Who's on First?

I've spent the better part of my life trying to make the world stand still. As it turns out, that's no easy feat. Much of the time I find myself swimming upcurrent until I succumb to exhaustion and am pushed downstream, waving and flailing and praying I'm not thrown upon the rocks. I figure that worrying is like feverishly battling against the flow of water - it's a futile attempt at control and a fight you ultimately can't win. And yet there's always something that drives me to turn against the tide and swim like hell. As if swimming will keep me from being forced into the unknown hurdles. Clearly I'm not a 'go with the flow' kind of gal.

Recently my little family and I have found ourselves bumping along under the turbulent currents of change. G got himself a new job working out of the house (which I continue to imagine looks a lot like channel surfing/bon-bon gorging in unwashed sweat pants until I see evidence to the contrary). This is a vast departure from the 'establishment' position he previously had - and while I'm always supportive of his decisions, we're arguably past that point in our lives where "Damning the Man" is still practical. This is where the river starts to pick up a bit.

As it happens I have also been presented with a new career opportunity. A good one. A damn good one. And one that just fell into my lap as if God were saying "sorry I knocked your kid's tooth out, how 'bout I do ya a solid and we'll call it by gones." This is where any rational person would scream "yes" and flee from their current desk leaving only paper clips and post-its in their wake. Of course I, on the other hand, take this as an opportunity to stay awake at night trying to poke holes into everything ("Hello gift horse? Let's take a look at that mouth!") And just like that I've constructed my own crossroad - one road leading to "Career" and the other, it would seem, to "Successful parenthood". I know, in the deep shadowed corners of myself (the ones with all the cobwebs that I keep from everyone else) that I've kept my career on the backburner. On low simmer. In the years since I graduated law school I've been focused on baby more than JD. Well before C was even on the perceptable horizon. That was what I wanted for myself - to be there for my children. To be present in every step of their childhood. To be the sun in their little universes...because I know that time is fleeting. There is a very finite window of time during which I can be that big of a presence in their lives. Where my kisses heal their scrapes and bruises. Where they come to me for comfort. Where I'm the clown. The storyteller. The singer. The chef. The coach. The purveyor of how it is in the world. Because once that time is gone...it's gone. And my role will inevitably be distributed to various others...friends, teachers, teammates, girlfriends and boyfriends. And I honestly don't know what happens, what role I'll be relegated to, once that time comes. And that starts me swimming.

The other road, the Career road, seems to have it's deadlines and due dates too. Other colleagues and friends of mine that are of the same age and same education have managed to make it a lot further than I have in that span of time. They work late hours. Weekends. They wine and dine and mix and mingle. They've been on that road full steam - where I diverged to be at home more. But the longer I do that the less chance there is of ever navigating the path that I was educated to walk. For the most part, I was okay with that. Until, of course, I wasn't.

My father always used to tell me that "you can't get to second with your foot still on first." We had a lot of sports metaphors in our family. I liked that one best, I think. Because I was always reaching for second without wanting to leave the safety of first. I didn't want to take the risk. I didn't trust myself. I couldn't conjure up the confidence to just go for it. And if I couldn't go for it, I couldn't go anywhere. Sadly, the sentiment was applicable to a number of areas of my life. I would stay in relationships long past their expiration date. I would lament graduating from any school or program because it meant transitioning to the scary unknown of the next. I would stay at a position where my potential was limited because I was just so afraid that if I strove for more I could fail. At everything. And, as of late, I've grown tired of being afraid.

Upon resigning from my position I clung to the delusion that people would be cheering me on (*images and sound bites from Chariots of Fire may be applicable*). For whatever reason I really wasn't prepared for the general question to be "So you're going to be a Stay at Home Mom?" Nope. I'm a Kick Ass At Work Mom. Mommy, Esq. Since my announcement I've been collecting skeptical faces like trading cards. Normally this might completely undermine me...but today I choose otherwise. I don't know how I'm going to bridge these two paths...but I'm not exactly foraging through unseen territory here. I am not the first woman to pursue both professional and maternal ambitions. So today I choose both. Today I stop fighting the current and start steering the waters. Bring on the obstacles - I can't see you, but I know you're out there. Today I choose second base.

Nothing but the Tooth

Ever think to yourself that "things couldn't get any worse" only to immediately realize that the universe has jinxed you for such a pessimistically naive notion? Yeah. I did that last week. On the heels of having my child call another woman "Mama" I threw my hands up to the world and thought that we couldn't possibly be teetering on the precipice of anything else that could in any way construe that I'm a terrible mother. Upon hearing that, God gave me a swift kick in the ass. On my third day of voicelessness I succumbed to the need to see a doctor who tapped my glands, chalked it up to bronchitis and prescribed some serious horse pills. Figuring it made sense to swing by the pharmacy before picking up baby C from daycare I spent the next twenty minutes hunkered in line at the neighborhood Walgreens. Whilst in line my phone rang. It was C's daycare - and, in the year he's been there, I've come to realize that whenever I'm the recipient of a call from daycare during the day I should automatically trigger the Mommy panic alarm button and commence headless chicken meltdown. This call was no different.

"Hi there, it's [Daycare]." (You know, the one your child actually calls "Mama").

My inaudible squeaking.

"You may want to get a hold of a local emergency room."

Frantic squeaking.

"So, C was out in the play yard today when he decided to pick up a piece of chalk..."

At this point I was wildly waving my hands, irate at my own inability to speak, and utterly pissed off that she couldn't see my hand signals through the phone. Get to the point Woman!  What's wrong with my son?!

"...and he tripped over his foot and fell right into the pavement. He's bleeding a little bit but he's stopped screaming..."

It's unnerving how quickly, after becoming a mother, I'm able to go from rational human being to psychopath. I'm standing at the pharmacy counter with my arms loaded with kiddie Valentine's items and I'm simultaneously envisioning gory neck wringing (How could you let this happen to my precious baby?!), sobbing in bronchital squeals into the phone while tendering money to the cashier for my antibiotics.

"...I think that he may have chipped his tooth but it's difficult to see how bad the fracture is. You're probably going to want to see an after-hours dentist for this. I think it's ok but if the fracture is bad it might break off while he's sleeping and he could choke on it..."

I proceed to do what any non-hypertensive person would do: sprint out to the car to repeatedly call my husband as though my hair was on fire and he's the only person on the planet with a bucket of water. Unable to reach him (after seventeen or so tries in a three minute period) I unknowingly leave a "frustrated" message on his voicemail. And by frustrated I mean ragingly insane. This would later be played back to me over and over...and over again by my husband as he shakes his head in that it's moments like these when I forget why I married you, you neurotic drama queen kind of way. I may be paraphrasing but I think it sounded something like:

"DAMMIT!! Dammit pick up the phone!" (Sob) "Why?! Whhhyyyyyyy?!" (only, of course, I had no voice so the sounds are coming in staccato squeaks like I have the voice of a fourteen year old boy in the throws of puberty).

When I arrived at Daycare, C seemed fine minus a little chip of tooth missing off his right front tooth. Silly me - I almost completely overreacted to a minor incident. Good thing I kept my composure!  Everything is fine...

Until I get him home, of course, where I hold him under a light to get a good look at that little chip. Hold on, is that blood? I touch the tooth ever so slightly with my pinky finger and the whole damn thing pops back like a garage door. PANIC! PANIC! PANIC! I looked like a trained responder before this moment. Now the situation has become completely bifurcated (Before: Mildy perturbed, Now: Bat*shit*crazy). I return to leaving messages on my husband's phone ("I know I said he was okay but now he isn't! We need an ambulance! We need a doctor now! 911!) as though the tooth is going to fall out and get lodged in my child's heart somehow.

Moments later my husband walks in the door bearing McDonald's. I am starting to draw a bright line between McDonald's, my husband, and serious medical pain as the last time I remember having McDonald's was on the way to the hospital, after my water had broken, on the night C was born. It was 2am and I was standing on the tile floor of a McDonald's under those florescent lights with my pants sopping wet listening to the girl behind the counter ask when I was due and my husband cheerily answer "Right now!" while my first real contraction hit. I am starting to have a Pavlov's dog reaction to McDonald's. I believe every time I see a Big Mac going forward I am going to have a panic attack.

We decide, after a lengthy call with the Emergency Room attendant, that since it would be a good 5-6 hour wait in the triage room before they even paged the on-call Dentist, to let C get some sleep and make an emergency dentist visit first thing in the morning. Up until this point, my son is looking at me like I'm nuts (which, I imagine, I will have to get used to) as he isn't in pain and is just annoyed that I'm not letting him eat any solid foods or gnaw on his sippy cup.

So, at the dentist the next day, we get the news: the tooth needs to come out. At this point I've entertained enough freak out moments that I actually take the news calmly and with dignity (minus a subtle tear or two). C has cracked the darn thing from the bottom to the top straight down the center and there's just no saving it. Who knew that they didn't make false baby teeth? They assured us that the procedure was quick and easy, just a bit of numbing and he'll be right as rain right after. Just down one front tooth.

I think every mother experiences at least one moment, likely a whole lot more, where you look to your child and tell them that you would do anything to take their place to spare them the pain. I said it right then. And God I meant it.

As promised C was in and out in only a few minutes - and we have the first tooth to hand off to the Tooth Fairy, just five or so years early. He hasn't batted an eye about the whole incident since and just looks like a rougher, tougher version of his sweet little self. It sounds stupid to admit it but there was a part of me that needed to grieve the loss of it. Of a tooth of all things. I knew from the look of it the night before that this tooth was coming out and there's a part of me that lamented that he would be different than how I was used to seeing him. But once the doc delivered the news I just sort of sucked it up for the sake of my son - because he had been so tough through the whole ordeal and because there are times when I am able to rise outside of myself and appreciate that I need to be tough, in turn, for him.

It's been over a week since all of this happened and the funny thing is...I haven't been tempted to bemoan our 'poor luck' or to assure myself that nothing worse could happen. Not because I'm afraid of the "wink and snap" jinx from the universe but because I'm damn lucky that I'm as fortunate as I am. That we're as fortunate as we are. I do have a little more perspective now. Because he could've fallen and broken his nose or cracked his head open. Because of a lot of things. So, I derived a little truth from the tooth. And of all things, this admitted pessimist is trying to look on the bright side :)

Shoots and Ladders

I lost my voice yesterday which has never happened to me before. I don't think it would normally amount to a hill of beans except that I'm fairly certain my toddler possesses an acute ability to sense weakness and is exploiting my vocal inabilities with Wile-E cartoon precision. I begrudgingly trundled out of bed this morning and began the slow march into the kitchen to find my son elbows deep in our garbage can. I opened my mouth to let out a mighty Mom yawp of "NOOoooooooo!" but no sound came out. Baby C began digging further though last night's discarded left overs as I lunged towards him arms a-flailing. I love my husband for allowing me to sleep in but he affords our child with "trust" - a trust that he wont, I don't know, go ass over tea kettle into our garbage can if unsupervised for thirty seconds. So thus far my voicelessness has alerted me to the heavy presence of the word "No" in my vocabulary (popped up as being one of my top three faves once C became mobile). In the last 24 hours I've replaced "No" with a whole lot of wild gesticulating (which, so far, has been slightly more effective than "No" in that it makes C drop into hysterics and stop whatever "No" inducing behavior he was previously engaged in).

On a more metaphorical level, though, this inability to speak has only added fuel to the whole "disappearing Mom" fire. You see, one of my worst fears was realized last week. I went to pick C up (after a particularly grueling day at work...it's worth noting) when his daycare provider tells me:

"He calls me Mama".
Eye twitch.
"What?"
"Mama. He's started calling me Mama...they tend to do that with all women they spend their time...."
But I was no longer listening. Tough to smile and nod when you're mid-stroke.

On that particular day my husband (let's call him "G") was with me.  I think this was one of those moments that God had everyone come together just for comic relief - because as I was starting to internally melt down I was well aware of the similar expression migrating across G's face. Not because of the implications that were furiously pinwheeling through my head ("I'm an absentee mother!" "He loves her more than me!" "I need to quit my job!" "He's going to completely forget who I am!") but because he was beginning to appreciate the amount of calming down he was going to need to go through to talk me back from the maternal ledge. He gets the same look when I start listing things that need to get done around the house...bills to be paid...groceries we need...it isn't pretty. So that really lays into the crux of the whole work/life balance argument. Before C I was on a steady course, routines were easy to keep, I felt as though I was ascending the rungs of that professional ladder. Now it's a game of shoots and ladders. Ladder ladder ladder...shoot (double ear infection, fifth round of Augmentin). Ladder ladder ladder...shoot (daycare closed: family emergency). Ladder ladder ladder...shoot (rendered voiceless by mysterious toddler virus). Baby C is and always will be my priority...how could he not be? Motherhood is the only thing that can send you gleefully down a path of unknowns and upheaval *think fourth degree tears down-under (yeah, I went there), sleeping in two hour increments for nearly a year, sitting in a client meeting while doused with baby vomit and unidentified goo stain on pants and rocking/swaddling/shooshing out the wazoo to end the fourth consecutive hour of infant wailing*. Honestly, none of that matters - in fact, in retrospect, it's all very funny and endearing. Because he's this beautiful little soul - and the very best thing that has ever been in my life. He's the embodiment of my incredible love for my husband. His smile, his laugh, can instantly erase any disastrous thing that has happened - because they're the only things that matter. Which is why my garbage picking snot-monster simply can't call another woman "Mama". I. am. Mama. It's an exclusive station in life - and while I'm quite sure he knows I'm his mother, it just means so much more to me than everything else out there. All the crap that gets me in a tizzy each day. He's what matters. So my jealousy over my son's seemingly easy distribution of "Mama" trumps even that of my husband's penchant for "Hottest Beach Bodies" and "101 Sexy Pop Tartlets" tv on VH1. They are not child appropriate (aka "Let's see what they'd look like after three years of law school, one baby and no trainer/dietician/liposuction"). I'm really still just learning to navigate the pitfalls of profession v. parenthood - and while I'm not sure if you can really have it all at this stage of the game, I'd venture a guess that it's possible. I have to believe that. Because I will always tell my son that he can be anything he wants to be - and that if he works hard enough, his dreams are reachable. And for it to apply to him - it can apply to me too, I think. It's what my parents always told me - so it has to be true, right?

Recalculating

So quite by accident this morning a friend of mine inquires about how we're coping with the 18 month sleep regression. Wait, what? We've only recently emerged from the tunnel of sleep deprivation into the light and now there's another underground on the horizon? Dammit. I think what irks me more about this potential dark in the near distance is that (of all the many things I unearth to worry about) I completely missed this one.

When my son was born (for the sake of anonymity lets call him baby "C") I felt over prepared in the wake of everything I'd read about what to expect when you're pregant (*bad*), birthing (*badder*) and finally parenting (*disaster*). The name of the game was essentially "expect the worst" but, hey, it's all worth it in the end. I was on board with that but so neurotically awaiting each crisis that I started manifesting them. My  husband is all too happy to regale you with the story of how our obstetrician remarked about how short C's femurs appeared in our third trimester ultrasound that I raced home to bone up on dwarfism. Suffice it to say that C is perfectly sized.

It became clear early on that my own anxiety was trumping the benefit of all of this acquired knowledge (I began deferring to "Dr. Google" for everything from pimples to poop and developed an expertise in preemptively diagnosing our poor son with a host of maladies when they almost always amounted to gas, teething or general 'newborn-ness'). So I ditched the books, confident that I would march forward as a competent parent no longer diverted by worry inducing medical mumbo jumbo. I think, more rightly, I just wanted to hunker down in ignorance (a la Plato's Allegory of the Cave), content to acknowledge the shadows without having to identify the truth behind their shape. At least, that's what I'm thinking now in light of this whole 18 month sleep regression debacle. Apparently the "What to Expect" franchise extended past the first year - so I find myself in unfamiliar territory. Which of course translates roughly into blind panic. PANIC! But rather than engaging that part of me that always seems to succeed in conjuring up the worst case scenarios (I graduated from college the Salutatorian of Worry of my class - huzzah!) this time I choose sanity. Sadly, my GPS does not recognize the destination for "Successful Parentville" - and I suspect if it did, unforeseen jags in the road (hello off-ramp to 18 month sleep deprivation regression) would yield a whole hell of a lot of recalculating, recalculating...

Kid, you'll move mountains...

To date I've read the book "Oh, the Places You'll Go" to my son at least ten times while he toddles about his bedroom, engaged in far more interesting activities like dismantling his bookshelf, distributing his stuffed animal brigade one by one to the far corners of his room and implores me to play a modified game of hide and seek around the barred perimeter of his crib. So, at this point, I'm fairly confident that I'm getting more out of the book than he is. This is a glimpse into the bedtime happenings in our household where I know, at the hurried age of seventeen months, I should have picked "Goodnight Moon" but didn't in favor of reciting some encouraging Seussian truisms about life. Bedtime, like everything else in our lives, has its share of imperfections. Case in point - the copy of the book I'm reading from is stained and brittle along the edges from being doused with dog pee of all things. Still, it retains some sentimental value (a college graduation gift - nothing says "most likely to succeed" like dog pee) so I've kept it.

Nothing's perfect. Certainly not me - and it's been a long process of accepting that I fall tragically short of being the perfect wife or mother, having the perfect job or body or being more than a slim line above crazy. But, hey, those shortcomings keep life interesting (so says the crazy lady yapping about her messy life to the public unknown).  So here it is, no agenda or objective, in medias res of my little story.