i don't know when i last wrote a poem, but i was bustling around yesterday and suddenly felt that old call, the urgency of words pushing against my hands. This is for my three friends, and for women.
i'm a big fan of the tv series Rescue Me, created and written by and starring Denis Leary. i don't know why this show isn't snapping up awards and accolades left and right, because it has an amazing ensemble cast and manages to tap dance between hilarious and harrowing and deeply human every single episode. It's so well-written and acted. It's gritty, and not to be watched with your grandmother (unless granny is a retired NYC firefighter), but i think you should put it in your Netflix or Blockbuster queueueue....ue. Thank me later.
Anyway, here's Denis Leary discussing parenting on Jimmy Fallon last night. Since Mr. Perfect and i are soon to join the parenting club, i am taking Monsieur Leary's advice very, very seriously.
i just want to read a story, internet. JUST. WANT. STORYYYYY.
And not the story of the beautiful, fertile woman who abandons her every selfish whim to do X with/for her newborn and, in doing so, ensures she and her infant will be forever followed around by a golden light of health and happiness.
And not the story of the evil, arrogant feminist who doesn't do X and therefore cruelly condemns her infant to a life of allergies! low test scores!! and irritable behavior!!! never to be corrected because mom was a BAD BAD MOMMY who couldn't get her infant to latch/sleep/poop properly!!!!!!
And so help me, if i see one more photo or drawing of a woman who is dressed and styled like she crawled out of the bowels of the 70s, i will take my dog and move outer space and never come back. If my husband wants to meet his offspring, he'll have to come along.
My (crackpot) theory: the pregnancy industry is why the population is getting dumber/nuttier/tasteless...er. i don't know about you, but my smart, stylish, savvy friends are all refusing to have kids, and i suspect it's partly because they believe they'll have to give up their style and savvy immediately upon being fertilized. i can't really blame them. The 'What To Expect' book series, widely regarded as the Holiest Of All among its peers, looks like the book equivalent of the culottes your Great Aunt Janice would buy for your Christmas present at her local Salvation Army.
The other books have groan-worthy titles you're embarrassed to be seen purchasing, like 'The Womanly Art of Breastfeeding'. (Why yes! There IS a beatific, 70s-era woman serenely-yet-brazenly breastfeeding a Perfect Baby on the cover! Enjoy landing with that book at the 18 yr old male checker's station at Borders.) Lordy. Is there any other word as gaggy as 'womanly'??
If you've never had the pleasure of reading this literature, trust me, it's nearly all cheese, all the time. i'm not sentimental (surprise!!!!!), but i have to wonder if even the sentimental, 'feeeeelinggggg' preggos out there don't get tired of all the saccharine-covered blathering in these books. The problem is that they established themselves as The Sources for information decades ago when there was little competition and have been stalwart ever since. Yes, they're informative, but only in between all the filler.
To be fair: there are more recent additions to the genre that eschew the poetry and propaganda, or at least have updated cover art and layout design. i am deeply thankful for them and hope they take their own advice and procreate. So far one favorite is Dr. Oz's 'You: Having a Baby', which tells it like it is (very efficiently and informatively) and has an easy, relatable voice. Ie:
In the world of fetal development, the 10-fingers, 10-toes test gets all the attention, but we all know that this digital obsession is a mere symbol of the bigger picture: making sure everything's humming along perfectly during the 40 weeks of gestation. That's especially true when it comes to the newborn noggin'.
i also love 'The Baby Name Wizard' which ditches the notions of listing every name's meaning (pointless) and origin (nebulous) and opts instead to give you an idea of just how many other 'creative' parents are naming their future car salesmen Cayden. (Hint: a bajillion. Avoid.) There are a growing number of fun, savvy pregnancy/child-rearing memoirs like 'It Sucked and Then I Cried' and 'Didn't I Feed You Yesterday?' and i'm all for those, but i would really like it if the staples were updated for the new generation of breeders.
Por ejemplo, i'm going to rewrite the atrociously painful 'Womanly Art of Breastfeeding' and call it 'Milked: How to Master the Art of Feeding Your Little Sucker'. Instead of nauseating bologna like, "with his small head pillowed against your breast and your milk warming his insides, your baby knows a special closeness to you. He is gaining a firm foundation in an important area of life: he is learning about love", (i'll pause a moment to give you the chance to gag and/or throw up) (their unspoken alternative: a bottle-fed baby will never know love and therefore will be a sociopath) i will say things like, "it's pretty spiffy how you get to be a human crock pot complete with every nutrient another human needs... and it's FREE!" And due to the absence of cheese and propaganda, my book will be just as informative without being 460+ pages long, because i happen to know that being pregnant actually REDUCES the hours of productivity in a given day and we, the fertilized, are busy people who don't have unlimited time to sit in a holy pool of light reading about how suckling an infant is "beyond even one's wildest dreams." (Sorry if that made you gag again. And yes, it says that. Apparently its target reader does not have very wild dreams.)
Argh. For the record, i'm not anti-breastfeeding at all. What i am opposed to is telling women who are physically or situationally unable to breastfeed that they're failures and their kid is doomed. (Exaggeration? perhaps, but unfortunately not as much as you'd think.) i realize this is part of what comes out of literature published in 1958, but for that and other reasons i think it's time to trim the propaganda and give the modern pregnant woman what she needs: reassurance in her abilities and encouragement to take it all on with style and grace and guns blazing.
....i swore that having a baby would not mean that i'd start posting posts chock full of awkward words like 'breastfeeding'. Fail.
Being that i'm just shy of 7 months pregnant, and being that the genetic lottery has determined i'm a relatively lithe person, and being that maternity clothes are UUUUUUGLY and i have no budget for them anyway so i'm just stretching my regular t-shirts and tank tops over the basketball attached to my torso, it's safe to say i'm noticeably pregnant. This of course leads to strangers engaging in conversation with me about my 'state'. The checker at Chevron, the guy at Costco, strangers at church, people in parking lots....en totum. It usually goes something like this:
How far along are you?
When are you due?
Oh, all summer huh?
Do you know what you're having?
Do you have a name picked out?
Is this your first?
Are you excited?
Friends and acquaintances ask if i'm tired of strangers getting all up in my biz and asking awkward questions, but i'm honestly not. (And not just because the questions are usually accompanied by compliments about how great i look.) So far no one has asked me anything terribly personal and, aside from the aforementioned Chevron checker asking 'so are you totally miserable?' i haven't fielded anything i wasn't prepared to answer. The way i see it, people see 'pregnancy' in flashing neon and an instinctual excitement clicks on and they want to connect with it in the only socially acceptable way available to them: conversation. We pass a hundred people every day in the grocery store, coffee shop, bank, etc and have no known way of connecting with them beyond a gripe about gas prices or a comment on what's in the produce section, so when there's something that inspires a fundamental sense of shared experience, who am i to begrudge what comes out of that? Every person born becomes a part of our experience as citizens, and in Times Like These, when things are being slashed and tightened and restricted and hoarded, anything representing abundance and growth and future has an extra measure of wonder thrust upon it. i'm fine with that. You should be too. As thinking and feeling as we humans are, we are also primal creatures. Primally, when our species reproduces, it means we'll have someone to care for us when we're old and infirm and it means the work we accomplish in our lifetimes will not have been in vain because there are future members to take advantage of it and to continue it on to greater purposes. It doesn't bother me when strangers quiz me about my state of fertility, not because i'm soooo enlightened, but because it's obvious they're excited and since i'm excited, why can't we all be excited together? It's good for the tribe. i obviously don't speak for every pregnant woman waddling around in the world right now and there are certainly those who guard their privacy moreso than i do mine, but this is me telling you that if you encounter a pregnant stranger, it is okay to engage her in polite conversation in order to express your primal joy. (Remember: it is not okay to touch her stomach any more than it is okay to touch a non-pregnant stranger's stomach.) Saying, "observing your fertility has made me excited" is NOT a good idea (especially if you're a man) because she'll think you're a dangerously weird pregophile, but you can say, "a baby on the way! That's exciting! Gooo species!!" or something to that effect. Okay? Glad we had this little chat.
**Edited to add: Erin K. reminded me of one line of questioning i've received that, although frightfully prevalent, does NOT fall under the umbrella of 'appropriate' or 'polite' and that is the, 'Were you trying to have a baby?' or 'Was this planned?' angle. i simply do not understand what answer people are looking for with this question. If the answer is 'yes', well then.....boring. If the answer is 'no' then, isn't that awkward? "Oh. So you didn't want to have a baby right now but you're pregnant so.....i'm sorry?" It's just a bizarre line of questioning that yields no fruitful conversation AND is NONE of your business! Honestly. Just be primally enthusiastic that the species is continuing and don't concern yourself with whether it was due to months of temperature-taking and strategically timed hankypanky, one night of boozy inhibition, or anything in between.
Here's something completely unrelated that restores my faith in humankind:
i left you with nary a post for a while (though i was thoughtful enough to leave you in the hands Captain Amazing all that time. You're welcome.) and it's generally been slow going the last, oh, 15 weeks. Because, (see: there IS a reason... besides laziness and lack of inspiration) when you can't say Something, then you're afraid to say Anything. Classic avoidance of bean spillage. If i simply don't speak, i cannot accidentally say what i'm not allowed to say, right?? Children employ this technique regularly. Bloggers too, evidently.
If you're semi-local or Facebook friends with either Mr. Perfect or myself, you know by now that we are currently sprouting a Baby Perfect (so-called in the desperate hopes that It takes after the husband) and are about 3 months into that process. It was a secret for the first 13 weeks because i'm the emotional equivalent of a paranoid shut-in. It might have remained a secret until said sprout was birthed and squirming around in the world if it
weren't for that pesky weight gain and 'showing' thing that fertile women can't hide from. That's just how i roll: secretly. But the handful of The Privileged Informed were getting impatient and wanted to brag to the Less Important Uninformed, so we (meaning 'i') conceded to the pressure to divulge. Mr. Perfect wanted to broadcast from day one, and my dad was particularly antsy to declare; i think it's a male pride thing, primitively speaking, though both are far from the primitive type. (Picture Tom Hanks in Castaway, madly declaring to the empty vastness: "I! HAVE MADE FIRE!!!" Then replace "fire" with "generation" and you get the sense of their eagerness.) We spread the word, kind of awkwardly. Rather, we made a few cryptic revelations and let the word spread itself because i find it very strange to publicize anything personal-health related, much less something that is the direct result of fornication. Anyway, Direct Result is due August 30th, so you'll need to excuse the various muu-muus that are going to have to get me through the ensuing hot summer, which will no doubt be very, very long, since the last 15 weeks have been The Longest Of My Liiiiiiiiiiiife.
So now that the secret is out, the dam is broken and the bloggedry floweth. Hopefully. Don't consider that a promise because i'm going through a 'never say never' phase. Advisory: i have no intention of becoming a 'mommy blogger' because there are plenty of those out there already, and i don't want this blog to become my kid's online equivalent of a baby book, so fear not: o ye haters of the obnoxious and pretentious 'worship my toddler' blogs. i fully intend to continue blathering about Nothing In Particular and the goings-on of 2 mildly entertaining pets, and climbing on the occasional soapbox. (mini-box: i haven't seen The Blind Side but nothing i've seen has demonstrated in any way that Sandra Bullock (an admirable talent) deserved that Oscar over the likes of Helen Mirren or even Gabby Sidibe.) These gems will no doubt be peppered differently now that i am (supposedly) different (or at least in a different Life Phase) and am introducing a new character into my doings, but as the Irish always say, c'est la vie.
"The elevator, which had haunted its untidy shaft for a hundred years, came wafting skyward, dragging its ungodly chains and dread intestines after. The door exhaled open. The lift groaned as if we had trod its stomach. In a great protestation of ennui, the ghost sank back toward earth." -Green Shadows, White Whale
