Jun
2
Room for improvement
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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.
May
30
Allsorts
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I take back every bad thing I once said about Twitter, because not only am I finding it entertaining, but useful, too. I posted (I cannot bring myself to say “tweeted”, okay? I HAVE LIMITS) that I was looking for a picture of this contestant’s hair from Wednesday’s episode of So You Think You Can Dance and boom, two awesome people totally helped me out. Here’s the hair, and dude, is that a cute style or what? I kind of want to bring it to my stylist and be all MAKE ME LOOK LIKE HER, but I’m also thinking that’s a ‘do with some maaaaaaaaajor upkeep. Still! So cute!
I’m sort of hating my hair right now because it’s growing out of its cut (clearly what I need is a style that will require even more trips to the salon, duh) and the bangs are at this awkward length when it comes to working out — they’re too long to just wear as usual, because as soon as I get sweaty they flop down in my right eye and if I try and push them out of the way they look hideous and won’t stay put, and they’re too short to efficiently tuck behind an ear or something. Last night I went to a new gym class with what basically amounted to two ponytails high up on either side of my head, holding back as much hair as possible, while the shorter back and sides just flopped down like a mullet. SEXY. Not that it mattered what my hair looked like, since the class ended up being a series of conditioning drills including many, many pushups and something horrific involving keeping your weight on your hands while you sort of jump your feet back and forth in a big lunge-running motion (I don’t know what that’s called except maybe the Hot Painful Death Lung-Puke Routine) and by the time it was all over I pretty much resembled some particularly disgusting piece of human special effects from CSI: 24 Hour Fitness.
Also, speaking of the gym, I think it would be fun to do a series of character studies from that place, maybe take some photos and put it all together into a nice coffee table book. There would be Loud Grunty Free Weight Guy, and Spectacularly Odorous Hefty Dude On Elliptical, and Short-Shorts Hip Hop Class Girl, and Embarrassed Lady Reluctantly Working With Personal Trainer, and Cocky Meathead in Massive-Armhole’d Tank Top, and of course me, the Pretending to Take a Water Break While Actually Avoiding Round Five of Those Motherfucking Pushups Girl.
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Weekly Elsewhere Blogging Wrap-up:
• Embarrassing children’s items and life with Riley at ParentDish
• A milestone reached and more 3-month thoughts at Gather.com
• Father’s Day gift ideas, round two*; Kid’s storage solutions at Work It, Mom!
• Lynda Barry*, sewn art, Facebook advertising*, and eyebrow maintenance at SundryBuzz
* These posts written by everyone’s favorite blogger, Swistle
(By the way, does this little section bug you? I figure you can just skip it if it’s not of interest, but if it smacks too heavily of sticky self promotion, just say so! You won’t hurt my feelings. MUCH.)
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Lastly, I put this on Flickr the other day and I watch it whenever I need a quick laugh:
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My product review site:
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