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!!!

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.

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.

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.

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

“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.

“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.