So that sucked.

Come to find out, when people say that having a child will put a strain on your relationship, what they REALLY mean is, "You're going to want to kill him. Like... ALL THE TIME." Because, ha ha! This whole keeping someone alive thing is hard. Fucking haaaard. When you read that second hard, you should kind of grunt and double over because IT'S SO HARD.

Yeah. So since the baby was born, we've been kind of drifting around, the boy and I, drifting around each other in the same house but not really the same because our lives have been pretty separate. We don't parent together, we just switch off. This sort of seems to have evolved as a coping mechanism, but obviously is not. This is the exact opposite of productive living because we're doing it alone, but while kind of near each other, which is maddening. As you might be able to guess. Oh, and also, our baby was really colicky and miserable. Not easy. No baby is easy, obviously, but they're certainly made harder by tortured screaming 20 hours a day. (That? Is not an exaggeration. "Babies sleep all the time," is the biggest bullshitting lie I've ever heard and I would suggest you not repeat it to anyone, ever, lest they wind up with Baby O' Terror like mine was, and come for you in your sleep.) It's gotten better, the screaming, but still. Stress.

And last night, it all kind of compounded and blew itself to stinking, rotting bits, and The Boy and I wound up slinging words like, "You're a crazy pain in the ass to be around," (him) and, "You don't do ANYTHING! Why am I even HERE?!" (me.) Needless to say, it was terrible. We worked it out, but it sucked. Bad. And I need it to not happen again, because I just cannot take it.

So what I WANT (There's always something, isn't there. Me, me, me. I, I, I.) is ADVICE. Yes, I'm asking for it, so let me have it with both barrels. Tell me our fatal mistake was getting knocked up out of wedlock, or that we haven't even been together long enough (a year and some change) to raise a child together, or whatever. Include every admonition you can think of if you have to. Just give me advice on how to keep this from happening again, because as it's going now I'm going to be finding out how hideously Prison Orange clashes with my low lights. (Because I'm going to fucking ax murder him, for those of you just tuning in. Which is going to be the result of me constantly walking away to avoid saying I HATE YOU AND YOUR ASSFACE out of misplaced aggression.)

I'm too snarky to go to prison. I'll get shanked. Save me from myself, will you?

Oh, damn it.

I just got a text message from my sister: "I guess you didn't get my email. (Niece) is going in for surgery tomorrow."

So, I called. Obviously. My sister told me that my 7 year-old niece is going to have three moles removed from her scalp tomorrow morning... They'll require stitches, and the doctors will have to shave her head in a couple of places to remove them.

She's scared, because she's never had stitches and she's afraid it will hurt. And how that breaks my heart, I can't even say.

The moles will be sent in for tests, and then we'll know more in 14 or more days. I stopped listening after 'fourteen' because seriously? Fourteen days to hear back about whether or not a little girl has cancer? So I don't know how many more than fourteen days we might have to wait. I do know that skin cancer runs in my sister's father's side of the family (we have the same mother) and that my sister has had to have several moles removed in her life, "just to be safe." I know that skin cancer is the leading cause of death in her father's family. I know my sister is afraid, and trying not to be.

I'm trying really hard not to furiously pepper big, terrified F bombs all over this. I just found out, and the baby is sleeping, and I'm trying to work my mind around the fact that we live in a world where things like this happen so I wanted to write about it... I wanted to try to work it out, and I kind of need help to do that. I know that bad things happen, and they happen to sweet, sweet little girls. Maybe not this one, though, I keep telling myself to shut up and remember that we don't know anything yet.

Let me tell you something about this girl. She giggles CONSTANTLY. I mean that seriously. It's constant. At first it comes off as a nervous habit, but if you know her you know that she laughs all the time because she's just that happy. She's really, really happy... And she's a cuddle bug. The child is never happier than when she's in someone's arms, or holding your hand, or sitting on your lap. She loves everything and everyone SO MUCH. She's a sweet, darling little girl, and she's scared right now because she's going to do something very hard tomorrow and she doesn't want it to hurt.

I don't want her to hurt. I don't want this to be the kind of world where sweet little girls have to do scary things.

I don't mean to be one of those people that goes onto their tiny little blog and asks the four readers she has to send happy thoughts to a stranger, but please... Please, if you pray, could you do that? If you have a spare happy thought, could you send it? It can just be tiny, and general, aimed at all of the nameless, sweet little girls out there. Because good thoughts can never hurt, and prayers are never things that can do any harm, right? And she's just so little. She's just a little girl.

(Look at that, two posts in one day. Wish it had just been the one, but I'm kind of panicked and The Boy isn't here to talk to me and did I mention she's just little? And our mother died of cancer? And oh, damn it.)

Dreams.

I keep having dreams about my parents. I dream that they aren't dead, that they're here. I dream that they know my son. I hate these dreams because they remind me even when I sleep of what I will never have. They irritate me by showing me what I avoid looking at when I'm awake.

These dreams are fuckers.

I've been feeling so incredibly lucky lately, so blessed. I've been busy and overwhelmed and in so far over my head that sometimes it feels like I'll never be able to breathe again, (and then I remember that I'm going back to work in a week and a half, and I realize that I don't know what stress IS yet, and I start to hyperventilate for real) but when all of that passes- and it does pass- I'm left with a feeling of such fortune that it stuns me. I've never done anything in my life to deserve any of this. I don't deserve to be this kind of happy. It is a solid thing, a lasting thing. It sits beneath all of the confusion and fear and panic of new parenthood, and patiently it waits. It abides.

Eventually, I slow down and take a moment to look at this person that I had a hand in making, and I forget to feel guilty that his stomach is a messed up ball of FAIL, and that sleep is nothing more than a photograph of a dream about a distant memory that someone else had forever ago, and I will never have a chance at again ever because mah bebeh, he does not snooze... And it's then when I am quiet that I feel this warm, sweet thing that can only be perfect happiness.

But it seems as though a part of me cannot manage to be content. It roots through, digging down to a wound that I wish would just scab over and scar, ripping it open again and again.

I'm too young to be an orphan. A thousand times a day, I need my mother. I'm not sure if you've heard, but somehow there must have been a mix up in the paperwork because, holy shit, they let me walk out of a hospital- where people were trained to keep infants alive, and were probably completely capable of doing so- with a newborn. A tiny little thing that depends on me.

Two quick notes about parenthood:
1. Wow. Wow, huh? I mean, WOW. Amazing, humbling, beautiful. Amiright?
2. I miss alcohol and cigarettes. LIKE BAD. Because this? Is fucking stressful. See that part up there where I said something about a tiny thing depending on me? Yeah. That = Stress.

I miss my mother. I keen for her. More times than I can count since my son has been born, I've wept for wanting her. I need her to hug me and tell me it's going to be okay, that my son is going to be okay, that I'm not fucking everything up. I need to hear her because I know I would believe her. I know I would feel better, that I wouldn't feel so terrified and lost with her here to steady me.

I miss my father, too, but less because I need him and more because he would have been so proud of his grandson. He loved babies and had wanted grandchildren for a long time (..From what I hear. My sister was the one to inform me of that - he wanted HER to have children, not me, for reasons I've touched on here before. But beggars, choosers, blah. Specifics aren't important, right? It's what I tell myself.) When I think of my father, there is still a lot of anger, but I do miss him. I miss them both.

And so I dream of them. I dream that they hold my son, that they can see him smile and hear him do his best impression of a baby dinosaur. (I'm no expert, but in my humble opinion, it is an impressive audio likeness. It's positively primal.) I dream that we are together. I dream that I'm not alone.

I dream of the only thing I can't have when I'm awake, the only thing I have left to want, and I ache.

Fear.

Turns out, I really was in early labor. I didn't mean to leave anyone hanging, it's just that I've been kind of occupied with this little ball of baby boy, and that doesn't leave a whole lot of time for writing.

More than the physical and mental occupation with our son, I'll be honest and just put it out there that I'm terrified. I can't say it anywhere else without people looking at me like I might be too overwhelmed and at risk of throwing the baby out on trash day. (Which, let me be clear, is not what's happening here.) I'm just... it's just a lot. It's more than I thought it would be, and it's harder than I imagined, and I'm scared. When I say I'm scared, people look at me like I need medication. Maybe I do, I don't know, but the details are as follows:

My son was born a month early, at 5lbs 3oz... (I did it on my own, by the way. No medication, 12 hours of contractions 1 minute long/2 minutes apart, 2 hours of active pushing. I'm kind of proud of that.) He dropped to 5lbs 4oz, and was hardly maintaining there for a week... He had one bowel movement in the first two weeks, which is highly unusual, and we had to start supplementing with formula because I was starving my son by breastfeeding exclusively. And holy shit, can I just say that hurts so incredibly bad to even TYPE, no wonder people don't want to hear me SAY it...

Now at a month old, he's up to 6lbs 6oz, which is almost the size of a 'normal' newborn. I thank God every twenty seconds that he's growing... But his stomach is a mystery that the doctors can't crack. He screams for hours in obvious pain, and is constipated terribly. We've tried every stupid thing they can throw at us, even giving him diluted juice and Karo syrup in an attempt to give him diarrhea. So yeah, we're trying to make him sick to make him better... Again, I can hardly even type those words... Now the doctors are throwing around words like "barium" and "extensive tests" and "possible intestinal abnormalities" and I want to throw myself into fucking traffic because this can't be happening. It has to be a dream, and everyone knows that if you die in a dream you wake up. Or is it that you die in your sleep? Either way... Anything would be better than this not knowing, this inability to help my son.

He's just so little, yaknow..? He's so small, and he's in so much pain, and they aren't helping him, and I just want to scream ALL THE TIME. Babies aren't supposed to know pain. We're supposed to be able to protect them - I'm supposed to be able to protect him - and I can't. And I'm afraid this is what insanity feels like. A month is hardly any length of time in the big scheme of things, but it's an eternity when there's no sleep for you (literally three hours a night, that's how much sleep I'm getting) and no relief for your child. A month is forever.

So if there's no improvement by tomorrow I have to take him to the hospital, and I can't even think about what that means right now. I just keep staring at him, thinking stupidly that if I stare hard enough I'll be able to figure out what's the matter and fix it. I stare and hope and pray, and I hold my fucking breath until I think I'm going to die because its all I can do. And it's not enough.

That's what I've been up to... What about everyone else? What's been going on outside this tiny universe of mine?

I blew my cork. Except less 'blew' and more 'slipped away like Wilson from the raft.'

So remember when I said I'd shortly be writing about a reoccurring dream I've had my whole life? Yeah, that was a lie. I didn't know it was when I told it, but woops! Pesky ol' LIFE got in the way and what do you know, I'm in the early stages of labor. Or, uh, the stages of Early Labor? Or whatever. I don't know. It depends on which book you read, but apparently the only thing keeping me from firing an infant out of my patunia like a cannon ball is that my water hasn't broken yet.

That seems like a flimsy barrier, yaknow? A bag of fluid is all that's standing between me and having a person coming out of my pelvis. I keep kind of looking down and going, "Really?" because, REALLY? There's a person that's going to come out of there? Whatever. That's got to be a joke or a dirty rumor that someone started when they were high on glue.

Without getting too personal and queasy, let me tell you what's already happening with my vagina. (How contradictory am I? Shut up, it's cute.)

- I'm dilated to 2 cm, and have been for about a week. My doc put me on 'modified bed rest' - which means that I can come to my sitting-on-my-ass-type job and SIT, and I can go home and lie down, but that's it. No walking around, no doing anything. No lifting anything heavier than a gallon of milk, wtf.
- The baby has most definitely moved down. I can breathe now, but the trade off is that I can hardly walk, because there's like this SKULL inside my PELVIS and holy shit OW. Well, not really ow. But more... owwww. Not really painful, but decidedly uncomfortable.
- I started losing my mucus plug yesterday. (I have to whisper 'mucus plug,' when I say it out loud, by the way, and follow it up with an ambivalent 'whatever,' as in, "I'm losing my mucus plug or whatever." Because there's something weird about saying 'mucus' when you're talking about your downstairs. So in an effort to make talking about it less awkward, I've taken to calling it my Cooter Cork, and that makes me laugh so hard I almost pee every time I say it. In addition to the peeing, it feels like my abdomen is going to rip open ala some terrible horror movie every time I laugh, because it's SO TIGHT and FULL OF BEBEH OMGZ.)
- I've started cramping low in my back and belly. It's a vague, menstrual period kind of cramping.
- I'm 36 weeks pregnant.


Now, all of these really vague, contradictory and mysterious books and Internet sites I've been scouring tell me that early labor can last like, twenty seconds, or it can go on for fucking WEEKS. Because who knows! The female body is a strange and mystical thing that no one could ever possibly understand!

So... Any advice? I have my hospital bag packed. I've got everything all ready to go. It's just... uh... Hm. I'm kind of worried that I'm going to be doing this crampy, achy, vaguely labory thing for A LONG TIME, and that makes me want to go up to the Walmarts and start doing bicep curls in the diary section to get things kicked off.

Monkey hijack.

I know no one is interested in hearing about what another person dreams. Dreams never make any sense, and they're always kind of anticlimactic and weird. You never ask to hear about them, but instead it comes on in a sort of bum rush hijack. Like a mugging. You see someone at the grocery store and they're like, "Oh my gosh, so, speaking of bananas. The other night I had this dream where a monkey broke into my car through the bumper, and I went outside to see what the ruckus was, and I could see this bigass monkey in the passenger seat of my car. He was like... looking at me. So I went back inside to get Mr. Husband, and when we came back out, the monkey had ripped the entire car apart! And I said, "Fucking monkey!" and then I woke up and I'd peed the bed. What do you think that means?"

I think it means you need to not drink so much coffee before bed. Strike that. I think you need to not drink coffee EVER, especially when you know you're going to the grocery store and might run into an unassuming acquaintance that didn't ever want to know you have bladder issues and a strange monkey fixation.

That being said! I had a dream last night. It's a reoccurring dream, and I've had it since I was very little, always the same down to the most minuscule details. I'm going to post about it here shortly, and I'd like some feedback. I've always wondered what it might mean, what the symbolism is, why I have it at all. So, fair warning, I'm going to bore everyone with my own little monkey dream. I'd love to hear about yours, too, if anyone wants to share. Dreams are fascinating things. (Except when they're not. Which is usually. But I'm sure yours are AWESOME.)

Spoiler: There are no monkeys in the dream I had. Damnit.

I said the F word in a funeral home. A LOT.

Last Sunday I found out my dad died. I found this out the same way I always find out things of this nature - my older sister told me. People tell her and have her tell me, because... I don't know why. But they always tell her first, and leave my finding out up to her.



I was at work when The Older emailed me and asked me to take a break so she could call my cell. I said hey, no problem, and ran down the hall to the locker room. As I was sitting down to pee, I called my sister. She answered the phone crying, and I told her to take a deep breath and not say a word, because whatever this news was, I wasn't going to get it on the toilet.



After I was situated on a bench I told her it was okay, whatever it was, and that I wanted to hear her breathe for me. Big, deep breaths. After she did this for a few minutes, I told her to go ahead, but take it easy. (I can't stand to hear her upset. It murders my soul.) She told me between sobs that our dad was dead. I knew the news was coming, because there was nothing else that could have upset her this way unless it was news about our other sister or her children, which I would have gotten first because I'm closer to The Oldest than she is. I stupidly asked if she was serious, which appears to be my stock asshole response when I'm getting "So-and-so Is Dead" news, and told her it was okay. I told her to breathe. I stared at the tiled floor while the news tried to beat its way into my brain, while it tried to wring some sort of reaction from me. The Older noticed my lack of appropriately upset reaction and commented on it, making me feel about thisbig as I told her, "I'm at work."



It was all I could think to say.



It is my job to keep people calm in crisis. In order to do what I do, you fabricate around yourself a shell that is nigh on impenetrable. You do this to preserve yourself against the absolute horror that can come with what I do. That shell is most of the reason I did not react, I think. I hope. I hope the reason for my lack of reaction didn't have something to do with the shitty state of my relationship with my father, although if I'm being honest, I know that it did, at least a little. I know there was some shock there, although his health was TERRIBLE and certainly this did not come as a true surprise... Death is always a shock. It's so sudden, so permanent. And so, I focused on talking my sister through her grief and panic, because for whatever reason, it's what I could do at the time.



I went back into my office, asked my boss very calmly if he could get someone to cover the rest of my shift because my father was dead. He didn't seem to hear me, then turned and looked at my face, as if to see if I was serious. My phone was still to my ear as I looked at him, my skull filled with the sound of my sister crying on the other end of the line. I said, "I'm sorry," but to whom, I don't know. It was all I could think to say...



The Boy showed up then- turns out The Older had called him before she called me, out of concern for my reaction to the news and the affect it might have on the pregnancy. He found me kneeling in the dark in another office, staring at the carpet and trying stupidly to comfort my sister over the phone. He pulled a chair over, sat down with his legs on either side of me, and there in the shelter of him the tears finally came.



The next couple of days are a blur. We wound up in our home town, where we picked The Older up at the airport. The morning after that there was the funeral home to visit, details to tack down that could not be finalized long-distance via phone or fax. I learned, not unexpectedly, that my father had not had one cent of life insurance, nor had he made any sort of realistic arrangements for his death at all. (My uncle's ex wife had gone and gotten all kinds of papers for him, filled them out, and taken them to his apartment. She'd explained that all he had to do was sign those papers, and the government would give him life insurance. They would pay for his many, many medications. He would have nurses that would come to the apartment and check on him, they would make sure he was okay. The drawback would be that my dad would receive a few dollars less a month in Social Security, which would be more than made up for in the deferred cost of his meds. The papers were never seen again. He made no effort to even sign his name.)



My dad had been in congestive heart failure for over ten years. He'd been told by every specialist, general practitioner, nurse, whomever that he'd ever seen, "You're not going to live much longer." How could he? He was poisoning himself with everything he ate or drank. It was some strange miracle of luck that he'd managed to live as long as he had. He knew he was going to die, and soon. He could not have thought otherwise, and did not think otherwise, as evidenced by a comment from his own lips not so very long ago in response to the question, "Who do you think it will fall on when you die? Who do you think will be responsible for handling that?"



His answer? "What do I care? I'll be dead."



With no wife to shoulder the burden, he knew it would fall on The Older and myself. With The Older not having had a paying job in quite some time (She is the primary caretaker for her fiance's very ill mother, and cannot be away from the house for stretches of time, so this is more than understandable,) he knew it would fall on me, the daughter that was not his daughter, more by his own doing than genetics ever could have accomplished alone.



So there I sat, at this table, across from a mortician that seemed to have a Jones for very large numbers. I stared at him quietly as he explained that the stiff cardboard box they used to transport my dad's corpse to the crematorium cost more than 200 dollars. (A box. A cardboard box. Worth 200 dollars.) The transportation fee itself was enough to boggle the mind, not to mention the cost of the urn or the memorial pamphlets that had been printed up, apparently using pure gold leaf as paper, and the blood of infant angels as ink. I sat very, very quietly, staring at the ever growing numbers. I did not make a sound.



And I got angry. I got angry because, as terrible as it is to admit, I resented that as the daughter with the shitty relationship with this man, who was not my biological father and had never treated me as an equal child to begin with, I was staring down the barrel of a six thousand-dollar gun while trying to save for the birth and future of my unborn child. I got angry because not once in his life had he ever done anything responsible, and it never kept him up for one second at night how his childish ways hurt the people that had to make up for them. I got angry because he was a PARENT and should have done MORE, because we were good, dutiful children and deserved more. I got angry because The Older started crying again, as I (the youngest) signed papers and prepared to shoulder a very heavy financial burden that she could not help with, and so she was being crushed by a guilt I could not sooth with words or actions, and the inability to save her from that feeling ENRAGED ME. I got angry because ANGER is not the response a person should have when sitting in a funeral home trying to iron out the details of a parent's final arrangements. I got angry because what I wanted more than anything in the world right then was to punch the funeral director in the throat and chuck that fucking over priced urn through a window, and I am not proud of that.



The Boy tapped my shoulder, asked me to step out of the room with him. I snarked, "I don't want to step out of the room. I want to fucking leave." He asked me again, very softly, to step into the hall. So I did. Of course I did.



And then I lost my ever-loving mind. He hugged me while I scream-whispered about how my dad was a selfish, heartless fuck who never thought of anyone but himself for one second of his life, and how were we going to do this with a baby? He held my hand while I asked over and over and over, "Who DOES this to their kids? Who fucking DOES this to people they're supposed to love?" He told me it would be okay, that he would write a check right then to pay for half, when I started hyperventilating again about how we're having a baby, I can't afford this with a baby, oh my god, THE BABY. He soothed me when I demanded if he'd seen the look on The Older's face, the one that suggested she was either going to throw up or kill herself right there, and how could someone do that to her?



I said 'fuck' more times than I can remember.



My sister and uncle came out of the office eventually with the funeral director in sheepish tow, and explained to me that since our dad had been a resident of the same county for the last 40 years, that county might be willing to help defer some of the funeral costs if we could find certain information. They needed his social security card, a copy of his lease, any titles he might possess, bank statements, etc. I growled that we would never find those things, as the man had never kept any sort of responsible record. They insisted we try, and so we went to his apartment.



Walking into the room where my dad died had absolutely no affect on me. I looked at the chair his body was found in, and wondered if he had been comfortable. I hoped that he had. The Boy and The Older went to search our dad's vehicle while The Uncle and myself poked around the apartment. Long story short: We found what we needed. The county deferred close to four thousand dollars of the funeral cost, and I was absolutely floored.



I cannot describe how grateful I was and am that a system exists to assist people with this burden. While The Boy and I could have paid the full cost, it would have put us in a precarious position, one where ANY unexpected cost would have put us very, very close to being shit out of luck monetarily. The fact that we were not put in that position but instead are still able to pay our medical bills and our house payment without having to beg, borrow and steal, is something I will never stop being thankful for.



Things I will never, ever forget or find my way around to accepting:

-The fact that my father was selfish down to his last atom, and his self absorption was entirely complete and unrelenting. This was evidenced not only by the total lack of insurance, etc, but more so by the *very large* quantity of something he should not have had that was found in his apartment. He had it and knew that if anything happened to him we would find it, and didn't care what that would do to my sister, how it would hurt her to know that he had been such a different person than she thought he was.


-The way a business or industry can capitalize on the misfortune of those that have lost a family member or loved one, going so far as to QUADRUPLE their cost and absolutely ROB people blind.

-Finding the papers my aunt had gathered for him, the papers that simply required a signature to insure his life, shoved in the back of a drawer in the kitchen and forgotten.

-My surprisingly violent reaction to the above three points.

-The fact that my sister will form this experience into a club and use it to bludgeon herself for the rest of her life, feeling guilty for not being able to help do what needed to be done, because he couldn't be responsible for himself and keep that burden from her shoulders.

-Going into false labor as soon as we got home. Having contractions and mind bending nausea for hour after hour because my body was coming down from the stress of the last week. Being so thankful that it stopped because, although my baby could be born now and survive, he needs more time. Don't we all need more time?

-That the predominant emotion associated with this whole shebang, for me, was anger and frustration. Anger that my father, who I loved deeply despite how I know it seems, could not care enough for his daughter - The Older - to take care of himself, or at least be marginally responsible for her sake. Anger that I'm angry, because it's easier than being sad for him and my sister and myself. Frustration that everything he ever said or did seems like lie after lie, in the current light, and he said he'd never lie to us.