the happiness project

last night around nine in the evening Andrew and I were sitting on our front porch, and I almost jumped out of my chair because out of nowhere I felt a breeze blow by.

‘Did you feel that?’ I asked. And I was so jazzed up that he gave a quick scan to see what had gotten my panties in a bunch—but there were no snakes, no bugs, no armadillo scurrying over my foot.

‘Feel what?’ He asked.

And so I had to explain it to him. ‘September!’ I practically shrieked, ‘Did you just feel September come in? I swear to God a wisp of wind just broke through the heat and touched me on the face.’

Obviously that was a ridiculous way to ask about one freaking wisp of wind, but luckily I have discovered that love isn’t just about flowers and good times and having someone to hang out with on Sunday afternoons—it’s also about keeping the person you care about protected from their own personal brand of craziness. And so Andrew was kind enough to let me have my moment without shepherding me back into the house and sedating me with a tall glass of vodka. Instead he let me continue sitting in my chair on the porch with a goofy smile on my face—sadly, probably a preview of his life in about fifty years.

When I woke this morning I found that I was not dreaming, it is my lucky day. September is finally here and I will live to see another fall.

Now that we have survived, I have to wonder if in five, ten, fifteen years, when I feel the first blanket of heat descend down on my summer—the first weekend in late May when you realize spring has fled the scene for good and it’s time to settle into the long haul of living in the South—I wonder if it will ever be possible for me to roll into a summer without remembering the last three months, which were the first three months that our little family lived through together.

In the old days fall was the only season that made me nostalgic. Boxes of new pencils. The smell of crayons. High school football on Friday nights. But now it appears no season will be safe, summer will do more than cause me to sweat in the armpits, it also might cause me a bit of sweat in the eye area.  Eye wide open at three in the morning. The return of Dr. Seuss to my life. Large amounts of regurgitated milk on everything I own. Right now it’s all still a little too close for comfort, but I can see where in a few months, when the leaves are orangish and I put on a sweater to go out at night, I can see where thinking of this summer, mixed with the right amount of hormones, might just be an effin Hallmark moment in the making.

But as for August and I, if we’re going to find a way to live peacefully together it’s going to take some adjustments. I’ve already made plans to be elsewhere next August, and when I say ‘elsewhere’ I mean ‘anywhere but Texas’. And when I say ‘August’, I mean ‘for the whole damn month.’ Goodness knows Andrew loves his summer heat, and because I love him I will not begrudge him his own craziness on this point. I’ll just have to be sure and set up a computer on the front porch for him, so I can skype in from wherever I am in the world, and we can peacefully sit through whatever August delivers—even on the days it’s hot enough to fry eggs on the damn cement.

facebook and I, our relationship has always been a bit rocky. Up and down and down and up. One minute things are okay, I’m cruising status updates and thinking that maybe today’s going to be a good day—a quick trip down memory lane and some light laughs—then the next thing you know facebook is saying something I don’t like, little puffs of smoke come out of my ears, and four letter words start somersaulting out of my mouth. Some people slam doors when they’re pissed. Me? I slam my laptop shut.

Back in the day, it was a fun way to reconnect with people I hadn’t seen since the years I used hairspray. But recently it has come to my attention that ‘back in the day’ was actually ‘back sometime last year’ and that the word fun can no longer be used in conjunction with my facebook usage. The discussion began a couple weeks ago, when Andrew entered the room to find me hunched over my computer, intently examining my computer screen.

‘What are you working on?’ he asked.

‘Not working,’ I mumbled.

‘Oh,’ he said. And then he walked behind me to see what I was doing, i.e. to spy on my screen. You must understand, having people spy on my screen is a huge pet peeve of mine from the days I spent in corporate America. I daresay having a man stare at your computer screen while talking to you is even more annoying than having a man stare at your breasts while talking to you. It’s a toss-up though because both are fairly awful, and to be completely fair, it probably depends on the man.

But anyway. I could feel him looking at my screen so I slammed my computer shut. ‘Do you think?’ I started, but I wasn’t quite high-pitched enough so I had to rewind and start again. ‘Do you think, the baby should have more stable neck control at this point in his life?’

Given the tone of my question you would have thought I was asking whether he believed I should move my life savings into the stock market, or whether he preferred Swiss Miss Cake Rolls to Oreos, you know—something earth-shatteringly important.

So he took a second to think, probably to replay my question and make sure he’d heard me correctly. ‘Neck control?’ He asked. And I could tell by the way he looked at me that he had already classified this conversation in the ‘overreaction’ column of his brain.

‘I think the baby’s neck control is great given his age,’ he replied. But then he put two and two together….my computer usage, plus the slamming of the screen, the sudden irritability and the judgment of my own life versus others.

‘Anna,’ he said very calmly, ‘Have you been looking at pictures of other people’s babies on facebook again?’

Damnit if he wasn’t right! Damnit if it wasn’t true! I had been looking at pictures of other people’s babies on facebook. Some mothers probably use charts in parenting books or perhaps the percentiles of growth given at the pediatrician’s office. But, personally, I’ve found facebook picture stalking to be a much more efficient method of developing insecurities as a parent.

Since I started the dastardly habit, everything from pictures of babies with excellent head control to pictures of babies with five chins have sent me spinning into a whole other world of anxiety. Is my baby on track? Is he putting on enough weight? Does he look better in blue than the average baby?

Andrew sat down next to me and put his hand on my leg to make sure I remained seated—he thought it was about time we had a little chat about facebook. He pointed out that since he’s known me, facebook has done very little to enhance my life. And with the exception of remembering lots of birthdays I otherwise would have completely forgotten, I had to agree it was true. He also pointed out that looking at pictures of other people’s lives was fun, but if I couldn’t see shots of someone’s Maui vacation without getting wistful for an airport or check out someone’s new niece without wondering whether she was going to touch her toes before our baby would, then perhaps I needed to take a step back from social networking. ‘After all,’ he pointed out, in what would later be the comment that kept me up that night, staring at the ceiling and wondering if life in the country was going to turn me into the hermit I’ve always been destined to be, ‘You don’t like being social in real life, so why bother with it online?’

Perhaps it’s postpartum hormones, or perhaps it’s something larger than hormones, maybe it’s the dissonance that comes from getting one-dimensional views of other people’s lives. I feel like I’m getting the whole picture, but of course I’m not, I’m getting the digital picture and my mind fills in the rest of how great and marvelous and Maui-fied everyone else’s life must be. Even though there are pictures of my baby that demonstrate his excellent neck control, I also know that behind the scenes, we battle with a bit of bobbing. And even though I love where I live (eleven months out of the year), posting a small series of shots from my Sunday isn’t going to get nearly as many thumbs up as an album from Hawaii would.

Whatever the cause of the facebook-induced franticness, Andrew and I have agreed on one thing—it’s time for a facebook diet. For better or worse, facebook is around for the long haul, so I don’t want to go totally AWOL. I will still visit occasionally, but never in excess. In case of urgent situations (direct messages from friends, something about the book that needs to be posted on its fan page.) I will make unscheduled stops, but otherwise I’ll steer clear. I know what’s best for me (and my stress levels) and so I’ll work hard to keep my hand out of the cookie jar and my browser pointed somewhere more productive—as of right now there is a whole list of online shoe stores I’ve been dying to spend some time in. After all, I heard the stock market is going to shit, maybe shoes really is the best place to put your money these days.

when we woke up this morning and realized that A) it is still August and B) spending more than two minutes outside could turn you into one large strip of sizzling flesh we decided perhaps it was a good day for a trip to town. There was some tractor shopping that needed to be done (I shit you not) and one of the dogs required a return trip to the vet about a brown recluse bite that will not heal (again, I shit you not) and after a week of listening to me complain about the weather, I think Andrew was down to his last resorts for making me happy in a heat wave: a trip to Target and a meal of good Mexican food.

There are probably people out there who think it’s gross to crave cheese when the temperatures are soaring, but those are the same people who ‘just can’t eat anything’ when they get depressed. I don’t understand those people. Those people probably also never lose one sock in the washer or find themselves at an impasse for hours over whether or not it’s appropriate to become a facebook friend of an old flame. I think life happens to be a bit more enjoyable when it’s messy and the same rule holds true for my food and that’s part of the reason I’m okay with the fact that chicken fried steak is a food group of it’s own in my neighborhood. All that aside, the truth of the matter is that there there are only so many things you can do when it’s 108 degrees outside. Once the tractors have been perused, the dog has been healed and the ultraviolet lights at Target have sent your infant into a tailspin—a big bowl of melted cheese and tortilla chips is pretty much your best bet for sanity. The air conditioning? Yeah, it comes free with your order, and that’s why you bothered getting out of bed this morning and finding a shirt in your closet that would properly camouflage any armpit sweating that might occur in the next twelve hours.

We stretched the meal out as long as we could but eventually our stomachs were about to burst due to the solace we’d ingested and when I stood up to go to the restroom I saw that my ass had semi-permanently molded the material in the chair I was sitting in so obviously it was time to return home. By the time we had loaded up in the truck the internal thermometer had reached 109 and as soon as I witnessed that I began a deep, guttural wail that would have undid all the good my order of queso had done and probably also slightly (or massively) upset the baby so Andrew pulled out his phone to check the weather for the next week. If he could have, he probably would have checked all the way into January so he could have given me enough good news to keep me calm for the hour we had until we got home. But alas, all he had to comfort me with was this, ‘Good news, there’s a major cold front coming through, it’s going to be 91 on Wednesday.’

You heard it here first, time to pull your sweaters out of the closet because the cold front is on the way.

every morning I wake up and look at my watch and every morning I am waiting for the digital face to reveal something more than an 8 where the month is listed. No more August, please dear God, let August end. The nine, damnit, give me the nine. It’s been over a hundred and one degrees for longer than I can remember and if the days get any longer or hotter or, wait, did I mention longer? Yes, yes I did, but the profound, everlasting, suffocating heat of this Texas August is making me delirious and unable to remember what I said three words ago.

I think about writing on the blog, really I do, but then I sit down with my laptop and the bottom of it is hot on the tops of my thighs and so instead of allowing more heat into my life, I close the laptop and go sit in front of the air conditioning vent until the baby wakes up from his nap and then I sit with the baby and tell him elaborate stories that involve us living in Montana, or maybe Antarctica, and never sweating again in our lives. Ever. Never.

Maybe tomorrow there will be a 9 on my watch. I’m thinking positive, because eventually this shit has to break. Do you hear that August? Eventually. You. Have. To. End.

[this happened to me yesterday and since I wrote the post I’ve been waiting and thinking, wondering if I should put it on the internet because it was such a perfectly timed conversation in my life, it almost seems fake. I am a person who has many faults. I eat the cashews out of mixed nuts containers and leave the crappy peanut bits for other people, and I also have an occasional bout of road rage, but creating false encounters with pedicurists is not a fault that I have to call my own. Continue with the knowledge that all you are about to read is true. Sometimes, quite simply, the universe is just good to us—it knows when we’ve reached our very last straw and gives us what is necessary to keep us from snapping that straw in two.]

a few days ago I realized that I needed some dedicated time to write or I was going to self-combust and explode into a million little shards of stressed out pieces. It takes two hands for me to type on the computer and three hands to take care of my baby, and even though my need to work on some writing projects is urgent, it doesn’t screech in my ear when ignored. I mean, hells bells, I’m one hand short just trying to keep the kid fed, in clean diapers, and with some semblance of a smile on his face, when am I going to get time at the keyboard? Enter my mother, who goes by Grammie these days, and her kind offer to have the young one and I at her home in The Woodlands for the better part of the week while I type away at my computer and she keeps our laundry from turning into one big, mildewing pile of dirt with the vague smell of infant shit.

You thought maybe, just maybe, you could get through a post without me mentioning infant shit. How wrong you were, my friends, how wrong you were.

Anyway. Today I had to take a little bit of a break from my writing because going from zero time to articulate thoughts to suddenly having two hour chunks of between-feeding time to articulate thoughts was causing my brain to spin faster than the AC units down here in Texas. And these here AC units spin fast, do ya’ hear? Cuz it’s August and I’ll be damned if it ain’t 105 degrees in the shade.

I haven’t gotten a full-out pedicure since before the baby was born, and since I would like to be able to wear flip-flops in public without always trying to hide my chipping nail polish and chapped feet under a grocery cart and/or a table of some sort—I decided that the best use of today’s recreational Camp Grammie time would be a trip to the nail salon.

My parents have lived in this house for four(ish) years (I’m not in the mood to do mental calculations at the moment, but fourish is close enough) and for all those years I have gone to the same nail salon. I only visit off and on so obviously I’m not a regular there, but I know most of the women who do nails on sight and I’m fairly familiar with their color selection. In the world of nail salons run by Vietnamese women this translates to: I trust their sanitation and feel comfortable that they’ve already said everything bad about me in Vietnamese that they’re ever going to say so that bridge is crossed and they also have my favorite OPI color The Thrill of Brazil so done, done and done.

Today the salon was fairly empty when I got there and it was also around lunchtime so all the women were in the back room except the one who was doing my pedicure. She seemed like a nice woman, I’ve seen her a couple times before but she’d never done my nails previously. I kind of collapsed into the chair and immediately pulled out my cell phone because I never, ever, ever get to call anyone on my cell phone anymore due to a combination of poor cell phone service at the ranch and the fact that it takes one hand to hold a cell phone, and like we already covered above, on most days I’m already running a hand short.

I made contact with a friend who lives in Dallas and over the course of the conversation I told her a bit about how things were going. The lack of sleep. The lack of sanity. The lack of full disclosure in 99.9% of pregnancy books about just how depleting a lack of sleep and sanity can be on a person. I thought I was being rather discreet but the sleep deprivation obviously has effed with my volume controls, because when I hung up the phone and dropped it into my bag the kind woman doing my nails looked up at me and asked, ‘You have a new baby?’

She spoke softly, ever so softly, almost as softly as all the Vietnamese women walk around the salon in high heels that would cause me to clop like a Budweiser beer horse.

‘Me? Have a new baby?’ I asked. Again, we were the only two people in this part of the salon. My synapses, lately they fire s-l-o-w-l-y.

Softly, ever so softly, she shook her head yes and encouraged me on.

I told her that I did have a new baby, a baby boy. And she smiled. Still while buffing around on my feet she asked another question, ‘You do the feed?’ And she looked at my breasts while she asked.

‘Do I breastfeed?’ I asked back. This time I knew she was talking to me but I was a little shocked that this conversation was happening. I’m used to them coercing me out of an extra few bucks on a deluxe pedicure because they convince me that ‘men like soft feet’ or reaching up to dab the skin above my lip because they would like me to ‘get rid of all that hair’. But usually we don’t cross into territory any more intimate than light blonde-hair removal and guilt about calluses. In a parallel universe I might have considered whether I wanted to get into the breastfeeding conversation during the two hour block I had away from breastfeeding for the day, but in this universe, on this planet, at this juncture in time I was too damn tired to think more than one step ahead in the conversation so I tell her that yes, I breastfeed, and when I try to force a small smile I’m fairly sure it comes out looking like an open-mouthed, silent cry: I’m just too tired to fully execute cheer.

‘I breastfeed too,’ she said. And I swear to God, she looked up at me with the same open-mouthed silent cry I had just given her.

‘It’s very difficult,’ she continued. Still whispering. Still buffing. I felt my collapsed self fold forward a bit.

‘Yes,’ I agreed with her. ‘It’s very difficult. I am having a very difficult time.’

‘I think about the formula,’ she said, ‘Because when they cry you think they are hungry.’

‘Yes!’ This is oh so true, oh so true, every freaking time they cry you think they are hungry.

She got very silent and thoughtful for a moment and in my mind, I am realizing that even though I have discussed the difficulty of breastfeeding at length—I mean, we’re talking hours and hours and hours of discussion—in about 2 minutes this woman has made me feel understood.

‘Tell me,’ she asked. And then she leaned forward, ‘Do you have a pump?’

And now, at this point, I start looking around, because I’m all no way, this just isn’t happening. Andrew is here somewhere, possibly in the back room sharing noodles with the other women who work in the salon, and our flip camera is set up to secretly record this moment so that he can play it for our son when they are old enough to gang up against me, manipulating every one of my female hormone swings and laughing at the crazy lady on the videotape who’s crying and hugging her pedicurist.

‘I do have a pump,’ I tell her. And I’m leery, I’m very leery, this is all just too coincidental. But then she stopped working on my feet, and the way she put her hands onto her knees, and then closed her eyes for a very long, very extended blink convinced me that no, this definitely was just the two of us, alone with this bizarre struggle involving our own bodies and our babies. ‘It’s bad,’ she says, ‘the pumps are very, very bad to your breasts.’

It was all I could do to keep from weeping. Like I said, I’ve spent a large percentage of my life over the last few months trying to talk about this subject, and I had yet to sum it up in such a succinct and true turn of the phrase. The pump is bad to your breasts. And breastfeeding is very difficult. And nothing can change either of those facts. This woman knew that too, the unchangeability of it all, because after we both took a moment of silence she went back to finishing the pedicure. And except for trying to talk me into a lip wax, she said nothing else for my entire time there.

Now, hours after leaving the salon, I still feel indescribably better for the exchange. It’s not that you want other people to have shitty times, but sometimes it’s just plain ole’ comforting to be reminded there are people out there dealing with their own versions of the troubles you get yourself all worked up about. The troubles that feel so big and huge and insurmountable and yet, at the end of the day, aren’t really that big or huge or insurmountable at all.

Sigh.

Since I know it will probably be another few months before I have a chunk of time big enough to get to the nail salon, now I have that calming conversation to return to, every time I look down over my breast pump and catch a glimpse of my toes. It’s not a solution, just a small serving of solace. Perhaps the sight of The Thrill of Brazil will silence the stream of four letter words that run in tandem with that damn pump, at least for a minute or two.

it’s done. Mileage completed, collection of McDonald’s coffee and soda cups disposed of, the vacation to Crested Butte is complete. Time to tie it up with a ribbon, organize the pictures in a scrapbook and file the adventure in the annals of family lore, only to be retrieved when the baby is a man old enough to be humiliated in front of the first girlfriend he brings home from college to ‘meet the parents’.

I can see it now, Andrew grilling huge slabs of cow ass while I pour goblets of wine and get teary about ‘that time we drove to Colorado, and he was so small but his explosive shits were so huge, and – oh gosh did I just spill Chardonnay? Best open a second bottle.’

On second thought, the stories about his explosive shits will probably be the least of his worries on the humiliation front.

The trip proved three things. One. I still know nothing about infants even though I’ve had one for almost three months. Two. Breast pumps are not a girl’s best friend. And three. Trail mix is a girl’s best friend. Put it all together and what do you learn from the experience? That God gave us the devices to dry out papaya and banana as a consolation for the fact that life is not easy, and that in that mixing bowl of not-easiness, raising a child is the heavy clump of butter that simply won’t conform to the recipe at hand.

Where to begin? How about at the end of the one, two, three punch…trail mix.

Andrew and I are at the store before we leave for the trip and we’re buying provisionals. The necessities. The things we feel we can’t live without on the roadtrip from Texas to Colorado that we are about to embark on. Obviously, I’ve already put two monster-sized bags of Combos into the cart. Andrew’s looking at things like granola bars and asking about apples and I’m like ‘Seriously? The last time one of us got to an apple before a worm did was before we had a child, back when there was time for things like counting calories.’ But he felt we needed a snack with a semblance of health attached to it and so next thing I know, I’m standing at the checkout line in Wal-Mart watching a 28 ounce bag of trail mix  go down the conveyer belt. I thought to myself, ’28 ounces of trail mix….like we’re ever going to eat all of that dried fruit.’ And then, sure as the day is long, we’re driving through Fort Worth on hour 13 of our trip home and I’m driving and in between watching semis barrel by us I’m throwing straws at Andrew (who is sleeping in the backseat) because I NEED the bag of trail mix. There are crumbs of dried banana chips still in there, I just know it….and I’m not above licking the inside of the plastic to get those crumbs in my belly

Breast pumps. What I didn’t calculate into the ‘during the roadtrip I’m just going to pump a shitload of milk so we can feed the baby while we drive’ plan were the truckers. Those guys (and to be fair, gals) have a bird’s eye view of everything that goes on in our more low-to-the-ground vehicles, and more than one trucker got an eyeful of me with two pumps attached, riding down the road on the way to Colorado. If there was even one iota of modesty still hanging around even after I wrote a book with a rather graphic description of a Brazilian bikini wax, then it’s definitely gone flying out the window now.

Breast pumps are one of those things that you think is going to free you. Many-a-time during the last three months I’ve thought to myself, ‘You know, if it weren’t for breastpumps….I’d never be able to breastfeed.’ Because theoretically, pumping milk is what allows you to go out and have a good time occasionally, it means other people can feed the baby while you feed yourself a few glasses of wine. But in practice, if you are a practicing Type-A personality like myself, pumping milk becomes just another aspect of motherhood to overemphasize and stress about. While driving to Colorado and back home, I pumped pretty much the entire time because what if the baby suddenly got super hungry and took down every ounce we had saved up. What if! What would have happened is that we would have pulled the car over and I would have popped that kid on my tit old-school style, but since I’d already told myself that I was going to bottle feed him to save time, stopping to feed him became my mark of failing on my mission to pump. And failure is impossible, because I have pledged my allegiance to modern motherhood—and while modern mothers have weaknesses (over-googling possible illnesses comes to mind) failure is not one of them.

The last, but certainly not least, revelation of the trip is that it’s totally possible I know less about infants than I did before this whole adventure started. For days, actually for weeks, I fretted about how the baby would handle the trip. Though this worry was obviously a guise for fretting about how Andrew and I would handle the baby handling the trip, there still was a lot of concentration and mental effort that went into imagining various scenarios (all ending in crying) and trying to devise elaborate types of entertainment for the baby (musical compilations were purchased.) In the end, you know what I totally underestimated? The hours of wonderment that one can find in their own toes. I swear that kid stared at his feet and/or played around with grasping his toes for the better part of West Texas, New Mexico and even into the beginnings of Colorado.

If only we could teach him to use those toes to feed his momma dried banana chip bits while she pumped him a milk-lunch. That, truly, would be a roadshow that even the most jaded trucker would slow down to see.

in three days Andrew and I and the baby are going on our first family vacation. Technically we were all in Costa Rica last November but that doesn’t really count because the baby was in my belly still and there was very little family dysfunction on that trip. We have specifically planned this trip so that it will be highly dysfunctional and therefore qualify as an official family vacation.

Perhaps that one family vacation back in the late eighties when our van (oh yes, when I was growing up we had a van) got lost in the Tennessee mountains and my brother and I started flipping coins to see who would have to be the first to sacrifice a pinky finger to cook over the campfire for dinner has left me jaded, but if there isn’t at least one moment during every family vacation when each person wonders what it would be like to be somewhere—no, make that anywhere—else then it’s not really a true family trip. If there isn’t a certain amount of misery then someone has either gotten their hands on some Prozac or a nanny is along for the ride.

I regret (oh how do I regret) that those buffers will not be ours in the coming week. On top of the lack of serotonin-boosters and someone to put pacifiers in the baby’s mouth while I eat bonbons, we haven’t exactly laid the groundwork for an easy trip. We’re going to Crested Butte for the week and it’s a trip we planned when I was still pregnant. Of course back then we thought having a baby was kind of like having a dog, except you’d have to feed it more often and cleaning up poop wouldn’t be as easy as bending over to pretend you’re getting it with the plastic bag you carry around the neighborhood but never actually use.

And so in a moment of infinite cluelessness—almost as if we were planting a reminder of how naïve we were back then—we chose to drive to Crested Butte instead of flying. I actually vividly remember finding plane tickets online and going so far as to enter in my credit card information, but then stopping in the middle and asking Andrew, ‘Don’t you think it would be more us to drive?’

More us. More us!

I wish I could pretend I asked that question while in an impaired state, perhaps after imbibing a bit too much alcohol. But the thing about being pregnant is that you lose the ever-endearing excuse of alcohol—there are no dark, wily shadows of martini glasses to hide behind.

What I was (probably) trying to say (God bless my confused soul) is that Andrew and I do really love road trips and maybe this was a great opportunity to bring the baby into the fold of our lives. Yet this is where my confusion unravels into downright silliness. As if 1. a baby can be brought into the folds of your life. I’m lucky if I make it through a day without finding a quiet corner to huddle in, nose facing the point—like a second-grader who’s gotten in trouble with the teacher. At this point it’s safe to say that the folds have fundamentally been rearranged. 2. The baby doesn’t care about what we love, it’s a baby, it cares about food and sleep and not getting too cold or hot and not having to sit in excrement for extended periods of time. Period. End of story.

So. With all that said. In a few days we are driving to Crested Butte for some time in the mountains. All three of us. In one vehicle. For two days. And fourteen hours of drive time. My parents bet us that I’ll end up flying home with the baby. I told them ‘No way’ but since they made the suggestion I’ve priced tickets and am thinking about going ahead and just getting one, you know, in case things get hairy. I love me my time in Colorado, but I’m not in the mood to lose any pinkys over it.

Wish us Godspeed. And in the case that Godspeed isn’t available, wish us two good pairs of earplugs. And some vodka at the finish.

so yesterday, as a preamble to my birthday celebration, Andrew and I loaded up the little one and drove to Clifton, Texas, so that I could eat at my favorite country cookin’ restaurant. It takes a special occasion for me to actually walk through the front door of this restaurant—mostly because one meal there blows my recommended amount of calories out of the water. Not just for a day, but for the entire week. At this restaurant it’s not a question of whether the food on my plate will be fried, the question is how many plates of that fried food will I have?

In case you were wondering, the best birthday gift you can ever give yourself is a country buffet. Don’t let any Dr. Oz tell you different.

We got all settled at the table and I swear to God—I’m not just saying this to improve my cholesterol karma—both Andrew and I hit the salad bar first. This has never happened before, and could be a reflection of our new and more mature selves…our parenting selves…our selves that realize man shall not live to see their great-grand children on diets of chicken fried steak alone.

After we were done with the denial part of our meal we moved in for the major carnage. I’ll spare details on what precisely went on my plate, but I will say that a large majority of it was crispy brown. Of course we had both just settled back into our table when I heard Andrew say ‘Uh oh.’ And this wasn’t a ‘I didn’t get enough gravy on my mashed potatoes uh-oh’ this was a ‘we have a potential party-stopper on our hands uh-oh.’ I looked where he was looking and quickly saw something that was uh-oh worthy times one thousand, a small bit of shit was leaking out the right side of my son’s diaper.

This is going to send a deep shot of sadness through my mother’s heart, but I have to be honest here—instead of whisking him up in a crisp show of optimum parenting, I instead grabbed the napkin from my lap, reached into his car seat, and wedged the white rectangle into his diaper. It’s a leak, right? It should be plugged? Andrew was all, ‘I don’t know if that is going to hold,’ and I put a stop to that negativity in one millisecond, I was moving my fork from the plate to my mouth and in between bites of chicken crispers I informed him that it was going to hold, oh hell yes it was, because THIS is my allotment of fried calories for the week damnit….and it’s almost my birthday—even the laws of infant shit have to recognize the sanctity of that.

But I was wrong. Oh, was I wrong. Soon the infant shit began to seep through the napkin, which meant it had fully soaked his onesie as well as the denim jorts (jean shorts, people, jean shorts) that I had costumed him in for our trip to the heat lamp buffet. And so, with a heavy heart, I took one last bit of crisper and stood from the table.

‘Are you taking him?’ Andrew asked. And I was, I was taking him. Because even though I knew technically Andrew could handle taking the baby out to our car to change the diaper, I also understood that if I put it under his control, when I went out to the parking lot to join them there was a very good chance that pieces of the baby’s clothing would inadvertently have blown into various quadrants of the lot, strangers would be staring, and Andrew and the baby would somehow have ended up with pieces of flying poop on their noses.

I said goodbye to my meal with the knowledge that it had suffered a preemptive end and went out to the car. Of course once our little buddy was changed into a fresh diaper he was a charmer, smiling every which way. Had he thrown those moves in the restaurant it’s likely my all-you-can-eat heart attack would have been free. Happy baby and I were hanging out in the parking lot when Andrew emerged from the restaurant. And in one look, I know that a cloud of gray sadness was about to descend on our day. Something in the picture was wrong, very wrong. I asked him, ‘Are you forgetting something?’ He had my purse and my sunglasses so he looked at me with confusion. ‘No, I don’t think so.’

But he was forgetting something. He was forgetting something very important. It’s not every day that an establishment offers you cobbler and ice cream as a complimentary addition to their buffet. And is it too much for me to expect that the man I will spend the rest of my life alongside would recognize that I might walk away from a chicken crisper in case of dire emergency, but I would never, ever, walk away from a cup of free cobbler?

‘The cobbler?’ I asked.

‘Aren’t you stuffed?’ he asked.

No, I was not stuffed. I was not stuffed at all. I only ate a salad bar and half a plate of my buffet because of the emergency state of diaper affairs that blew up at our table, was it irrational to expect that you would order my cobbler to go? And did I mention that I had your child two months ago? Because I did, and I’m of the opinion that a little bit of cobbler would be the decent way to show your appreciation for that act. Not to mention that my birthday was right around the dam corner.

Does anyone remember the Sex And The City episode where Carrie questioned whether Aidan was right for her in the long run because he didn’t know what kind of wedding ring she would like? In the parking lot of my favorite country cookin’ restaurant in Clifton, Texas, Andrew and I lived through our own fast-forwarded version of that episode. I can take or leave all the showy-ass diamonds, but I will consider pieces of warmed peach inside crumbly, baked crusts to be worthy of life-altering decisions.

‘Please watch the baby,’ I said. And I walked past him into the restaurant, where I kindly asked the waitress for a cup of the cobbler to go.

She must have been able to tell that I was a little shaken up by the mishap with the cobbler. Because instead of simply speaking to me from where she stood she walked up to me, and I got the impression she as a women who has had to exit restaurants due to explosive shitty diapers  many, many times before because she put a comforting hand on my arm. ‘I’m glad you came back,’ she said, ‘do you want a to-go container for the buffet or do you just want dessert?’

Andrew should send that woman a thank-you note, because with that one gesture, our relationship, and my 32^nd birthday, were saved.

i spend a fair amount of time these days imagining what my son is thinking. I mean, the poor freaking guy, right? Andrew and I got all this preparation on what to expect while I was expecting and how life was about to change and all the ways in which we could swaddle our new baby and change his shitty diapers and try to soothe his cries….but he, HE, got to spend ten months floating blissfully in my belly only to suddenly be ejected into bright lights and a room full of really large humanoid people and a mother who cries periodically because breastfeeding is hard, damnit, it’s so much harder than anyone warned her it would be.

But I digress.

So I really wonder how he sees the world, and the more I think about it, the more I see that he must think our normal is crazy.

Hanging out in the stroller around our yard as his father weeds and plants and maintains the green which grows there. So let me get this straight, two inches is the maximum distance we move at a time? Isn’t this a stroller? Aren’t we supposed to be on a stroll?

The mini-blanket that has a giraffe head on it, which I keep trying to get him to love. I actually enjoy the moments I am alone and this woman is obsessed with having me entertain this damn piece of fabric.

Isabella. Oh, dear God, what does our little man think about Ms. Isabella, I can only imagine. Please tell me someone is going to clean up the armadillo carcass in the road, what will the neighbors think?

It’s made me look at our lives differently, now that I attempt to see it without all the bullshit context we regularly associate with our activities. Don’t worry, I’m not moving into a Bette Midler moment, there will be no Hallmark sentimentality in the foreseeable future of this post. But I am going to point out that whenever I lean in close with my iPhone to take a picture of the baby he flashes me a look like, ‘What is this black rectangle thing you always put in my face. And more importantly, why must it always be with us?’

Tomorrow is my 32^nd birthday. In the past I have always spent my birthdays in rather fabulous & fun places. Vegas. Mexico. New Orleans. And so for the last month Andrew and I have been talking about what to do for the celebration. We started with west Texas  then due to the travel hassle we downgraded to Austin and/or San Antonio for a couple days, and then in the end we decided, hell, we’re happy here, let’s just stay home. Tonight Andrew was like, ‘Are you sure you’re okay that we’re not going for a celebration somewhere?’ And I had to think about it, because it’s always been this thing, this very important thing for me to have a birthday celebration that’s a big damn deal….but I could see it as the baby would see it. All this packing up of stuff and driving and then a big hullabaloo getting settled in a hotel and at some point mom and dad would probably raise their voices at each other because, let’s face it, this is a first-time travel experience with the baby and on a scale of 1 to 10 that’s like an 11 as far as optimal opportunities for frustration. If I traveled, it wouldn’t be because I thought it would be fun in execution, it would just be fun in theory and then probably provide some fun facebook photos that would inform all my ‘friends’ what a great time I had on my birthday. (If only those photos could talk, right? They’d say ‘WHY ARE THESE PEOPLE FORCING A VACATION WHEN THEY HAVE A NEWBORN IN TOW?’)

I assured Andrew that yes, staying home was fine with me. And I know that it’s true, so, am I just getting older and therefore more boring? Or have we lost the battle and our spunk is gone only two months into the parenting adventure. Worst case scenario: we are now the most boring people alive and I’ll soon be spotted wandering through the country wearing mom jeans that have waistlines right beneath my bras and I’ll have to wait until I’m 50 to resume my birthday celebrations. Best case scenario: this is just a little blip of domesticity on the radar and next year we will introduce the baby to the glory of my birthday week celebration. At which point he’ll likely be thinking Did I seriously end up with a mother who lip syncs Bon Jovi, and if so, is there any way to go back and request one who isn’t destined to embarrass me on a regular basis throughout my junior high and high school years?

i always know when I’m toeing the line of not having my shit together, because whenever thinking gets foggy and it feels like the sleep deprivation, or stress, or general ennui with the world is about to catch up with me, I start craving a trip to New York. Some people call their doctor for a refill on the ole’ Prozac. Others reach in the back of the pantry for the reserve box of Hostess cupcakes. Me? I start mentally mapping trips on the subway.

I lived in New York for some years of my twenties (see Just Don’t Call Me Ma’am for more information on those years as well as too much information on the bikini waxes I received during those years), and I can honestly say that when I moved to New York, I had no idea the beating it would give my brain. I was all Dreams Of Being A Big-City Girl! And Oh My God The Bars Stay Open Til Four In The Morning! And Djid I Mentjiony The Barsh Shtay Open Tjil Fthour Jin Tshe Mjorshning?

But as it turns out, New York is more than just fun times in stiletto heels staring down the bottom of a whiskey sour and listening to a douchebag finance guy fill your brain with dreams of forever in a Connecticut zip code with flower gardens and nursery schools that include SAT prep. It’s also a grating work schedule coupled with smelly subways and winters that don’t quit. And summers that don’t quit. And springs that are rainy and a fall that gives way to winter too quickly. Oh but there are those few weeks during seasonal transitions which are quite enjoyable, provided you aren’t stuck in your office succumbing to the aforementioned grating work schedule.

I had a couple years in me of keeping up with the Joneses of New York (much like the Joneses of other places but with black-rimmed hipster glasses and a smug sense of contentment that lingers looong after they’ve left you for their impossible-to-get reservations at THE latest eatery in town) but after a couple years my white flag went up. Granted, it took a while for me to see the flag waving as it can be difficult to discern a white flag from the white blankets of snow that were falling my last winter there, and damn if the whiskey sours don’t make it easy to confuse a white flag with the light at the end of the subway tunnel, but eventually I realized that my love for New York would best be nurtured from afar. Kind of like that ex-boyfriend you wish you’d never actually dated because it was so much more fun when you just stalked him at your local coffee shop and thought he was perfect and didn’t yet know he talked with his mouth full and had really lame friends and also occasionally bossed you around. Actually living in New York, and trying to make a relationship with the city happen, was the step that made the dysfunctional dynamic impossible to ignore, and cemented the fact that one of us was going to have to walk away. Not to state the obvious, but the island of Manhattan wasn’t going anywhere so the leaving was up to me.

Things I know now that I didn’t know when I was in my early twenties are that A. I enjoy long, extended periods of solitude and quiet B. The only thing more relaxing to me than quiet is listening to music in my car at very high volumes while driving on a highway. C. Nature doesn’t suck, in fact, it’s actually quite awesome. Because I am not a millionaire and did not have a front door that opened onto Central Park, the only highway I ever got onto while living in New York was in a cab heading to La Guardia, and even when I was by myself in my apartment there I could still see through my bedroom window to the guy who lived in the building next to me—it’s safe to say none of those things I have discovered as ingredients for my happiness were achievable for me in New York.

HOWEVER. When my world starts to get really crazy, it’s like I was so conditioned to associate chaos with the time I spent in that city because the next thing you know, I’m standing at my kitchen counter and I have a flash of what it would have been like to stand at a kitchen counter in a New York apartment. I wonder about shopping for new kitchen dishes at my favorite home stores in New York. I picture myself walking down the street, then stopping for hot nuts at a vendor, then discovering I don’t have enough singles to pay the guy for nuts and he doesn’t have enough singles to break my twenty so ending up with an entire dinner’s worth of nuts that I will wash down with some whiskey sours at a romantically dark haunt tucked away in the city somewhere.

I don’t picture the fact that I won’t sleep at night or that I’ll miss my family or that I’ll wander through days wondering why, oh why, I have to force myself to go so fast all the time when there is an easier way to live. No, I don’t picture those things—because that would be the reality of living in New York, and not the fantasy I build in my head, the fantasy I like to retreat to when the real life I have chosen gets to be a bit trying.

I’m about to show my country self so prepare yourselves, but one of the songs I currently enjoy listening to at high volumes as I travel on the highway is called Genevieve and it’s sung by Sugarland. Sugarland! I know! It’s so Americana! Go ahead and roll the eyes you keep hidden behind those black-rimmed hipster glasses!

The chorus of the song refers to this woman, Genevieve, as the singer’s ‘favorite sinner’. Obviously Sugarland didn’t coin the phrase ‘favorite sinner’, but I hadn’t heard it in a while and since stumbling onto that song, I have officially re-fell in love with the idea. And as my brain has been flirting with the urban-anonymous chaos of New York in the last few days, those are the words that come to mind. It’s what New York is—and likely will always be for me—my favorite sinner. Vegas is my favorite effing place to go get drunk and run through the streets and stare at lights and act like I am 21 years old, but New York is the longer-enduring and more serious temptation that I love to give into.

It’s the place that will inevitably turn on a dime, blissful and energizing for the first bit (like any good sin) but then after too much, I grow numb to what I love and am left with a buildup of all the noise and fast-pacedness and looking over my shoulder at how other people are doing things that ultimately brings me down (again, like all the sins eventually do. Sigh, if only bone-breaking hard work got you nowhere and the sins, the sins, the sins could get you anywhere.)

Everyone who’s ever had an ex-boyfriend they never should have dated but, regardless of that rational knowledge, still struggles to walk away from, knows that the hardest part of prying yourself away from the temptation is that the ex is usually only a cell phone call away. Right now, between the city of New York and I, is half a country, an airline flight with a newborn, and my first experience in conversing with TSA employees about how to fly with a baby carrier and all the bags of shit I now require for every trip I make that’s farther than my mailbox. And so regardless of how much I would like to give in, I know there’s no way in hell I’m going to start jumping through those hoops, so I am safe from any sinning. At least for the short-term.