Sunday, January 24, 2010

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?

Tuesday, January 19, 2010

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.