Trailer mom

I am somewhat of a traitor in the "mom wars," being that I work less than 40 hours a week. There is one day a week in particular where I stay home and do the things "SAHMs" do, which generally involve trips to the grocery store, hoisting the baby in and out of a car seat while she throws fish cracker shrapnel, and cleaning the kitchen 1,000 times. For those of you who may never know the bon-bon eating glories of stay at home momitude, I thought I would share some highlights of today:

1) Leave for grocery store after 30 minutes of canvassing house for baby shoes. Car suddenly swarmed by small children holding illegible, pencil-written signs that, I glean from context, indicate that they are having an impromptu, mid-week yard sale on our bleak, empty suburban street, consisting of three of their broken toys on the sidewalk in front of their house. Guilt stabs heart like shish kebab skewers while I drive on.

2) Schlep around to two different grocery stores, watching grocery bills reach dizzying, airless altitudes since we never eat out.

3) Tetris groceries into crammed, disorganized cabinets in fridge with one hand while feeding mozzarella sticks to baby with other hand.

4) Hand baby locked cell phone to amuse herself while I clean kitchen for 1001th time. Baby begins animated babbling conversation, holding phone up to her ear comically, sort of behind her ear, the way she tends to do: "Bleepp? Greba mama. Baba? Nana." She waddles over to me and holds out the phone. "For me?" I say. "Hello?" Her favorite game. Except, there is a voice. Yes, I think you know the one. "911, what's your emergency?" "Oh crap, I am so sorry," I say, "my baby had the phone..." "Yes," the operator says sarcastically. "She was having quite a little chat with me." Oops.

5) Overcome with guilt over children's yard sale, I slap sunscreen on the baby, and scrounge around the house for dollar bills, hats, garage door openers, and the other 100 required items for leaving the house with a baby in tow. When we arrive at the sale, there is but a lone empty chair, and some sad chalk drawings on the sidewalk. I look across the yard. Two glum little children press their noses against the living room window.

They'd given up.

5 Things I Did Not Know About Having A Baby When I Was A Childless Person Who Slept In and Went to Movies and Wasn't Especially Nice to People

It's taken me about three years to like Joni Mitchell. Maybe four. She keeps coming up in the iPod rotation, with her very specific yellow-at-the-edges songs about 1970's times and places, and I usually wave it off, oh musty patchouli boomer folk-angst, but today I finally came around when I heard The Last Time I Saw Richard while sitting in a traffic jam on the way to the grocery store in the rain, behind some idling produce truck, while the baby threw bagel chunks around in the backseat.

Right, the baby. Back to my point here. Which is to enumerate the:

5 Things I Did Not Know About Having A Baby When I Was A Childless Person Who Slept In and Went to Movies and Wasn't Especially Nice to People

---

1) All that bad stuff that you read about generally isn't going to happen to you. There is a glut of information out there suggesting that pregnancy destroys your body/looks/mind, and that your pregnancy is very likely to go horribly awry if you eat tuna, pass a smoker on the sidewalk, or use a laptop. Of the 74,098 horrors that I meditated on month after month while pregnant, 0% of them came to pass.

2) Your friendships get weird. Especially if you have tons of avowedly childless friends. By weird I mean, your friends stay exactly the same. They spontaneously go out to late dinners in random locations without notice. They jaunt off on road trips. They saunter abroad. They see every new movie the weekend it comes out. They take bike trips to the winery after five minutes of cell phone planning. These are things that come to a dramatically dead stop for you the day the nurse hands you seven pounds of swaddled offspring in that little ubiquitous pink and blue striped hospital blanket, and I am not sure if it ever starts up again exactly as it was for the rest of your life. You may catch yourself feeling bitter about this, but as the husband is wont to say, "you buy the ticket and you take the ride." Bonus: Many of your friends embrace your new state with a lot of grace.

3) People will like your baby more than they like you. Friends and relatives will quickly exchange whatever enthusiasm they once had for your sparkling personality for the more rewarding pastime of giving your baby rides in the laundry basket, or trying to get her to say passe slang terms like "sweet."

4) You may suddenly have a greatly expanded sense of empathy for other people. I used to hate people, basically. I thought having children was an uncool, self-indulgent and earth-hating undertaking, and families made me vaguely claustrophobic. I may have shot anyone with more than three kids a dirty look in public. I passed up countless opportunities to make new friends in favor of glowering at home or hanging around the same three people I've known since I was 17. Now I instigate random conversations with people at parks and cafes. I organize social outings with people from work. I smile at other moms and wave at their babies as they ride by in grocery carts and cry at child abuse stories on the news. If a kid fell on the sidewalk, I wouldn't stand there and stare and not know what to do. If you have a baby, I will want to hold it. I am not scared of diapers. And mom, I am sorry I was such a jerk when I was 13.

5) There is going to be something about parenting that tries you every single day. It won't be diapers. Trust me. But there will be something that will kick you in the ass more days than not, no matter how zen you try to be about it. For me it's sleep. I'm a sleeper. I sleep eight hours a night. No exceptions. If I don't, my eyes burn and I think very angry thoughts, and stumble around and say and do stupid things. And yet: if you have a baby, I am here to announce that you're going to be sleeping less than 8 hours. You're going to go to bed late, you're going to be awakened at random hours after midnight, you're going to get up real early seven days a week unless you make specific arrangements ahead of time. I've never gotten used to it. But then, it keeps me humble. It's a daily reminder that my own care and comfort is not the most important task on my agenda, and I am the sort of person who needed to be taken down a peg. So it's OK.

Baby projects

As I previously mentioned, babies engage in projects. I have documented one here.

E.R.

You say you're not going to be one of those parents, the loser rookie pediatrician-on-speed-dial type hassling the on-call doctor at 2 am about sneezing, or rushing their kid to the OR with a rash, since when you sign up for the whole parental thing, it's one the mantras they drill into you, repeat after me: It's probably nothing.

But then you have this baby sitting there engaged in some sort of typical baby project (dumping the contents of your wallet out on the carpet, un-doing neatly folded piles of laundry, extracting dog-eared, ex-lit-major paperbacks from your bookshelves one by one) when suddenly she begins to scream the strangest scream, a sort of jagged, wheezing, barking scream, and curls up into a ball.

Now, something is really wrong. Ruptured spleen wrong? Favorite gold earring that I lost in the carpet at undetermined time this week drilling a hole in small intestine wrong? Between screams she groans, like a war movie casualty. Her eyes are wild. Her screams disintegrate into an odd, exhausted trilling sound, a sound we've never heard come out of her before, and with that I'm on the phone to one clinic, and handing thepediatrician on speed dial to the husband, and we're holding this gnashing, pale child in our arms, giving each other startled looks, is it me? Or did something really bad just happen to us?

They filibuster. "We usually say that the child should scream for an hour before someone takes a look." "The doctor on call will get back to you, what's your call back number?" The baby is pale and gasping, and making a noise like Old Yeller after he'd been shot. Yes, it's time to overreact, I'm saying to myself, running up the stairs with the baby in my arms, where are her socks? Where's her health insurance card, the one probably dumped out on the carpet somewhere, under a layer of unfolded clothes? We're doing that thing they tell you not to do, it's decided then and there. We're taking her to the ER.

Now we live pretty close to the hospital but it always seems that people are driving so slow on your way there, I remember it seemed that way the day that she was born. I'd waited a wee bit too long at home, stoic, determined not to be one of those idiot moms who came rushing in at the first twinge of labor, only to be sent home in disgrace to wait it out.

The baby is in her car seat, and she is fading. I couldn't even bear to force her into a pair of pants, the car seat straps seemed to cause her intolerable pain. She is moaning and slumped, the color drained out of her face. Her eyelids are tentative, they begin to droop over her eyes, and for the first time a real sense of fear crow bars its way into my naturally skeptical heart, I'm slapping her cheek and telling her to hold on, I'm putting my ear up to her chest, is she breathing? How can you tell, inside a noisy car?

No one likes to see a baby in the ER. The people calmly sitting in the waiting room look up and wince as I stagger in, a half dressed baby dangling oddly in my arms. Revived by fear, she is screaming again, and I announce the obvious to the triage attendant: "something is wrong with my child."

So begins the restraining of the baby; the weighing, the temperature, the blood draw, the catheter. "She definitely has a temperature," the triage nurse says. Ah, so I'm not insane. They're always so casual, you're standing there with your wheezing, hysterical baby while they calmly discuss shift rotations and who didn't leave the baby-sized IV needles in the third drawer to the left.

The baby clings to me like a rhesus monkey while they tape glowing heart monitors to her toe, and stick instruments in her ear canal. She has found some reserve of energy somewhere from the terror and the intrusions and the strangeness, and she heartily screams, a little more of a normal kind of scream, sweaty and red-cheeked. Her color is back. They can't find the vein, darn these babies and their tiny veins.

And when the tide of blood-drawers and catheter-inserters washes out and we are left alone in the florescent white room of this new hospital wing (so much has changed when we were here years ago with that nasty cat bite) suddenly snatches of our old baby return, like feeble sun rays, she's calming down a little. The barking and the wheezing, they're gone.

It seems like a very long time, some calculable fraction of our lives before the young-ish doctor returns and tells us, all the tests, they came back clean. "I don't know," he says. He looks contrite. The baby, she reaches out to touch her glowing, heart monitor toe, and smiles.

"I have a one year old," the doctor says. "I've been in the ER seven years, and I used to just think, eh, but you know, now that I have a kid, I would have done the same thing." And so with that, we checked off that parental milestone, first inconclusive visit to the ER, and we all drove home, and put the baby to bed.