• Previous posts

  • Aging is for the weak, and everyone else
  • More short cuts
  • Smol Ketchups
  • What’s the opposite of green juice and deep breathing
  • Living through it all online
  • The Change
  • 18
  • Ok but ALSO:
  • Midlife POV
  • Influence and Dooce
  • Horse therapy
  • You can’t go home again
  • Obsolescence
  • Before and after
  • A cringe confession on friendship

Archives from 2002-2006

Sometimes I think being the parent of a toddler and an infant is not unlike dealing with a mixture of glycerol and nitric acid, which is to say: DEADLY. Someone is always crying, someone is always pooping, and the combined force of their whining has the power to detonate an adult’s temporal lobe at fifty paces.

Other times I see it from a different angle, and instead of all the wrong notes being struck at once I get this sense of a phenomenally rich chord humming away, pitches and durations that pour into every last corner and crack. The little boy often squirms away from my hugs but the baby accepts them with openmouthed wriggling joy. The baby can’t talk to me but the little boy carries out lengthy conversations and surprises me every day with what he knows. The little boy gets mysterious and has Moods, the baby is a wide-open storm of emotions, no subterfuge yet on his horizon. The baby must be eased carefully into sleep, the little boy wants the light left on so he can page through books while curled in his bed. The little boy leans against my leg and tells me he loves me, the baby claps and squeals and burrows his face into the crook of my neck.

If it sometimes feels as though one and one does not equal two, and that I am flailing under the weight of responsibilities and inconveniences and various pains in my ass, it is also — and more often — true that the joy and amazement brought into our lives by having one child has more than doubled. There are so many good things, so much of the time, and it is multifarious, an impossibly, deliciously-balanced landscape.

I was feeling decidedly Grinchy about the holidays a few weeks ago — probably because at that time we still had tentative plans to travel back to Oregon in December, which have thankfully been scrapped in favor of staying in Seattle — but now I’m doing all sorts of ridiculous shit like listening to Christmas music on purpose and buying gifts when there’s PLENTY of time yet to panic and pay rush charges.

I’ve even been wrapping presents, which is a strange exercise in psychology. No matter how many times I do it, I always think it’s going to be an enjoyable activity, and it pretty much never is. I always think that this time I won’t be so terrible at it — I won’t get wads of dog hair stuck in the tape, I’ll be able to do those neat end-box folds, and I’ll measure the paper correctly instead of having to hack at one end once it’s halfway wrapped — but no: every time, my presents look like they were assembled in a mental institution during art therapy, and the entire process makes me vaguely despairing and wishing I’d bought some of those fancy gift bags instead.

JB is secretly jealous of our neighbor whose yard is ablaze with electronic cheer (every time we drive by their house, JB mumbles darkly under his breath and rushes off to buy more LED strings), and I have this seemingly bottomless desire to frill up our house with decorations. I’m not sure what’s going on, but if you catch me perusing a goddamn fruitcake recipe, please slap some sense into me.

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