Found the first gray hairs today. Thanks, Nathan. At least they’re in the front; I always wanted one of those cool gray stripes in my bangs.
Just in time for my 35th birthday in a few months. Guess I should be glad it took this long; my sister was getting them at 17.
My confession today is that I’ve stopped liking cats. I used to like them. I did! I had several as a child, and I always liked them and never minded the being clawed and the hair on everything and the Attitude all cats have and the poop-shoveling.
But somewhere along the way, I couldn’t do it anymore. I didn’t become a dog person, either; now I’m just sort of a Non-Pet person, except maybe I’d like one or two pet chickens to eat bugs and produce eggs. Is that too weird? But then, chickens don’t shed fur on your good black coat.
I don’t hate cats. I don’t mistreat them, I will pet them if they’re desperate for attention, and I’ll feed them and make sure they take their medicine, whatever. We still have Matt’s cat, or will when we get our own place and get her back from Matt’s brother. And my mom has a cat. A needy, friendly, but god, so needy, cat. He gets all sorts of attention from the other adults in the house but it’s not enough. He rubs on me and jumps up and gets in my face and mews pathetically if I don’t pay attention and I just want to watch TV, ok? I’m tired. Leave me alone, cat.
I have no problem with other people’s cats. I just…don’t connect with them anymore. I’m too busy, maybe. More selfish of my time, perhaps. Maybe just tired of all the dirt that any pet brings…on their fur, on their paws, the litter scattered around the box, the food scattered around the dish, the hair, my god, the hair everywhere that no vacuum can touch. I don’t want to clean after them, I don’t want to have to wash my hands all the time, I don’t want to have to protect my furniture from shredding, I don’t want to get up and let them out in the middle of the night. I just don’t. I’m too busy, and all my nurturing goes to the people in my life. I’m tapped out.
I may be screwed, as Matt continues to be a cat person and Nathan may want a pet, and when you’re one of the adults in a pet-owning household, you end up taking care of them at some point. And I don’t want to begrudge anyone else who enjoys pets their chance to have them. And yeah, I’ve read about the studies that show taking care of pets lowers your heart rate, but for me, it’s actually more stressful. I don’t get anything out of it. If anything, I get more tense.
Anyone else ever feel this way, or am I the soulless freak here?
Avert your eyes, oh ye atheists.
So, about two days ago, I had had it with this situation. Despite my brave little post below (which I would like you to imagine me reading with “Battle Hymn of the Republic” playing softly in the background), I was Up To Here with our situation. I mean…unemployed and living with my mom at 34? Not my idea of Stunning Success. Also: poverty. Poverty sucks ass. Also, I’m feeling way too fat post-baby, but can afford neither more flattering clothes to cover the fatness, or a gym to burn it off. Also, I don’t even own a bed, or dishes, because we had no room to bring all that with us from New York. And I was watching too much TV because I had nothing else to do all day with a baby and no car. Cue anger and depression.
I do pray at such times, in full recognition that there may in fact be no one up there to hear it. Usually such prayers are simply “Help, please. Um, just a bit? Something? Hello?”
But a few days ago, I Prayed Angry, somewhere along the lines of “Dear Deity Who May Not Exist, I am sick of this shit. Get off your celestial ass if you want me to believe in you, because right now? Not happening. We need money, and we need it NOW.”
And then the next day, as I was working my one day temp assignment (which deserves its own post) I get a call from the temp agency. They have a 30 day temp to perm that pays half again what they’ve been paying Matt per hour, doing admin work. Meaning he could take the week off he needed to wrap up his album, then go into being the at-home parent without hurting us financially. Meaning no more Gilmore Girls reruns being the highlight of my useless days. Meaning…I have to keep being Not An Atheist.
I know, I know. Anecdote and coincidence do not constitute proof. And I’m not trying to convince anyone of anything. But I feel a little, I don’t know, honor-bound to have some sort of belief after this. Although it does paint kind of an interesting picture of Whatever Deity Exists—either they’re slightly deaf or prefer people willing to yell to get what they want. What the hell do I care, I’ve got a job, and I’m a little better off money wise, and someday, SOMEDAY, I’ll have my own place again, just like when I was 22!
Sigh.
Sometimes the hardest thing in the world is to do what comes easy to you. At least, it’s hard if what comes easiest to you is something that the world doesn’t put a high value on, and you enjoy survival.
Take being a writer. Everybody and their dog thinks they could be a writer for a living, if they wanted to. And anyone who’s actually tried it knows such people don’t know what the hell they’re talking about. My theory on this gap between perception and reality is that people are only looking at the physical effort involved (typing words onto paper) and thinking “Hey, I could do that!” The actual work, the part that involves figuring out what to say and how to say it, is invisible. The other part, where you send your creation to a publisher and wait for weeks or months to get a rejection or an offer that won’t even pay for your groceries, is also ignored.
The only career with even less guarantee of payback might be being a musician, because at least writers don’t have to pay for recording time or guitar strings or any of the 800 other little pieces of equipment musicians need.
And all of that means that Matt and I live in a perpetual game of economic juggling. (Editor’s note: this is not a prelude to a money request). If we take the paths that make the most money, we cut ourselves off from the things we love to do, and make ourselves crazy doing things we hate to do forty hours a week. If we do the things we love, we have no money, or very intermittent money, but no insurance or any other of life’s little luxuries.
I’m not saying all of this to whine. So many have it so much worse than we do, and no one has forced us to make these choices. On the other hand, as much as we hate being broke and struggling all the time, we can clearly see how miserable we would be if we gave up what we wanted to do for something more lucrative. And there’s the fragile hope we cling to, that someday what we’re doing now will pay off for us, and we can have enough to live on while we do what we care about.
The funny thing (funny ha-ha and funny strange) is that I believe more in that hope now than I used to, despite enough economic blows to the head to knock out Muhammad Ali pre-dementia. It truly is faith, because I have absolutely no concrete evidence that either of us will ever be able to make a living creatively. The merest thread of money + family support separates us from destitution. It could unravel at any time. But so far, it hasn’t. Despite all those blows, we’ve come a long way by hook, crook, and the skin of our teeth.
“You haven’t reached your goal after all your trying,” says Despair. “Ah, but you haven’t wiped out all chance of reaching your goal, which means you shouldn’t give up yet,” says Hope. I don’t know which voice is right. Despair certainly does its share of keeping me up nights, watching Daria reruns and eating junk food to drown it out. But Hope is amazingly persistent, which either means that it’s real, or that my powers of self-delusion are greater than I thought. But as I tell Matt often, if in fact it does all goes to hell and we reach bottom, then we will have plenty of time whilst living in our cardboard box to wallow in our self-hatred and feelings of failure. Why do it ahead of schedule?
Neither of us can change who we are. We’ve both tried, at different times, to relegate our creative selves to the back burner. It made us crazy, a much worse kind of crazy than our normal kind, a bitter, angry, uncaring kind of crazy. And when I worry about raising Nathan with all this financial uncertainty, I think about raising him with lots of financial security but all that bad craziness in his parents, and I can’t see putting him through that. I went to school with kids whose parents were like that, and it messed them up. I want Nathan to have enough to eat and clothes on his back and all the things he really needs, and I’ll work my ass off to make sure that happens. But I have to keep my soul intact too, or else he’ll lose something more important.
It’s hard to explain what we’re doing to other people, even the ones who support us. When success takes its sweet time coming, everything you say starts to sound like excuses. People start to wonder if you’re just being immature, refusing to suck it up and take on your adult responsibility to be a productive citizen. And I’ve gotten used to getting that vibe from some people, because I understand how they could see things that way.
But dammit, we’ve worked so hard for what little we’ve gained; I’m not ready to let this go. We’re still poor as hell, but not because we’ve been camping out on people’s couches smoking bowls. We have accomplished things that we never thought we would. I have five books published, for cryin’ out loud. Listed in Amazon and everything. I have online articles from previous jobs, too. Google my real name, and you’ll see a lot that I’m proud of. Matt’s got a CD out that continues to sell three years later, to people all over the world, people who have heard of him through some unimaginable chain of circumstance that we’ll never know about. He’s been featured on a Warren Zevon tribute CD, and had his music used in a PBS documentary. No, it’s not enough to support us, but considering that we’ve done all of it with almost no assistance from anyone, no resources, no connections, and no guidelines, I don’t really feel like I need to make excuses for not yet being multi-millionaires.
Don’t get me wrong. I don’t like this uncertainty, I don’t like poverty, and I don’t think there’s anything inherently noble in being poor. If someone offered us big pots of money to do what we’re doing, I’d accept it happily and skip all the way to the bank. Like lots of poor people, I have very specific plans for what I’d do if either I won the lottery or met a genie who would grant me three wishes.* I’d like nothing better than a nice non-McMansion house, savings in the bank, a yard for Nathan, a studio for Matt, and an office for me. And we could have many of those things now if we had made different choices five or ten years ago. But when we try to imagine being the people who made those choices, we can’t. We are what we are, and if that makes us look like failures to some people, well that can’t be helped.
*Shut up. You know you’ve thought about that too. And I won’t tell you what all of mine are, but obviously, tons of tax-free money is one of them.
New pics! Click this one to see the rest. Tummy time rocks his world.
Poor little Nathan..or rather poor giant Nathan. He barely fits into his co-sleeper anymore. We need a real crib. Our in-laws heard of our dilemma and went into their attic, pulling out Matthew’s original 1974 Lullabye crib that they’ve kept since his little brother stopped using it in the early 80s. It’s in good shape, everything works, it just needs a little paint. We tested for lead paint (not banned till 1978…can you believe that? I probably ate some as a toddler), and it was fine.
But to be honest, I’m lazy. I don’t really enjoy sanding and painting and fixing up things, though I do enjoy watching other people do it. We’re pretty cash poor right now, so recycling the old crib seemed like a sensible thing. We bought a new crib mattress and were good to go.
But then our IRS check came, about double what we thought it would be. And while we have 10 places to put every dollar even with a windfall, I thought a new crib might be a good idea. Because if Nathan has to wait until I get around to sanding and painting his crib (and probably botching the job), then he’s going to end up sleeping on the floor on his crib mattress for a few months. Or re-learning the fetal position to fit into the co-sleeper.
I am sort of relieved he rejected our experiment in co-sleeping in the bed, because the kid has long legs and can kick. He’s a restless sleeper like his mama; we just aren’t good at the snuggling all night thing. Really, the boy deserves a nice sturdy bed where he can stretch his legs and throw out his arms with some room to spare. His daddy knows his pain, since there’s no bed short of a California King that will fit his legs, and we only have a queen right now. Matt’s been having to curl up and sleep diagonally his whole life.
So we’re thinking of one of those convertible cribs, the kind that change into toddler beds. Like this one. Yeah, it’s WalMart. It’s just an example; Babiesrus.com doesn’t have as many convertibles online, so I don’t know if we’ll buy it there or not. Don’t hate me if I shop WalMart now and then and I won’t hate you for watching America’s Top Model. Deal?
Well, kiddo, you’ve made it this far. You’ve slowed down some, growth-wise, which is great, considering you’re wearing 12-month clothes. You seem to be putting your energy on other things, such as your newest trick, rolling over onto your stomach and pumping your arms and legs frantically, trying to crawl. Your head is suddenly steadier on your much-stronger neck, and you can now lie on your belly and look up at me with a drooly grin, instead of just planting your face in the rug. Or stick out your tongue at me, another new trick.
Just a few hours ago, you put your little sweaty, slobbery hand on my face and explored it with your hands for the first time. You pulled off my glasses and dug your sharp little nails into my cheeks and laughed, and it was wonderful. Painful, but wonderful. You’ve started some experimental splashing in the tub when I wash you, instead of just laying back like a little lump. You hunch forward a lot now when you’re sat down somewhere, straining to sit up. You’re a busy kid, these days. And a good looking one too, even with the little patch of bald where your hair’s rubbed off in the back.
I’ve finally started to feel like you know me as Mom, someone special, instead of just Random Person Who Cares for Me, because you don’t warm up to strangers much now. You wailed when poor Dr. Gupta tried to examine your ears, and didn’t even want much to do with your grandparents when we went to visit, at least not at first. I’m not glad you have separation anxiety, don’t get me wrong, but because of all the weirdness at your birth and after, it’s comforting to know that you need me, specifically, not just anyone who can hold a formula bottle or change your diaper.
You know who your daddy is, that’s for sure, and you kick and squeal when he comes home and plays with you. You know your Mamaw and Gramps because you see them every day and they think you hung the moon. I keep thinking I’m imposing when I ask them to watch you, and they keep grabbing you and waving me away, in time-honored grandparent fashion.
The charts all say you’ll start talking and teething and crawling soon, and it all seems impossible to me still. I shouldn’t be surprised, but I am, remembering the tiny helpless thing I brought home 4 months ago. I don’t know that I’ll ever stop being surprised by you, no matter how old you get. Something to look forward to.
I’m reading Sarah Hrdy’s Mother Nature, and I have to say, it’s been one of the most helpful books ever in dealing with my PPD, what’s left of it. Hrdy is a sociobiologist, Harvard graduate, mother, and all-around super-smart person who deftly deconstructs myths about motherhood and parenting while putting both in a fascinating evolutionary perspective. Also, you learn that humans birth big, fat, healthy, smart babies that just barely, if we’re lucky, squeeze through our pelvises. As opposed to gorillas, who have babies that are much smaller in relation to pelvis size and give birth in 20 minutes of grunting. But also as opposed to hyenas, who have to push a pup through a 180-degree turn in the birth canal AND out through an elongated clitoris that looks like a penis due to female hyenas having so many aggression hormones. About 40% of pups never make it out. And I imagine the moms aren’t enjoying it so much either. So we human moms don’t have it great, but it could be worse.
She also mentions research showing how, up to the minute of birth, the mother’s environment continues to affect the fetus in many species..some even spontaneously abort, or (like rabbits) reabsorb fetuses when confronted with stressful situations. And I think about how frightened and alone I was in the last trimester, how I had no one but Matt there to hold my hand, and him just as frightened as me. And maybe those stressful feelings encouraged me to go late-term, letting my baby get bigger, leading to problems in labor. I don’t know for sure. But any woman who’s been pregnant will find it significant that as tired as I was, I deep down didn’t really want the pregnancy to end, even at 42 weeks. Most women want it over long before that. But I didn’t feel that at all. Nor did I ever have a nesting instinct come over me. Maybe…I’m theorizing here, but…I never felt safe and secure in my birth plans, and that delayed things. My mind told my body that it wasn’t safe out there, and so my body put off birth as long as possible. I never nested because I didn’t have a place to nest, and no caretakers to watch over me.
And at the hospital, I never truly relaxed because hospitals are some of the worst places to relax in–fluorescent lights, cold floors, beds high off the ground, beeping equipment, strangers coming in and out–it’s not the kind of place that puts you at ease, even if you have enlightened doctors and staff. And if you don’t, if you perceive those around you as threatening, how can you relax? Most mammals give birth in quiet, dark places that are safe from intruders, like your cat having a litter in the back of the coat closet. Isn’t it odd that we expect women to blithely give birth in a place that’s the exact opposite? We are mammals, after all. And like a mammal, I desperately wanted a safe, warm, comfortable, dimly-lighted place to be, but neither my apartment nor the hospital fit the bill. If I knew then what I know now, I’d have ruthlessly rearranged that apartment (or moved out altogether) to be a nest, but at the time, I was afraid to act on my instincts. I was still assuming other people knew best, that I was being silly. But reading Hrdy reminded me that our instincts are ancient and powerful and evolved because they have often helped us survive. We don’t always have to listen to them, but we shouldn’t discount their power.
Hrdy’s book covers so many large topics besides birth that it’s hard to describe it. Mating, male/female relations, tribal hierarchies, primate cultures, insect survival strategies, etc., all come up for examination. But it’s one of those wonderful science books that puts complex things and ideas so clearly and intelligently that it adds depth to the ways you see the world. She is a good scientist in that she cites her sources and acknowledges areas where she is hypothesizing or where evidence is sketchy. Some of what she discusses is disturbing, like the history of infanticide, but again, she puts these issues in cultural and evolutionary perspective. Good stuff. Read it.
Did I mention how much I hate looking for a new job? No need, since everyone else hates it too. I’m consciously not freaking out about the search, even though I’ve had few nibbles and no offers. I’m too tired to freak out. Even when he’s not sick/teething/learning a new skill that cuts down on our sleep, Nathan is a 2o-something pound baby with no mobility, meaning I’m lifting and hauling him all day long. I should really be more buff, but mostly, I just collapse every night. Leaving little time for freakouts.
But this is the second week when there’s nada on the radar; no jobs worth pursuing in the usual online places. I’ve signed up with several employment/temp agencies too in the last week, but none have called me yet, so I’m still just hanging out watchin Noggin far too many hours of the day.
Although, (cue subject change) at night Noggin turns into “The N”, a teen network, which between Degrassi and Moesha, shows Daria reruns. They’re only on around 4am, but my mom has DVR. Oh joy! When Daria was on originally, I was in a cable-less situation because I was working retail and living in a shitty apartment. So at least some of my free time can now go to watching a 90’s animated show about a glasses-wearing sarcastic brunette girl. It’s like they wrote it for me, if I were a lot cooler in high school.
I have no shame about how much I watch cartoons, even the ones aimed at preschoolers. One of the nice things about being at home has been catching up on the latest in kid tv, and seeing some old favorites too, like Danny Phantom and The Fairly Oddparents.
I still love animation, and I wish I were a good enough artist to become an animator, although the hand-drawn kind is being pushed out by Flash and CGI, which still don’t do as much for me. Though Flash can at least preserve some of the rough, warm edges that hand-drawn animation had. CGI stuff, like The Backyardigans, is getting better, but it’s still cold and plastic-y. I can watch and appreciate movies like Toy Story, because the writing is good and the artistry clever, but it doesn’t grab me the way “real” animation does. I don’t know why, but introducing a third dimension to animation seems to take away more than it gives; when the characters and settings become just objects manipulated in space, it seems to make them smaller, less important. When they’re flat and 2-D, they are less “realistic” but more interesting, somehow.
If I had more free time and more cash, I’d build my DVD library of animation and buy old cartoon collections by the truckload. And explore graphic novels, a literary form that became more available just about when I started having less and less money for books. There’s so much good stuff being produced out there. I still haven’t finished reading the Promethea series, or looked into some of the more highly acclaimed stuff, like Spiegelman’s Maus, although I did get his In the Shadow of No Towers.
I will say that it’s still not all that easy to find graphic novels I’m attracted to reading, though. The superhero stuff has never grabbed me. I just can’t give a rat’s ass about Japanese animation or manga until it all stops looking the same and featuring half naked prepubescent girls. And a lot of what’s left is so autobiographical and/or experimental that you have to feel a real connection with the writer to enjoy it. Pure story is somewhat hard to find.
Though if anyone has recommendations, I’m all ears.
