Iowadrift

Typing With a Fat Two Year Old On My Lap

Thank you for all your comments!  It was such fun to log on today and find all these good wishes for both the birthday and the Rugrat (the latter being, I'm afraid, the way TTD and I refer to the daughter we hope finds us).  Cyberspace has given me a lovely community--that would be YOU, reading this, so go buy yourself something nice and frivolous--and I am so grateful.

Today was sort of a beginning birthday, in that my mother came up and watched the kids while I went for a massage (!!!!!) and then had lunch with a dear friend (beautiful, PhD in philosophy from Harvard, mother of a six and a three year old, writing a book on Kant, and yet you can't hate her because she's so real and funny) who lives here in my new town.  She gave me a magnolia tree, which was a much better present than the one I'd bought myself while browsing some shops before lunch: I bought some Spanx under--hmm, undergarments?  Girdles, actually.  I bought GIRDLES.  Because I am FLABBY and when I wear a thin rayon dress out on Saturday my rear view is going to look, to quote my grandfather, "like two racoons fighting in a bag."  Anyway, the magnolia tree was better than the Spanx.  I'm going to dig a big hole and plant it tomorrow, right outside the kitchen window where I'll be able to enjoy it and think of her for, I hope, years and years and years. 

So the day wore on and I spent a while sitting in the sun admiring my tree and fending off small boys (Urp: "I want to bite!  I want to bite!"), then I failed to get Urp down for a nap, decided to bring the boys to the beach, did so, got eaten to pieces by midges, fled, and ended up at a harborside playground climbing on whale sculptures and eating PB&J.  Now I am blogging madly while TTD drags everyone (tired, sticky, sandy, dirty, cranky everyone) upstairs for baths.  And oops, they are melting down.  Have to run.  Back in a minute.

Hi, I'm back.  TTD and I have just finished going over the autobiographical questionnaires our social worker sent us in preparation for our first home study interview next Tuesday, and though we filled the papers out separately, we ended up checking exactly the same boxes, which I hope is a good sign.  Look, see how well-adjusted and harmonious we are!  Look at our absolutely dazzling level of insight and our sparkling judgement!  OK, if not that, then look at our legible penmanship, itself miraculous when you consider its medical-practitioner origins. 

The home study interview is one of the earliest steps in what's going to be a very long process.  We went to an introductory meeting a few days after we arrived in MA, and learned a bit about the basic process and the different country options, then sent in the first round of registration paperwork and received two fat packets of more papers in return.  I ran around getting things notarized, finding birth certificates, xeroxing IRS 1040's, etc, and sent THAT packet in, along with a bunch of requests to various agencies for criminal background checks (they will find a lot of parking tickets) and sterling references.  About ten minutes after the agency, which we will call The Agency, received that stuff, a Social Worker Woman called us to set up the first of three home study interviews: one with TTD and me together, one with each of us individually, and one at our house, where Social Worker Woman will be able to watch both our sons prance out onto the deck at intervals, pull down their pants, and whizz onto the boxwood plants which border the deck, and which are starting to die from a surfeit of uric acid.   

After the home study finishes and The Agency signs off on it (we hope, we hope, we hope: we are trying not to get all wacko neurotic at the prospect of people scrutinizing our parenting, and we, or at least I, are not succeeding) the state of MA does a lot of fiddling around to make sure we're not fishy, and THEN what The Agency calls our Dossier, which sounds to me like something out of The Bourne Identity, gets sent to Ethiopia, where they do who knows what with it.  Eventually, if we are both blessed and lucky, Ethiopia will refer a child to us, and we will go to Addis Ababa to pick her up.  And yes, we are allowed to request a girl, since our children are both boys.  The actual time from Dossier-to-Ethiopia to a child's being referred can be as little as one month or as many as eighteen.  So we have no idea how long this will all take.

I am excited.  I am nervous.  I am braced for a long haul.  It's a bit like deciding to try to conceive a child: the only thing you know is that anything can happen, and that nothing will be as you imagine.  TTD says he feels the same way.   And  Rabbit has been asking for a baby for the last year, so I think will be very pleased about this: he certainly has been glad to have a little brother from the moment Rooster came home from the hospital, and he also has this strange sort of baby jones, where he just can't get enough of them and wants to stare at them and pinch their little cheeks all the time.  As for Rooster (Urp's current nickname), I have no idea, but whatever his reaction, it will be loud, long and definite.

So, have any of you adopted children, or are any of you in the process, or considering it?  Are any of you adopted yourselves?  If you are, or do, or have, I would love to hear about it.  I love hearing from you anyway: you know me, I'm a comment slut. 

A sleepy comment slut.  I was putting Urp down tonight and telling him a story as I rocked him in the dark, and as I often do, I began to fall asleep as I talked.  I had been telling a story about Thomas the Tank Engine, I think, but I woke up to hear myself say, "And then Thomas dropped off Percy at the sheds, and then he dropped off the lyrics for the toothbrush, and then he dropped off the Elvis impersonator for Daddy."

Please don't tell The Agency that story.   The lyrics for the toothbrush?  I ask you.

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

It's been a very baby week.  First, The Motel Manager had a beautiful, adorable son on May 14th, who spent all last night screaming his head off, so everyone head over there, read all about it, and offer her some words of fellow-feeling, solace, or wisdom, whatever you have available at the moment. 

Then, Elsa and Clio came to visit today with their parents, Jane and A. Folks, never have I seen such adorable five-month-old twin girls, and definitely not since The Deadbeat (to whom I would link if she still blogged) have I seen such competent, smart, relaxed parents.  It was a delight to coo over the girls, poke their fat cheeks, watch their parents heave them around in carseats, and admire their mother's truly spectacular rack.  Also, Rabbit, who love babies, thought he'd died and gone to heaven: TWO babies, right here in the living room!  At one point he asked me, "Do you think they'd like to play on my swing set in the yard?  Or maybe the baby grownups would like to play too?"  By "the baby grownups" of course he meant Jane and A.  Sadly, it's been raining here for five days (tell you what I think about THAT) and nobody ended up on the swing set, but still, it was a nice offer.

So that's the good, with maybe a little bad thrown in when you consider the all night screaming fest mentioned above.  The ugly, fortunately, is not current, but it's something I've been wanting to write about for a long time, and for some reason now feels like the time to do it.  Well, probably not NOW, b/c it's late and I'm tired, but a little now and a lot later.  Namely; Post-Partum Depression (PPD). 

I know I've talked a little about it before.  But it's only now, when I've been on Lex.apro for three months and am really, finally feeling like me again, that I'm beginning to comprehend how bad it was. 

With Rabbit, it wasn't THAT bad.  It manifested itself as anxiety, mostly, and as an inability to really enjoy him as an infant.  And, you know, the colic didn't help and neither did his refusal to sleep through the night until we (and I do mean we) cried it out at thirteen months. But still, I was so TENSE.  Not just new parent tense, but crazy tense.  I thought if I didn't get it right (get WHAT right, I think now), something awful would happen.  I had to get him on a schedule, I had to get him sleeping, I had to do everything perfectly, and I thought that if I just did that then he'd never cry, he'd always be happy...well, you see how far from reality I was.  What it boiled down to was this awful guilt and second-guessing, following me around all the time, eating away at my enjoyment of my baby and my ability to let go and just flipping look after him on a daily basis without getting chewed up by an existential crisis every time he cried. 

But down at the bottom of it all, I still felt like myself.  I still recognized myself.  And by the time Rabbit was one, I'd relaxed a lot and learned the sanity-making value of frequent babysitting.  Which is when I got pregnant with Urp and went crazy.

I found out I was pregnant when Rabbit was sixteen months.  We'd wanted another child; we'd been (I love this phrase) "trying" for three months.  But when I saw pink line number two on the stick, my first thought was, "Wait, I'm not ready yet!"  Then, about three weeks later, I woke up one morning and didn't recognize myself.  I was mean, I was angry, I didn't want any part of my family.  And I was stupid, because even though it got worse and worse I didn't realize that 20% of PPD starts DURING PREGNANCY.  And after the birth, whooeee.  There followed eighteen months of awful.  Awful.  Terrible.  Terrible for me, worse for TTD and Rabbit and Urp.  I'll get into more detail with my next post, but for now, suffice it to say that the whole experience was like  being eaten by a black hole: my center, my self, felt like it was rotting, and all I had to take its place was anger and guilt and a kind of cosmic irritation.

And then I started to get better.  I got a job, I got out of the house, I met other mothers, I started doing yoga again instead of just running all the time, and the kids started sleeping more, and my hormones balanced out (I presume) and I got a little better.  But finally, in February 2007, I realized that I was still dragging a smallish ball and chain of guilt and explosive rage and resentment and exhaustion and absent-mindedness and lack of appetite and desire to sleep constantly and all that, and I went to my very good doctor and said, "Can I have Lex.apro?" 

Which, for me, works.  Beautifully.  I feel like I'm a window and someone finally cleaned me.  I can see out of my eyes now.  There's a me inside here again.  It's not all hearts and roses, but I can function, and I can enjoy my little boys, and savor my food, and wake up without weeping at the thought of getting through a day, and I am so grateful.  Yay, drugs!  Yay, Lexa.pro!

So, why am I writing all this down now?  Well, for one, it's part of my reality and I wanted to share it with you.  Also, I want to make sure this blog doesn't get too pie in the sky and idealized.  I mean, I really try to be honest and I really want to write about the hard parts of mothering, not the cute parts (or not just the cute parts), and I really don't want to do that thing where you write all this confessional prose but in the end it just winds up making you look good (look at me, all amusing and confessional!).  Finally, and most importantly, I figured out what was going on with me from reading blogs.  Remember, I worked in an ER, I hadn't done family practice in five years, and PPD wasn't on my professional radar as much as it should have been.  Also, I have the usual nurse's denial system firmly in place.  But gradually, through several blogs, I began to recognize myself.  So I'd like to pass on the favor, just in case anyone reading this recognizes herself and in doing so takes the first step toward help.

Oops.  Battery almost out.  Must post before this disappears.  Anyway, aren't you glad to have a break from the moving talk?  Even I am ready to be done with that.

   

And Then We Have This...

Just in case you had to visit the dentist after the candy-fest of that last post, I offer the following exchange, verbatim.

Rabbit: I like teasing girls.  I'm going to tease all the girls at recess.

Me: Do you think they like that?  Or do you think teasing makes them unhappy.

Rabbit: I WANT to make them unhappy!

Me: Hey, I'm a girl.  Do you want to make ME unhappy?

Rabbit: No.

Me: How would you feel if you saw someone teasing me and making me unhappy?

Rabbit: I don't want anyone to tease you!

Me: Well, all those girls you tease?  Are going to be grown-ups some day, and maybe mamas.  Just like me.

Rabbit:  I guess I'd better kill them quick before they grown up, then.

Losing My Tiny Mind

Hoo, boy.  I just read over my last few posts, and discovered that the entry entitled, "Surprise!" is even more surprising than I thought, since I didn't write about the surprise which engendered the title.  You following?  If you are, you're doing better than I am.  But here: here's what I was trying to write about.

When I got home after those lousy rotten four days of work over Thanksgiving, I found the Christmas lights lit on our house.  Now, we leave them up all year (I know, I know, but it's one string, hidden by the vines, so what the hell), so turning them on isn't that big a deal, but still, I was delighted.  Then, when I got inside, I found a stool in the middle of the kitchen draped with balloons and streamers and bearing a paper birthday plate with two candle-bedecked cookies and some chocolates.  A note from TTD explained: "SURPRISE!  This is a surprise party for Mama, organized entirely by Rabbit.  He dreamed up the whole thing, so you'd have "a nice surprise when you got home from work," and insisted on lights, and candles, and "surprise party plates," and goodies and balloons and streamers.  It was all arranged with great glee and love by two little boys."

I'll admit: I cried and cried.

I did manage not to cry yesterday, though, when the babysitter told me she'd been drawing shapes for Urplet and asking him to identify them, because that's one of his favorite pastimes these days.  He got circle right, then square and triangle.  Then she pointed to a heart and said, "What's this?"  And Urp said, "Mama."

Surprise

So, how was your Thanksgiving?  I hope it was full of family and friends, and turkey and stuffing, and post-dinner games of touch football, and a genuine gladness about the people in your life.  Was it?  Oh, I hope so.

Mine was kind of grim, but the boys's vacation was excellent, so that's what counts.  In order to get Christmas off, I worked Wed-Sat over the holiday, ten-hour shifts, and because I was going to be gone so much the boys and TTD packed up and set off again for NW Iowa and the grandparental dairy farm.  They had a wonderful time.  Urp quit urping, and Rabbit ran, and TTD got to spend lots of time helping on his younger brother's farm, and everyone got to bask in the glow of really good Iowa meat, and lots of it.  I talked to them on the phone a few times, and Rabbit sort of yelled, "Hi Mama!  I miss you!  Got to go chase Big Cousin and Little Cousin now!" and gave the phone back to TTD.  And Urp said, "Hi Mama," with beautiful clarity, and walked away from the phone.  Clearly everyone was doing just fine.

I, however, felt forlorn, which I usually don't when I'm alone.  And I was glad: it seems to me it's a sign of health that I missed the boys when they were gone.  Oh sure, I enjoyed the sleep and silence, hugely, but I deep-down missed them, and that, in a perverse way, reassured me.  I want to miss them!  I want to want them to be here! 

On Saturday the boys stopped by the ER on their way home, and that was surreal, and a treat.  A surreal treat.  We were having a hideously busy day, just nuts, flat-out, and awful.  The thing with an ER is, there's no holds barred: people just keep arriving and arriving and there's no closing time, there's no clinic limit, there's no ER to send them to...you just have to deal.  Wheee!  So in the middle of my running around with six rooms full of patients and ten people waiting and more coming in (and 30 patients in the main ED, most of them really ill), I hear, "Hi Mama!" and these two glowing little boys in bright fleece coats come barrelling into my arms and stick there like burrs. 

Mmmmm.  One minute I'm freezing in my ugly blue scrubs, racing physically and mentally as fast as I can, stressed to the max, flooded with flourescent light and drowned in the smell of dirty feet, stale cigarette smoke, and rotavirus poops.  The next, I have my nose buried in two silky, little-boy-smelling necks and my arms full of warm, soft, squishy, lovely little boys who are murmuring, "Mama" contentedly and nestling happily.  I looked up at TTD, who was wearing a bright-orange fleece (and that's a lot of orange on a guy his size) and said, "Thank you."

They marched off a few minutes later to inspect the escalators (and, TTD reported later, ride them 29 times), and I returned to my nightmare night, which ended with an emergency surgical transfer to the university for my last patient, at midnight.  Happy Thanksgiving!

But you know, it was.  I was tired and stressed and overworked, and I missed my boys, but I was grateful, when I could get my head on straight, that my job is interesting (mostly), decently paid, and somewhat useful (sometimes).  I was grateful that I had two delicious boys, my Violent Viking and my Poetic Pirate, to squash in the midst of a wretched shift.  I was--I am--grateful that they traveled safely, and that we are all back together.  And I say again: I am grateful that I can miss them, and then welcome them home.

Now, if only Urp would SLEEP....

Urp, And How

It must follow as the night the day, must it not, that the week the kids go down (or come up, as it were) with a GI bug is the week the washing machine heaves a sigh and dies. 

Oh yes.  That classic rite of parental passage, the serial pediatric stomach flu, has hit our house.  With embellishments.  Poor Rabbit was the first to go down, on Thursday night, and I mean ALL NIGHT LONG.  The poor kid: dry heaves in a bucket every half an hour, with Mama holding his forehead; piteous requests for water, which I answered with ice chips; white-faced naps on crumpled towels; eventual dawn pass-out with Mama and boy curled around each other in a sleeping bag on the floor.  You know the drill.  Rabbit does too, now.  He was very brave and good, as kids so often are, and very uncomplaining.  Once, at 4 am, he paused mid-barf to announce, "This is serious!" and I had to agree.

Then we had a day of peace, followed by a Saturday's worth of pale Urp and a Saturday night's worth of urping Urp, and boy, did he ever.  He went down harder than Rabbit, and dry-heaved literally every fifteen minutes for eight hours straight before collapsing in his bed (before that he'd been collapsing on Daddy's chest in the rocking chair).  I went in to check on them every two hours or so, and at three a.m. found them both asleep in the rocking chair, Urp naked except for red socks.  He awoke and croaked, "Bottle?" in the most heart-breaking tones possible, then resignedly went back to sleep. 

He still hasn't really bounced back; he's been intermittently feverish for the last two days, and just threw up his bottle of soy milk after dinner tonight.  Even when he's not barfing, he's liable to lie down on the kitchen floor and look pale and chew on his thumb.  His neck has gotten skinny, and he has a lamentable tendency to want Daddy 24 hours a day.  Well, not lamentable as far as I'm concerned, but it's hard on Daddy.

Who can tell what excitement tonight will bring?  I wouldn't dare guess.  Instead, I'll make pronouncements about what has already occurred; in fact, I'll make broad, sweeping generalizations and you can chime in and tell me if they're true.

1. Beware that first barf, the one for which their tummies are full and you are unprepared.  A cough or two, an innocent hiccup, and WHOOSH, your upholstered sofa, your rug, your towels, your child and yourself are soaked in barf.  And it will always be spaghetti-with-marinara-sauce barf, or spinach-soup barf or chocolate-sundae barf.  Nothing innocuous like vanilla ice cream.

2.  As I mentioned, if your washing machine is going to bite the dust, it's going to do it mid-epidemic.  We have discovered this week that every time we come in the door with five loads of freshly-washed sheets, towels, pajamas, mattress-covers, and slip-covers, depend upon it: our appearance will trigger another round of looking for Ralph.

3.  It is easier to deal with a vomiting almost-four-year-old, because he can understand, "No water now, but you can have some after your tummy's been OK for a few hours."  A 21-month-old, not so much.

4. We live in an age of videos, and sometimes that is a good thing.  Except now the baby gets up in the morning, looks at me, and proclaims, "Watch Thomas!"

5.  Professionally and personally, I have yet to meet a child who will drink Pedialyte.

So, how was YOUR week?  Oh, and I loved your comments on the last post; it's so much fun when you de-lurk!

The Parent's Choice Awards

No, the title's not a typo.  I am acting on my own here, without consulting anybody else, even TTD, in handing out the following awards to these richly deserving videos.  Oh, and about which: yes, I let my children watch videos.  We turned off the cable a few months ago, mostly because we want to have less and less TV in our lives as the kids get older, so videos are our one source of televised entertainment.  And oh yes, I use them. 

I wasn't going to, of course.  I was going to have TV-free kids.  But someone gave us a Baby Einstein when Rabbit was about eight months old, and hey, would you look at that: time for me to cook dinner, without a baby on my right hip.  So we did Baby Einstein, and then Thomas the Tank Engine, and gradually I have become embarrassingly familiar with the entire genre of Kid Videos.  I grew up on Sesame Street every morning, and Mr. Rogers every evening, and not much else, and that seemed to work out OK, so I'm hoping we can get some kind of balance like that around here.  You know, a little Mama down time for the breakfast-clearing and dinner prep, a little end-of-day quiet time for Da Boyz, but none of this TV-blaring-in-the-background stuff which always disconcerted me when I visited friends' houses as a child.

Sounds good, right?  Well, we go for brutal honesty here at Iowadrift, so I'll admit that there are times when I adopt a Too Much Is Enough policy toward the video.  When the kids are sick.  When the weather's been terrible for days.  When we are all too bloody tired to get out the door for yet another healthful and educational activity, and we just want to lounge on a rainy afternoon.  When I am exhausted from working until midnight and TTD has to leave at 7:30 am for weekend rounds.  When I am horribly irritable and the boys are too and we're driving each other nuts, and we've already been to the park and played in the sandbox and made brownies and colored and set up traintracks and played the guitar and made lizards from Play-Doh and I feel I have discharged my parental duties, dammit, and now I want some internet time.  When we're on a six hour trip in the minivan.

So, given that we've had ample time to check out a variety of videos, here's my picks for best, worst, and most irritating.

Most Likely To Make the Kids Laugh Out Loud
Pingu, that claymation penguin who speaks his own language.  His pratfalls seem to touch some three year old nerve.  Well, hell, don't you think it's hilarious when someone gets clobbered with a flounder?  A dead flounder?

Nicest To Look At
Thomas the Tank Engine.  I love that soothingly British Island of Sodor, and I love model trains, so what's not to like? 

Most Boring
Um, that would be Thomas again.  The stories, while unobjectionable, are devoid of humor, suspense, irony, or dramatic interest.  Which leaves us with, um, scenery.  And I did give that its due.

Most Strenuous
Dora the Explorer.  I know, I know, who can object to a Hispanic girl explorer and her animal-rescuer cousin.  It's wholesome, it teaches the kids, like, one Spanish word per episode, it involves a rather watered-down type of problem-solving, and it's relentlessly positive.  But that last is the problem: it is RELENTLESSLY POSITIVE.  Everyone's always SINGING and DANCING and ENCOURAGING EACH OTHER and CHEERING and saying, "WE DID IT!"  It's so...American!  It makes me tired.  Plus, the songs suck.

Most Appalling
Caillou.  Whiny!  Irritating!  High-pitched!  Stupid!  Boring!  Smug!  Complacent!  And with a mother who looks like a potato sack and never loses her temper!  If Caillou were my four year old boy, I'd be hiding under the bed with a bottle of gin.

Cleverest
Veggie Tales.  It's the song lyrics.  And the cucumber playing a tuba.

Best to Listen to As You Cook
Baby Einstein.  I totally don't buy that videos-as-developmental-tools bullshit--who are we kidding?  these videos are SO for the mother's benefit, so she can pee in peace--but I have no objection to listening to the Goldberg Variations or Eine Kliene Nachtmusik while I chop peppers.

Best Overall
Kipper.  These are British, of course.  Gentle, quiet, easy on the eyes, entertaining, with good music, irresistable accents, and a sort of relaxed, ironic approach to life.  Two dogs and two pigs do things like go swimming, or meet aliens, whom they offer lollipops.  Where Dora, say, is all about enthusiasm and success, Kipper is all about a kind of bemused resignation in the face of life's recalcitrance.  Me for the latter.

Oh, and speaking of which, the video which allowed me to write this has just finished.  The boys are sitting side by side on the couch, both with pillows on their laps and books atop the pillows, because that's how Rabbit got himself organized, and then Urp had to come get me and tell me, "Book! Pillow!" and have me help him get organized exactly the same way.  Because the way Rabbit does it is The Way, people.  Remember that.
 

Always Summer, The Fruit Always Ripe, and Aloysius In A Good Temper

Does anybody remember the 1981 BBC miniseries of Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited?  I remember watching it with my parents when I was, oh, about thirteen, and being completely enchanted.  I loved the beautiful boys, obviously, and the settings (Venice, Castle Howard, a transatlantic liner in a storm), and the layers of story.  But more than that, I was caught by the series' piercing nostalgia.  Just the soundtrack alone, a wistful theme on an English horn, was enough to leave me, at age thirteen, yearning for some lost time. 

Of course, at thirteen I yearned just for the sake of yearning: I lived to yearn.  But I started watching the series again recently, and even though, or perhaps because, I am three times as old as I was then, the nostalgia hit me all over again. 

But it hit me in a different place.  This time, instead of thinking about my own childhood and early adulthood, I thought about my children, specifically about Urp's current squishy deliciousness, which won't last more than another few months.  I remember when Bunny made the transition from baby to kid, at about 2 and 5 months, and I've watched a lot of other babies go through it, and I know that the Urp's fat cheeks, his stumpy legs, his magnificent belly and peachy bottom, his unselfconsciousness and seriousness and general uncomplicated babyness, will disappear, oh, about next June, leaving me with a long-limbed, skinny, articulate preschooler.

Which is as it should be.  But for the first time, I realized that yes, I will miss having tiny children--or rather, I will miss some aspects of same.  And this realization spawned several others, to wit: these are times I will look back on and understand as precious, and at the same time, I am old enough for every joyful time to carry with it the noise of Time's goddamn chariot hurrying near (thank you, Mr. Marvel). 

In other words, our little family is making its own nostalgia right now.  I will look back, when I am in the nursing home or on my ice floe or sitting on my front porch busily pickling myself with gin, and think of the time when the boys were little, and healthy, and their hearts were still relatively unbroken and their problems relatively solvable and their father and I could still provide them with a modicum of protection and they still thought we were the cat's pajamas.  I will remember them jumping naked on the cushions in their bedroom, and standing in the tub chorusing, "Not me!" when I ask who left a trail of pee down the hall, and running into my arms after they've been on an adventure with Daddy.  I won't romanticize it, because I'll remember all the other stuff, but I will see the good, the good which exhaustion and irritation sometimes obscure for me now, and I will be grateful we've had it.

And at the same time, because I am no longer a child, I am conscious of the fleeting-ness (word invention!) of every moment, particularly every moment with the grandparents, all of whom are alive and blessedly healthy right now, and this consciousness makes for a different kind of nostalgia and memory-making than the consciousness of childhood.  Until I was about thirty, I had a sense of having all the time in the world; I had a sense of possibility and invicibility which of course I don't have now.  (Not that that's bad: that's just called growing up and beginning to understand mortality in your own darn bones.)  And this sense, or these senses, cast a particular light over my early experiences.  If they were photos, or a movie, they'd have a particular summer's day glow, clear and bright. 

Now, the light which infuses the memories I'm currently making is different.  It's more like that end-of-summer light, deep and rich, sharpened by the coming fall.  When I look back at my memories of my children's childhoods, they will look different than my memories of my own childhood. 

They will look clearer, and more golden, at the same time.

PS  Props if you place the quotation which makes up the title here

He Ought To Be A Stay At Home Dad

They got home safely last night, prompting my usual reunion reaction of, "Oh my Lord, you're all so cute!" followed immediately by, "Holy shit, no, this cannot be my life!"  I mean, just the foot-deep carpeting of cheese rabbits and mini-marshmellows (about which,????) on the floor of the minivan was enough to make me want to hail a cab to O'Hare.  But yeah, they're home, and poor old TTD had to head off to work this morning, looking totally exhausted, which is why I keep begging him to come home a day early when he does things like this, because he needs a vacation from the vacation before he goes back to all the wheezy geezers and LOLs with CHF (little old ladies with congestive heart failure.

But the point of this is, the boys are great, which they always are after a weekend of Daddy Time.  They're relaxed, obedient, happy, un-whiny, and open to suggestion.  They're sweet, loving, and much, much easier than they are at the end of any amount of time with me--like, say, an afternoon.  They're so good, in fact, that a thought is creeping around my mind, a thought I've had before.  It is a crying shame I didn't go to medical school for many reasons, but at this point, the main reason is this: I should be the one working full-time, and TTD should be the one doing two days a week.

Really.  Seriously.  I would be a good Dad, and he'd be a good Mom.  He is much better than I am at being with the boys for long stretches of time; he is more patient, less tempermental, more consistent, and more creative than I am; he enjoys their company for days at a time.  He gets done what needs getting done, but leaves plenty of time for horsing around; he keeps them running around until they're tired out, which is exactly what they need; he isn't in their faces all the time, micromanaging, yet he's able to discipline them when neccessary.  He is, in short, a terrific boy-parent.

Me?  Not so much.  I would rather get up and go to work any day than face two small, clinging, fighting boys with runny noses.  I can handle work stress with infinitely more aplomb than I can handle toddler stress.  I am, tempermentally, much better suited to bringing home the bacon than to frying it up.  Children have a habit of bringing shattering amounts of self-knowledge to their parents, and this is one of the exciting tidbits mine have brought to me.

Which is problematic, given that TTD earns at least half again as much as I do.  To switch primary providers at this point would mean a family pay cut of, oh, WAY TOO MUCH.  Not in the giving-up-luxuries sense, but in the paying-for-preschool-and-the-mortgage sense.  So, what to do.

Well, probably the same old thing we have been doing, which is 3/4 time for him and very part-time for me. And in about twelve more hours I'll be back in the swing of it and, you know, it will all be fine, especially since I actually like the running-the-house portion of my job quite a lot: I would have been a good housekeeper.  I always know when the cats need to go to the vet, and we rarely run out of toilet paper.  THAT stuff, I can do.

But thanks be to all the gods at once that I was never called upon to be a governess!

It Gets Better

Remember my post, full of woe and self-pity, about how I wanted just one day to myself, just one day without small children lining up and solemnly watching me as I sit on the john.  Well, I got it.  I got THREE! 

TTD, the wonderful, wonderful man, has taken the boys to his folks' place in NW Iowa for three whole days.  Three days!  Granted, I spent twelve hours of one day in the ER, but still, the rest of the time, I have had the house to myself!  To myself!  The house!  And my time!  Oh my word, the time!  There is so much of it!  Also the exclamation points!  Really (obviously) it is all too much.

Not that I don't miss them.  Of course I miss them.  But since I know they're coming back, I can enjoy silence, and sleep, and oh, did I mention the time?  I feel like I'm floating around in this big, still pool of time.  I can do something, like make bread, slowly and without interruption, and then I can stop.  Then I can do something else, like laundry or yoga, and then stop.  I can get so much done, and still have all the time in the world to just sit on the back steps and stare at the falling leaves and my fat cats, who live like this every day.  I feel like there's room in my brain.  It's a very good feeling.  It's an astonishing feeling.  It's like something in the middle of my chest has let go and relaxed.  Like I've just left downtown Manhattan at rush hour for the silence of the prairies around the Rez.  Like, hmm, I'm a little stoned?

So yes, this is good, and I am very grateful.  I was feeling a little desperate there, and now I feel like I can go on again.

Of course, there's another reason I can go on, and that is The Iowa Hawkeye Marching Band, which is now practicing, ad infinitum, a medly from Phantom of the Opera.