Time travel

Okay, to the two people who actually keep up with my postings in real time (hi A! hi P!) this may seem weird, but I'm about to travel back in time to post blog entries that I wrote down in my notepad or word processor (yes, I write in a stand-alone word processor sometimes...it's actually kind of rad) over the past few weeks. So if you checked my blog last week and saw that I hadn't posted in a while, and then checked back today and saw that there were "new" posts from 2 weeks ago...that's what happened.

I just finished a homework project that was due today. I can't promise this means I'll blog more for the foreseeable future, but here's hopin'.

Tears and frustration

I swear to be-Jebus, the very night that I wrote how Anonybabe had suddenly turned into a little angel from heaven, she sensed my praise and used it to fuel a newfound height of naughtiness.

As Anonyhub and I were discussing the ways she'd recently gone from bad to beatific, she started biting me on the nipple during nursing, and then giving a sly grin when I'd tell her no. Later she'd climb up on a chair - fine, and then pull to standing - not fine, and instead of sitting down when I asked, then demanded, she would look at me with raised eyebrows and instead of crouching down, stand on her tippy-toes. Sigh. Testing the boundaries.

Hugs and kisses

Let me just say that in the past week Anonybabe has suddenly gone from a person I rued spending most of the next 18 years with to an affectionate little delight. She's been giving spontaneous kisses for a while, but they seemed more of an automatic, a confirmation that she did something right. I mean, when she does something that delights us, both Anonyhub and I tend to pucker up and ask for a kiss, so if she did something she thought we should find delight-worthy she'd turn perfunctorily to us, crane her neck and raise her eyebrows as if to say "Kiss, please? Come on, I haven't got all day!" She would also give "squeezes" when requested, but tended to be more impressed with herself by knowing what they were and how to administer them than with the hugs themselves.

But this past weekend a sweet sweet light went on. First off, she of the furrowed brow and head shakes has finally deigned to use her voice for something other than squealing and babbling. For a while, she's been kind of whispering out consonants when we say words ("buh" for "banana", "puh" for apple, "puh" for pacifier). She would enthusiastically and rapidly make the consonant with her lips, but little to no sound would come out. If she was gibbering something that sounded like a word and we asked her to repeat it, she would suddenly stop and look up at us and give us a look as if we'd caught her doing the Hammer a little too enthusiastically in front of her bedroom mirror (don't ask how I know that look so intimately). She hadn't even really said "mama" and "dada" yet, although she could point to the proper entity 9 times out of 10 when quizzed as to that person's whereabouts.

Until this weekend. I suddenly seemed to go from the woman who's nice to have around because she provides the warm milk and the opportunity to climb stairs to, well, "mama". Anonybabe would chant it while asking for milk with her hand, and instead of being an endless string of "mamamamamam", she would say it with the proper two syllable format. She would give a self-satisfied smile when I would pull out my breast, then lean against my bare chest and look up at me and take a moment to enjoy being close and say "Mama" so sweetly before digging in.

So now, instead of having visions of the wary strangers we will eventually and all too soon become, I have movies playing through my head of Anonybabe as a 7-9 year old, holding hands with me as we laugh and stroll down the street together, sharing some inside joke and reveling in each other's company. Maybe she will like me a little while before teenagerhood comes and bites me in the ass with her impertinence. I almost don't know what to wish for. My folksy wisdom (stop! I see you laughing and snorting your coffee through your nose) such as it is, tells me that Anonybabe will rebel, will go through a necessary period of separation and isolation from her dear Daddy and me. I think it'll suck, but I kind of think it's inevitable and necessary. And then part of me thinks, maybe I'm wrong. Maybe we'll get along.

Or maybe no matter what I should tell myself and work hard to believe we will get along because I'm kind of ruining the present by worrying about the future. As in, I don't want to fully give my heart to this adorable little imp because of my certainty that she will stomp it into a greasy smear immediately upon blowing out the candles on her 12th birthday cake, and won't think to apologize until at least her 21st birthday. I almost didn't enter into a relationship with Anonyhub because of the same reticence to share my heart, and I'm glad I eventually did. He was a lot nicer, and my heart was a lot more resilient than I expected.

Parenting is like bathing in shit...except without the "like"

Like any parent, I've become more intimate with my child's bodily functions than I ever would have feared. I've been pleased and amazed at how I've kicked it into parent mode upon coming into contact with someone else's pee/shit/vomit. I've been in the same bathtub with my daughter while she defecated, most notably on my first mother's day, when I thought it would be sweet to bathe together after she'd just peed on my belly.

But instead of getting immune to this, I get more grossed out every time it happens. Today I gave Anonybabe a much-needed bath in her little green plastic baby tub. She'd been allowed to crawl around in her dad's store and then up and down the front steps outside, so she was beyond filthy. She'd managed to grab a half-eaten apple with one of her grubby paws, of course grabbing it around the eaten part so that the juice of the apple picked up all the dirt on her hands and formed a grimy coating that she happily bit into before I managed to take it away, along with a bit of bagel. I plopped her into the tub with Francis, who she'd managed to throw in while my back was turned. (Are you seeing a theme here? She's too damn fast for me!) I was relieved I didn't have any poop to clean off of her before putting her in the tub.

Poor naive me. When she grunted a little and then smiled up at me with red-rimmed eyes - classic poop face - I looked for floaters, but didn't see any & figured she'd just been splashing around. Cut to a few minutes later when I finally see a sliver of brown being gently rocked to and fro in the waves of the tub. When I picked her up I found she had been sitting on a little pile of compact turds that began to swirl around. I put her in the big tub to finish her bath and tried to remember whether all of the bathwater I'd been trying to keep her from drinking had been ingested before or after poopface. She'd also successfully sucked water out of Francis's stuffed paw. I never ever vomit, but I had to really fight wretching when I emptied out the contents of her little tub into the toilet and then hosed it down in the back yard.

Fuck me, parenting is disgusting. And we haven't even gotten to emptying the wee training toilets and cleaning up the accidents yet. I think I owe my mother a "thanks for letting me shit on you" bouquet. A big one.

Whoooooo are you? Ooo-ooo, Ooo-ooo

Today we had coffee with a couple who was in our pre-Anonybabe childbirth class. Their daughter was due one week after Anonybabe, but ended up being born a couple of weeks before. We'd clicked hard with them at the time of the class, but had only managed to hook up one time post-vagina rending.

Their daughter is a tiny effervescent thing, with sparse dark hair, thin dark eyebrows that she has recently learned to waggle to great effect, and expressive eyes. Her parents had been teaching her the signs for some time and she had a big vocabulary, signing like crazy and making conversation whenever she could. When we walked up she took the sticks we'd gathered on our walk over and proffered them brightly back to Anonybabe for her to eat. She knew the sign for "friend" and used it frequently, toddling around from table to table and asking for or offering bites of food to the patrons. Her mom told us she'd recently climbed into a stranger's lap at another coffee shop, pointing to her muffin and to ask if she could have some. She was, in a word, amazing.

Anonybabe, by contrast, sat in my lap. She has taken nary a step, but she didn't venture down for so much as a stand, much less a crawl. She scowled at our friends and stared somberly at their daughter, sizing her up. Eventually she loosened up enough to suck some peanut butter and jelly off of the english muffins I brought, and shove a toy duck into my hands for me to make quack and share her sandwich. She was, in two words, social deadweight, as usual.

As our friend's daughter smiled and flirted and flitted around us, and Anonybabe sucked peanut butter, I allowed myself a few moments of self-incrimination. Did we do this to her? Did I? Had I coddled her or kept her at home too much? Should I have helped her learn to walk instead of letting her figure it out on her own? Was she doomed with us as parents?

And then, just as quickly as the storm clouds had gathered in my mind, they scuttled away. Anonybabe was still scowling on my lap, but suddenly I felt a warm affection for the gal. She was just utterly and completely being herself. And I loved her for it. I would be more than delighted to spend the day with this other toddler. She was bright, she was fun. But I don't like Anonybabe "because" or "in spite of". I really just do.

As we walked away from our coffee date I squeezed her midriff repeatedly. She's just so very her. It's hard to separate moments of pride with moments of recognition, because they both give me a warm glow.

More than one way to skin a wolf

Anonybabe got her first skinned knee last week. She got it while Anonyhub was watching her, and I didn't want to ask and come across as the overzealous mother, so I can only assume she scraped it on the concrete in our back yard. At first I tried to direct her to the softer grass when we were out back, but then I realized if it doesn't bother her -- if it in fact delights her to crawl across it with bare feet, knees, and hands -- then why should it bother me? She's developed a method of picking up her legs when she does it, so all we've had to fear are extremely dirty legs at the end of the day.

I was so proud when I saw those two little hardened rust color blobs on her leg. Work-a-day bruises and scrapes on children represent a life well-lived, I say. There's such a tug-of-war going on in me regarding Anonybabe's independence. Part of me is so excited for her to be doing things on her own, for her sake and mine. And part of me wants to morph with her and never let her go. That part of me is frightening.

I just listened to an address by Bill Moyers to a group dedicated to a renaissance of certain standards in news media. It was good, but I only mention it because of a tale he used to illustrate a point. It regarded a wise man who told his grandson that he always had two wolves battling inside him. One was the wolf of greed and anger, cynicism and hatred. And the other was the wolf of love and activism, empathy and heroism. "Which wolf won?" asked the grandson. And the grandfather replied, "The one I fed."

Nice, eh? So I'm going to feed the wolf of independence in my daughter, while trying desperately to figure out what it means to be interdependent, so I can feed that wolf most of all.

Fight or Flight

So I told Anonyhub a bit of my post sob-story revelation: that I'm sad because I don't spend as much time as I'd like with Anonybabe or him. That my job is alright moneywise but it seems like I could be doing better things with my time. And while I was at it I told him some of my fantasies about the future. That we'll have another youngin' when Anonybabe is about 4. That I'll be able to work part time and write for pay. That I'll get to spend a large amount of time unschooling our daughter.

He got snippy at the mention of a second child, but I expected that. He got snappy when we started talking about how my plans fit in with his plans to go back to school and soon we devolved into an argument about the future in which I'd insulted his parents, he insinuated that he'd have to think twice about living with someone who had so little concern for housework, and we both decided it would be best if we didn't talk to each other for the rest of the evening.

Laws, people. I'm dedicated to this marriage and I love my husband, but at what point is this going to get easy? I'm beginning to suspect we get the initial 6 months of our relationship and our golden years for that, provided we make it that far.

No means Yes!

I've mentioned here how I've sort of become a one man muppet show for my daughter. And how bossy she's become about sitting back and letting me do all of the work of entertaining her.

Hey, she certainly can't make Francis give witty discourse on carrots vs. apples, so of course it makes sense for her to press me into service. Having grabbed my hand and pushing the stuffed animal of choice into it, she as good as lays back in her baby blue La-Z-Boy and settles in to watch the show.

Now I've been loathe to say no to Anonybabe about anything that didn't put her or me or her father in immediate peril. If she's going to swallow a penny, I say no. If she's going to try to climb on the shelving above our bed, or pull one of the heavy dinosaur toys from it down on our heads, I say no. If she bites me, particularly on the mammaries, I all but yell it.

Otherwise, I figure I'll just let her do her thing. And that had kind of morphed into taking directives from my one year-old. But Jesus K. Riste, was I getting tired of being the court jester. So last night, as long as I was into it, I would "play" one of her stuffed animals for her. Then when I tired of it, I would tell Anonybabe "no, I'm done" as she would repeatedly whine and bump the stuffed animal into my hand. If I hid my hand behind my leg, she'd seek to extract it, then would bump the animal against my elbow or wrist. "Ungh!" She would insist. "Ungh UNGH!" She would demand and gear up to yell it.

She got pretty mad, and then, marvel of marvels, she gave up and turned to something else. We repeated this cycle several times last night. She never seemed pleased, but she did move on.

It is hard saying no to her, but holy of holies, I'll be jiggered if I wasn't enjoying her company a damn site more last night since I didn't feel imprisoned in "loyal servant" mode. Mommy has rediscovered the magic of "me first." When Anonybabe was first born I had a wise doula tell me: "when mama's happy, baby's happy. When baby's happy, mama's happy." The idea being that if either one in that equation is miserable, then something's gotta change.

Anonyhub and I are going to leave Anonybabe with a friend tonight and go to a movie. I expect to be bursting with love and goodwill after the break. It might more than make up for the anger Anonybabe'll probably feel at being abandoned in a strange place. Or maybe she'll love being at this friend's and I'll have been putting myself on house arrest for no good reason.

All told, the learning curve on this stuff is mighty mighty steep.

Dirty bird

Anonybabe loves the dirt, thank Jesus. If she didn't we might have a hard time finding things to talk about. My best friend in high school was completely dirt-averse. She repeatedly told the story of how she was set down in the freshly plowed rows in the fields behind her house as a baby, and how she cried and cried until she was picked up and taken into the house to be cleaned off. We haven't kept in touch.

I'm no hard-core dirt enthusiastic like my mother and grandmothers. They had an itch that could only be scratched by getting their hands in their gardens every spring through fall. I also have farmers in my family, at least as far back as my great great grandparents on both sides, and as recently as my dad, who reluctantly oversaw the family rice and soybean farm until he was 40. I grew up watching my dad shoot at red-wing blackbirds from the drivers window of his pickup. (A decidedly pointless and assholish thing to do, even if they were eating his rice. But then my dad was the resident spoiled rich kid of the community. And now my digression is digressing.)

So I like dirt alright. But Anonybabe seems to delight in it. If we are in the yard, she will crawl through the grass to the nearest available dirt patch. She'll plop herself down in it and start digging. She no longer puts anything and everything in her mouth, but she put a hand full of black soil in her mouth the other day and then smiled beatifically at me through blackened teeth when I went to swish it out.

I start to feel a little negligent when her knees and the tops of Anonybabe's feet get so dirty that I could easily write "wash me" on them with a wet finger, and she has little dirt half-moons at the ends of her fingers and toes where the soil is packed under her nails. But then I remember the joy of holding a cool handful of freshly turned dirt in the palm of my hand. I think of the smell. And I set Anonybabe in the grass to crawl away whereever she'd like.

Cry, cry, cry; Why why why

I cried myself to sleep last night. It felt very pms induced, but as a mildly depressive aunt who was in the throes of menopause once told me, you may be acting all crazy because of hormones, but that doesn't mean you should dismiss what's happening. Things that usually get tamped down are coming to the surface. You may as well treat them as legitimate; you might get something out of it if you do.

So I was legitimately sobbing into my pillow last night as Anonyhub and Anonybabe played in the next room. I'd been a megabitch to Anonyhub when he got back from work. (First I'd put in a full 8-6 workday, then he logged in a few hours). I'd been having a good time with Anonybabe, much to my relief - she was issuing no face slaps and half of her previous grouchiness, and she interspersed goodwill giggling and huge blocks of time entertaining herself with jar lids and bottle parts while I did some cooking. I was really enjoying myself, and was surprised when Anonyhub came in and I was immediately at his throat and escalating the argument for every little comment.

"What is your deal?" he walked back from the kitchen to ask me, after I'd kicked a beach ball hard in his general direction. Every time he asked what my problem was I earnestly replied that it was him, then realized that even on the days he really is my problem I usually have the self-possession to refrain from saying so. I still went on to rant about how I hated our schedule and how I never get to bed on time because Anonybabe is always up until the witching hour and so I never get up on time and am perpetually late to work and on and on. Anonyhub stood up for himself and managed to avoid being pinned with any of the wild blame I was trying to lay on him for my lack of sleep. With an abrupt and cursory good night I climbed into bed and seethed for a while. And when I heard Anonyhub and Anonybabe reading books and squealing happily in the next room, I started to cry.

I asked myself what the real problem might be and immediately my mind went to some fantasizing I'd been doing earlier. I'd been trying to figure what it would take for me to quit my job so I could be at home with Anonybabe more. I'd gone so far as to estimate the baseline housing and food expenses and noodled out what I'd need to make per hour.

I realized that I'm not really happy with the amount of time I spend with Anonybabe and I don't know what I'm going to do about it yet. I realized that I hated that Anonyhub and Anonybabe went to bed after me because I wish they were by me all the time when I'm home. I'm kind of surprised that this is coming up because when Anonybabe was an infant I didn't feel as bad about being away from her. I felt bad, but I didn't feel like I was doing something wrong. And now, this feels all wrong. It feels like my priorities are out of whack.

Yelling at Anonyhub didn't help. Maybe I'll try talking to him about it.

To blog

I've been strolling around the blogosphere lately, following a chain of link-the-links through (mostly) parenting blogs that catch my eye.



I already knew this on some level, but good god almighty are there a lot of blogs out there. Funny blogs. Sloppy blogs. Boring blogs. Unendurably clever blogs.



I'm experiencing a mixture of warm fuzzies and abject terror.



As a woman who doesn't get out much, this is, ironically, the closest I've ever come to being a social butterfly. I read! I comment! I put my foot in my mouth!



I'm a little bit jealous of the good blogs, even though life isn't a competition, I still get the distinct feeling that that guy over there who is just a lot funnier and that woman over there who slays me with her writing just knocked me down a little further in my own self estimation.



I mean, it's about time I got out there and lived a little. Sigh. But I'm beginning to remember why I elected to enter life a wall flower in the first place. There are so many stupid things one can say. Why not say nothing?



Because then the world wouldn't be the beautiful chaotic cacophony that it is. I kinda like the world. I like the noise. I like the pomp. I like the bruised egos and the illusions of grandeur. I like the smiles and the pageantry and the awkward moments. And if I like all of that, then I need to do my part. Contribute. Say something. Say the most off-putting ignorant things that come to mind. And then if I'm lucky, and anyone is paying attention, I can just smile and soak in the backlash.

The Boy is Mine

The Mothering magazine I picked up the other day has been sitting in our bathroom for weeks now. I was suckered in by the article titled "How to raise strong confident women." It is a testament to how ill-prepared for that I feel that I'm grasping at 1,200 word magazine article straws.


Anonyhub (who has read more of the magazine than I have at this point) was suckered in by an article on Ani Difranco, a woman he has loved to hate for musical reasons since the mid-nineties. She apparently annoys him as a philosophizing mother as well.


"She kept complaining about how men have taken medicine and birth away from women and have made it horrible, like women didn't have anything to do with it. I mean, she's right about men making it bad, but my mother and my sister and pretty much every woman in my home town wouldn't even consider giving birth without drugs and a hospital bed. It's like she's saying women were forced to do things a certain way."


I've since read the article, and I don't think Ani sounded as victimy or man-hating as Anonyhub thought she did, but I like the implications of what he's saying by refusing to see women as the victims of mean old men. He's saying, hey, don't come crying on my shoulder, don't you have brains, and a will, and the ability to strategize? Then use them. He refuses to see women as powerless. And I love him for it. And I'm glad he's going to be emanating this philosophy around Anonybabe.


Women are sitting in the catbird seat when it comes to demanding better care surrounding pregnancy and birth. And maybe, like me, if more women get a taste of how good it feels to demand what we want in pregnancy and birth then we'll learn to demand it elsewhere.

Mommy Mambo

Ever since Anonybabe's fever broke (did I mention the fever? 24-hour stomach virus immediately followed by another bug that gave her scary high fever, all during heat wave. My dehydration fears were in full swing but I didn't break down and give her Tylenol...just monitored her constantly to make sure it didn't get up to 104...am I becoming one of those Christian Scientist types who gets mocked and berated for avoiding modern medicine until a completely avoidable incident in which their child dies? No? What was I saying? Oh yes, since Anonybabe's fever broke) she's had an extremely short fuse. If things don't go her way, she gripes. If we don't understand what she wants, she fusses. If I don't read her freaking mind and her cryptic cock-eyed pointing the right way, she hits me dead in the face. And then "wah"s and hits me harder when I tell her to stop.

After just a couple of days of this (granted, a couple of days after taking a 6 hour road trip with a sick child and then days of caring for the child alone while I listened to my husband wretch unassisted into a trash can by the sofa) my own fuse is short. And I worry that this is a semi-permenant personality shift. What if she's like this for the foreseeable future? What if she's like this forever? Am I going to even like my daughter from here on out?

I thought I was a patient and kind mother, but that seems to be only when my daughter acts perfectly. When she's trying I jump from beatific to bitch as quickly as she jumped from docile to grouchy.

So I'm trying to make a shift in my mind, to think in terms of what my daughter needs and what she's really asking for when she hits me in the face instead of being single-mindedly obsessed with making her freaking stop already and fantasizing about being away from her.

It takes two to tango. I don't have to like it when she hits me in the goddamn face, but if I want to move things in another direction, I have to take the lead. I'm just not sure what to do. Telling her to stop has not alleviated her angst or mine. Just being nice about it certainly isn't getting us anywhere. Time to come up with some creative and fancy footwork.

Sigh

It has been a rough week. Anonybabe and then Anonyhub came down with some sort of stomach virus they picked up on a trip to the in-laws this past weekend. Vomiting ensued. An outdoor concert Anonyhub and I had planned to take Anonybabe to didn't happen. My best friend was in town and I didn't get to see her as she was also sick and our families didn't need the additional load to our immune systems. I only worked a day and a half of my normal work week since I needed to take care of the sickheads. I was supposed to have a night off tonight to hang with a friend and it looks like that isn't going to happen. By-the-by, how the heck do single parents hang on to their sanity?

There's so much I've been wanting to blog about, from Anonybabe's incredibly off putting baby phobia (She cries or frowns frostily whenever her cousin or my best friends' babies approach), to my musings about homeschooling, to my fear that I'm over sharing in this blog, to... I don't know. All of the minutia that I like to blog about. But at the moment I need to catch up on some work.