the pieces of my life

Guess what I’m thinking right now!

It seems every day I get another e-mail about another friend who’s had a baby. This week there were two of them, most notably a friend from home, Rachel, who had a beautiful son, Max. I’ve decided that in deference to the thirty zillion people we know having babies (I can quickly think of nine babies born since November and I’m sure if I thought about it I could come up with even more) that, even though I’ll always be thinking it, I shall no longer refer (outside of family, I mean) to the Doodlebug as the cutest baby ever. It’s a small sacrifice to make to keep all those new hormonal moms happy.

I’m worried about Adam’s future. Adam had laying out some Xeroxed chapters from his Analytic Reasoning class. The one right on top was… “Counting.” I kid you not. When I pointed out that I could teach Adam that myself (and I have every intention of teaching the Doodlebug–he’ll learn to count before he gets his MBA, thank you very much, not that my son would have any desire for an MBA), he told me that he had started reading the chapter, but had found it too hard and switched to his bankruptcy reading. I laughed until I realized he was serious.

I Replayed (which is like Tivoed, only we like it better in our house) HBO’s Angels in America a while ago and I finally got around to watching it. It was a compelling film that didn’t get my full attention because it’s hard to give anything full attention when you’re trying to bounce a Doodlebug on your knee to keep him happy. I know the film had its critics, but as I never saw the play (it opened when I was still in New York, and I remember wanting to go, but never going. I can’t remember if it was a financial issue or a laziness issue), I thought it was moving. Part of it is that I remember those days so well. When I was just out of college, I volunteered as a “buddy” with GMHC. I worked as a buddy for about three years before I burnt out and then I did easier work for another year. AIDS, while as serious as ever today (I am in no way trying to trivialize today’s AIDS epidemic), was different back then. For starters, in 1989, it was a fairly immediate death sentence. No one lived with AIDS. This was when people knew how HIV was transmitted but much of the public was still frightened that they could get it from toilet seats or from sharing a water glass. This was when “Silence=Death” began appearing all over the City. In college, just a couple of year earlier, my friends and I had all trooped in for HIV tests from the city, because “you never know.” All of us sweat out that two week period between taking the test and getting the result, even though I don’t think a single one of us truly had anything to worry about (I take that back–one friend was a former junkie, but the rest of us were just pseudo-cool East Village-wannabes who had never done anything to seriously warrant the test). To show you how much things have changed, in those days, the nurse administering the test tried to talk me out of taking it. “You should have safe sex no matter what,” I was told. “And if you find out you have it, there’s nothing you can do about it. So why ruin your life by finding out?”

My first “client” was a sweet guy who fired me from the case. Yes, you can be fired from volunteer work. In my naivete, I asked my team leader (we worked in teams so we’d have support), very concerned, what happened, and he told me (in his sweet Georgian accent), “Honey, you aren’t blonde enough and you don’t have a dick.” My next client, Glenn, wasn’t so picky and we were together not quite a year and a half. I don’t want to delve into the relationship here–I’ve written about it enough elsewhere–but in the film, one of the men is a Mormom and his mother (played by Meryl Streep) keeps talking about “ho-mo-sex-uals,” in that way the emphasizes every syllable. The character in some ways is so out there that my first thought was “too fake, too cliche.” But she struck a chord with me and I realized she was incredibly like Glenn’s mother and that she was the truest character in the film. Glenn came from Texarkana. He wasn’t very close with his family–femme gay ballet dancers apparently aren’t the most welcome in some parts of this country–yet toward the end, his parents came up to visit. I think they appreciated my presence not necessarily because I was helping their son, but because I was a straight haven for them to retreat to. At the end, when Glenn was having hallucinations about Korean men at the foot of his bed, his mother would wail to me, “Oh, why did the Lord make my son a ho-mo-sex-ual?” I swear, somehow she managed to add a few extra syllables to the word. The difference between her and the Meryl Streep character is that the Streep character redeemed herself. Glenn’s mother never did. In the end I felt bad because the mother wrote me a nice letter and I never responded. I didn’t know what to say to her. Glenn and I had such a difficult go of things (many times my GMHC team leaders tried to pull me from the case) that I didn’t know what to tell her. So I just let it go. Sometimes that’s all you can do.

I actually walked outside without a jacket to warm up the car and said, “Wow, it’s really warming up!” According to the car thermometer, it was 22 degrees out. I think I’m officially turning into a New Englander.

After much guilt and angsting on my part, I’ve decided to send the Doodlebug to day care twice a week (although my father says, “Don’t think of it as twice a week! Think of it as sixteen hours a week.” And really, by the time we get there and as I pick him up a wee bit early, it’s really only about fifteen hours a week). Last March, in my second trimester, Adam and I put our name on the waiting list for a local center. We looked at a couple of places, and this one really impressed both of us. On January 1, we got a call that they had a part-time spot (if we had wanted a full-time spot, we’d still be on the waiting list). Adam left the decision up to me, and after a lot of stressing, obsessing, and generally being miserable, I decided to go for it. The Doodlebug seems to love it. He’s fascinated by the other babies, he’s excited about all the new toys, and he gets lots of cuddling time from the teachers. One disappointment: they couldn’t get him to go to sleep in a crib either. The Doodlebug sleeps in the bouncy chair there. Just a few more weeks till Ferberization…. But I digress. He’s only been one day so far (but we’ve been a bunch of times. The director encouraged me to bring in him a bunch before we started so we could hang out there together and get to know the teachers, the other kids, and the surroundings), but what a day it was for me. If anything is going to propel me to get my own work done (both freelance and personal), it’s the guilt of knowing the Doodlebug is in day care. I had such a focused work day because there was no way I was just going to Web surf and sit on my butt. I’m torn between how much freelance I’ll be doing and how much of my own writing I’ll do, but I’m sure I’ll find the right balance.

Every time Adam calls the Doodlebug fat, I protest. My family isn’t, shall we say, weight-tolerant. It’s a sensitive topic in the house and I don’t want my son to have the poor body image that’s plagued me all my life. Yet, we’re reaching a point where it’s difficult for even me to deny. My son is, um, Rubenesque. Zaftig, you might say. A bit round. I had to ‘fess up to myself when the Doodlebug’s khakis, which are still too long for him, didn’t button around his waist. Although to say “waist” is a real stretch, as there is only pooch. Admitting defeat, the Doodlebug and I went out shopping today for clothes. Of course, since it’s January, places had primarily their summer clothes out, and considering the heat wave we’ve been having (hey, it hit 22 today!), I stocked up. Actually a few places had winter clothes buried in the back, so I was able to pick up a few outfits for him. Yet, I can tell you, he’s going to look a little silly in them. Because an informal weighing shows that our son is 17 pounds. Not a bad weight for someone who’s about to turn five months. But he’s about 24 inches long. I picked up two 6 to 12 month outfits at Old Navy. The weight range is perfect: 17-22 lbs. But apparently, at that weight, babies are expected to be 27-29 inches long.

On Saturday we visited friends with a brand-spanking new baby. Another couple, with their ten-month-old daughter, T., was there. Of course, being fraternity guys, the question came up of which baby would win in a fight. It was generally agreed upon that T. has the advantage of mobility and reach, but the Doodlebug could just keep her moving until he tired her out and then he would win by simply falling on her. That’s my boy.

Since Adam is so erratic in updating his blog, I suggested that he let me guest blog for him when he’s too busy to write. That idea didn’t go over real well. So, my next thought was I’d blog here as Adam, to let everyone know what he’s thinking and what he’s up to. Except, well, he spends much of his evenings downstairs doing school work in his office, so I’m not sure what he’s thinking and I assume he’s doing problem sets and reading case studies, but since I’m trapped on the living room chair beneath a sleeping Doodlebug, I can’t be sure.

Maybe I should write about the Red Sox, I thought. Only, of course, I don’t really know anything about the Red Sox. So I figured I do what Adam does: visit the Sons of Sam Horn board and find some original thought about the Sox that I could pass off as my own (ethical? no. But possibly entertaining). (Okay, I realize that was a poorly constructed sentence that implies that Adam passes off others’ baseball ideas as his own. He does not do that. What he does is he visits the board frequently. However, he is an MBA and occasionally has poorly constructed sentences in his blog, so I’m going to let it stand.) Okay, I peruse SoSH. And I study the topics. Looking for something semi-intelligent to say. Something… baseball related. But what do I find? Threads on “The Official American Idol Season III Thread” and “Trading Places ending…” and “Best ‘Hair Band’ song.” Hello? Where’s the baseball? Is the board run by a bunch of tween girls?

I can mention what little I know of his semester. He’s taking one class that’s really hard, and it has hours of problem sets each night. He has another class that meets at 8:30 a.m. Oh, and he’s working on a negotiation. Which means he has a BATNA. Which is no relation to BAFTA.

Other things that have been going on his life: he occasionally leaves the house with streaks of spit-up on his back. Before the semester started, instead of reading cases, he read Bringing Down the House: The Inside Story of Six M.I.T. Students Who Took Vegas for Millions, which he loved. He’s sworn off TV, except for his secret, guilty favorite, The O.C.. And he can still be suckered into making the hot fudge sundaes.

I think I’m starting to understand why he didn’t want me blogging for him.

Yes, yes, it’s boring and trite to write about the weather. But I had a number of errands to run today with the Doodlebug and when we were getting ready, I checked Yahoo Weather. High today: 8. Low today: 0. Current temp: -5 (and why doesn’t that automatically trigger the low temp to change?). Feels like: -22. How do you dress a Doodlebug for that? And today’s not even the supposed to be the coldest day of the week!