oh evie

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[oh-evie]

TV

The first time I received pictures via daycare app of Desi mainlining blue frosted cupcakes for one of his classmates’ birthdays, I was scandalized. He was 11 months old and we had moved from a home daycare to a traditional daycare center with its attendant high volume exchange of information. For example, I could know exactly when his diaper was being changed and about the consistency of any stool, if I wanted to know that. I guess I was just surprised that, given the concerns of anxious overeducated parents paying the daycare’s bills, they weren’t more restrictive about treats.  Also, like, there were a lot of kids! They were going to be having birthdays every week probably! What could be done, though? What was I going to ask them to do, quarantine Desi while his classmates ate cupcakes? Also, the sugar-behavior link is a myth apparently? (You can bet I didn’t bring in cupcakes for Desi’s birthday though. He still doesn’t know what a birthday is. Gotta milk that.) Now I just forget to think about it. Like, it’s a cupcake. In this age of precious middle class parenting, not overthinking sugar feels like an act of insurrection. Speaking of social ills, Desi now knows that our TV works.  Not to brag, but TV isn’t a thing we had been doing. Mainly because it was a seal I didn’t want to break. I don’t do so hot at moderating, I figured that once TV was on the table, it would be on all the time. A few Saturdays ago, he spent most of one morning crying. Nothing could console him. It was like newborn times. WHAT DO YOU WANT, CREATURE? (Probably he wants molars not to be erupting through his mouth flesh.) I had a bolt of inspiration and we put on a Curious George cartoon that I found on Netflix. My mother-in-law got him a stuffed Curious George doll for Christmas and has been sending Curious George books in the mail, and then following up on these gifts via weekly Skype calls. (Baby’s first brand!) “George!” he said in his toddler Sopranos-mobster-accent, dropping the r, once the monkey appeared on screen. The stormcloud of his tortured morning passed over us and for the few minutes the show held his interest, it was like black magic.  This morning, I was trying to cope while bone-tired. Nick had gotten up with Desi at 5:45 (fuck off, time change) and I had slept until 8, and so now Nick was sleeping, but I was still pretty fuckin’ tired. Desi was demanding “outside! outside!”, and god, the idea of hauling our stroller down the front steps in the rainy cold for 5-10 minutes of park playtime before his hands starting getting too cold....it was too much. I wanted to stay in my indoor clothes. I wanted to drink my coffee out of a mug. I put on Planet Earth, which I figured was a good approximate to “outside.” On Planet Earth, if you’ve forgotten, lots of sweet big-eyed creatures get savaged by predators and babies get separated from mommies on desert migrations. It’s probably fine for toddlers, but adults might not be able to hang!!!!! Just in case you were thinking of incorporating some Attenborough-voiced nature docs into your home life!!!

[oh-evie]

How to even be!

This week I am getting joy from the netted sack of clementines ("cuties") that Nick brought home. They are the most rich color, peak tartness. They are the ideal of that candy that Altoids made for a few years that were formed in the shape of tiny orange segments, which I would house a tin of in one sitting and then get bombed with mouth ulcers from the chemical acidity.

It's been a weird week. In some ways the Inauguration relieved some tension for me?? because I find suspense to be utterly intolerable and if this THING was coming I needed it to come already so I could at least figure out what it was I needed to do. There's a reason that state executions are supposed to be swift! A long execution is especially inhumane!! Of course, I also cried about everything Tuesday night for the first time since right after the election. Sometimes I feel selfish for worrying about how things might affect me when I know that they will affect more marginalized persons worse, by a factor of one hundred or so. Other times I think, well I can be sad for myself, too. There is enough sadness and anger to go around. My new year's resolution was to do things that make my body feel good, in the short term. This is a stab at the self-care required to keep a full enough well to take care of myself and my family and hold authority accountable without keeling over. It may sound hedonistic but it's really meant to harness my difficulty delaying gratification and use it for overall personal wellness. Turn my weakness into a strength. So it means stretching before bed, getting massages, exercising, going to sleep extremely early, drinking so much water that I pee a little every time I clear my throat??? (Vaginal birth is very dignified!!!) Eating stuff that doesn't stall my guts, avoiding alcohol unless it would really very much hit the spot. If my skin clears up and I lose 10 lbs, then that would be welcommeeeee but goals like that don't work for me. I don't believe in my future self, I mortgage my future self constantly, better to do well by my current meat suit and hope it helps me live forever. Because I'm going to need to keep fighting fascism until I'm old, if memory serves, Nazis live foreeeeeverrrrrrrrr.

[oh-evie]

Toddlers are people

I let Desi taste my seltzer. It was after work, in that frenzied post-commute time, and I cracked it while sitting on the floor with him, and this was unforgivable. He was wailing, trying to take it from me, to have it for himself. I felt two things very strongly at that moment: I didn't want him to cut his fingers or mouth on the can while struggling for it and I also didn't want to put the drink away in the refrigerator until later. (Have you ever had flat seltzer? It isn't anything.)  Infants are like high-maintenance exotic pets, but toddlers are people. And it's rude to get yourself a beverage in the company of other people and not offer to share. I will concede that point. I should never have expected to drink it unmolested. So I got him a straw, popped it in the punched-out aluminum spout, and let him drink deeply, which is the only way he drinks. He looked at me with such betrayal and panic. How could you let me drink this? He sputtered and coughed.  I remembered, suddenly, trying to drink soda as a kid. How it burned my throat.

I'd thought maybe I was doing good parenting, letting him see for himself that the thing he wanted to try was not to his liking after all. It appears I may have been doing bad parenting, allowing him to consume something abrasive and not just saying no and being the boss. Who knows?! I never will. Not right away, at least. He can't even squeal on me yet.

[oh-evie]

Cleaning house

Someone cleans our house once a month now. Her name is Joy. Houses need to be cleaned more often than once a month, but at least monthly cleaning halts the dogged, unstoppable build-up of pubes in that "taint" area between the toilet bowl and toilet tank, the sight of which stirs up me in an anxiety which steals my breath and makes it impossible for me to relax. You see, I have set myself up for emotional failure by having an aspirational standard of cleanliness and tidiness that I have never been able to, or willing to put in the work to achieve, in my adult life. (I'm not using "we" despite the fact that Nick does indeed do a fair amount of housework because Nick was not socialized to tie the state of his house to his worthiness as a person, CC: patriarchy.) I go through cycles of feeling truly whatever about it, this moral failing of mine, but I tend to be less chill about it when I feel less chill about other aspects of my life. And this summer I was struggling and our rented shithole was not helping matters. So that's another line item on the budget of our one-civil-servant's-income situation. It's my favorite "bill" to pay and one of the best days of the month, coming home to gleaming wood floors. Like a hot stone massage but for the spirit. Today is Joy day. Lololl Nick gave her our wifi password so she can listen to music without using data. She also has a key to our place despite never having met us face to face. Hiring people on the internet is dystopian and magical like that. If she robs us blind and steals our identity, she will have earned that and we wish her well. In Trump's America, we gotta band together. Shit, what if Joy voted for Trump? I asked Nick if he thought she did this morning and he said "no," probably just to halt that unproductive spiral. My friend Jon described this election as effecting the gloomiest New Year's resolutions, as we all figure out what we need to do to protect our hearts and spirits but also never let this happen again. For me that has been, properly "tithing" to organizations that promote racial justice, abortion access, and fight climate change. I've rationalized that we'd be charitable people once we were double income and done paying for daycare and, I'm guessing, backstroking through bathtubs of money. But we aren't poor, lucky us! If we were poor, we'd be eligible for public assistance, which we are not. So for all my posturing about paying for daycare on one income (see above), and how if I thought I'd be the sole provider for my family for six years I'd not have majored in French, we are not poor. We are quite fortunate, really. And the former Sunday School kid in me remembers the poor widow giving her last two coins. For me that has been, prioritizing fitness again. I want to be strong enough to lift this Cadillac off my chest. I don't know what else to do with this shrill scream of powerlessness ringing in my ears at all times. It helps that it gets dark at 3 p.m. now and it's cold and there is not much else going on. Going to the gym isn't a chore when the weather is bad. For me it has been finally seeking out a steady volunteer gig, to be boots on the ground for all my top-notch opinions, the opinions which don't actually do anything to help marginalized people. My first volunteer training was last night, which is Nick's late night at school. My friends, a working parents of two, watched Desi during the training last night. Because if you need a favor, ask a busy person. They fed him dinner, bathed him, and sent him home in pink pajamas. People are good. We can all do this, I think. We might have to watch each other's kids sometimes. We may have to hire someone to clean our homes when we can't find the energy reserves to do it ourselves. But I am really hoping that we can outlive this, outlast this, dismantle this, rise above this.

[oldloves]

In her new memoir The Princess Diarist Carrie Fisher discusses a three-month long affair she had with Harrison Ford on the set of Star Wars. The year was 1975, She was 19 and he was 34 and married with two children . Harrison drove her home one night when she was “wine sodden” and they ended up sleeping together Apparently their first time was not impressive, but she didn’t mind because “he really was handsome” She doesn’t remember much about their affair because of “the brutal strength of Harrison’s preferred strain of pot” She recalls the diary she kept throughout the affair, in which she "relentlessly” tried to make him fall in love with her and dreamed that he would ask her to marry him with a “gold band with diamonds (inscribed) ‘Carrison.’”

[oh-evie]

CARRISON <3

[oh-evie]

Standing to Nick’s left under that tree May 2013 / June 2015 / September 2016.

[oh-evie]

Self-care

My powers of procrastination are extra potent lately. Like, I have to evaluate 25 RFPs before the end of the work day and I haven't looked at them and my answer is to bang out a tumblr post about how it could come to pass that a decadent bitch such as myself could have so little going on in the way of self-care. (A term that gets thrown around a lot in a way that sometimes feels not in service of mental health OR dismantling the patriarchy tbh however I have no better phrase so self-care it is.) I didn't have much in the way of hobbies before, so I don't have an old reliable thing to take up again. My interests were more...episodic, let's say. I like to scheme vacations and plan weird theme potlucks with my friends. These are things you do occasionally, not consistent opportunities to retreat into the forests of your mind on a weekly basis. My "hobbies" were cooking and working out which don't count. Cooking is now the bane of existence and working out doesn't count. God, 20% of my motivation for working out is to take up less space so I can be a cuter handmaiden of the patriarchy, you know? So that doesn't fucking count. I don't really do crafts. I like to make quilts but they are so MUCH.  And I am beginning to think (it's a whole involved thing) that baby quilts, which I have enjoyed making in the past, are dumb. People don't even put blankets in cribs anymore. And then when kids are old enough for blankets, baby quilts are so small, so square. And regular quilts: a huge commitment. What is the "snack" portion of quilting? The "short story" version of quilting? Making potholders? I guess I could do that. My therapist "assigned" me to find a self-care-ish thing to do once during the work week and once on the weekends. Something I do only for myself. Is it suspicious that I started trying to get out of the assignment as soon as it was given? The thing is that I already don't see my kid much during the week, and a lot of the time I spend during the week with Nick is in the unromantic trenches of triyng to get our kid fed or cleanish or asleep. And I like very much spending time with Desi and not Nick, with Nick and not Desi, and with both of them together. Our kid has been experimenting with wakeups between 3 a.m. and 5 a.m. on and off for the past few months. So being out past 9 p.m. during the week is not super appealing. Do you see all this weird rationalizing? How did I end up wearing my responsibilities like a weighted cloak? Why am I avoiding....myself? A few weeks ago, I took a modern dance class. It's something I've wanted to try for a while. I'm utterly amateur - my last time doing dance was age.....8? It felt radical because there was no "point." I can't see myself ever being good enough to perform and it's not a skill I can use as a gift or display in the home or wear or keep or eat or show off. It's just learning how to move my body in space and not think about anything. How insidious that I've come to only seek out skills that might be useful. I only did one class because I keep forgetting to sign up for another one. "Does Nick forget about band practice?" my therapist says, politely, in reply. UGH SHUT UP I KNOW

[oh-evie]

You’re Doing Your Kid a Favor by Being an Imperfect Parent

Show them that being a human means trying and failing.

Probably not surprising to anyone who reads stuff I have written in the last year but this is SO MY SHIT and I irrationally was jealous I hadn't written it myself but then was relieved that someone else wrote it (and who better or more qualified than Ask Polly, really) because if someone else writes it you don't have to. Down with self-referring as "slacker mom" or "bad mom" because you didn't, for one day, do something related to development or care that is above and beyond what your child ever needed or asked for. Down with self-referring as a "lazy mom" because you lied on the couch with a book instead of reading Little Blue Truck Leads the Way for the fifth time to a vaguely disinterested audience. It's called being a real, full person and it's better for everyone. Rise up!

[oh-evie]

“I have already lost touch with a couple of people I used to be”

There are some things about my lifestyle at the moment that might — to an outsider, or more realistically to a past version of me, because who actually gives a shit about my choices but me — seem like concessions, slow erosions of self and sensibilities. Much of it has to do with food because, god, how fraught is food. So much political and class stuff wrapped up in how we think it’s ok to eat or cook. At this time in my life, I am amazed by the very existence of frozen silver-dollar pancakes sold in a sack of fifty in my grocery’s freezer, and thrilled to microwave them to life every morning in groups of four or five to go in my kid’s lunch box.  I microwave all kinds of shit now. Scrambled eggs, you can make in the microwave. Hat tip to my mother-in-law on that one, who was a single mom in the ‘80s. To think I used to feel quietly smug about not owning a microwave for snobby, crunchy reasons I can no longer access.  That’s where I’m at! Microwaved storebought pancakes. It’s awesome. It’s not an erosion of self. It is an expansion of self, a multitude I seem to contain. It is intoxicating.

[oh-evie]

“Rediscover this day”

So that function in Google Photos is going to be fucking me up for the rest of my life I guess? I took a few photos a week before I had this baby, if that. Now I take a few dozen every week, and when he was newborn, I took a few dozen every day.  This day last year, I went to the thrift store with him and bought a bunch of 0-3 months flannels. I ran out of stuff to do on maternity leave. I mean, I could have cleaned and organized the house. He could have had a proper “nursery” before he was 5 mos. old. But that felt like a reach. My options were, hold fussy baby while eating. Hold fussy baby while drinking coffee. Sit on couch with my phone while fussy baby naps. Or get out of the house. So I tried to get out of the house. I couldn’t believe what a trove the Volunteers was for baby clothes. I got home and washed a load of tiny clothes, and then I put him in his first non-onesie outfit and took a picture. A green and tan flannel shirt with green stretchy pants. Later, we went to the grocery store as a family and I took a video of Nick cart-dancing and singing to “Gloria.” The Laura Branigan song, not the Them song.  He spun around and said “’Gloria’ is good, we should put that on our girl name list.” I remember feeling relieved and also shocked that he was considering having another baby with me after the month we’d had.

[oh-evie]

Stuff I want to remember right now

I am not writing those progress reports anymore. I didn’t mind writing them but a year felt like a good stopping place. I wasn’t going to write them forever. Progress report: month 350. Desi is spending Thanksgiving with his girlfriend’s family who he describes as having “enviable personal boundaries.” I am so surprised by how things still change from week to week here, the way they have been doing since he was newborn. Sometimes we wake up to a different kid. Sometimes we wake up to a different kid three days in a row and I want to get these things written down before I forget. Sweaty blond curls from car seat naps. Climbing on me and wanting to be picked up and tumbling onto me whereas just last week he was not interested in any sort of physical touch. Strong cheese face anytime he senses he is being cute or is given a food he wants, often, well, cheese. Wanting to share something from his mouth with us, like a well chewed piece of pancake. “Uh oh” and “tenkoo.” Thinking “tenkoo” is a means to get someone to give you something they are holding. Busting out either “uh oh” or “tenkoo” in the midst of a tantrum, like, I’m just gonna try everything, maybe one of these will work. “Hiding” under something that is not big enough to cover him. Then revealing his face to a big cheesin’ grin. “Clapping” for himself when he makes a stack or picks something back up that he dropped, but really just tapping a closed fist against one open palm silently. Stompy little dance in place. Always reaching for dad when I’m holding him. Less like a perpetual motion machine than he was even a few weeks ago, will deign to sit on a lap to have socks and shoes put on, etc. Will sit with a container of snacks for a bit. His eyes truly light up when read to, like some kind of dream baby, but only for a few pages and then he’s over it. Lies down on a pillow as a bit. I say, “Are you relaxing?” He laughs. Can dismount a slide and climb up a slide with steps, but needs help being put in sitting position to go down a slide. Can’t hang in the bath so one of us sits in the bath with him and kind of pins his legs down with our legs? Thus, he is bathed, oh, weekly. “Words” of his we still can’t parse: uda? udis? g’dao? I say, “ma!....muhhhhh” to him with an embarrassingly thirsty focus a few times a day but he is still playa-hatin’ on that one. Sometimes he busts out “dash-eeee” which could be Daddy, Desi, both or neither.

[oh-evie]

This month in “my process”:*

My bottle-attached kid is off bottles by some miracle and is eating more. When I was in Denver a month ago, I was telling Lyn we were so screwed to get this dude off bottles and eating meals. She offered that maybe it would be one of those things he did on his own, to be a mentsch. I may have laughed bitterly. That is kind of what happened, though, with the intervention that we stopped buying formula (we got near the bottom of a tub and I declared it the Final Tub.) He didn’t really like what was replacing formula in his bottles. I’d go to give him his nighttime bottle and he’d take one swig and then throw it across the room like a mean drunk. Misty watercolor memories! So I guess gentle starvation, then, is what it took to get his appetite to pick up. We didn’t really do it on purpose, because that would have never worked, because I am lightly obsessed with my skinny kid’s weight!

And I didn’t even really want to get him off bottles that much, save the nagging sense that I should. But bottles are so easy! I thought. I resented “needing” to quit them. Why can’t something just be easy for a while? Something that is easy though: not washing bottles. We’ve been washing bottles nightly since last November. You will not catch me shedding a single “baby’s so grown” tear about not washing bottles anymore. So many soapy sinkfuls of breast pump flanges and milky bottles in the winter-darkened kitchen, dumped out of an insulated lunchbox, silicone nipples going invisible in the water like jellyfish. Ohhh fuck me, I just got a little wistful. The bleak, bleak grind + time = romance. *** I thought we’d already seen our last hot day of the year, but yesterday it got close to 90F and so we hoofed it down to a local splash pad after dinner. By the time we got there, the sun was going down and the temperature had dropped considerably. The splash pad, which I remembered as being dinky, was actually somewhat intense for our little man. Unpredictable surges of cold water at varying strengths and locations. At one point, Nick set him down in the middle and the fountains started bubbling ever higher until there was water shooting taller than him on all sides. He looked utterly freaked out, "trapped” in a narrow lane of pavement between two walls of water. I wanted to swoop in and grab him, I almost did it without thinking, because of the look on his face. That look!  But Nick and I both managed to hold back, and Desi, who was never in any danger, who was never farther than four feet from either of us, made his way out on fat Fred Flintstone feet. Of course he did!  So seventeen+ more years of ever-escalating versions of that, then? SO CHILL

*

whining to anyone who will listen that we’re doomed, DOOMED, forever doomed until things....work themselves out or we manage to fix them and it’s fine

[oh-evie]

I’ve been having a lot of “these are the days” feelings lately. As challenged as I am by this new phase of parenthood where we have to set limits in order to not have a boy tyrant on our hands. As frustrated as I am that our limit-setting seems to accomplish very little, except to enrage the baby and make us feel impotent and tired. I can tell we are in this Time, and that it’s a special time. I’m no longer pregnant or in recovery, I’m not breastfeeding, we’re all sleeping decently, he’s active and independent and cheeky, we’re living in this place that we know very well, in a routine that is familiar to us, and we “only” have one kid. It’s cozy. I’ll remember it fondly, I think, and also with a bit of awe. We were on one income and our place was cramped and falling apart and we didn’t hate our lives! How? *Ultimately decided I draw the line for social media exploitation of my child at full-frontal nudity

[oh-evie]

Progress report, month twelve

My schooling is finished but I don’t know that I’ll ever stop feeling like summer is the end of the “year”, that fall is the beginning. Becoming a mother in late August only reinforced this alternative calendaring. The single greatest change of my life and it happened as the weather was cooling, the first week of my grad student husband’s fall semester. And then I slid right into my baby year. I can tell that my baby year is over. This may be particular to my specific issue of baby, but dude is no longer cuddly. He likes when we’re in the room with him, but why would he be near us when he could be passionately stacking and moving empty diaper boxes around like the tiniest little builder. They should warn you before you leave the hospital how quickly they stop needing to be on you. We were only in the hospital two full days for his birth but it felt like a week. There were visitors but still so much downtime. It was like we were on a strange, sterile cruise ship. As in, the food was kinda bad, but hey, it was “free” and no dishes. As in, there were “activities” on offer, like watching the baby get bathed by a nurse. (I remember feeling threatened and humbled by the baby-washer. She washes a hundred babies a year, this is an assembly line situation for her, be careful with my baby. But then, She washes a hundred babies a year so she probably knows what the fuck she’s doing.)  He was already Desi by then. I went into labor with our boy name decided, and we began calling him Desi from the moment we could see the small balloon of his scrotum. His name still felt forced, a sweet little bluff. We said it to him until it was real, as we pushed him in his little A/V cart down the short corridors. When we got too close to the elevators, his ankle monitor device triggered a recording warmly warning us that our baby was too close to an exit. Your standard Orwellian cruise ship stuff. Hallway walks: another fun maternity ward activity option. It was surreal, our weekend on the high seas, but I liked being gently nannied by medical staff. I also liked being brought three chocolate puddings or whatever. They don’t discount your bill if you only order one dessert. All you want in those first weeks is not to have anyone touching you for five minutes because your ass is numb and fused to the couch from cluster feeding, and your nipples are so sore, and you can’t tell where your sweat ends and the baby’s sweat begins. Then poof, that old curse, “may you get everything you want,” and you have a one-year-old and don’t nobody want to touch you. I think a lot about how he’s his own person, how he’ll never be as physically close to me as he is now, how he is less physically close to me than he was six months ago, two months ago even. I wonder if my mom ever wants to cradle my 6′2″ brother in her arms or kiss him on the lips. I wonder if moms and grown sons ever….go on vacation together?? No? Are you sure??? Fine. I gave birth on a Friday and on Sunday, we went “home,” but not really. Our cruise ship had docked somewhere different, a scale model of the place we’d left behind. Everything since has been a shell game of expectations, and we still haven’t made it home, back to where we were before all this. But if home is a feeling, I feel it. 

[oh-evie]

Child turning one in 2016.

[oh-evie]

When you go to buy a thing online for your boy baby

and there are two colorways, and one is so obviously the “girl” colorway and one is so obviously the “boy” colorway and you like them both equally, or I guess I mean, neither stirs the spirit much, and you wonder if it’s a bit false and immature to get the “girl” one solely to visually telegraph to the the squares how nonconformist and cool you are as a parent, and so you decide to get the “boy” one, and right before you go to pull the trigger you realize you actually prefer the look of the pink/purple/teal one after all, and then they are out of his size in both varieties, and so you close the tab, and feel weirdly grateful for all the endless preppy, cargo-ed hand-me-downs you are given because there is nothing for them to transmit except maybe the fact that you are thriftier than you are aesthetic-minded. That’s right, world, ya girl is ~prudent~.

[oh-evie]

August 15

A year ago, I woke Nick up (it was Saturday morning) and said, we have to go to due date brunch. And he said, do I have to go, too?, thinking, I guess, that this was yet another cryptic lady social convention like a baby shower from which his Y-chromosome exempted him. I was horrified. Uhh YES you have to go, it’s brunch with me, on my due date, you want me to go BY MYSELF? So we went to a diner that we had a gift card for, but it was crowded so we had to sit stashed at the bar, back by the bathrooms, on goddamn stools. I don’t like sitting without my feet touching the ground, especially not when I’m 50 lbs overweight, but apparently due date brunch is not dreamy because nothing is dreamy at 40 weeks’ gestation. I remember being very irritated with Nick for the whole meal and then our gift card only had like $4 left on it somehow when we went to pay. Probably I was irritated because I knew I’d be back at work on Monday, having to smile tightly when people implied I was still showing up there out of some lopsided sense of duty and not because of the criminally fucked parental leave situation in this country. Why are you still here, ya starry-eyed go-getter???? Fuuuuck offfffff. Maybe someday I’ll forget that August 15 was my due date. It still feels like a minor holiday to me. Happy due date, unnamed mystery fetus. Happy due date, Desmond Leo. Happy due date, self.