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Hey! I’m employed. Or I will be, starting after July 4th. Of course, it’ll really only take us from Complete Destitution to Godawful Poverty, but it’s still a move up. Not many good-paying jobs in my field in Texas, unless you were to go into advertising, which I just don’t have the stomach for. I can’t fake it that well.

In the meantime, I’m winding down at my temp job, and there is definite joy in that. The people are not bad people and even A has stopped treating me like I’m radioactive. But damn, it’s dull.

We just have to get through the changeover between paychecks; basically, it’ll be nearly the end of next month before I get a full check from the new place, and that, my piglets, is craptastic. We’re having to make the serious money pinching moves now. We got rid of my cell phone and got a landline that was much cheaper. We’re stocking up on rice and beans and other cheap food sources for a while and forgetting the low-carb thing. Although we won’t be buying a lot of processed food either, so maybe that will help. No eating out lunches, no dinners, no haircuts ( I have my own haircutting scissors I bought during a similar poverty spell; you can do pretty well just trimming your bangs). We’re encouraging Nathan to continue to eat his cheaper solids instead of a lot of formula. And thankfully in summertime he gets by fine in t-shirts and diapers.

I’m hoping all this means we’ll qualify for a nice tax refund come next April, but that doesn’t help us a lot now. We’re still leaning on our family more than I’d like, but it can’t be helped.

And for the moment, actually, we’re not hurting too badly. We make our car payments with Matt’s ongoing freelance gig that’s good for the next few months. He brings in the odd gig money and recording money. And him being home means he doesn’t need work clothes, gas for getting to work, or as much eating out.

He’s good at staying home, in a way I don’t think I would be. He manages to fit in his music here and there, and gets out with his friends now and then to get some adult interaction. Unlike me, he’s really good at taking Nathan and going places. I tend to just mope and get bored and depressed. His job is much harder than mine, and pays squat, except in drooly smiles. But he’s good at it, and I’m so so grateful he’s the kind of guy who’s willing to be an at home dad. Nathan’s a lucky kid, even if his parents are broke as hell most of the time.

At his grandparents’ on Father’s Day. Where was I? At home, gettin’ some down-time. It was good.

Nice choppers.

He looks about ready for 2nd grade here. Dang.

Frankly, I think he’s hitting some sort of cuteness peak and will soon become ugly, because he cannot possibly get cuter. Like a Cuteness Event Horizon or something.

No words needed.

(all photos courtesy deanpence)

Over on les-cadeaux, Molly, a NY acquaintance of mine, asked about whether anyone knew the city and loved or hated it, whether there were city and non-city people.

I used to think, yes, there are city and non-city people, but now I think, there are those who don’t fit either category so neatly. It depends on your circumstances, for one thing. Being poor in the city is a different life than being comfortable. Being single, being married, having children or not, all these things affect what you want out of life and what a city can or can’t give you. If I had gone to NY single and younger, I might still be there. I wouldn’t necessarily be happier. But it would have been a place I would have made more effort to be at home in. But I went to NY married, in my 30s, with my habits and my self more decided, and that self was formed in bigger, greener spaces, for good or for bad. For four years I wrested out a life there that worked, mostly, but it never really fit. It never stopped being hard. And when Nathan came along, it was time to give up that fight. I couldn’t run the race and carry him too. And he came first.

I felt relief when I came back to Texas, despite how eager I was to leave it. It wasn’t the richest soil in the world, but it was the one I’d done most of my growing in. I know how to live here, mostly. I never felt that way in NY.

But where am I now? With Nathan’s traumatic birth and its aftermath, I went down so far I barely saw daylight. After coming through that, you find that your questions about your life are different. Things that once bothered you don’t so much, because you’ve got enough else to worry about. I’m not all that happy with the change, to be honest; most days I’d rather be a little less wise if it would make me a lot more happy. Suffering brings you insight, sure enough, but it still sucks ass, and unless I’m going to become an advice columnist, I’m not at all sure what the use is for whatever wisdom I’ve gained. If I’ve really gained any at all.

So I work, I raise my son. I kiss my husband good morning and good night. I write on my blog. I write my own stuff, now and then, waiting for something good to rise up out of it. I drive to my job on the noisy, polluted, freeways through a blighted part of town that dried up when the layoffs came at the local plants, and wonder what will happen to this place in 10 years or 15. I wonder if we’ll stay or go when our lease is up in 12 months. I wonder if it’ll get any better.

The future remains a blank; all my plans and schemes have been tried, and I haven’t come up with any new ones in a while. I’m wandering the desert, which isn’t a bad place so much as a non-place. Not much happening here. All the landscape runs together until you feel like you’re walking in circles. You don’t know when or if you’ll find the way out. You just keep walking.

I love this picture of you (courtesy deanpence) because it captures both your excitement and your uncertainty about all the cool new things there are for you to do. Yes, your face says, swinging is exciting! Also, a little scary!

You continue to stagger me with your cuteness and your unfiltered happiness. When I walk up to your crib because I hear you babbling madly, you look up and smile, and reach up your little hand to grab hold of my arm. Mama, hello! Pick me up!

I will come out and admit it…for a baby, you’re mighty sweet-tempered. I’ve known lots of kids your age that were a heck of a lot grumpier about everything from diaper changes to feeding time, but you hardly ever seem fazed. Hysterical crying is very rare. I don’t know how we got lucky in that regard, and I damn sure am not taking credit of any kind for it. You came out that way.

And yes, I know I’m jinxing things by saying that. You might still be the World’s Worst Toddler, and I suspect we won’t escape the era of Sullen Teenage Jerkiness. But right now, the only thing that would make you more perfect is if you suddenly learned to change your own diapers and let Mom and Dad sleep till noon occasionally. That’s probably asking a bit much.

Too early to tell if you have musical aptitude, but you did manage to keep up a ragged banging on the drum all through one of your dad’s and Smokey’s guitar singalongs. You like slapping your baby hands on the table, or your daddy’s guitar, or anything that makes a good noise. And then we took a picture of you on a drum and your dad made a scary face. Don’t ask me why.

You have four teeth, the ability to sit up (but not get back up when you fall over), the ability to get on your hands and knees, but not to crawl yet. Any day now. You sleep better than you ever have (jinx again!) and like oatmeal with mashed peas. Your hair has your daddy’s cowlicks in the back. Your eyes might actually be turning green instead of staying blue. You still have your little stork bite marks on your forehead. You are starting to pay attention when we cut your fingernails and figuring out that you may not like it. But you haven’t decided to bitch about it yet. You are too big for your baby tub, but not big enough for the big tub yet, and the echo in the bathroom freaks you out, just a little. You like riding in your sling again now that you can sit up and hold on.

You’re growing so fast that this picture is outdated; you sit up better now and you can’t fit into that outfit anymore. Onesies just weren’t made for long tall types like yourself.

You and I have it pretty good right now, kiddo, and I’m starting to pay more attention to special little baby moments like feeding you while you snuggle in bed with me, looking up at me with perfectly round, serious eyes. I know that era is going to end, I know we’re headed towards the unknown, you and me, and this equilibrium will change. I know you’ll be a big kid soon enough and I won’t have leave to cuddle and kiss you whenever I want. But right now, in this peaceful little moment, you’re all mine.

I got three job rejections via email today. What is this, National Sorry, We Don’t Want to Hire Your Ass Day? Because if I’d known, I’d have gone out and gotten some beer to take the sting out.

Actually, I can’t buy beer now, for the next little while. I’m South Beaching. It’s not strict South Beach, because frankly, I can’t afford the recipes for grilled salmon every week. Dude, I just got rejected from three jobs! Canned tuna is doing good for me! Most of my household accesories come from the dollar store! So I kind of combined Atkins (which has worked for me before) with the SB, since at the beginning, they both tell you just quit the carbs, Fatty. Atkins, however, allows you to eat pork-rind nachos, as they have no carbs but still give you that junk-food, shameful-pleasure feeling that we all want and need.

I’m still processing purchase orders for Very Large Multinational, and it remains the sort of job you have a hard time believing anyone could do for long without losing their minds. Like being on an assembly line. How do people stand it? The most notable thing about this job is how much thought and effort have gone into creating an incredibly sophisticated, powerful computer program to handle purchasing and receiving, and how that has not in any way reduced the number of man-hours needed to process that paperwork. It might have increased it. In the old days, I imagine, purchase orders had to be interofficed in and were checked and signed off on by hand, then sent to corporate. Now they’re faxed in, put into the computer by a human being, who then checks and signs them off by hand, and emailed back to corporate. Nor is there any less paper; the POs still have to be printed out and end up in a filing cabinet, and then in a dusty storage room somewhere.

Somebody spent hours of their lives putting that software together, and then made some serious cash selling it to our company and a bunch of others. And in the end, it didn’t really reduce the workload, or the workforce, at all. Even the stupidest, most mind-numbing jobs still require a human brain. Which is a pity, because that means there will always be some poor soul having to do this for a living while their life slips by ala Joe vs. the Volcano.

Moving gets harder the older you get. Even when most of your stuff is already packed, and you have a good friend to help you and the biggest UHaul you can afford and a first floor apartment and no deadline…it’s hard. Brusing and back wrenching and sweaty and exhausting.

Not that I really did much of it. I was on baby duty because my mom was too ill to watch Nathan and my in-laws out of pocket. So it was just Matt and our friend Smokey, who is a Good Friend Indeed for helping out at the last minute.

All the same, Matt finally acceded to my request that NEXT time we hire movers. Up to now, he just refused to spend the money, but this move finally did it. Next time, we hire some sweaty student types with uninjured backs and younger muscles and a truck, and save our energy for the unpacking.

But all that aside, we have an apartment, our own, non-roommated apartment, for the first time in about two years. Deanpence was an excellent roommate, except for his excessive flatulence–oh wait that was Matt. Anyway, Deanpence was a good roomie, but once you have a kid, you have all the roomie you’ll ever need.

It’s not the World’s Greatest Apartment, but then our bar is set a lot lower than it was in New York. Now we’re impressed with things like garbage disposals, non-industrial carpet, walls that haven’t been plastered so much they’re too bumpy to hang things on, and most of all, my walk-in closet. I love my closet. So. Much. All my clothes…hanging! All of them! At one time! And my shoes…not living under my bed! It’s like a beautiful dream.

We still have boxes everywhere, and no bookshelves for my books, and general chaos, especially when we tried to make dinner but realized we didn’t have a can opener anymore. Thank Jeebus for the Dollar Store. But Nathan’s stuff, and Nathan himself, now have their own room.

And thanks to that, tonight he and I had what I can only consider a perfect evening. I got home and played with him and fed him an enormous amount of oatmeal, and gave him a bath in the sink, which he loved splashing in. We played on our new IKEA bed, which is lovely and large and has a nice firm mattress he doesn’t sink into and threaten to suffocate in. I read my book while he gabbled and talked and stuck his toes in his mouth or rocked back and forth on his hands and knees, practicing to crawl. Then the sun went down, which is our signal to start getting ready for bed, since his room faces west. We sat in the rocker in his room and rocked and read (in his case, tried to eat) one of his books together. He started to droop and rub his eyes, so I put him in bed on his special wedge baby-pillow, and knowing he wasn’t hungry, let him suck on a bottle that he was holding himself, like a teddy bear. He wasn’t getting much milk, but he really just wanted the comfort of it. I rocked and read my book and when I looked over, he was out. Easy as pie.

He sleeps hard in there, despite more traffic noise than I like. Last night there was even some idiot outside our windows thumping his base while playing some crap R&B song in his pimpmobile, and that didn’t wake him either. It’s his space, and that seems to make a difference, to my surprise.

Our first night here, I thought it might not work. Nathan was freaked out and wouldn’t settle in his crib. We hadn’t put our bed together and so were sleeping on our mattress on the floor in our room. I finally just brought his mattress next to ours and got him to sleep next to us that way. Even so, he’d wake up every few hours and clutch for me, making sure I wasn’t going anywhere in this strange place. I thought, oh God, we’re going to have to co-sleep after all. But the next night, he slept. And every night since, he’s slept better. We all are. We’re relaxed in a way we haven’t been able to be since before he was born. It’s just us, doing our thing, just our little family, hanging out at home.

It’s a small island of happiness in a sea of what is still a lot of uncertainty and occasional Sheer Effing Terror about our future, about money and jobs and all the rest of it. But I’ll take it.

to my nice commenting readers. You were caught in the spam filters and I was Internet-bereft all week and unable to clean them out. Now fixed.