the pieces of my life

Adam’s out at a school event tonight, which means it’s going to be a light blogging day. It’s hard enough getting the Doodlebug down when there are two of us (we even met with a sleep consultant this week–today at nap time, the Doodlebug fought the mom and for the first time, the mom won! But it took a looooong time), so the majority of my evening will be spent trying to cajole him to sleep.

I grew up on Dilido Island. The island has a sign where the Venetian Causeway crossed it. As you can imagine, the sign is vandalized often. The next island over is San Marino Island, the sign of which is currently intact but for most of my high school years read “Dan Marino Island.” (And no, I had nothing to do with it. I’m not into vandalism, although I will say that I find the “Reverse Curve” sign on Storrow Drive in Boston that was changed to “Reverse the Curse” amusing albeit dangerous for those who don’t see the “v” underneath.)

I went running twice on the Venetian Causeway, which must mean we went to Miami this past weekend.* We hadn’t planned on a trip to Miami. What we had planned was the Tweedle Twirp coming to visit so Adam and I could go see The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King. “Oh, I want to see the Doodlebug!” she said. “I want to come up. But I promised our grandparents that I’d go to Miami soon.” “That’s fine,” I said. “We can see Lord of the Rings in Miami. We’ll meet you there.” So we made our arrangements to go to Miami, and then find out the Tweedle Twirp can’t make it. Suddenly the Littlest Brown finds herself in dissertation mode. I’m not sure when that kicked in, but apparently, it’s here, and Adam, Doodlebug, and I found ourselves in Miami. No problem, we said. We’ll get my mother to babysit while Adam and I go see the film.

We made our plans. It was playing at the Regal, which is walking distance from my parents’ condo, at 12:30 p.m. It’s a good time to babysit the Doodlebug because he’s in a good mood then and it wouldn’t screw up any dinner plans (it’s hard to make arrangements around a nearly four-hour movie). Everything’s set and we’re going to go to the matinee when we check again and… of course the movie left that very day. I know it’s been playing for a while but I find it odd that it would leave the theater the week after it received eleven Academy Award nominations. The closest the film was playing was Coco Walk, but it was a 3:40 showing, which not only screwed up our dinner reservations, but was smack in the middle of fussy time (for the Doodlebug, not me. My fussy time isn’t until later in the evening). So, instead, Adam and I pretended we were tourists and we walked around Lincoln Road Mall and Ocean Drive and had mid-day drinks at the Clevander Hotel, which has an outdoor bar. It was nice to have a date, especially in such lovely weather (my parents had warned us that it was “cold” in Miami. Yeah. Cold. High in the low 70s, low in the upper 50s. I’m shivering. The Doodlebug is so happy to be able to go out without socks… and pants), but we’re both bummed we still haven’t seen Lord of the Rings.

*Side story: I told my father I wanted an easy run–I was a little under the weather. He said, “Oh, it’s a mile to the Miami Herald building.” So I set out around 8 a.m. and decided that I’d also make loops on all the islands to make it a little longer. By the time I was approaching the Herald building, I was so hot and absolutely exhausted. I couldn’t believe my little two mile (including the islands) run to this point was taking me so incredibly long! By the time I made it back to the condo, I was absolutely beat and my legs were really tired and it had taken me a whopping 72 minutes, which means I was crawling along (even though it didn’t feel like it). I asked my father, “Are you sure it’s a mile to the Herald?” “Yes,” he said. “I clocked it awhile ago.” The next morning Adam came with me for my easy run, which was just to the Herald and back. “Doesn’t this feel longer than two miles?” I asked him. “Yeah, it does.” After I insisted to my father that it seemed longer, he promised to re-clock it on his way to work. I got a call Monday night: “Yeah, it’s 2.2 miles one way. I must have clocked it from the old house.” I think my father has Adam’s HBS disease: Always certain, often wrong.

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.