now fortified with impotent fury!risperdal

Ah, New Mexico

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Quick sidebar (hah! quick! me! Tehee!). I did, in fact, find a pediatrician, the second person I talked to, and one floor up from Dr. Psycho Hosebeast (thus, she is not in the same practice). She is wonderful. She listens. She feels that given our grasp of science, medicine, and our combined medical histories that even though we’re first time parents we are not talking out of our asses re: formula. Hoo. Freakin. Rah. (She also has children, which lends her a certain attitude of ‘my god, the first 3 months are horrible enough- the sleep deprivation is worse than when I was a resident on call- why would you knowingly do something likely to give yourself a fussy gassy spit-uppy baby?’)

So Saturday noonish I came home to a fully decorated house and a baker’s dozen of the folks nearest and dearest to me in the world, who had braved east coast storms and LA to KC red eye flights to descend upon me and the lad and pre-welcome the snarklet appropriately. I cannot possibly say how wonderful and sniffly inducing this was. And it was completely- except for some of the confetti and stuff- completely un babyshowerish. My mother did say, with an impish grin, that she was going to have a devil of a time explaining this to my grandmother, who would insist on knowing how the house was decorated, and what games we played, and what food was served, and what the cake looked like. Nana is unlikely to grok how very wonderful, and very us, and very right a party consisting of us and our friends lying around, whapping each other in the head with ‘chinese’ yo-yos, eating sandwiches and drinking beer or specialty sodas or wine, and a cake devoid of flowers or babies or foo really was.

In essence, we all hung out and snarked for several hours, and caught up, and laughed at my belly as the snarklet did a rhumba occasionally, and every so often a couple of us would go and hang in a different room- which was lovely. Lovely to catch up with R and E and A and others. Some folks had gotten a bit mislocated in driving around, and had noticed the mega churches, so we filled them in on that whole phenomenon, which caused quite the discussion- especially when I brought up the faiths of the world sermon series going on at the methodist megachurch, and how the sermon on buddhism came across to the parishoners as ‘buddhists believe life is suffering and there’s no loving god to take comfort in, thus its a hopeless painful religion’. Dog Faced Boy immediately responded, “Yes. Now marvel as I break these boards with my head!” See? Not your normal baby shower. (Also, your normal baby shower would not then adjourn to the local faux irish pub).

We all met up on the plaza the next morning for brunch, and ambled the plaza together, groups peeling off for the airport until it was just Leather Pants Grrl, the Lad and I left. Some genius- who I do not remember- did not believe how bad Pottery Barn Kids could be, and insisted on seeing it, so the whole snarky passel of us went off, and oh man. Completely gender separated. Pink irons for the girls. In a fab moment, someone said, “But why no chain saws for the boys?”, a saleswoman overheard, and cooed, ‘But we DO have chainsaws for the boys, right over here!’ Matilda began to twitch and threaten to spell out ‘fuck you male oppressors’ in the overpriced plywood letters, and Leather Pants Grrrl walked around shrieking, and King of the Hill People took great delight in pointing out the it’s a boy and it’s a girl signs in case we were so dense we couldn’t get it without help. Which meant, we concluded, that the sage green nursery set was for ‘It’s a Hermaphrodite!’

And lo, a good time was had by all, I think. Heavens knows I did. And the neighbors, who thought it was just darling, darling I tell you, that our friends did this, are most confused by gifts which included a black velvety hoodie and pants for the wee little slacker (from Leather Pants Grrrl, who apparently walked through the downtown shopping district in her city saying aloud, ‘Oh poor wench. Oh poor wench.”), a black onesie with skull, a book called ‘operating instructions’, and a card with a pic of the carseat we registered for (cosco’s alpha omega) proclaiming ‘I am the alpha and the omega, you shall have no other car seat before me!’, among other fabulous, thoughtful, wonderful things (they still don’t get the baby einstein tapes. A crocheted blankie they can understand, but it’s not in typical baby colors, so….).

Like I said elsewhere. I have the bestest friends.

This weekend is wholly different from last- this weekend is framed by ass laziness, unlike last weekend. Last Thursday, the darling Leather Pants Grrl arrived for a weekend of scaring the norms, which commenced nearly immediately as I declared entirely too loudly, as she exited the plane, “I didn’t realize you were booked on the Flight of Businessmen.” After lunch with the Lad near campus, we hied back to the Casa de la Suburbia, and proceeded to lie around and watch Nigella Bites, laughing our asses off and being horrified at the Bacon Salad with Bacon Fat Vinaigrette With Enormous Cheese Curls. She, the Lad, and I went off to 40 Sardines for dinner that night, where her leather pants and our very loud and raucous discussion of film history earned us many glares from the whitebread couple 2 tables down and slavering glances from men elsewhere in the restaurant.

The next day, while the Lad, you know, worked, I blew off clients to laze around with LPG and expose her to the traumatizing horror that is Babies R Us. Babies R Us is horror filled for so very many reasons- the strict gender identification, the toys which just never should have been invented, the heterosexuality and assumption of happy coupledom that exudes from the place, despite the fact that some atrocious family dramas play out there on a daily- if not hourly- basis. What better place for a pair of fierce quasi urban grrrls- who, I might point out, are rather chummy, to the point where People Were Clearly Wondering. It was delightful to be in the store with someone who agrees with us on the badness of some of the names. For instance, would you garb your puling moppet in a onesie which declared “Baby Safari”? What’s the implication- we’re off hunting baby animals, or we’re off hunting human babies? Either way, it’s bad- I want the winter line of the clothes to feature baby harp seals if it’s the former, and if it’s the latter it puts a whole new spin on Teddy Roosevelt’s founding of the National Park System. LPG really couldn’t keep it together when we hit the toy section, featuring toys from a brand named- I’m serious- ‘Tiny Love’. One of their products is the ever present interlocking rings, which they unwisely named ‘Tiny Love Fun Rings’. A toy designed to stimulate touch was dubbed the ‘Tiny Love New Sensations’. Plus there’s the fabulous soft book entitled ‘Who Loves Baby?’ which LPG picked up, said aloud, and flipped it open- to discover blank pages (turns out it’s a photo album). The blankness startled us for a moment, until we both yelled, “Who Loves Baby? No one!. This, coupled with our antics attempting to purchase a mattress, lead us to declare, “Today in Johnson County, a pair of renegade lesbians was spotted in the Babies R Us.” This became something of a theme.

And, well, Friday night she and the Lad bonded while I went to the high school musical that a neighbor kid was starring in, and the next day we went off to buy high quality frommage and caffeinate LPG some more. When we came back, I found that the tingly roach sense which had been bugging me- I knew something was up, but not precisely what- was, in fact, correct, as I popped open the back door and caught sight of an assload of crepe paper streamers and balloons in the kitchen. “Honey?” I yelled. “There’s clearly someone in the house.” And lo, let the cracking up commence.

I’d write more, right now, but as I mentioned at the outset, this is the weekend of laziness. Thus, the Telling of the Shower Weekend later today. Or tomorrow.

I need to write up the lovely saga of this weekend, which was el surprise baby shower featuring a coast to coast assemblage of many of the people I love most in the world, and it was fabulous and snarky and relaxing and just great.

Too bad I have a rant from yesterday I must get out. One of the joys of pregnancy is the expectation that, well, you’ll have a puling infant at the end of it, an infant that requires medical care. Which means you have to find a pediatrician or family practitioner. Which means you have to navigate the maze of insurance coverage, doctors who are accepting new patients, and then begin interviewing the doctors. Doctors’ offices are set up for this, setting aside time for ‘pre natal’ meetings, wherein you meet large swaths of the office staff and, by the end of it, find yourself blinking at a doctor for 90 seconds as you try to figure out what you ought to be asking them. I mean, what the hell are you supposed to ask the doctor, especially when in the lead up you’ve asked it all of the neonatal nurse, the regular nurse, the patient liason nurse, the lab tech guy, and chuck the janitor?

Well, that was an unfounded worry on my part, because I didn’t even have to open my mouth in order to hate this pediatrician with the white hot fire of a thousand burning suns. I have a complex and bizarre medical history from my youth, involving a really ugly syndrome (now nearly completely resolved, woo) which meant I was a dreadfully ill infant. I spent a great deal of time in the hospital, hooked up to an IV, unable to consume any food other than liquid strawberry banana jello. In terms of symptoms, one aspect was similar to celiac, but this wasn’t a case of allergies, it was a case of my entire digestive system shutting down and rejecting itself. Needless to say, this is a concern. And the Lad was allergic to breast and cow’s milk, and so was on goat’s milk formula as a baby.

One has to meet with the neonatal nurse, who also happens to be the lactation consultant (sidebar. Lactation consultant. How very American. I can just picture someone from another country looking at us as though we’re insane.) prior to meeting with the doctor. She takes a full history- including what your jobs are so they have a sense of who they’re dealing with- and so we had a very amiable discussion around the inborn metabolic diseases and our options for testing on them. You know you’ve made your case for not even trying breastfeeding when the lactation consultant- a woman paid to tout the benefits of the allmighty milk flowin cachonga- looks at you and says, “You know. Have you considered just…starting with formula? Probably soy based?” And yet, when the doctor came in, despite the extensive medical history the lactation consultant had taken, started in with:

Dr.: Perching on exam table and hovering menacingly over Wench as she delivers 5 minute monolog on why I should try breastfeeding and how it relates to later allergies.

Wench: Icily informing doctor this is a decision the Wench and Lad have given serious thought and consideration, and we are comfortable in our conclusion.

Dr.: Waving hand to dismiss this and emphasizing that we really haven’t given it due thought, and- this is what really made my blood boil- asking me if I was confident in my doctors’ (allergist, gastroenterologist, and childhood pediatrician) recommendations, did I really trust them, cause this sounded a little odd, and really, was I sure my mother wasn’t exaggerating how sick I was as a baby. Woman, would you like to see the itemized deductions from their tax returns, showing over 20 fucking percent of my father’s salary went to doctors, hospitals, pharmacies, and specialized infant formulas from 1973 until 1978? Would you like to see my baby book where my poor, sainted, exhausted mother wrote, one fine day, “Hurrah! She kept down a teaspoon of formula for 3 minutes! Longest yet!” Or perhaps she’d prefer the entry that states, “Wench in hospital again. Can’t find veins anymore so doing PIC line. Funeral director keeps calling, I told him to fuck off. Wait, I shouldn’t have written that in here. Wench, as you read this 20 years later, I’m sorry.”

Wench: Icily informs doctor I trust my other clinicians and my mother.

Dr.: Another effort to convince me about breastfeeding. And uses the phrase ‘it’s the perfect food and so not allergenic, and so you’re denying your baby the best start.’

Wench: Steam commences to pour from ears.

And believe it or not, it went downhill from there. She didn’t listen as I inquired if the other docs in the practice had areas of interest- and I specifically said NOT specialists- so that if allergy or GI issues came up we’d see one of them instead, and she gave me a song and dance about how if I was really so worried about that I should go with a pediatrician from one of the children’s mercy hospitals, since they could get me into a specialist that much faster. And then when I asked if she performed circumcisions, she waved a hand again and allowed as how- and please bear in mind, on the history she had in her hand is said in no fewer than 3 places that I’m Jewish- ‘there’s no point in doing it other than social. I mean, people just do it because it’s trendy or they think it looks better.’

This woman will never touch my child. I don’t care if she is rounding at the hospital on the morning the sprog enters the world, I will physically bar her from touching him, preferably involving as much bloodshed as I can manage to inflict on her judgemental, psycho hosebeast ass. Then I will brain her with a Cosco sized drum of Similac Isomil powdered formula, as a final indignity to visit upon her.

Not with a bang, but with a slow slide into total mediocrity. #100, here I come!

85. I have 10 certified copies of my father’s death certificate in my files, so that I may, at the drop of a hat, prove he’s dead. This comes from the joys of having owned stock jointly with him when I was a minor, and every so often I get a letter from someone informing me that due to a split/buyout/act of God in 1987, my father and I jointly own 3 shares of Energizer and gosh they’d like to buy them back from me, and then I have to prove he’s dead. Because digging him up each time would be damned inconvenient.

86. I also carry a copy of my marriage license with me at all times when on the road or dealing with anything- and I mean anything- official, as the amount of trouble the Lad and I have had with different last names is astonishing.

87. Despite what the 2 above points would imply, I really don’t think I’m that anal. I just hate hate hate bureacracy.

88. I hate the care bears with even more passion than I hate bureacracy. In fact, I didn’t even own a teddy bear till I was 10, and really don’t know what the big deal about stuffed bear above all others is. This, of course, doesn’t even begin to compute with my MIL, who worships all things stuffed ursine.

89. I keep our house journal in a lab research notebook. Yes, I’m a freak.

90. Every year since I started grad school I have, without fail, gotten a squeezy stress ball from someone for Christmas. In fact, colleagues and clients took to giving me squeezy brains. What does this say about my stress level? Or, perhaps, my Mad Scientist Quotient?

91. I am Pro-Choice. Yes, pregnancy has not changed that. In fact, it’s strengthened it.

92. I don’t like having a cellphone. I consider it an electronic leash, of sorts, but the whole consultant thing means I need one. In some sort of childish recalcitrance, I refuse to program it heavily, nevermind that taking the time to do that would make my life so much easier. I know. Estupido.

93. I have this weird issue with spending gift certificates. I love getting them. And then I horde them. Especially Amazon. God help me if S&H ever makes a comeback, I’ll have millions of stamps piled up.

94. I am a fountain pen whore. No, really. And a sucker for the wee little bottles of fancy italian inks. This is not the most brilliant thing to have artfully arrayed on the shelves of my office, which is connected to the to be nursery. I might as well display my collection of knives and food processor blades, glass objects and rare books there, too.

95. I have this strange compulsion to collect bits of ephemera from trips, and then put them in elegant, hand-made paper journals or sleek shadow boxes, in snarky shrines to places I’ve been and food I’ve consumed. It’s like the dark side of scrapbooking. This means I have a comprehensive record of the debauchery that was Canada, tho.

96. I loathe cockroaches. Yet I will cheerfully pick up non poisonous snakes and lizards.

97. The only times I have managed to 1. watch an entire episode of oprah and 2. watch an entire J-Lo movie were when I had the killer death flu and a 103 fever.

98. I do my own taxes. This will lead to much wailing and gnashing of teeth, and I think next year we’ll cave and get an accountant. But for now, je handle. So long as I don’t do any of it on a monday, it’s all good.

99. My closet is a fucking pit. I swear it has its own gravitational force.

100. I’m rather fond of my life.

Pregnancy and motherhood really force one to lose any sense of squeamishness. You find yourself doing things, checking things, analyzing things, cleaning things, and recleaning things you never, in a million years, in your previous swanky urbane sleek snarky existence, imagined yourself 1.. paying attention to 2. dealing with on a highly personal level. I thought I’d hit the bottom of the ‘I have no shame’ moment when I was spitting out wine against a dumpster in a back alley on Beaujolais Nouveau release day, but oh, oh today topped it.

I was curled up in bed, chatting with the whores and dealing with work calls and emails, before throwing myself in the shower and having a honest to god grown up meeting. A face to face one. Like, where I had to throw on a shirt that fit and pressed slacks and high heeled boots, and actually wear makeup. Well, makeup’s a given these days, as I have hormone driven zits along my jawline that hurt like a mofo and are the approximate size of Mt. Doom, and as impervious to any normal acne treatment as Washington is unswayed by rational thought. Anyway, I looked down and realized, with horror, that though I am but 28 weeks into this adventure, the man eatin cachongas have grown bored with merely expanding to hot air balloon like proportions, and have decided to start producing…stuff. (Yes, I know the technical term). Stuff which must be free and escape.

On the day I have to look decent. Fabulous. Suddenly my morning became much more frantic, as I showered and dressed and raced to the Walgreen’s to buy nursing pads. You know, I didn’t realize what a, er, ordeal this would be. I’m not actually nursing, I just need to wad something down there so I don’t have two wet spots staring my colleagues in the face I don’t need them to be branded by the trendy ‘pumping’ apparatus. I just need discs of absorbent foo that don’t crinkle when I move. Of course I got Grandpa McFriendly as the checkout dude, whom I promptly mortified. And of course, their bathroom is closed. Fine. I go across to the amoco- my options for places with bathrooms prior to getting on the highway for the half hour drive to the meeting are pretty limited- and guess what? THEIR bathroom is closed!

This would be how some truck drivers on- I am not kidding- I-69 (69. Hee, I’m 12) were treated to the view of a woman in a volvo unbuttoning her french blue shirt and ramming things down into her bra. Then jiggling to test for unduly crackly noises. Then readjusting. Then jiggling again.

I’m not even going to BE breastfeeding. Is there some tap to turn these damn things off?

Elle is cursing my fair name, saying she’s going to have to resort to things like ‘I like string’. I’m cursing my own name plenty, as shortly I’m going to have to resort to things like, ‘I enjoy breathing’. Let’s see how shallow and short we can be, eh?

71. There are many kids books and SF/Fantasy books that folks like sanj and R devoured, that I have never read. I hunkered down with nonfiction, plus lived in a local that wasn’t warm towards sf/fantasy.

72. In that vein, my guitar teacher was arrested, but not charged, for teaching 10 year old me rock music, as the local authorities felt this was corruption of a minor.

73. I have all the artistic skill of a limbless newt. This has not stopped me from undertaking a mural in the baby’s room, because I am insane.

74. I cannot funtion on a normal, 8 ounce cup of coffee in the morning. Oooooh no.

75. Black is my favorite color, followed by midnight blue, silver grey, and coffee. Black is not, however, the color of my true love’s hair.

76. I don’t believe in soulmates. Yeah, the Lad and I are clearly poifect for each other, but the whole sappy-whine-Oprah like connotations of ’soul mate’ make my flesh crawl.

77. In one 3 week span of time, my purity test score (500 question version) dropped 20 points.

78. By the time I graduated college, it had descended a total of 60 points. Yet I’ve never had sex on an aircraft carrier or shot heroin into my eyeballs, had sex with a corpse or done odd things with bodily fluids. Some might say my youth has thus been wasted.

79. My biggest fight with my mother in the past 10 years has been over the fact that I made it through college without learning how to roll a joint. She sees this as indicative of my having wasted the opportunity of being away from my parents’ watchful eye. This would be the same woman who informed me, when I’d been with my college boyfriend for 2 years, that she hoped, if we were talking marriage, that I slept around before committing to him for the rest of my life, as I shouldn’t ‘buy the first car you test drive’.

80. I find it impossible to sit through a movie on tape or DVD in one go. I must, at some point, hit pause and go do something else.

81. In fact, I have the attention span of a cat. Liberal arts was a good choice for me, research science baaaaaad. Yet, I plowed through Goblet of Fire in one sitting, no matter how many shiny objects the lad rattled at me.

82. One of the things annoying me most about pregnancy is the feeling that I am wearing sweatpants at all times, because nothing has a zipper. I will do a fucking mazurka the first time I put on a pair of pants that zip again.

83. Je adore wombats.

84. My favorite museum in DC is the Sackler, but for sheer jaw dropping ness, the old Library of Congress is just incredible. I mean, wow. We do have library of congress cards, which do, in fact, count as a federal form of photo id.

And now I am lame, and must get back to work. Blah, next time, this ends!

Our weekend lives, while never entirely predicatble, have a certain rhythm, regardless of the details. I wake up first, and goad the lad into going downstairs and making coffee. I grab my mug and flop on the couch, flipping on the tv for the weather and news while the Lad potters about, checking email or showering. He wakes up after a shower; I wake up after having had coffee, so perhaps it’s understandable that it took both of us a few minutes to comprehend what we were seeing yesterday morning. I saw it first, and thought, “Morons, the anniversary was 3 days ago, why are you playing tape now?”, and when I figured it out, I yelled for him and had to shout, ‘The shuttle exploded’ to get him to move his ass downstairs. He called his mother and in a voice he had used only once before- when he had to call his new yorker parents and tell them about the WTC- and said the same thing as he did that morning- ‘Mom, turn on the tv’. I did much the same, and my mother, keenly intelligent woman that she is, after saying, “Again?” and I ascerbically responded that this was the Columbia, they couldn’t very well lose the same shuttle twice, said, “This will be a very hard day for you and me. Call me if you need me.”

We are not a military family, nor are we a space family. I wasn’t one of those children obsessed with space, I didn’t go to camp in Huntsville- unlike the lad. His family regards it as patriotic duty, as the exploratory destiny of America, one of the noblest things one can do, something to aspire to. I regard it from more of a scientific viewpoint- really cool, don’t get me wrong- but I somehow manage to view it devoid of the American context. His dad worked for Grummond, and had the lad’s eyesight not been so bad, he was all ready to go navy ROTC and become a pilot.

What I do have, though, is memory. For 5 years we lived on the space coast. My friends’ parents all worked for NASA or NASA subcontractors. The space program was a part of our lives, as much as church is for some. My father was in Florida getting the job that moved us there when Columbia first launched, and brought me back a commemorative coin. We moved at the end of the 1985-86 school year, our lives bookended by the shuttle. Every night shuttle launch, every rocket, every satellite, we went up on the roof of our 2 story house and watched. I remember that, for some reason, there always seemed to be a satellite launch on the dog’s birthday. My parents did the lottery and got tickets to an actual launch, and we picnicked on the grounds at KSC; the launch was delayed 6 or so hours, and my dad got a vicious sunburn on his mostly bald head. Daytime launches, the schools pulled the fire alarm so we could all tromp outside and watch, close enough to make out the shape, the color, the nuances of the contrails. We were a bunch of well versed 10 year old analysts. Our science and history classes tromped off to KSC at least 4 times per year for field trips, and to this day I can give both the blue and red tours from memory.

That January day, my dad was working at home as a consultant, typing at his computer, facing out the big picture window that looked to the north. Mom was gardening. I was in school, a twelve year old 8th grader, and when the fire drill was pulled I wriggled away from my geeky honors english classmates and found my friends. One of our teachers- the head of the excuse to go to disney and to the beach and airboating in the Everglades science club- had been a semi finalist in the teacher in space program, eventually being eliminated because he was a smidge too tall, and so we all knew far too much about this flight. I couldn’t see, the crowd was so thick for this one, and so T.J. and Todd, who had both, at the age of 14, broken the 6-3 mark, hoisted me onto their shoulders so I could see and do play by play.

My mother paused in her gardening. All over the block, mothers looked up, shading their eyes from the sun, the trowels falling out of their hands.

My father leaned over and looked past the computer monitor, his partial deafness keeping him from hearing the sound distinctly, but he recalled the hail-like rain of grey and black told him something was terribly wrong.

I was told I was the one who did not scream. I was told I kept narrating, until I just suddenly stopped and started yelling for Todd and TJ to put me down. I don’t remember that, but I remember the sudden inhalation of 500 teenagers, as we all watched and knew. Knew because we lived there. Knew because we played basketball against the kids of the astronauts, and had parties on the beach, and ran our fingers over the plaques of engineering patents at our friends’ houses. Knew, as we gathered in the courtyard of the school, where tv monitors had been hastily set up, and surfer boys with their blond hair and lazy, pot-addled expressions screamed at the tvs, “they’re DEAD, you idiots, we know it, why don’t YOU?” 3 months later, one of those surfers, a friend of mine named John, shish-kabobed a florida politican who had gone up on the previous flight, asking him point blank in a ‘come to talk to the student senate and the science club’ little press stop, if he felt at all responsible for the death of Gregory Jarvis, for in getting to go on the previous flight, he bumped Jarvis onto Challenger. There was something grimly glorious in watching a man in a 900 dollar suit sweat under the damning glare of a ragtag surf rat in a faded ron jon t-shirt.

The Lad is full of present pain and anger. I cannot stop replaying a cold January day, 17 years old, in my head. I am almost 13 again, and I am thinking of the children without parents. I am thinking of the families who will never be able to lift their eyes heavenward, and not see- for fond memory or pained remembrance- death. In one way or another, be it through the power of the mind or the brute force of the rocket, the dreamy gaze of creation or the stalwart belief in heaven, the stars are our destination. I’m just not sure how we’re meant to get there, now.