Jun
3
Smoosh
Filed Under Uncategorized | 59 Comments
Dylan seems to be at a particularly binary stage of babydom: either he’s being ridiculously, almost putridly adorable, or he’s a rotten little hell-beast who should be reclassified as a WMD and parachuted into war zones.
One state begs more camera documentation than the other, obviously:
I realize I’m not capable of being entirely objective over here, but I’m pretty sure he’s cute.
He recently discovered his feet, and I can tell he wants so very, very badly to stuff them in his mouth.
Tonight out of nowhere Riley decided he wanted to feed Dylan and although the execution was clumsy, the little scene was so sweet I nearly leapt from my chair in order to delete this entry, because what madness had I been talking about, everything is so miraculous and amazing and heart-shatteringly beautiful; then Riley had a tantrum and Dylan yelled all during the Obama speech and I was all, oh yeah. But still: SO SWEET.
The reddish hair is killing me lately, ditto the flirty expressions.
Lastly,
Ah, can someone hand me the remote? Please?
Jun
2
Room for improvement
Filed Under Uncategorized | 63 Comments
Dylan was sort of a no-good baby last night, screeching and resisting sleep and generally being a tiny little (adorable!) asshole, and at the same time Riley was in his bedroom issuing forth random, I’m-not-asleep-yet tantrumy whines and kicking the wall next to his bed, and I had been planning to get some writing done and then do some yoga before enjoying a late-night bowl of strawberries and Cool Whip and the children were RUINING EVERYTHING, and god, I was just so ridiculously frustrated with it all — stomping around yanking off my yoga clothes and heaving big dramatic sighs and mumbling about how we should just stuff the children in the Dogloo and feeling something like total despair over our damnable choice to become breeders in the first place.
I hate that it often feels like I am scraping the bottom of my reserves, that instead of being capable of taking a deep breath and shouldering my way through the less-fun moments everything all of a sudden seems so impossible, as though I had been enduring days and days of misery instead of five consecutive unpleasant minutes. I hate that I hold my free time so dearly that any imposition on it makes me feel so garment-rendingly bitter.
The other morning I was up early after a difficult night and trying to feed Dylan while he thrashed around and howled and I told JB with great irritation that I didn’t have the patience to deal with children, JEEZ, and JB said without missing a beat that he knew.
“Wait,” I said, stopping the rocking chair and putting the bottle down. “What do you mean, you know? You know the kids require a lot of patience, or you know I don’t have enough?”
“Both, I guess,” JB said.
I told him later how stupidly hurt I was by his response — stupid because it was like telling him I felt soooo fat, waiting for him to exclaim over how skinny I looked, and being upset when he didn’t perform on command. I do think both of us were tired and cranky; I was exaggerating for the sake of complaining, and he probably didn’t much feel like placating me at the time, but I felt like I’d just gotten the world’s worst performance review, made all the more devastating because this job is mission-critical, this is not a job where you fuck around, this is the job of caring for the people I love more than anything on this earth and if I am a screwup at this then there is no hope for me at all.
On the one hand, I think that this job can be hard as hell, and if I sometimes feel resentful and selfish and impatient, maybe that just means I’m human. On the other, I think it’s shameful to admit that, because this is what I signed up for — and my god, this life is so good.
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