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Yikes!
They didn't tell me it would be like this......my husband keeps me honest. "Who is 'they'?" he keeps asking me. Oh, come on, you know who they are, people you read in magazines, on television, experts, know-it-alls, people with bylines, degrees, yak, yak, and all the rest. I believe them when it suits me. Sometimes they are full of research-ed crap, and I should know, I used to be a journalist. But they make for good copy, these experts, and they made parenthood seem do-able. Hard. Bloody hard, but within the realm of the possible. Mother of all that is holy, can I say you gotta be kidding here?
Okay, this is where I get off the 'they' wagontrain. I could have read a thousand manuals and still gotten it between the eyes when our daughter landed on our doorstep, suitcase and a serious case of id in her teeny-tiny hands. Orphange-raised she had baggage dragging across the threshold, but not what you would expect. She's just more experienced than she should be at thirteen months, having had to wheedle, manipulate, shout, and smile sweetly in turns for the attention every child has the instinct for. Our Sweetpea, she is a person, small yes, size six-month shoes and a doll's face with a sweet cupid's mouth and a mean left upper cut with a snak-paks full of cheerios.....I'm just not fast enough to duck yet. Honestly, I don't know what hit me half the time.
There is just so much you can absorb in any given moment and I've definitely reached my limit on any given day. Heck, any given hour. Okay, every couple of minutes.....I can't figure out how someone could have made it as far as I have in life and career and be so unprepared for this little corncob, kernels trailing after her as she moves about the confines of our playfenced life. The playfence is one of those things you didn't know existed before becoming a parent. Usually it's not on the first shopping list you make while dreamily contemplating your upcoming life as the champion, provider, guider, and inspiration for the soon-to-be child in your life. But once you start seeing the dangerous world from a hell-bent-for-danger toddler's POV, you're over at Toys R' Us faster than you can say "Eeek! Touch that socket and you'll fry your brains out!!!" Playfences as far as I can tell come in one color -battleship grey and now this mass of plastic defines our living room. No one will be visiting here for a long time, sitting on the comfy suede sofa with a glass of merlot, talking to someone next to them while I cook in the kitchen. Bye, bye other life.
Crack open one of these durable, portable (box verbage) yards and feel what it's like to sit inside, to draw down away from the artwork hanging distantly on the walls, light fixtures, porcelin smooth objects so fragile now and out of reach, little bits of the outside world through honeycombed matting. You'll start to hyperventilate, I guarantee it. No wonder Sweetpea gets pissed off between demonic grins with her finger poking through a hole in the fence toward a socket......no, please no!!! The other thing about a play yard, okay, fence, is that she spends her entire day throwing objects over it and then doing that high-pitched grunting, pointing thing that kids at this non-verbal age do to get it back (or to get anything, for that matter). You parents know this sound, it twangs your eardrums painfully after a while: Eee!, eeee!, point, point, eeh!!!...this quickly escalates into a meltdown if you don't retrieve it. Soon I'll tie strings onto everything so she can haul them back herself and leave me out of it.
We are moving sometime in the future to a house far, far away so all that groovy furniture is gone now, in storage for that other life, in its place are durable fabrics, soft-sided objects, fluffy animals and assorted plastic seating less than 8 inches from the ground. I spend a lot of time even lower than that, looking up at the nostrils of my daughter, and she looking down at me, her expression ranging from delightful curiosity to bitter frustration. Believe me, I prefer delightful curosity. That's where I thought I'd be the most help but I'm beginning to believe that the bitterness is more likely to dissipate or move in permanently depending on my parenting abilities.
Sometimes I feel like the crappiest person in the world and I've never felt that before. You just can't rationalize or jump around in your head in an intellectual exercise to reduce your ultimate responsibilities when there is a baby involved. Right now she's going on a potent mixture of instinct, growth hormones, and other ingredients in a mysterious chemical soup designed to push her forward onto the next level of some pretty steep steps.
Me, I'm the adult. The mature one. I have reason, wisdom, and the Internet. It's all up to me right now. And of course, my husband, without whom, I am nothing.
They didn't tell me it would be like this......my husband keeps me honest. "Who is 'they'?" he keeps asking me. Oh, come on, you know who they are, people you read in magazines, on television, experts, know-it-alls, people with bylines, degrees, yak, yak, and all the rest. I believe them when it suits me. Sometimes they are full of research-ed crap, and I should know, I used to be a journalist. But they make for good copy, these experts, and they made parenthood seem do-able. Hard. Bloody hard, but within the realm of the possible. Mother of all that is holy, can I say you gotta be kidding here?
Okay, this is where I get off the 'they' wagontrain. I could have read a thousand manuals and still gotten it between the eyes when our daughter landed on our doorstep, suitcase and a serious case of id in her teeny-tiny hands. Orphange-raised she had baggage dragging across the threshold, but not what you would expect. She's just more experienced than she should be at thirteen months, having had to wheedle, manipulate, shout, and smile sweetly in turns for the attention every child has the instinct for. Our Sweetpea, she is a person, small yes, size six-month shoes and a doll's face with a sweet cupid's mouth and a mean left upper cut with a snak-paks full of cheerios.....I'm just not fast enough to duck yet. Honestly, I don't know what hit me half the time.
There is just so much you can absorb in any given moment and I've definitely reached my limit on any given day. Heck, any given hour. Okay, every couple of minutes.....I can't figure out how someone could have made it as far as I have in life and career and be so unprepared for this little corncob, kernels trailing after her as she moves about the confines of our playfenced life. The playfence is one of those things you didn't know existed before becoming a parent. Usually it's not on the first shopping list you make while dreamily contemplating your upcoming life as the champion, provider, guider, and inspiration for the soon-to-be child in your life. But once you start seeing the dangerous world from a hell-bent-for-danger toddler's POV, you're over at Toys R' Us faster than you can say "Eeek! Touch that socket and you'll fry your brains out!!!" Playfences as far as I can tell come in one color -battleship grey and now this mass of plastic defines our living room. No one will be visiting here for a long time, sitting on the comfy suede sofa with a glass of merlot, talking to someone next to them while I cook in the kitchen. Bye, bye other life.
Crack open one of these durable, portable (box verbage) yards and feel what it's like to sit inside, to draw down away from the artwork hanging distantly on the walls, light fixtures, porcelin smooth objects so fragile now and out of reach, little bits of the outside world through honeycombed matting. You'll start to hyperventilate, I guarantee it. No wonder Sweetpea gets pissed off between demonic grins with her finger poking through a hole in the fence toward a socket......no, please no!!! The other thing about a play yard, okay, fence, is that she spends her entire day throwing objects over it and then doing that high-pitched grunting, pointing thing that kids at this non-verbal age do to get it back (or to get anything, for that matter). You parents know this sound, it twangs your eardrums painfully after a while: Eee!, eeee!, point, point, eeh!!!...this quickly escalates into a meltdown if you don't retrieve it. Soon I'll tie strings onto everything so she can haul them back herself and leave me out of it.
We are moving sometime in the future to a house far, far away so all that groovy furniture is gone now, in storage for that other life, in its place are durable fabrics, soft-sided objects, fluffy animals and assorted plastic seating less than 8 inches from the ground. I spend a lot of time even lower than that, looking up at the nostrils of my daughter, and she looking down at me, her expression ranging from delightful curiosity to bitter frustration. Believe me, I prefer delightful curosity. That's where I thought I'd be the most help but I'm beginning to believe that the bitterness is more likely to dissipate or move in permanently depending on my parenting abilities.
Sometimes I feel like the crappiest person in the world and I've never felt that before. You just can't rationalize or jump around in your head in an intellectual exercise to reduce your ultimate responsibilities when there is a baby involved. Right now she's going on a potent mixture of instinct, growth hormones, and other ingredients in a mysterious chemical soup designed to push her forward onto the next level of some pretty steep steps.
Me, I'm the adult. The mature one. I have reason, wisdom, and the Internet. It's all up to me right now. And of course, my husband, without whom, I am nothing.
posted by vallie at 7:46 PM
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