same thing pre-baby.
You will never forgive her because you'd been looking forward to talking in full sentences to an actual grown up all week.
You picked a fight with your husband just because you missed him so much.
Sigh.
I finally fall asleep after looking at instagram for an hour to find inspiration for the baby's first birthday cake.
I am already dreaming about the cup of coffee I'll make myself in the morning.
I was going to do as much stimulating, educational play as I could with him, at the very least three separate hour long sessions. We would not turn the television on during the day. I would only turn it on after 6pm, and then , only when he was nursing so it didn't damage his brain too much.
I was going to eat three balanced meals a day with him to encourage him to have healthy eating habits, and hopefully never develop the disordered relationship to food I struggled with for so long.
So my days are a lot less like my goals and a lot more like this.
5am-Baby wakes up and starts climbing and squealing. I rush him out of the bed before he can disturb my Beard too much, because he has to get up and go to work in an hour and a half. I sit at the computer and nurse the baby for forty five minutes or so, an episode of Supernatural on Netflix, typically.
5:45am: We rug up and take the dog out.
6am: I put the babe in his high chair with a toy while I make him breakfast, usual a few spoonfuls of pureed fruit and oatmeal. Between feeding bites of mush, I drink half a pot of coffee.
7am: I put the baby in the Pack and Play. He screams for ten minutes then sits and amuses himself for twenty. This cycle repeats for an hour. I scramble to use this hour to do work. The herrband leaves for work in there somewhere.
8am: I put the baby in his bouncer and shower. Sometimes I am ambitious and try to do mommy and me yoga videos from youtube. It's usually about ten minutes of frustration trying to keep the cat away from the baby and the baby away from stuffing whatever hideous thing he's pulled out of the carpet into his mouth. As soon as the big tears start and the howling begins I know it's nap time.
Nap time is my chance to get errands done and fresh air.
I strap the babe into the ergo, put my wet hair up in a bun and grab anything I can think of that needs doing, bills that need to be posted, library books that need returning, money traded for laundry quarters, whatever. I have to remember what it is while the baby struggles against the carrier and yells and sticks his fingers up my nose and in my eyes because he is crankiest right before napping.
I run out the door. Is the baby wearing a hat?
No.
Fuck.
I run back.
Put hat on baby.
Did I lock the door?
I have no idea.
I'm not going back.
If we get robbed we get robbed. I don't care anymore.
About ten minutes down the street, the baby falls into a heavy sleep, and I breathe a sigh of relief. I run my errands. If I'm feeling fancy, I buy a latte or a chai. I walk by the ocean and berate myself for not enjoying autumn more. I think about all the things I should be doing but am not. I wonder how I'm supposed to get a real job after taking a year off with the baby in a country that insists doing so indicates my laziness and unworthiness of gainful employment. I work myself up to and talk myself out of several panic attacks. Sometimes I call my Dad for help with that.
10am: Home again. The baby wakes.
Shit.
I haven't eaten anything yet today, and after all that coffee and running around I am ravenous.
Bung a banana and a yoghurt into the blender with a handful of twigs or cardboard bits or unidentifiable green shredded thingies scraped out of corners of freezer.
Drink concoction and chase it with large spoonful of peanut butter eaten directly from jar, all while baby is hanging from nipple.
Baby is really awake now and requires attention.
11am: try to do another hour's worth of work while he screams and briefly entertains himself in Pack and Play.
Noon: Strap baby back in high chair. Feed him puffs, sometimes bits of banana, or spoonfuls of yoghurt. Enjoy having my skin all to myself for ten minutes.
Herrband calls to check in. He reminds me of several things I was supposed to do today and have completely forgotten about (calling pediatrician to switch appointment date, email his mother about baby's changing clothing size, cancel this subscription to that thing). By the time the phone call and the reminding is done, I have a choice, get more work done while baby naps at boob (because he refuses to sleep anywhere else), or strap him back into the carrier and run out the door for another hour.
The decision always ends up being whatever gets the most done. If I need to do more work, then it's boob time. If I need to get groceries, or if the Beard has reminded me of an errand that I forgot to take care of that morning, then on goes the baby and out the door I fly.
A couple of times a week, I actually have nothing more to get done of a grown up nature, and I get to meet up with a friend. We get coffee, or lunch, and we walk a bit. If the baby wakes up, we play with him and I feel significantly less subhuman and lonely.
Most of my friends are still childless, however, and have exciting lives. I'm often by myself with the baby from the moment the herrband leaves until he walks through the door. There are some days that go by so quickly it's all I can do to keep up. Other days, I find myself sitting in front of the television, pinned down by a slumbering, nursing baby. I've already done everything I can think of, and my sleep deprived brain is rapidly disintegrating. I am physically incapable of napping, so I put on a movie.
I can't focus on the movie about half the time I'm watching it though because I am having terrible guilt about how none of my parenting goals have been accomplished. I am exposing my kid to too much screen time. I am not contributing enough to our household financially. I grocery shop twice a week. Food costs are stupefyingly high and somehow we still have a completely empty fridge, and I don't even buy organic!
I should buy organic anyway.
My kid is going to have three eyeballs because I am feeding him GMO infected, pesticide soaked food.
My kid is going to have three eyeballs, breasts, and be addicted to screens, and we will most likely be destitute and homeless all before his second birthday because I am a horrendous mother.
I decide I am the worst.
Sometimes this decision prompts me to read a chapter in a book I should have finished reading months ago, back when I read books quickly because I could concentrate on something for longer than three minutes. Most of the time, though, I just silently berate myself while the movie plays.
If there is any food nearby me, I inhale it because sitting still will always remind me how hungry I am. It could be a bag of chips, a bowl of fruit, or a thanksgiving turkey, if it's within arm's reach, I will destroy it.
I have become a stereotype I think.
I read the mommy blogs. I watch the clever Buzzfeed videos. I know it's all designed to make legions of women feel less guilty about not being able to live up to the shining paradigm of motherhood the media brainwashes us is the expected norm.
We're all supposed to be wearing leggings, embracing our postpartum bodies, letting our hormone addled emotions fly, whether we're in public or screaming unreasonably at our partners.
We're supposed to drink obscene quantities of coffee and joke about how we don't remember the last time we showered. We're supposed to go to yoga classes, but be terrible at them.
There's this terrifying mediocrity we're meant to aspire toward. This flawed ideal that can't be too flawed, but can't be too perfect because then you're not likable.
And maybe that's why I struggle with it so much.
I can't stand not showering. I really miss running when the weather is nice.
I hate how cloudy I feel when I'm really sleep deprived, and I hate how forgetful it makes me.
I am struggling with intuitive eating and listening to my body's cues because my body's cues do not take precedent over my baby's needs. This means that occasionally I find myself standing in front of my kid while he plays in the high chair funneling a bag of tortilla chips into my mouth because I forgot to eat all day.
Afterwards, the flush and rush of shame is the same as it always was when I was bingeing and restricting as a lifestyle, but I have to breathe and tell myself that it was my body's natural response to the situation and I am not going to go back into the depths of my ED just because I ate a bag of chips.
Then of course, I realize the baby has been screaming for the last ten minutes because he threw his spoon to the dog, (oh shit, did I remember to feed the dog today?) his diaper is wet, and I have been having a self hatred/self love stand off instead of being caretaker.
I soak in my guilt as I clean him up and change him and pour extra dog food in the bowl.
A lot of times, I can't fall asleep at night because of how guilty I feel.
Please tell me I'm not alone in this.
I'm so tired. I waited all day to be lying in the dark with my baby, in my bed. I have a solid four hours before he'll wake me up, and I. CAN'T. SLEEP.
My brain races through the day's activities playing them over and over and correcting all the decisions I made that it deems shitty.
That bill you were going to pay? You forgot it.
You watched The Little Prince instead of a documentary on climate change while the baby slept.
You didn't do the laundry.
You forgot to email your mother in law.
You baked cookies instead of making a proper lunch for the baby and let him eat cheerios while you had a hot cookie and a cup of tea for the first time in six months.
You didn't go outside.
You forgot the baby's hat when you went outside.
You got mad at your one friend who made plans with you because she forgot and scheduled a dentist's appointment for the one hour your baby was going to let you hang out with her. You want to forgive her because you would have done the exact same thing pre-baby.
You will never forgive her because you'd been looking forward to talking in full sentences to an actual grown up all week.
You picked a fight with your husband just because you missed him so much.
Sigh.
I finally fall asleep after looking at instagram for an hour to find inspiration for the baby's first birthday cake.
I am already dreaming about the cup of coffee I'll make myself in the morning.
Monday, October 31, 2016
Baby's First Halloween
For the first eight years of my life, I lived in Australia, where I hear now Halloween is actually somewhat celebrated. In the early eighties however it was not, and my mother (Canadian by birth and transplanted by marriage) was dreadfully homesick for this North American holiday.
I remember clearly my mother trussing me and my sisters up for the end of October, though it made no sense to me as a little kid, I thought it was just another reason to play dress up, and I wasn't going to complain. My Mum even went around to the neighbors and asked that they have a couple of treats on hand for her kids so when we marched up their steps and bawled "Trick or treat!" at the tops of our lungs, there were freddos and caramello koalas to flop into our pillow cases.
It never really made sense to me though. My mother didn't insist on cooking a turkey at Thanksgiving, and she didn't seem to mind that it was hot at Christmastime, but Halloween she missed, and so she went to all this trouble to enjoy it with her bewildered offspring.
It wasn't until we moved to Canada in the early nineties that I understood the torch she carried for the holiday. We weren't wealthy by any stretch of the imagination, and we lived in the middle of nowhere-seriously, our bus ride to school was an hour each way; we were the last stop-but my Dad made a bunch of scarecrows, and we constructed costumes out of the dress up box and trick or treated down a street about a two miles away. Yes. We only trick or treated one street. Because we lived so far away from civilization, there were probably only a dozen or so kids who trick or treated in the area, and so the adults would give you a ridiculous amount of candy. After about eight houses, we'd barely be able to lift our bags.
These are some of my fondest halloween memories. Even though in Canada, you had to wear longjohns under your costume and there was the chance that the festivities might be cut short due to snow, I remember how some people decorated their houses so elaborately they felt like real haunted houses, with huge figures bent over steaming cauldrons, twinkling orange lights, flashing strobes, sticky spiderwebs, and speakers crackling with haunted house noises and random screams.
Around the second or third house, you'd become infected by the hysteria of the spookiness, and you'd start squealing and shrieking at every little thing, running down steps after collecting your candy, and tearing through shrubs and hedges cluttered with plastic caution tape convinced that there really was something chasing you.
I was thirteen when we moved to the states, and so I only trick or treated one halloween here (technically). At the age of fourteen, I declared myself too old and began helping my Dad with the scarecrows and in the guise of a kindly fortune teller or friendly witch, I dedicated myself to handing out the candy to the kids who braved our driveway.
No, I was never cool enough to go to an actual halloween party.
In fact, I didn't go to haunted houses, hayrides, or my first actual halloween party until college. Sadly, I didn't even know they existed because I had just assumed that once you were a teenager you put aside these childish things.
It's funny, when I think about my adolescence, I used to self impose all kinds of weird "rules" about growing up. Things I was supposed to give up or put away because I had outgrown them, that nobody would have minded, let alone noticed, if I'd kept my interest in.
As an adult, I have actually dedicated a lot of my time to recapturing those thrills of childhood and embracing the innocent joys of the holidays and the things I used to take pleasure in.
It's not an act of rebellion. I don't do it defiantly.
I do it because I think we talk ourselves out of joy almost constantly.
We laugh at people who are too excited or too involved in things as though they're missing some vital adult component, when in reality they're having a much better time than the person who disparages the fun as immature or juvenile.
One of the things I am thrilled about, as a parent, is sharing in the delights of the holidays with my babe. Especially this one.
My husband helped me lift the last vestiges of restraint I had about celebrating with abandon, and in the decade we have been together, I cannot think of a Halloween we have not marked with elaborate costumes, tons of treats and trickery, lots of decorations, candles, parades through graveyards, chicanery, and spooky tales traded with friends.
Leave aside the fact that we live in Salem, MA, the halloween capital of the Northeast.
It's impossible to ignore the magic of the season here.
And this year, I am very grateful for that because for the first time in a long time, my energy to enjoy this festival of creepiness is practically zilch.
I remember last year. Eight months pregnant, I dressed like a black widow and we handed out candy on a friend's porch right in the center of historic Salem. It was glorious. Afterwards, we walked the pitchblack backroads to another friend's costume party and drank punch and ate some bone cookies and I reminded myself that this would be so different when the baby came.
I have never been so right.
The last three weeks have been a miasma of teething and sleep regression.
In the last seven days, he has started his day at 3am on two occasions, 5am on three, and has yet to allow me to sleep through the night. That's right. At almost eleven months postpartum, I have yet to sleep more than three consecutive hours.
We are at the beginning of the fourth week of this nonsense, and I have been up since 4:30am.
My Beard has a costume for his work Halloween party and a different costume for handing out candy tonight. I didn't realize that I hadn't even thought of a costume for myself until yesterday.
This will be the first year I haven't dressed up for Halloween in memory.
I'm sure I could run down to CVS and grab a cheap make up palette and make myself into a sugar skull or a zombie or something, but as the babe has a habit of whacking me in the face and teething on my chin, make up doesn't seem like a wise idea.
I haven't carved a jack 'o lantern. I bought a bag of mini snickers last week and crushed it in three days while trying to nurse the babe back to sleep during the midnight screaming times.
I haven't been apple picking, hayriding, or haunted house traipsing. The closest I've come is the daily walks I take with the baby which I've been extending longer and longer so I can enjoy the various local cemeteries in all their autumnal splendor.
Tonight, I will swathe myself in black, cradle my babe in his bright red onesie with his devil horn hoodie, and help the Beard hand out candy on our spiderweb sticky porch.
Maybe I will watch Hocus Pocus in the midnight screaming times.
I will try really hard not to think about the halloweens past that were spectacular, and I will try not to think of the halloweens in the future when I am taking the babe trick or treating, or working with him on his costume, or baking treats for his class at school, because I look forward to all that weirdness. I really do.
I will try to enjoy sipping hot apple cider on the porch in the cold, moonless night, and remind myself that life is funny, and I could always be thousands of miles from my New England home in the city where I was born, where the world is exploding into a tropical spring, and Halloween is more devised to sell cocktails than a thrill you get in the pit of your stomach as you watch clouds move darkly past a church steeply and think perhaps you see something solid, something ragged and familiar, streaking through the fog.
I remember clearly my mother trussing me and my sisters up for the end of October, though it made no sense to me as a little kid, I thought it was just another reason to play dress up, and I wasn't going to complain. My Mum even went around to the neighbors and asked that they have a couple of treats on hand for her kids so when we marched up their steps and bawled "Trick or treat!" at the tops of our lungs, there were freddos and caramello koalas to flop into our pillow cases.
It never really made sense to me though. My mother didn't insist on cooking a turkey at Thanksgiving, and she didn't seem to mind that it was hot at Christmastime, but Halloween she missed, and so she went to all this trouble to enjoy it with her bewildered offspring.
It wasn't until we moved to Canada in the early nineties that I understood the torch she carried for the holiday. We weren't wealthy by any stretch of the imagination, and we lived in the middle of nowhere-seriously, our bus ride to school was an hour each way; we were the last stop-but my Dad made a bunch of scarecrows, and we constructed costumes out of the dress up box and trick or treated down a street about a two miles away. Yes. We only trick or treated one street. Because we lived so far away from civilization, there were probably only a dozen or so kids who trick or treated in the area, and so the adults would give you a ridiculous amount of candy. After about eight houses, we'd barely be able to lift our bags.
These are some of my fondest halloween memories. Even though in Canada, you had to wear longjohns under your costume and there was the chance that the festivities might be cut short due to snow, I remember how some people decorated their houses so elaborately they felt like real haunted houses, with huge figures bent over steaming cauldrons, twinkling orange lights, flashing strobes, sticky spiderwebs, and speakers crackling with haunted house noises and random screams.
Around the second or third house, you'd become infected by the hysteria of the spookiness, and you'd start squealing and shrieking at every little thing, running down steps after collecting your candy, and tearing through shrubs and hedges cluttered with plastic caution tape convinced that there really was something chasing you.
I was thirteen when we moved to the states, and so I only trick or treated one halloween here (technically). At the age of fourteen, I declared myself too old and began helping my Dad with the scarecrows and in the guise of a kindly fortune teller or friendly witch, I dedicated myself to handing out the candy to the kids who braved our driveway.
No, I was never cool enough to go to an actual halloween party.
In fact, I didn't go to haunted houses, hayrides, or my first actual halloween party until college. Sadly, I didn't even know they existed because I had just assumed that once you were a teenager you put aside these childish things.
It's funny, when I think about my adolescence, I used to self impose all kinds of weird "rules" about growing up. Things I was supposed to give up or put away because I had outgrown them, that nobody would have minded, let alone noticed, if I'd kept my interest in.
As an adult, I have actually dedicated a lot of my time to recapturing those thrills of childhood and embracing the innocent joys of the holidays and the things I used to take pleasure in.
It's not an act of rebellion. I don't do it defiantly.
I do it because I think we talk ourselves out of joy almost constantly.
We laugh at people who are too excited or too involved in things as though they're missing some vital adult component, when in reality they're having a much better time than the person who disparages the fun as immature or juvenile.
One of the things I am thrilled about, as a parent, is sharing in the delights of the holidays with my babe. Especially this one.
My husband helped me lift the last vestiges of restraint I had about celebrating with abandon, and in the decade we have been together, I cannot think of a Halloween we have not marked with elaborate costumes, tons of treats and trickery, lots of decorations, candles, parades through graveyards, chicanery, and spooky tales traded with friends.
Leave aside the fact that we live in Salem, MA, the halloween capital of the Northeast.
It's impossible to ignore the magic of the season here.
And this year, I am very grateful for that because for the first time in a long time, my energy to enjoy this festival of creepiness is practically zilch.
I remember last year. Eight months pregnant, I dressed like a black widow and we handed out candy on a friend's porch right in the center of historic Salem. It was glorious. Afterwards, we walked the pitchblack backroads to another friend's costume party and drank punch and ate some bone cookies and I reminded myself that this would be so different when the baby came.
I have never been so right.
The last three weeks have been a miasma of teething and sleep regression.
In the last seven days, he has started his day at 3am on two occasions, 5am on three, and has yet to allow me to sleep through the night. That's right. At almost eleven months postpartum, I have yet to sleep more than three consecutive hours.
We are at the beginning of the fourth week of this nonsense, and I have been up since 4:30am.
My Beard has a costume for his work Halloween party and a different costume for handing out candy tonight. I didn't realize that I hadn't even thought of a costume for myself until yesterday.
This will be the first year I haven't dressed up for Halloween in memory.
I'm sure I could run down to CVS and grab a cheap make up palette and make myself into a sugar skull or a zombie or something, but as the babe has a habit of whacking me in the face and teething on my chin, make up doesn't seem like a wise idea.
I haven't carved a jack 'o lantern. I bought a bag of mini snickers last week and crushed it in three days while trying to nurse the babe back to sleep during the midnight screaming times.
I haven't been apple picking, hayriding, or haunted house traipsing. The closest I've come is the daily walks I take with the baby which I've been extending longer and longer so I can enjoy the various local cemeteries in all their autumnal splendor.
Tonight, I will swathe myself in black, cradle my babe in his bright red onesie with his devil horn hoodie, and help the Beard hand out candy on our spiderweb sticky porch.
Maybe I will watch Hocus Pocus in the midnight screaming times.
I will try really hard not to think about the halloweens past that were spectacular, and I will try not to think of the halloweens in the future when I am taking the babe trick or treating, or working with him on his costume, or baking treats for his class at school, because I look forward to all that weirdness. I really do.
I will try to enjoy sipping hot apple cider on the porch in the cold, moonless night, and remind myself that life is funny, and I could always be thousands of miles from my New England home in the city where I was born, where the world is exploding into a tropical spring, and Halloween is more devised to sell cocktails than a thrill you get in the pit of your stomach as you watch clouds move darkly past a church steeply and think perhaps you see something solid, something ragged and familiar, streaking through the fog.
Wednesday, October 26, 2016
A Brief Thought on Mindfulness and why it can go straight to hell.
Sitting at home, watching Baz play with a sock, and wondering how the hours of the day just fritter away...
Why the fuck is mindfulness en vogue of all sudden?
It's as if on top of everything else we're supposed to be doing, we're now also supposed to be "living inside the moment", "relishing the fleetingness of time", "appreciating our here and now".
Does anybody else suck at this?
I mean, sometimes I'm not too bad.
I watch the sunrise or feel the softest little breeze, or actually slow down when I'm housing ice cream and let the sweetness melt on my tongue for a moment, and yes, I've got it, I feel good, it's lovely, and I am happy to be alive, to have a corporeal form that allows me such things as physical pleasure.
But there are other times that we shouldn't be mindful.
We deserve to get swept up.
Like kissing.
Am I the only person who has ever just ruined a make out session by suddenly getting stuck in her head?
Instead of being all, "oooh this is so nice and lovely and tingly and might be headed towards more nice lovely tingly things..." I got stuck in my head, and thought, "Oh this is a mouth, this is a squishpit full of round, polished bone things that I have to avoid lest I suddenly forget everything I ever knew about kissing and accidentally become a dentist who diagnoses with her tongue" or "why do we do this? I think I read somewhere that kissing originated during pagan marriage rituals where the two newlyweds placed their mouths on top of one another's to symbolize giving one's beloved the breath of life. If this is true, then isn't making out some form of pointless struggle? Am I currently fighting with this person attempting to breathe them full of my air as they strive to fill me with theirs? Or are we literally sucking the breath out of each other?" or (and this is a favorite) "huh...mouths are weird. My mouth is inside a mouth right now. Oh fuck...I'm supposed to be swept up in this. Come on Jess, get all jiggly in the knees again, think about how nice a face this person has, how delicious their skin is next to yours, and how magical the gift is-is a mouth a mushy mouth mouth mouth, flesh, gums, esophagus, stomach, intestines, this mouth leads to poooooooooop! AAAAAAAAAH STOP THINKING ABOUT POOP AND GET BACK TO THE NICE KISSY FEELINGS WHAT IS WRONG WITH MY BRAINNNNNNN?!?!?"
Yeah...
so mindfulness isn't always the best practice.
It's great if you rush through life and then don't understand why you didn't enjoy more of it, but I sit here, and I watch a baby playing with a sock, and I think, maybe it's a bad idea to tumble down the rabbit hole of thinking how much I love this baby, how precious he is, how soon I will be packing him off to college where he will disregard his socks all over a dorm room floor, and then I will die, and he will die, and dead mouths don't maul socks.
Maybe it's better that I just take the sock away, and play with him instead.
Why the fuck is mindfulness en vogue of all sudden?
It's as if on top of everything else we're supposed to be doing, we're now also supposed to be "living inside the moment", "relishing the fleetingness of time", "appreciating our here and now".
Does anybody else suck at this?
I mean, sometimes I'm not too bad.
I watch the sunrise or feel the softest little breeze, or actually slow down when I'm housing ice cream and let the sweetness melt on my tongue for a moment, and yes, I've got it, I feel good, it's lovely, and I am happy to be alive, to have a corporeal form that allows me such things as physical pleasure.
But there are other times that we shouldn't be mindful.
We deserve to get swept up.
Like kissing.
Am I the only person who has ever just ruined a make out session by suddenly getting stuck in her head?
Instead of being all, "oooh this is so nice and lovely and tingly and might be headed towards more nice lovely tingly things..." I got stuck in my head, and thought, "Oh this is a mouth, this is a squishpit full of round, polished bone things that I have to avoid lest I suddenly forget everything I ever knew about kissing and accidentally become a dentist who diagnoses with her tongue" or "why do we do this? I think I read somewhere that kissing originated during pagan marriage rituals where the two newlyweds placed their mouths on top of one another's to symbolize giving one's beloved the breath of life. If this is true, then isn't making out some form of pointless struggle? Am I currently fighting with this person attempting to breathe them full of my air as they strive to fill me with theirs? Or are we literally sucking the breath out of each other?" or (and this is a favorite) "huh...mouths are weird. My mouth is inside a mouth right now. Oh fuck...I'm supposed to be swept up in this. Come on Jess, get all jiggly in the knees again, think about how nice a face this person has, how delicious their skin is next to yours, and how magical the gift is-is a mouth a mushy mouth mouth mouth, flesh, gums, esophagus, stomach, intestines, this mouth leads to poooooooooop! AAAAAAAAAH STOP THINKING ABOUT POOP AND GET BACK TO THE NICE KISSY FEELINGS WHAT IS WRONG WITH MY BRAINNNNNNN?!?!?"
Yeah...
so mindfulness isn't always the best practice.
It's great if you rush through life and then don't understand why you didn't enjoy more of it, but I sit here, and I watch a baby playing with a sock, and I think, maybe it's a bad idea to tumble down the rabbit hole of thinking how much I love this baby, how precious he is, how soon I will be packing him off to college where he will disregard his socks all over a dorm room floor, and then I will die, and he will die, and dead mouths don't maul socks.
Maybe it's better that I just take the sock away, and play with him instead.
Wednesday, October 19, 2016
The Long Distance Relationship You Live In
Dear Diary,
I am starting this post like a diary entry, perhaps inspired by the terrifying character of Amy in Gone Girl, who writes seven years of fake entries to fool the police. Tell me I didn't just ruin the book for you. The book does its own work for me there.
Perhaps because anytime a woman begins writing about her relationship there is something at once secretive, nostalgic, and confessional about it.
When faced with the subject of "our husband/partner/wife" we all get a little dreamy. You know, when we're not picking them apart at the seams.
I am making many assumptions, but let's soldier on.
I am in a long distance relationship after all, and there are miles to go before i sleep.
Beard and I met when I was a never-been-kissed nineteen year old.
We spent two and a half days killing time while our best friends
(who had met on the internet back in 2000. This was a BIG DEAL. I came along mostly to ensure that whoever this boy was who was coming all the way from Virginia to meet my gal pal wasn't going to chop her up and bury her in a camp site. I'm pretty sure my future Beard came along with his best buddy as the ultimate wingman), flirted obnoxiously, and we rolled our eyes.
A few years, and Myspace comments, later, found me living in an apartment in San Francisco, trying to figure out my life as a twenty three year old with a liberal arts degree and some encroaching idea as to my own irrelevance. It found my Beard newly single and lonely in his apartment in Virginia.
We began sending idle emails, that turned into phone calls, then visits, and after about four months, I moved away from the Pacific to "see where this was headed."
We've been together ten years now, married for seven, and we've been apart no longer than a week since.
Let's be honest, Long Distance Relationships work because we know the climate is temporary. There is an element of excitement and urgency to pining away like some kind of teeny-bopper, composing emails at two in the morning, or falling asleep with their voice on the phone at night. The giddy stomach dropping sensation of getting a text from across the miles that says, thinking of you takes on more meaning, because you aren't there to fan the flames. You actually have to pop into their head at random, as though they genuinely like you or something.
LDR's are the romantic ideal really. You listen to songs apart that have meaning for you together. You take yourself on long walks and wish they were there to slip their hand into yours. You look in the mirror and make faces, or talk out loud about the future you want to have with them. You're constantly on the lookout for little items and trinkets you can mail to them. After visits, you pull out the swiped hoodie or t-shirt you stole from their laundry, and you sleep with it, because it smells like them.
You do a lot of swanning about as they say.
And it's all SO FRAUGHT with emotion because you're figuring out, based on these phone calls, these visits, these little amuse-bouches of love, whether you want to buy the whole goddamn restaurant. It's tricky and scary and so very bittersweet. Eventually one of you has to make the plunge of moving to the other, and you have to put the relationship to the test.
Can we actually stand each other now that we have to be around each other all the time?
A lot of relationships get this far, and then collapse in on themselves because after all the build up, the real thing just can't compete.
It's one thing to be dying on the end of the phone line, sexting your brains out, and crying into your morning latte because they aren't there to share it with you, and it is entirely different to be with that illusory magical romantic human when he/she farts, gets food poisoning, doesn't take the trash out for weeks on end, forgets your birthday, picks a fight with you or horribly all of that at once.
Somehow, Beard and I survived the transition.
The first year we were still kind of in LDR mode. We hid all our ugly habits from one another. We never fought. We cuddled a lot and watched "Oh I don't care, whatever you want is fine, baby" for hours. I put make up on every morning, threw away my ugly pajamas and underwear with the elastic band all stretched out, and made his coffee first every morning.
He dressed the gothy way that had hooked me, kept his hand permanently glued to my lower back, and constantly asked if I was okay. He texted me "I miss you" while we were at work. He sent flowers to the coffee shop where I slung espresso on our anniversary.
We generally swanned about a lot still, but all over each other. I'm sure it was revolting for anyone to watch.
Then we moved to Massachusetts.
We had trouble finding jobs and blew through our savings pretty quickly.
I was surprised at how living in New England made me feel as though I hadn't done anything since high school, and when the best job I could find was making bread at a local bakery, I had the quarter life crisis I'd been putting off for a year to be stupidly smitten.
Beard had more trouble finding work, and when he finally did it was a corporate retail job that treated him like garbage. We had to move to a cheaper apartment on the shittier side of town. We had to put off getting married because we couldn't afford a wedding. We both started cracking, and showing our cracks, and it was hard.
We had some ugly fights.
We both said things that made the other person look at them like they were a stranger.
We left the room sometimes and didn't come back for a few hours so we could get our heads on straight.
Some nights we went to bed so angry we couldn't even touch feet in the bed.
Some mornings, we opened the fight back up again, and didn't know how to close it.
But we also learned.
We adapted.
We didn't give up.
I think that's part of the LDR turning into the LTR*. You know you're both in it for the long run, so you don't try to "win" at fights. You wait until the inferno blows over and you try to approach the shitty situation rationally. You have a safe word.
That's right, a safe word.
When we are having a fight, and one of us realizes it's getting out of control, or it might be about the fact that one of us is really stressed or tired, or we just know that this is going to be the time we say something so hurtful there's no apology in the world that makes it better, one of us says,
banana
Yes. That's right.
One of us invokes the rule of Banana. And no matter what it is we are fighting about, we both have to drop it. We both have to walk away.
I don't attribute my marriage lasting seven years to the Banana Rule, but I attribute a lot to that development, let me tell you.
If you are in an LTR and you don't have an anger safeword, make one. Make one now. You'll thank me later.
Anyway,
so what's the point?
Why does it matter that my LDR turned into an LTR?
Because we've come full circle my friends.
And having a baby has put me and my husband back into the same situation that started it all.
The night feeds and wakings are typically my jam because I don't have to go to a 9-5 and make pretty with actual humans. In fact, if I feel particularly shitty after a bad night with the were-baby, I don't even have to shower, but Beard has to clean up, nut up, and show up every day, so I get those night hazards.
Typically, we have about ten minutes in the morning, while he fills his travel mug from the dregs of the coffee pot I have already crushed because I've been up for two hours. The baby is in his high chair cooing and eating puffs or bits of banana, and I get in a decent hug before the gent heads out the door. We sort of look at each other filled with a deep sense of melancholy knowing that this is the most coherent we're going to be around one another for another twenty four hours, and then off he goes.
Most nights he gets home by 6pm, which is about an hour before Baby bedtime. In fact, we have eaten, bathed, and possibly even read a book by the time Daddy walks through the door. Our final bedtime moments are spent watching Daddy eat dinner (which he does while attempting to visit with the baby, and I slide in any important things I need to say like: hey we have a doctor's appointment on Saturday or I picked up your prescriptions here they are et cetera).
By seven, I am attempting to rock and nurse the baby to sleep. We trade off for the hour it takes to actually accomplish this, and then I am confined to the bed, where I sometimes indulge in an hour of looking at instagram and being disgusted by how beautiful everyone else's life looks in comparison to my milk-soaked, nonsense existence.
Beard comes to bed after the first hour of the day that he's had to himself, which i assume he spends either crying into the toilet, speed eating turkey jerky, or watches the vilest horror movie he can possibly find to make himself feel better about his life in comparison to being chained to a radiator by a demon infested hooker who keeps eating pieces of his genitalia.
We saw each other more often when we lived on opposite sides of the country.
We are in a long distance relationship.
Somehow, over the last ten months of me staying home with baby (and contributing a meager bit of moolah from the writing classes), and Beard going forth into the world and bringing home the old school bacon, we have devolved back from our advanced degree in commitment directly into the weirdness of the LDR.
Exhibit A.
We text.
Yes, this is 2016, everyone bloody texts, but we text each other shit like
I miss you.
or
It was hard to say goodbye this morning.
and
I miss feeling your hand on my lower back.
Exhibit B.
He sent me flowers on our anniversary.
To the house.
Then he texted me to go outside and check if an amazon package had arrived for him. It was a genuine surprise. Red roses. Yeah, that's right. Fucking red roses.
I loved them.
He also got me a Halloween present, which he hasn't done since we first moved to New England some eight years ago. A whole host of very spooky Hocus Pocus paraphernalia. Just out of the blue!
Delightful.
Exhibit C.
We send each other bits and bobs on social media.
Last week, my husband, who balks when I use the word feminist and constantly argues with me about the fact that while white, middle class men are the bane of human existence, white middle class women are pure evil (and he's not wrong), sent me an incredibly cool article from The New Yorker about Shirley Jackson's life as a domestically abused housewife and her genuinely creepy response to oppression through writing.
Seriously, it's an amazing article. Here's the link:
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/10/17/the-haunted-mind-of-shirley-jackson
I also send him links to things like the scariest amusement parks in the world, or Halloweentowns that actually exist in Middle America, or they just discovered a new room in the fucking Winchester house! No, really they did...
http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2016/10/09/new-room-discovered-winchester-mystery-house/
Anyway.
The trick of the LDR is to moon a bit.
Be a little romantic, and if that means being dumb, be dumb too.
Because it won't be long before the kid is sleeping in his own room, and we're forced to spend all the time together again and remember how human, fallible, and annoying we are, so in the meantime, being goofy kids who are sighing over their window sills because they don't get to spend every night asleep in a treehouse together is pretty nice, and it reminds me what's waiting for me on the other side of this strange haze of new parenthood, and what's waiting for me is a pretty great guy that I might like to see more of.
I am starting this post like a diary entry, perhaps inspired by the terrifying character of Amy in Gone Girl, who writes seven years of fake entries to fool the police. Tell me I didn't just ruin the book for you. The book does its own work for me there.
Perhaps because anytime a woman begins writing about her relationship there is something at once secretive, nostalgic, and confessional about it.
When faced with the subject of "our husband/partner/wife" we all get a little dreamy. You know, when we're not picking them apart at the seams.
I am making many assumptions, but let's soldier on.
I am in a long distance relationship after all, and there are miles to go before i sleep.
Beard and I met when I was a never-been-kissed nineteen year old.
We spent two and a half days killing time while our best friends
(who had met on the internet back in 2000. This was a BIG DEAL. I came along mostly to ensure that whoever this boy was who was coming all the way from Virginia to meet my gal pal wasn't going to chop her up and bury her in a camp site. I'm pretty sure my future Beard came along with his best buddy as the ultimate wingman), flirted obnoxiously, and we rolled our eyes.
A few years, and Myspace comments, later, found me living in an apartment in San Francisco, trying to figure out my life as a twenty three year old with a liberal arts degree and some encroaching idea as to my own irrelevance. It found my Beard newly single and lonely in his apartment in Virginia.
We began sending idle emails, that turned into phone calls, then visits, and after about four months, I moved away from the Pacific to "see where this was headed."
We've been together ten years now, married for seven, and we've been apart no longer than a week since.
Let's be honest, Long Distance Relationships work because we know the climate is temporary. There is an element of excitement and urgency to pining away like some kind of teeny-bopper, composing emails at two in the morning, or falling asleep with their voice on the phone at night. The giddy stomach dropping sensation of getting a text from across the miles that says, thinking of you takes on more meaning, because you aren't there to fan the flames. You actually have to pop into their head at random, as though they genuinely like you or something.
LDR's are the romantic ideal really. You listen to songs apart that have meaning for you together. You take yourself on long walks and wish they were there to slip their hand into yours. You look in the mirror and make faces, or talk out loud about the future you want to have with them. You're constantly on the lookout for little items and trinkets you can mail to them. After visits, you pull out the swiped hoodie or t-shirt you stole from their laundry, and you sleep with it, because it smells like them.
You do a lot of swanning about as they say.
And it's all SO FRAUGHT with emotion because you're figuring out, based on these phone calls, these visits, these little amuse-bouches of love, whether you want to buy the whole goddamn restaurant. It's tricky and scary and so very bittersweet. Eventually one of you has to make the plunge of moving to the other, and you have to put the relationship to the test.
Can we actually stand each other now that we have to be around each other all the time?
A lot of relationships get this far, and then collapse in on themselves because after all the build up, the real thing just can't compete.
It's one thing to be dying on the end of the phone line, sexting your brains out, and crying into your morning latte because they aren't there to share it with you, and it is entirely different to be with that illusory magical romantic human when he/she farts, gets food poisoning, doesn't take the trash out for weeks on end, forgets your birthday, picks a fight with you or horribly all of that at once.
Somehow, Beard and I survived the transition.
The first year we were still kind of in LDR mode. We hid all our ugly habits from one another. We never fought. We cuddled a lot and watched "Oh I don't care, whatever you want is fine, baby" for hours. I put make up on every morning, threw away my ugly pajamas and underwear with the elastic band all stretched out, and made his coffee first every morning.
He dressed the gothy way that had hooked me, kept his hand permanently glued to my lower back, and constantly asked if I was okay. He texted me "I miss you" while we were at work. He sent flowers to the coffee shop where I slung espresso on our anniversary.
We generally swanned about a lot still, but all over each other. I'm sure it was revolting for anyone to watch.
Then we moved to Massachusetts.
We had trouble finding jobs and blew through our savings pretty quickly.
I was surprised at how living in New England made me feel as though I hadn't done anything since high school, and when the best job I could find was making bread at a local bakery, I had the quarter life crisis I'd been putting off for a year to be stupidly smitten.
Beard had more trouble finding work, and when he finally did it was a corporate retail job that treated him like garbage. We had to move to a cheaper apartment on the shittier side of town. We had to put off getting married because we couldn't afford a wedding. We both started cracking, and showing our cracks, and it was hard.
We had some ugly fights.
We both said things that made the other person look at them like they were a stranger.
We left the room sometimes and didn't come back for a few hours so we could get our heads on straight.
Some nights we went to bed so angry we couldn't even touch feet in the bed.
Some mornings, we opened the fight back up again, and didn't know how to close it.
But we also learned.
We adapted.
We didn't give up.
I think that's part of the LDR turning into the LTR*. You know you're both in it for the long run, so you don't try to "win" at fights. You wait until the inferno blows over and you try to approach the shitty situation rationally. You have a safe word.
That's right, a safe word.
When we are having a fight, and one of us realizes it's getting out of control, or it might be about the fact that one of us is really stressed or tired, or we just know that this is going to be the time we say something so hurtful there's no apology in the world that makes it better, one of us says,
banana
Yes. That's right.
One of us invokes the rule of Banana. And no matter what it is we are fighting about, we both have to drop it. We both have to walk away.
I don't attribute my marriage lasting seven years to the Banana Rule, but I attribute a lot to that development, let me tell you.
If you are in an LTR and you don't have an anger safeword, make one. Make one now. You'll thank me later.
Anyway,
so what's the point?
Why does it matter that my LDR turned into an LTR?
Because we've come full circle my friends.
And having a baby has put me and my husband back into the same situation that started it all.
The night feeds and wakings are typically my jam because I don't have to go to a 9-5 and make pretty with actual humans. In fact, if I feel particularly shitty after a bad night with the were-baby, I don't even have to shower, but Beard has to clean up, nut up, and show up every day, so I get those night hazards.
Typically, we have about ten minutes in the morning, while he fills his travel mug from the dregs of the coffee pot I have already crushed because I've been up for two hours. The baby is in his high chair cooing and eating puffs or bits of banana, and I get in a decent hug before the gent heads out the door. We sort of look at each other filled with a deep sense of melancholy knowing that this is the most coherent we're going to be around one another for another twenty four hours, and then off he goes.
Most nights he gets home by 6pm, which is about an hour before Baby bedtime. In fact, we have eaten, bathed, and possibly even read a book by the time Daddy walks through the door. Our final bedtime moments are spent watching Daddy eat dinner (which he does while attempting to visit with the baby, and I slide in any important things I need to say like: hey we have a doctor's appointment on Saturday or I picked up your prescriptions here they are et cetera).
By seven, I am attempting to rock and nurse the baby to sleep. We trade off for the hour it takes to actually accomplish this, and then I am confined to the bed, where I sometimes indulge in an hour of looking at instagram and being disgusted by how beautiful everyone else's life looks in comparison to my milk-soaked, nonsense existence.
Beard comes to bed after the first hour of the day that he's had to himself, which i assume he spends either crying into the toilet, speed eating turkey jerky, or watches the vilest horror movie he can possibly find to make himself feel better about his life in comparison to being chained to a radiator by a demon infested hooker who keeps eating pieces of his genitalia.
We saw each other more often when we lived on opposite sides of the country.
We are in a long distance relationship.
Somehow, over the last ten months of me staying home with baby (and contributing a meager bit of moolah from the writing classes), and Beard going forth into the world and bringing home the old school bacon, we have devolved back from our advanced degree in commitment directly into the weirdness of the LDR.
Exhibit A.
We text.
Yes, this is 2016, everyone bloody texts, but we text each other shit like
I miss you.
or
It was hard to say goodbye this morning.
and
I miss feeling your hand on my lower back.
Exhibit B.
He sent me flowers on our anniversary.
To the house.
Then he texted me to go outside and check if an amazon package had arrived for him. It was a genuine surprise. Red roses. Yeah, that's right. Fucking red roses.
I loved them.
He also got me a Halloween present, which he hasn't done since we first moved to New England some eight years ago. A whole host of very spooky Hocus Pocus paraphernalia. Just out of the blue!
Delightful.
Exhibit C.
We send each other bits and bobs on social media.
Last week, my husband, who balks when I use the word feminist and constantly argues with me about the fact that while white, middle class men are the bane of human existence, white middle class women are pure evil (and he's not wrong), sent me an incredibly cool article from The New Yorker about Shirley Jackson's life as a domestically abused housewife and her genuinely creepy response to oppression through writing.
Seriously, it's an amazing article. Here's the link:
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/10/17/the-haunted-mind-of-shirley-jackson
I also send him links to things like the scariest amusement parks in the world, or Halloweentowns that actually exist in Middle America, or they just discovered a new room in the fucking Winchester house! No, really they did...
http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2016/10/09/new-room-discovered-winchester-mystery-house/
Anyway.
The trick of the LDR is to moon a bit.
Be a little romantic, and if that means being dumb, be dumb too.
Because it won't be long before the kid is sleeping in his own room, and we're forced to spend all the time together again and remember how human, fallible, and annoying we are, so in the meantime, being goofy kids who are sighing over their window sills because they don't get to spend every night asleep in a treehouse together is pretty nice, and it reminds me what's waiting for me on the other side of this strange haze of new parenthood, and what's waiting for me is a pretty great guy that I might like to see more of.
Monday, October 10, 2016
Perspective is Nine Tenths of The Law
There's a lot of crazy in the world right now.
A while back I had to cut my facebook feed down so that I wasn't constantly being barraged by horrific and disturbing images and news stories.
This doesn't mean that I unplugged from the world completely. In fact, I still read a number of news sources every day, however, I like to be able to filter how much I am beaten over the head by a story.
I do not need to be convinced of wars, climate change, natural and man made disasters, terrible events, and a siege of clowns.
Yup. A siege of menacing clowns.
Sigh.
I am convinced. I am an educated adult who has been living in the real world long enough to know that all that stands between me and abject poverty is a series of poor decisions and some bad luck. I know the only thing that stands between me and a natural disaster is luck, and a little geography, but mostly luck. I know that the only thing that stands between me and the millions of people staring into a the barrel of a news camera after losing someone, or recovering from an attack, or any of the things that happen to everybody in the world in their life at any given moment is pure goddamn luck.
This is why I am grateful for a lot of shit.
Yes, #grateful makes me gag almost as much as #pumpkinspice, but practicing "mindful thanks" is part of the psychotic optimist way I live my life, and it's how I keep the rolling tide of bone crushing depression from eating my will to live. LOL. WE HAVE A LOT OF FUN HERE GUYS.
Yesterday it poured rain.
Like from about halfway through Saturday night until early Monday morning fucking pooooooouuuuuuring. I, like a lot of psychotic optimists, need sunlight. I really really do. I know I'm ruining any chance at goth girl cred I ever had in my entire life by saying this, but I cannot stay stuck inside in the dark all the time. It was fine when I was seventeen and devouring novels set in the 1700's, 1800's, and early 1900's. Sure I could wrap my long tresses around me and gaze forlorn out the window as I lifted my cup of tea to my lips and pretend that I was "otherworldly" and "born in the wrong decade" and whatnot, but I also didn't have a lot of friends, rarely spent time doing anything other than reading or listening to music in the dark (actually miss that part quite a bit), and I was miserable.
I kept waiting to be older so I could get to the good part of my life.
You know, the part where I run through a deserted castle in a gossamer nightgown holding an inexplicably light iron candelabra as my twisted, yet devilishly handsome, beloved grapples with some awful secret he's only just revealed to me, and I simply must dash to the moors to come to grips with who and what I love.
Just the average notebook dreams of a teenage girl really.
Jess & Dr. Jekyll 4-EVA.
Well, I'm here.
If you're a weirdo like me and you read a lot about the dying, you find out that most people have these very important thoughts during their last days on earth.
1. They wish they'd taken more chances.
2. They wish they'd slowed down a little and not worried so much about "what was going to happen tomorrow" instead of the loveliness of "what was happening right then".
3. They pinpointed their thirties and their forties as their happiest decades.
After reading many articles where these three things came up again and again, I decided (being that I am thirty four), I had better get to observing the joy in the here and now.
This is more easily said than done, am I right?
We're so programmed by society, culture, school, workforce, all of it to constantly be worrying if we're hot enough, rich enough, cool enough, informed enough, cultured enough, enough of a mother, enough of a partner, enough of an employee, etc etc etc.
With all that going on inside our heads is it any wonder that we can't focus on the moment and spend all our free time roaming around on our stupid phones either trying to find invisible creatures so we can feel something akin to instant gratification and satisfaction in our autonomous lives? Is it any wonder that people are freaking out about celebrities instead of climate change? It's all distraction. It's all there designed to make us feel less than and reach for the nearest quick fix that with just the easiest click of a mouse or swipe of a card allows us to pay someone else to give us a glimpse at satisfaction.
We constantly seek escape from our lives because dwelling in the moment means taking the moment for everything it contains. Yes, there will be fear, inadequacy, that nagging dread that somehow, you are doing this life thing wrong, but you also might be surprised by how alive you feel by allowing yourself to feel all of these things and then letting them pass. What comes in their wake? What happens if you embrace that momentary weakness, let yourself feel like you aren't something? Perhaps what comes next is the feeling of what you in fact are.
I was on the train on Saturday morning headed into Boston to teach my current writing class.
I was given a six week long course in which I am supposed to inspire and help my students manufacture a new, fresh story every single week.
My joy at teaching this class during this period of time is abundant.
Whether my students like it or not they have been bombarded with writing prompts about ghosts, haunted houses, ghouls, and general spookiness.
YOU CAN'T JUST GIVE ME A CANDY BAR AND NOT EXPECT ME TO EAT IT PEOPLE!
So I go into work on Saturdays with about eight short scary stories under my arm. I ride the train with a nice hot coffee in my hand, and I purposefully use this baby-free time to go through all the things I like about my life and generally wallow in them. That's right, wallow like a pig in my blessings.
It would be easy to spend the forty minute train ride checking facebook and instagram. It would be easy to spend it checking my lipstick and wondering if my coffee cup is smudging it. And you know what, sometimes I do that. Sometimes I spend ten or fifteen minutes doing those things exactly.
But then I force myself to turn off my phone and stare out the window.
I allow myself to space out, and if I start worrying about bills, belly rolls, or baby futures, I force my brain to start a list of good things that happened this week, and I just add whatever the hell I want to the list.
As I was making this list on Saturday morning, I was staring at the salt marshes, watching as their edges were slowly eaten up by more and more urban sprawl, when I happened to glance up at a plane in the sky, and a tiny little chunk of rainbow caught my attention.
I looked more intently, and I realized that this perfect little hunk of rainbow was just sitting there. It wasn't a trick of the light, or a crack in my sunglasses. It was a perfect little prism suspended between two clouds and with the sun shining through it right then and there, I got to see it.
Stuff like that, my friends, is what I call a present.
I wondered if anyone else could see it. I thought about glancing back at all the people on the train. Was anybody else staring raptly out the window, or were they all going to be diddling their phones and fixing their hair, impatiently tapping their feet and waiting to get into the city?
I decided not to.
It didn't matter if the tiny rainbow was seen by every single person, or if it was experienced solely by me.
That's the glory of perspective.
It's yours. Maybe the rainbow was only visible from the exact place I was sitting at that exact moment. Maybe it was there all day. Maybe it was only for me. Maybe everyone who rode the train saw it.
It doesn't matter.
Because I saw it, and it made my heart feel a little lighter. It reminded me of magic, existing everywhere all the time, and how it really is observable if you pay attention, and actively push back against the darkness.
Saturday, October 8, 2016
She's a Pistol.
Okay, I know I'm anxious.
I know I come across a wee bit fearful, neurotic, cautious, or what have you, but my biggest fear isn't random masked intruders, possessed crib mobiles, or razor blades in apples.
It's pissing myself.
Let's shoo all the twenty somethings out of the room a minute, because the odds are good that if you're in your twenties (and you haven't either had a child or a serious drinking problem) wetting your chonies is something you've left far behind. It's a distant memory of that humiliating night when you were eight and had to get out of bed and wake up your parent-you know, the one who was least likely to shame you-and hushedly explain that you needed new pajamas. Maybe you were on a really long car trip, and you tried to tell them to pull over so you could go at the Burger King, but Mom wanted to push on to the next exit, and you had "an emergency" involving six thousand baby wipes, and a car seat that would never smell quite the same again.
Regardless, it was a while ago. You can tell it as a funny story at parties now and laugh.
For me, that story was when I was about seven years old.
My family used to go on little walkabouts on Sunday afternoons.
We'd pull on our sneakers, pile in the car, and Dad would get us to some pretty beach or trail or national park. We'd hike around for an hour or two and then split a large Cadbury's Fruit and Nut at the picnic tables.
Quite droll really.
On this particular Sunday, it was a bit chilly and raining, but not so heavily as to deter our patriarch. So we pulled on wellies and sweaters, and off we went.
I should mention that at seven, I was the eldest of the three children. My younger sister was 5 and the baby of the family was a little over a year.
We ventured out of the car at a little clearing with some pretty cliffs and forest to explore. I had a suspicion that I needed a bathroom, but I was a little too nervous to ask my parents to load us all back in the car and find one. I had very little experience peeing in the woods, but I was tenacious, and so I scoped out a copse of trees where I wouldn't be seen, pulled down my pants and attempted to squat.
This was the first time I became aware of a peculiarity particular to my anatomy. The piss stream, rather than adhering to those plebeian laws of gravity and going straight down onto the ground, shot out of my body in a magnificent, steaming arc right onto the wadded up jeans and undies around my ankles.
I watched in horror as the treacherous piss soaked my supposedly safe garments, feebly swiveling my hips to lessen the tragedy, only to find the motion more efficiently drenched every last inch of dry material on the ground.
By the time my bladder was empty, I was staring down the choice of either emerging from the woods naked from the waist down and drawing every human in my family's attention (and any unlucky hikers' to boot). Even at the tender age of seven, the humiliation was too much to bear, not to mention the wrath of my Dad, who blessed (cursed?) with an unmatched sense of smell had managed to convince my young mind that he could smell my farts when I was just thinking about letting one go, and that I would be left by the side of the road should I ever release one in his presence.
I'm still not entirely sure that was an idle threat.
So I did what anyone would do in this situation.
I tugged my saturated clothing back up my legs, feeling the already cold pee soaked denim rashing up my legs and around my hindquarters.
I swaggered out of woods like John Wayne to confront everyone with a lie and pray that I could walk until I dried (impossible since it was raining...remember? ah the incorrigible hope of youth...).
Luckily, my parents and youngest sibling were on the other side of a large rock face and it was Alex, who looked up from poking some fungus with a stick to see her elder sister red faced and soaked to the bone scuttle out of the trees like a demented, emotionally vulnerable crab.
"Jessie?" Her brow knit quizzically.
I immediately confessed.
"Daddy's going to kill me!" I blubbered after revealing my shame.
She reached out her little hand and took mine, looked me deep in the eyes, and committed an act of solidarity I have never seen matched in my life.
"No, no he won't," she said, and I watched, as my perfectly dry little sister, pissed her pants on purpose.
I watched the growing wet spot on her jeans with a growing glow in my heart.
"But-" I whispered. "You'll-"
She cut me off with a wave of her hand.
"He can't be mad at both of us," she said.
Perfect kid logic.
At this moment, my mother came around the side of the rock to see what was keeping us.
She took in the situation. Both her daughters soaked to the bone in piss, holding hands and smiling at her while valiantly fighting back tears.
I might be applying this look in hindsight, but I'm pretty sure we saw something like horror dawn on her face, but before she could react, my father came around the rock with our youngest sibling in his arms.
"What the?"
And all hell broke loose.
There was no chocolate to be had on this day. The pissing day.
Instead, we were unceremoniously lashed back into our car seats. I was made to put my raincoat on my seat so my shame would not soak into the fabric of the car. Alex stuck out her chin defiantly, but stayed stoically silent.
I wept openly, hot tears of mortification.
My father was still releasing his own stream of unrelenting curses, oaths, and slights about disgusting children and filthy habits and a good day ruined, as my mother tried in vain to smooth his mood and smile encouragingly at all of us.
She is a spectacular woman who knows piss, like everything else, dries and disappears eventually.
It was at this pivotal moment, when I truly wonder if my father was contemplating leaving his family on the side of the road rather than drive in a piss flavored air pocket the hour back to our house, that the youngest member of my family decided to completely fill her shorts.
A sound akin to time itself being ripped apart with a box cutter, tore through the car, and suddenly the vaporous, ephemeral scent of piss was replaced, actually, obliterated by the warm fragrance of baby poo.
We drove home in silence.
As an adult, I see both sides of the story.
Scrubbing piss and poo out of three sets of clothes sounds pretty miserable, being trapped in a vehicle with the zoo of odors we must have been emanating sounds just as awful, but now I have other things to worry about.
Over time, I learned to live with my strangely angled urethra. There were one or two mishaps after a night of one too many glasses of wine where I forgot to angle down properly, and I paid for those lapses in wadded up kleenex.
It is only since I gave birth to my son that I have noticed things have gotten somewhat...
how shall i say?
Dire?
Now my piss arc not only goes out, but it veers severely to the left, a fact I discovered during the incredibly sleep deprived early months of motherhood every time I went to the bathroom, if I didn't lean forward far enough, I actually shot over the seat and hit the floor.
I have only just recently gotten used to having to sit on the toilet side saddle like women in the early 1900's rode horses.
On top of this, if I do forget, and my arc streaks far and true, I find myself in the identical situation of my seven year old self, watching in horror as my pee soaks the pants around my ankles and forsakes the perfectly decent toilet I am perched upon.
All this to say, karma, my friends, means something entirely different when you become a parent.
I know I come across a wee bit fearful, neurotic, cautious, or what have you, but my biggest fear isn't random masked intruders, possessed crib mobiles, or razor blades in apples.
It's pissing myself.
Let's shoo all the twenty somethings out of the room a minute, because the odds are good that if you're in your twenties (and you haven't either had a child or a serious drinking problem) wetting your chonies is something you've left far behind. It's a distant memory of that humiliating night when you were eight and had to get out of bed and wake up your parent-you know, the one who was least likely to shame you-and hushedly explain that you needed new pajamas. Maybe you were on a really long car trip, and you tried to tell them to pull over so you could go at the Burger King, but Mom wanted to push on to the next exit, and you had "an emergency" involving six thousand baby wipes, and a car seat that would never smell quite the same again.
Regardless, it was a while ago. You can tell it as a funny story at parties now and laugh.
For me, that story was when I was about seven years old.
My family used to go on little walkabouts on Sunday afternoons.
We'd pull on our sneakers, pile in the car, and Dad would get us to some pretty beach or trail or national park. We'd hike around for an hour or two and then split a large Cadbury's Fruit and Nut at the picnic tables.
Quite droll really.
On this particular Sunday, it was a bit chilly and raining, but not so heavily as to deter our patriarch. So we pulled on wellies and sweaters, and off we went.
I should mention that at seven, I was the eldest of the three children. My younger sister was 5 and the baby of the family was a little over a year.
We ventured out of the car at a little clearing with some pretty cliffs and forest to explore. I had a suspicion that I needed a bathroom, but I was a little too nervous to ask my parents to load us all back in the car and find one. I had very little experience peeing in the woods, but I was tenacious, and so I scoped out a copse of trees where I wouldn't be seen, pulled down my pants and attempted to squat.
This was the first time I became aware of a peculiarity particular to my anatomy. The piss stream, rather than adhering to those plebeian laws of gravity and going straight down onto the ground, shot out of my body in a magnificent, steaming arc right onto the wadded up jeans and undies around my ankles.
I watched in horror as the treacherous piss soaked my supposedly safe garments, feebly swiveling my hips to lessen the tragedy, only to find the motion more efficiently drenched every last inch of dry material on the ground.
By the time my bladder was empty, I was staring down the choice of either emerging from the woods naked from the waist down and drawing every human in my family's attention (and any unlucky hikers' to boot). Even at the tender age of seven, the humiliation was too much to bear, not to mention the wrath of my Dad, who blessed (cursed?) with an unmatched sense of smell had managed to convince my young mind that he could smell my farts when I was just thinking about letting one go, and that I would be left by the side of the road should I ever release one in his presence.
I'm still not entirely sure that was an idle threat.
So I did what anyone would do in this situation.
I tugged my saturated clothing back up my legs, feeling the already cold pee soaked denim rashing up my legs and around my hindquarters.
I swaggered out of woods like John Wayne to confront everyone with a lie and pray that I could walk until I dried (impossible since it was raining...remember? ah the incorrigible hope of youth...).
Luckily, my parents and youngest sibling were on the other side of a large rock face and it was Alex, who looked up from poking some fungus with a stick to see her elder sister red faced and soaked to the bone scuttle out of the trees like a demented, emotionally vulnerable crab.
"Jessie?" Her brow knit quizzically.
I immediately confessed.
"Daddy's going to kill me!" I blubbered after revealing my shame.
She reached out her little hand and took mine, looked me deep in the eyes, and committed an act of solidarity I have never seen matched in my life.
"No, no he won't," she said, and I watched, as my perfectly dry little sister, pissed her pants on purpose.
I watched the growing wet spot on her jeans with a growing glow in my heart.
"But-" I whispered. "You'll-"
She cut me off with a wave of her hand.
"He can't be mad at both of us," she said.
Perfect kid logic.
At this moment, my mother came around the side of the rock to see what was keeping us.
She took in the situation. Both her daughters soaked to the bone in piss, holding hands and smiling at her while valiantly fighting back tears.
I might be applying this look in hindsight, but I'm pretty sure we saw something like horror dawn on her face, but before she could react, my father came around the rock with our youngest sibling in his arms.
"What the?"
And all hell broke loose.
There was no chocolate to be had on this day. The pissing day.
Instead, we were unceremoniously lashed back into our car seats. I was made to put my raincoat on my seat so my shame would not soak into the fabric of the car. Alex stuck out her chin defiantly, but stayed stoically silent.
I wept openly, hot tears of mortification.
My father was still releasing his own stream of unrelenting curses, oaths, and slights about disgusting children and filthy habits and a good day ruined, as my mother tried in vain to smooth his mood and smile encouragingly at all of us.
She is a spectacular woman who knows piss, like everything else, dries and disappears eventually.
It was at this pivotal moment, when I truly wonder if my father was contemplating leaving his family on the side of the road rather than drive in a piss flavored air pocket the hour back to our house, that the youngest member of my family decided to completely fill her shorts.
A sound akin to time itself being ripped apart with a box cutter, tore through the car, and suddenly the vaporous, ephemeral scent of piss was replaced, actually, obliterated by the warm fragrance of baby poo.
We drove home in silence.
As an adult, I see both sides of the story.
Scrubbing piss and poo out of three sets of clothes sounds pretty miserable, being trapped in a vehicle with the zoo of odors we must have been emanating sounds just as awful, but now I have other things to worry about.
Over time, I learned to live with my strangely angled urethra. There were one or two mishaps after a night of one too many glasses of wine where I forgot to angle down properly, and I paid for those lapses in wadded up kleenex.
It is only since I gave birth to my son that I have noticed things have gotten somewhat...
how shall i say?
Dire?
Now my piss arc not only goes out, but it veers severely to the left, a fact I discovered during the incredibly sleep deprived early months of motherhood every time I went to the bathroom, if I didn't lean forward far enough, I actually shot over the seat and hit the floor.
I have only just recently gotten used to having to sit on the toilet side saddle like women in the early 1900's rode horses.
On top of this, if I do forget, and my arc streaks far and true, I find myself in the identical situation of my seven year old self, watching in horror as my pee soaks the pants around my ankles and forsakes the perfectly decent toilet I am perched upon.
All this to say, karma, my friends, means something entirely different when you become a parent.
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