I walked in thinking I would get a pretty purple color, maybe something in the rose family, but Zoey was dead-set on rainbow colored toes and after I saw just how happy her feet looked, I couldn't resist. I do believe I've found my new go-to for summer toes.
p.s. I have a new theory: the time it takes for your brain to forget the sharp-edged horror of pregnancy and childbirth perfectly coincides with the time it takes for your baby to decide to smile at you. Coinky-dink? I think not. That there is a Darwinian smile.
Granted I am no epicurean (and wasn't even epicurious in college), but really? Chingalingas? Are you trying to make me say the word cunnilingus while out to dinner with my in-laws?
You never quite got the ruckus made of the 4th, choosing instead to celebrate July 5th, or August 4th. March 20th, why not? The way your daughter gives you rocks that she finds in the driveway, brown pebbled things that were probably dirty chunks of pavement once slick with motor oil. You drop them into the only vase you own, the weight of throwing them away full of something you don't want to play with or even think about. Swim class @ 2:10 circled on the calendar, July 5th, and you find yourself promising to always be the mother you are once she finally falls asleep each night, how you stand over her forgetting the sharp no's of the day repeated, the 1, 2, 3...without either of you fully understanding the portent of 3. This is what you celebrate, this day, fireworks for nothing, and how tomorrow you will be better.
So yes, there's that, plus packing up our house to move this weekend (!) and the very small job of keeping not one but two children alive. I'm telling you, it's enough to make a girl feel downright accomplished, even if she hasn't showered in days...
Doing the hustle from my living room couch,
xo,
S
In reality, he is quiet. (Too quiet! says the hand-wringer inside of me.) He makes these little squeezy noises instead of cries, loves car rides and holding hands. (We haven't tried yet, but I am sure he also likes long walks on the beach.) Somewhere between slathering Zoey's butt with Desitin and discussing the merits of Captain Jack Sparrow with her (we both agree that he's an exceptionally goodlooking man), I forgot that it takes time to get to know your baby. To stop seeing character actors in his face and attributing a grumpy old man's words in his sighs. It's slow-going, but we have all the time in the world. In the meantime, he's in his La-Z-Boy Recliner right now (the one that vibrates and chirps lullabies), muttering something about what is with kids wearing their pants so damn low these days...
The most part of these 2 weeks and 1 day I have spent crammed like so many worn tissues into the folds of my couch, one pillow propped under the right arm, another beneath the left, boobs out, back aching, wondering how they make it look so easy, though I have no idea who "they" really are. Despite the presence of nipples, here there is no glitter. Just me and my nipples, Luck be a Lady de la Leche, and at night when I use the breast pump the wheezing in and out of the machine sounds as if it's talking to me. Make more, make more, make more... (Or what a bore, what a bore, what a bore, milky whore, milky whore, milky whore...)
(Oh, how you would have loved me as a teenager, all sighs and sads and nobody understands. I am just thankful there were no blogs back then.)
Are you there WWW? It's me, Margaret. Behold a real life Before and After. Now, I was not able to breastfeed Zoey for a few different reasons that are now 5 years old. But this time? My milk came in and shit got real. Real to the tune of an E sized bra that is all kinds of ugly. Please tell me that this, too, shall pass. The hormones, yes, the sleepless nights, the fact that I am now chained to the couch with my nipples hanging out of humongously horrible E-sized boobs.
Introducing Ozzy Allston M. (I wish I could tell you our whole last name 'cause it sounds super kick ass all together.) Born May 30th, 7lbs. 13oz. This is what I know of him so far: his head smells like warm cotton, his eyes are the prettiest slate blue, particularly when he wears his blue onesie, he squeaks instead of cries and when he poops he scrunches his face up just like Renee Zellweger. Although I have never seen Renee Zellweger poop.
Here's a pic of Zoey meeting her brother for the first time. If I had told her that there was no Santa and that Unicorns simply do not exist, she still would've been smiling like this, so stoked was she to hold her brother.
Here she is being a bossy big sister, telling my mom how to properly diaper Ozzy.
As you can imagine, we are all a wee bit sleep deprived and some of us (me) have had their abdominal muscles sliced open and then stapled shut, but still--I'm going to try to post more often now. Although I should also mention that we bought a house and move in 3 weeks, so there is that. Too. 
Exactly. I mean, that’s it. That face. Lately that is how I feel about everything. Nutella on toast, clean sheets, successfully finding videos of that gay-for-pay kid on the latest Real World.
Bitch, please. The new Calypso collection at Target?
Totally. Then there’s the fact that our lease is up next month but we don’t want to sign another year lease because we are looking to buy a house again but our landlord won’t let us go month-to-month because I have no idea why. FYI? I have a c-section scheduled for June 2. We have to be out by end of June.
Plus one of these brought to you by the good people at The Hormones Responsible for the Nesting Instinct-ute.
Yesterday was the first ultra sunny happy summer day so we went to the beach just like the family behind us and on either side of us sitting too close, families everywhere with coolers and sand, sandy kids that were not at all cool. Then the family right in front of us pitched a tent, an actual real live tent with sticks and everything and I was all,
And Bryan was all,
And Zoey was all,
I mean, why go to the beach if you’re just going to sit inside of a nylon tent all day eating potato chips?
Of course about 20 minutes later I was hot, too hot, the 8 inches of dank skin hidden now beneath my humongous boobs all sweaty and sandy and I told Bryan I was going to buy a beach tent online as soon as we got home. And I did.
What?
I would die 4 U (but I would nevah evah B anyone’s surrogate, just so we're clear),
The Artist Formerly Known as Petunia Face
Remember when I used to blog? Like everyday, and I had something to say? And even when I didn't I pretended and you believed and read, commented, my inbox full of emails that weren't about sales and deals, viagra, Nigerian money scams or free sandwiches? Somebody once said that the way to become somebody's god is to disappear. And while that notion has stuck with me for its sheer dude that's so poetically beautiful it has to be true-ness, I'm afraid it's not. Because I am a master disappear-er, never saying goodbye at parties but choosing instead to slip out the door, driving away. And here, these last few weeks or months, I have slipped away and into dimensional life wearing 2-D glasses. Quietly, no kiss-kiss. Just this. Not that I want to be anybody’s god anyway, somebody somewhere always calling your name in vain and otherwise, like in bed, in the moment--how uncomfortable would that be? I just want to be me again.
Remember when I used to think thoughts other than I can’t breathe, my nose is so stuffed up, 31 weeks and ohmygodmyvaginabonehurts?
I don’t know what this photo has to do with anything here but it reminds me of something, you know?
Me, too.
I am on a beach on an island in a world with a strange woman whose nipples are white. We’re talking white white, the kind of white that made me think, at first, that maybe she had slathered them with zinc oxide or that they had been badly burned and then peeled, whiter than real. That white. Of course this is not the point of my special place, but it is worth noting: the rest of her skin was tan and she lay down with all the nonchalance of a not-American at a topless beach, bending, skin folding, as if she were not her body, white nipples and all. Close by Bryan and I sat on our towels eating figs, playing gin rummy and staring. To this day we still talk about those nipples. Remember? How white they were? That white.
But that is not where I go when I get my blood pressure taken. No, I close my eyes and go somewhere maybe 5 minutes later. Take a deep breath in and walk to the water, Bryan and the girl and the playing cards behind me. Exhale and dive into the gentle waves, bright turquoise like the sound of a plane high in the sky. I smile, my eyes open and I can see everything; it’s hard but entirely possible to laugh underwater. Did you know? At night now I cannot breathe. My nose stuffed, the baby sits somewhere full inside my torso and my throat is warm with the pasta I ate days ago. I cannot breathe and so my chest tightens, grasps, 140/90 and rising. When I blow my nose my nipples leak, the way they are supposed to but still I feel somehow broken.
Which reminds me—of Avent bottles and watery eyes—that one time in grad school I wrote a paper about Philoctetes, the Greek warrior who is bitten on the foot by a snake during the Trojan War. Although he is an expert bowman, the wound festers, suppurates, emitting a smell so horrible that he is left alone on the island of Lemnos to die. The story is ok, I suppose, if you like Greek tales, but what I remember is that my professor wrote in red pen large on my paper: SUPPURATES IS NOT A WORD and I felt defeated. But it is. Was then and still is. Suppurates: to fester, draw, to ooze. Once again back on an island in Greece where I close my eyes and dive in as if I, too, am not my body oozing from nipples not white but there. Just go to my special place, go to my special place, two more months and then some I hold my breath that I cannot breathe and smile.
No, no! Go not to Lethe, ankle bone delicate and proud
Like a bobbi pin for fine hair, *sigh*
Wolf’s bane, droop-headed edema shroud
Bidding adieu, Truth in Beauty, Beauty that must die.
And then I decorated my room with posters of my boobs lined in heavy black eyeliner.
Which means, of course, that in reality I went to Anthropologie and fell in love with this dress.
Knowing that it would be for after the baby. Like a few weeks after, right? I took it to the dressing room just to see how the shoulders would fit, ignored the confusion of the girl as I handed her a size 6 and squeezed past her into the doorway. If you need anything, my name is um, Arden. Um—mkay? And then she shut the door and I could not get the dress on. Like even half of it. My large breast that has become one mottled brown areola like some well-intentioned Doctors Without Borders, only it’s Nipples Without Borders—it would not even fit through the head opening with the side zip opened. So I sat there on the little reclaimed wooden stool in the dressing room with one boob caught in the vise grip neckhole of a seaworthy box-twill horizons dress said to represent pale sand, verdant ground and cool water, and felt very, very sorry for myself, Robert Smith and all.
When I said that I am not a very good pregnant person I did not mean that I am not very good at being a person who is pregnant. Apparently I am very good at that. My body knows just what to do, pops and blows, poofs, poots, bam and pow! Pregnant. I guess what I mean is that I’m not very good at being pregnant and a person. I think how back in the day pregnant women were not really seen out in public. How before Lucille Ball there had been no pregnant women on television. And I think maybe I should have been pregnant back then. Just shuttled away to a room somewhere with soothing wallpaper, left with water and chocolate and a stack of magazines to gestate. Percolate. Emerge months later with faint circles beneath my eyes that only made me look more tragically romantic, my ankle bones once again sharp.
So that’s where I’ve been. And while I cannot promise I won’t disappear again—the wallpaper! It is so pretty!—I can say that I will be back. Someone once told me to never cut your hair while you are pregnant, and I’m guessing the same goes for your blog. I won’t make any rash decisions while this hormonal and not-me, and although I may write secret bad poetry about the lost love of delicate bones and comb my hair forward, I will not cut my hair, myself, or my blog. 28 weeks and counting…
Coo, coo, ca-choo, my friends, though no nation turns it’s lonely eyes to me. This is where I’ve been: taking a glucose tolerance test (which I think I failed), talking to my doc about birthing options, i.e. cut me open and git it out, and reading on Babycenter that Little Lorem Ipsum is now the size of an English hothouse cucumber which would make total sense to me if I were baking a Shephard’s Pie but seeing as how I’m not I have no idea how big my baby might be. Is an English hothouse cucumber bigger than a bread box?
With Zoey I crafted a Birth Plan, typed it up and printed out multiple copies to hand out at the hospital. Included in my Birth Plan: preferred ambiance, push positions, people allowed in the room, pain relief options and props. Yes—props. I had a ball, you know? One of those yoga balls I planned on bouncing on? And Tootsie Pops in case I got dry mouth. I think I thought birth would like going to the circus. But when we left for the hospital at 4am I forgot to bring the ball and when Bryan handed me a Tootsie Pop I threw it down which was around the same time the doctor announced the need for an emergency c-section. You ever heard the one about how to make God laugh? Tell him your plan. Last year when we went to Mexico I unzipped the side pocket of my luggage and found four copies of that 2006 birth plan which never even made it out of the bag.
In 1978 I was 6 and didn’t quite understand why I felt not exactly funny ha ha or funny strange but more of a funny oh watching Erik Estrada in that tight highway patrol uniform. And then came the episode in which Ponch and Jon deliver a baby at the disco and it clicked—this was the mysterious doing it, so I decided then and there that I would do it with Erick Estrada on a disco floor lit with colored lights while everyone politely turned their backs and clapped their hands.
Granted I was a little confused with the logistics of it all, but I still am, so? I think this is my new birth plan. And please tell me you saw this episode because I searched for days trying to find the clip to no avail. All I could find is this riveting number of Ponch grooving it up not moments before he delivers the baby. Totally worth watching if for nothing else than the look of longing on Jon’s face 1:22 seconds in, plus the guy in the back with the white pants is packing it at 2:07. There is a brief moment when you see the pregnant lady dancing at the 0:30sec mark. Do you remember? How she goes into labor and everyone forms one of those solid gold circles around her with their backs turned? How they still kinda’ swing side to side clapping? At 6 I was not quite sure what went on inside of that circle, but at 38 I’m thinking this is my new birth plan. (I might as well make God laugh with something that is actually almost funny.)
And that, my friends, is what you’ve been waiting for. I probably should’ve opened up with Depeche Mode.
xo,
S
