I have no idea what I am doing

but I am still finding painting to be very therapeutic. I bought myself oils for my birthday last year but have only had the opportunity to play with them a few times. The heft of them on the canvas is kind of intimidating, but very satisfying in a way. I am still working up the nerve to really glob it on, what with the cost of canvas and the paints themselves. Still, I am having a good time, that is, when I am not being my own worst critic. It did save me from a huz works too much/american society doesn’t support mothers/women and children are being used worldwide as political pawns/my milk supply is so lame/we are still creating this freaking war meltdown yesterday.

    

I think I’ll keep at it, if only for my sanity. Who is to say what art is and what it isn’t, anyway.

So I am re-reading The Bitch in the House…

and let me tell you, the essay entitled The Myth of Co-Parenting by Hope Edelman is striking a chord in me, baby. It was one of my favorites in the book, pre-Bean, but now it is like I am reading pages from my life. I would like to put my favorite quotes here to encourage you to read it, but I tried and couldn’t choose favorites so I would basically have to copy the entire thing, and I do love you but I just can’t right now. I am different from the writer only in that Huz’s job makes it impossible for me to have a job outside the home, unless I want Bean to be “functionally orphaned” (author’s words) for whatever is left of a paycheck after daycare and other work costs are covered.

This excellent post by blue milk illustrates the co-parenting myth applied to childcare arrangements. This would be me, too, if I were to go back to work as I knew it before, just on a city bus instead of a train. Yep, Huz would pretty much just have his 10 minute walk, still as his schedule rather than a daycare’s schedule mandated.

It all leads me to admit that I am astounded (showing my prior naivety) by how even the most fundamental things change in a woman’s life upon becoming a mother, such as

having a feeling of individual personhood
taking a shower
sleeping for more than .75-2 hours at a time
eating food
using the bathroom at will and without interruption (and for a few days after the birth, without agony)
the ability to earn what one is worth
doing anything for pleasure that lasts more than a naptime, and even then, most naptimes are used to do all the things you cannot do otherwise, such as using the bathroom, eating food, etc.

…while a father’s life can pretty much stay the same. Now look, I’m not dissing Huz, you know I love him and I like him and I want him and I think he is just it. I am just amazed by his, well, ignorance of what my life is like with growing the Bean. Huz is still in his secure little work pattern (albeit a nearly non-stop one) and everything else to him is pretty much the same, too, but now, bonus! He has this fantastic little person to play with and love. The only things that have ruffled him are that his wife is a little more prone to crying and his job security has taken on a new level of importance. That’s about it, other than some minor sleep interruptions that are resolved quickly with the satisfaction that his child is already being cared for by the time he manages to rouse himself.

The co-parenting myth was even present as Huz invited me to accompany him to his work friend’s upcoming wedding. Huz wants me to go very badly he says, because, you know, he likes me. That is sweet and appreciated, but I still had to ask him the following:

Who are these people and why is this event worth me being away from Bean for such an extended time and my sister coming in from the suburbs to watch him for a longer period of time than even you have ever been alone with him?
Why is the one date you are planning for us work-related?
Will we have to sit with your boss? (of course)
Are you going to carry my breast pump for me?
Are you going to find me a place to pump that is not a bathroom so my boobs are not killing me three hours into the evening?
Are you going to sit with me while I pump, since I don’t know anyone else who is going to be there?
Are you going to abstain from drinking the top shelf alcohol at the open bars with me?

Guess which question gave him the most pause? Yep, the last one. You should have seen the look on his face, like, a wedding without drunkeness, whaaaat? Try a year and a half, Bucko.

And then the other day, when we decided to go to a new restaurant for breakfast: Bean woke, and was changed and dressed by Huz (yay!). I nursed him, then fed him some fruit, then pumped, gave him a bottle, then got myself dressed. Huz took the dog out and got himself dressed. What time was it when all of this was accomplished? Time for Bean’s nap. Wait, make that 20 minutes until Bean’s nap, which was just enough time to walk to the restaurant and be seated before he lost his mind from fatigue (the kiddo goes from wide awake to exhausted in .07 seconds, so we have to watch the clock carefully for naps).

So Huz comes back in the room and I say we can’t go and explain why. He looks as if I’d slapped him. As if I had somehow planned this. I wanted to scream, “Why the fuck am I in charge all the time? I am just figuring this shit out myself, right alongside you!” Instead, I kept my voice steady and asked, “What would you like me to do? Go now and have Bean nap in a sling while I rock him to sleep and stand and eat?” Because that is how I spent Christmas dinner and that was quite enough on the inequity scale for me. Or do you want me to drug the child? Huz’s response: “Well it’s my last day off for a long time and I really want to go to this restaurant, and I am really hungry.” Again I ask, “What would you like me to do?” You are a fucking chef, make yourself a goddamn snack! I calmly explain that if Bean takes a short nap, I can nurse him upon waking and we can take his lunch with us; he was already dressed and his stroller bag was packed, so I would pump while he was asleep and then we wouldn’t get caught in the same cycle as we did earlier.

So yeah, I get the stroller set-up to go, re-check the diaper bag, prepare food to bring, and pump while Huz farts around and gets a snack. Thankfully, Bean took a short nap so I only had to resist smacking the pout off of Huz’s face for about 30 minutes.

Huz does try to help out, and he actually is very sucessful when he can shake off the cloud of oblivion that he seems to roam around in. He seems to honestly have no concept of what my life is like, and what it was like when I was alone with Bean for those first three months. I feel like I have been through a war, with the emotional and physical scars to show for it, and he’s bitching about breakfast.

So we get there, through crappy rain that Huz very helpfully points out we wouldn’t have had to deal with if we had left earlier (making me go ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!! in my head). The host is a doll and seats us by the window so Bean can look out and just chill in his stroller. I am uncovering him from his blanket sack, positioning him, locking the wheels, getting a toy out, getting his food ready, taking my coat off, etc etc etc.  Huz just takes a seat and starts reading the menu.

It would be argued by say, Ralph Reed, that Huz works an awful lot, and would just like to relax for a bit and that he is entitled to said relaxation. Besides, he clearly has faith in my competence for caring for his child, and that is like a compliment, right? Ahem. Firstly, Huz sleeps. Nuf said. But in addition to that gross inequity of sleep, which is a basic human need for, oh, survival, when do I get to relax, to drink too much at a wedding, to just sit down and read the menu? The answer is likely never, at least not while Bean is a child, and I am fine with that, I truly am. I didn’t become a momma so I could count down until the day my baby stops needing me. I know what I am here to do. I do not want to be Attila the Honey I’m Home (see The Bitch in the House -no offense, Kristin!). My beef is this: why doesn’t Huz feel the same sense of all-encompassing, 24/7 responsibility? Why does he get to be oblivious? Why does he get to shower, use the bathroom, and dawdle on the way home without thinking about where Bean is and what he might need before the adults get to do their thing? Am I doing something wrong? Is he?

Hollaback!

Oh hell yes, I love it when the power of the interweb is used for good instead of evil (imagine that, you who ended up at my blog yesterday while looking for kiddie porn).

Current tv just played a pod on the Hollaback movement, which is an online expose of the people who choose to act out their psychosexual behavioral issues on innocent bystanders. I suggest you use the Google to see if there is already a Hollaback site for your city or check out the pod here to learn about starting one. If you’ve got a camera phone, use it like the fine folks in NYC have to give a public voice to the sexual harassment women (and I am sure some men, sometimes) endure while simply trying to walk down the fucking street.

Here’s the site for Chicago (which I actually find to be a very respectful city, all in all) where even we’ve got our share of sociopathic pervs.

HollaBack CHICAGO

You have the right to walk down the street without being the object of some turd’s fantasy! Just ’cause this is beeftown, it doesn’t make you a piece of meat. Email stories and pics of street harassment to hollabackchitown@gmail.com

O(cd) no she didn’t…

I talk about my OCD (or OD-the C) in this post, and now here is an incredibly candid post from a woman who went through a similar thing (thanks for the linkage, momomax).

I expect that my not-mom friends (how I hate that I am making that distinction right now) reading this would be all, oh no she didn’t, she didn’t just say that she was afraid her baby would end up in the garbage disposal and dumped out of his stroller, that she hated breastfeeding, etc etc etc and do you know what I would say? HELL YEAH SHE DID, AND BRAV-FUCKING-O.

We need each other, we blogging women. Nobody told us the truth about motherhood, or if they did we certainly weren’t listening at the time, so we need to tell each other now. All the things that we love about it, but more importantly, that which we hate and fear. Let’s continue to say write these things out loud, and if it needs to be behind the safety net of the interweb, so be it, because we only have each other to understand and (hopefully) reply with, hey, YOU ARE GOOD, and it will be alright.

Update: Here’s more on this from the ever helpful Moxie.

My Humps

I like Alanis Morissette well enough, but haven’t paid her too much attention over the years. Maybe I should have, because this really is genius. She is now my anti-Bratz doll of the musical world.

Here’s a great commentary on her video.

… Morissette has no new album or tour to hawk. As she has remained mum, others have jumped in to stage a healthy debate about whether the sexual antics of today’s starlets represent girl power or pathology. It’s an issue that goes way beyond Fergie. As Natalie Nichols wrote recently in CityBeat, TV shows like “America’s Next Top Model” and “The Pussycat Dolls Present: The Search for the Next Doll” “perpetuate the notion that a woman’s hotness is directly related to the amount of ‘power’ she has. As though the best power women can hope to wield is sexual sway over men.”

Touche, Pussycat!

God help us, she’s right

He Who Must Not Be Named (no, not Lord Voldemort, the OTHER guy) and the puppeteers who work his strings absolutely do seem committed to enacting these Ten Steps To Close Down an Open Society. The question is, why? To benefit whom, themselves? How??

Right now, only a handful of patriots are trying to hold back the tide of tyranny for the rest of us - staff at the Center for Constitutional Rights, who faced death threats for representing the detainees yet persisted all the way to the Supreme Court; activists at the American Civil Liberties Union; and prominent conservatives trying to roll back the corrosive new laws, under the banner of a new group called the American Freedom Agenda. This small, disparate collection of people needs everybody’s help, including that of Europeans and others internationally who are willing to put pressure on the administration because they can see what a US unrestrained by real democracy at home can mean for the rest of the world.

Dammitall

Soap opera update: So glad I said something, so glad I kept it (relatively) polite. An apology really can be a magic salve, even if it doesn’t actually change a situation much. Just hearing a person go, “oh hell, I’m sorry, I had no idea I came across that way and would never want to hurt you” heals all wounds, real or imagined. Hearing Huz say, “I am sorry if anything I did was inappropriate, I was just being nice to your friend but I understand what you are saying,  and no, I would not like it if you shared e-mails with her husband” is a good thing, too. Either that or they’re all just trying to soothe the breastfeeding dragon. No matter. It worked.

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I had to do something today that made me very uncomfortable. I had to tell one of my friends to step off. The worst thing about it is that she is a not-mom friend, and I am trying really hard to hang on to my not-mom friends, despite very obvious differences in how we live our lives since I became pregnant with Bean.

The thing is, she flirts with Huz. Like a lot. I have always blown it off, or flirted right back somewhat unconvincingly with her husband (I know, I know, the whole thing was like playing with matches). She and I flirted with one another even more, though, and what Huz and I have can’t be messed with, no matter how pretty the girl.

So anyway, we are all pretty close. Not crazy close, but we do spend holiday dinners together (everybody’s family is far away). Unfortunately, she has developed a comfort in writing and IMing Huz, which again, I blew off, as it was infrequent and sounded innocent enough, albeit a little misguided. Fine. Whatever. UNTIL. A friend of hers was in town and she decided to write to Huz and let him know they would be coming to his restaurant. Why do people do this to chefs? So they can be hooked up with special treatment and free food at a fine dining establishment, and look like rock stars to their out-of-town visitors. Fine. Whatever. Probably shouldn’t have written to him directly (again) since he is somebody else’s husband, probably should not have taken advantage of Huz’s good manners and arranged special treatment for herself and said friend knowing that Huz’s schedule is insane. Probably pushing some limits of unspoken decorum. Still, I let it go. Well, sort of. I did cancel plans a few of us had this past Saturday because Bean was teething and therefore pretty damn testy, but even more so because I just wasn’t ready to see her until my annoyance blew over and I could ignore that I ever felt it in the first place. Until today, when I received this e-mail:

How are you and little Bean? Is he doing any better? Have you been able to rest at all? I missed you on Saturday, but certainly understand. Frida (the other friend that I was supposed to hang with) came over and christened my deck. We drank beers all afternoon and lounged in the sun. Quite relaxing.

I had a wonderful lunch on Friday. Please give my thanks to Huz. He treated my friend and I like rock stars. It was fabulous. And I felt so spoiled.

Okay. Firstly, I do not need to hear about how my baby’s teething discomfort opened up the opportunity for her and the other friend I was supposed to spend time with to drink beers all day and relax. Why would you tell a person who had to cancel plans due to teething about what a great time you had doing things like drinking and relaxing, things which that person obviously cannot do until, umm, maybe kindergarten starts? Go to it, have at it, have a blast, but to tell the person? Why?

And then to go on about how “spoiled” she felt by my husband, after contacting him to secure special treatment for herself and some guy Huz has never met, as if he doesn’t have enough to do? Do I need to hear about my friend being spoiled by my husband? Do I need to hear that she feels like she has an intimate enough friendship with him to be writing to him at all?

I was not happy. Limits clearly needed to be set. A wtf note was sent in response (well, it was more of a “do you realize what you are saying to me? do you want me to be happy about this?” note). Remember, this is a person who has swooned at Huz more than once. (my sister was appalled when she saw it happen on one occasion, and I said oh no, no, she is just being silly, she has just had too much wine). This is a person who is supposed to be a dear friend. I think I have a legitimate reason to be ticked off. I don’t think it’s the breastfeeding hormones that are causing me to feel this way. You would tell me if it was, wouldn’t you? 

Is this the kind of thing that people are talking about when they say that they can no longer relate to their not-mom friends?

I can’t believe it

I am actually bored. BORED. This is amazing. Sure, there are a million things I could be doing, but I think I will just enjoy this feeling for a while. Bean is now old enough for me to feel comfortable with him sleeping on his stomach, and what a difference it has made. The King of Cat Naps, a.k.a. He Who Will Not Be Put Down, is now an independent, two-hour, midday napper. He is also now a talker of a delightfully varied dialect known as Beanese. I have never really been around a “normally” developing child before, and I am in constant amazement. Sure, the newborn cuddle stuff (well, screaming/cuddle stuff) was great, but it was also so freaking hard. This 6anahalf month old thing is outrageous. His capacity for joy is knocking me out. That grin! Those giggles! The yelling whilst monkey wrestling!

Even with the constant nursing/pumping/eating solids schedule we are on (he’s a featherweight, gotta bulk him up a bit) this new napping thing is such a relief. I know, I know, he will be refusing to nap again soon enough, but I am really enjoying just hanging around and breathing for a little while. Momma needs to just BE.

The times I have felt the best in my life

are the times I’ve given up on you.

My dad has always been a dull, relentless ache in my brain and body, ever since he drove us down to Florida and left us there when I was little. Before that, he was more like a knife wound.

I am giving up on him now, and it hurts, but it feels good, like when a bad tooth that has been killing you is pulled out, and you know that you are going to feel better soon. I am even back to dancing again (no, not THAT kind). I changed my living room around so there is a better flow and the focus of the furniture arrangement is not on the t.v. (which somehow happened despite my efforts for it not to) and it has opened up a big space in the middle of the room. I put on some Delerium and I am back to dancing. Something needed to break in me for me to do it again. Bean is enraptured with his momma’s movements, just laughing and laughing and talking in Beanese. It is a good feeling.

God/dess bless, people. I hope your day is a good one.

Angstalicious « The Road Less Traveled

I am so feeling this post.

Angstalicious « The Road Less Traveled