Too busy trying to take a picture of my haircut. Not having much luck.
Why I can’t write, part IV
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Category Archives: nablopomo
Why I Can’t Write: Part III
Because I am going to go to bed so I don’t oversleep and miss my hair appointment tomorrow.
Why I Can’t Write, Part II
The next installment of Why I Can’t Write: Because I Can’t Tell The Truth.
I don’t mean that I lie. I mean that great writers, the ones who make you laugh or cry or laughcry, tell the rawest, realest truth. I can’t do that. I love it and I admire it in a writer, but so far I have not been able to access that Truthtelling switch yet. I basically only access the Literal, Surface-Level Recounting switch.
For example. Here is Literal, Surface-Level Recounting: Today I posed along to a 15-year-old power yoga DVD on a mat in my living room with my toddler trying to stick her finger up my nose and my son using my downward-facing dog as a roomy train tunnel for his matchbox cars to have wrecks in.
(I am slowly coming to the conclusion that doing yoga in a quiet studio with a trained expert assisting your form is a pussy’s way of doing yoga. Trying to breathe deeply through your nose and maintain equanimity in a pose you have no idea whether you are performing correctly while a two-foot-tall someone takes a running leap at your back? That’s yoga. Or at least, that’s yoga at my house. I call it my “home practice.”)
(I am also comfortably familiar with Literal Surface Recounting’s first cousin, Prolix Detail.)
Here’s a true thing that is not a Truth: Once I bought a pair of red gardening clogs at CVS and they pleased me so much that I wore them to work every day for a week, pretending that no one would notice that I was wearing garden clogs from a drugstore as actual shoes.
Absolutely and embarrassingly true, but not Truth.
One more: When I was in second grade, the movie Willie Wonka And The Chocolate Factory scared me so much that during an in-class showing (public schools, eh?) I had to be escorted to the kindergarten classroom, where Bambi was playing, in order to not have a giant flapping panic attack, and also that to this day there are two movies you are not allowed to mention in my presence and Silence of The Lambs is the other one.
And another: When I was a senior in college and killing time, I took a course called Social Anthropology, in which we mostly watched ’50s surfing movies. My professor was a grey-haired Denis Leary type with an earring on whom I developed a ridiculous crush, which was obviously unrequited despite (as we learned in class) his recent and acrimonious divorce and probably largely due to the haircut I had at the time, which was so horrible — short, spiky, immaculately unflattering — that it outshone even my awkward personality and terrible insecurity.
So. These are all truths.
However, none of these truths is capitalized: Raw, Real Truth That Resonates With You as a Human. I haven’t found that yet, and although I know it when I read it, I still have not managed to recreate it at home.
Why I can’t write, Part I
FVCK YEAH NABLOPOMO! WOO!
Hi. So. Day two of Nablopomo, introductory expositional post out of the way. Now the real writing begins.*
As I mentioned in my last post, I’m going to try blogging every day this month. This is because I do like to write. I like to smash words together and type them out with my fingers. I like the feel of my fingers flying over a keyboard. I like that one time in a million when my monkey-typing manages to make someone laugh. And since I spend a large portion of my days feeling fraught and thwarted and wrung-out, I thought it would be nice to do something for myself that wasn’t running away to Toronto.
*Ha ha, I said “real writing” up there. Sorry to have misled you.
Anyway, so my theme this month is Why I Can’t Write. I thought about posting thirty pictures of Molly in a row, but that seemed kind of unfair and a little like cheating.
So here’s just one, because jesus is she cute.
Baby fish face!!
Parenting her is a full-time job. It’s like forty full-time jobs, especially after parenting a compliant baby like Owen and a snuggly one like Mac.
She is so completely herself, so smart and beautiful and chubby and cute and determined. But she is like no baby I have ever known. To come at it from the side, these are the books on my bookshelf right now: The Fussy Baby, The Strong-Willed Child, and Easy Home Repair. Girl is TOUGH. Do you know the Honey Badger? Molly is The Baby Badger. She does not give a shit.
She doesn’t brook any shit, either. She only naps for about an hour, maybe an hour and a half total each day. The rest of the time she is screaming and running and thrashing and tearing things apart and shrieking and smearing her boogie nose on things and flinging food on the floor and crying and tugging on my pantsleg and pushing her brother in the face and so on. She will not do cosleeping, she will not do snuggles. She will only stay in your arms if you stand up and let her use you like a mule to get to difficult-to-reach places. These characteristics make it somewhat (OK, unbelievably) difficult to enjoy any of the hobbies I once worked into my life of caring for babies. Even pulling out my phone to tap nonsense into Twitter means locking myself into the bathroom with her screaming on the other side of the door. My hands are full and my attention is split in a hundred directions from the time I get up until the time I go to work.
But I also know (when I am rested enough to take the longview) that this girl is going to kick the whole world’s ass when she grows older, because she is amazing, and it’s not her fault she came along when her mother was ill-prepared to parent such a spitfire. It has been said: “You are not managing an inconvenience, you are raising a human being.” I am an incredibly selfish and shortsighted person who values peace, quiet and copious free time, so when I read that I was chastened.
So what if I can’t indulge my hobbies? I’m raising three awesome little humans. My malformed knitting and incoherent monkey-babble can wait until they are teenagers and I have nothing better to do. As the old ladies at the grocery store remind me, that day will come sooner than I expect. And then I’ll be hobbling around Giant Eagle, looking for other babies to poke, and I might as well enjoy my own baby while she’s here and pokable.
So bring on the shrieking and the power struggles, because they are also accompanied by the wobbly steps and the fish faces and the big, smiling, slobbery kisses. Bring on all of it, and let this sweet and spunky little girl teach me to let go and just enjoy my crazy life, already.
Nablopomo?
I give it an optimistic but short-lived go every year, so here we go for 2011: Nablopomo, or, Blogging every day for a month!
I was thinking today as I was doing the dishes that I should play to a theme, and I think that theme, in light of my euphemistically “light” posting this year, will be Why I Can’t Write.
So! Sit back and enjoy! If any of you are still reading, that is, and if you are, then we really are best friends for life. Smooches!
And God bless Science
So dear darling One-Arm, a.k.a. HandiSpouse, a.k.a. Iain, will be having arm surgery tomorrow (a.k.a. today) to repair the biceps tendon that he ruptured last week while felling trees.
He’ll go under the knife about noon. Before he goes in, we’ll celebrate Mackie’s birthday with breakfast cupcakes and presents and grandparents.
Mackie will turn four at 3:10 p.m., four years after being induced and coaxed gently into the world following a tidy eight hours (even!) of labor.
I am glad to live in the modern era, where tendons can be reattached willy-nilly and overdue babies are firmly but kindly drawn forth.
Mostly I am glad to have these two guys in my life.
Flake day.
Oopsie doodle. I was enjoying myself so much last night (strawberry shortcake and Mad Men) that I totally spaced on writing. So I will double up today.
To what end, I may candidly ask myself. I don’t know. I guess just to pop in here to tell you how good it feels to take a day off from housework to sit on the porch swing with the baby monitor and my Kindle for an hour. Veddy, veddy nice.
I also found a post on mom101’s blog that cheered me up a bit. Something about “doing it all” and then everyone in comments confessing what they dont do. I’ll update that with a link soon.
Update: here is the link.
Ok. Time for coffee. More later.
Are you bored yet?
I am still doing this blog every day thing. Why? I don’t know. Why not. Like Mount Everest, man. Because it’s there.
Today I did a load of laundry, cooked, cleaned, yadda blah blah. In the scant hour and a half between Molly’s bottle and her next nap, I took her to Target with me, because Iain can’t really manage her with one arm, because she is crazy. She is a crazy baby. She is constantly crawling, wiggling, jibbling, punching, slapping, chewing, drooling, grabbing, standing, pulling, insert disruptive verb here. So if I wanted to go to Target, she needed to come with me, so come she did.
I was there to try on dresses. My brother is getting married soon and I needed some things to wear to brunches and suchlike that aren’t cutoff jeans or yoga pants or pinstriped trousers or a bathrobe, which are basically the only things I wear ever, I mean like with a shirt, because I do wear shirts. I don’t know why I only listed pants. If you can’t tell by now this is what English majors call a stream-of-consciousness piece of writing. So. I am trying on dresses which in itself is a cruel endeavor because not only have I had three children but one of them was a ten-pound baby and my body is nothing if not utterly wrecked. But I still have to appear in public wearing, as mentioned, something other than a bathrobe, so — dresses! Revolting. First of all, as hypnotic as Target’s influence is on suburban mothers such as myself, the quality of their sartorial selections is on par with, say, business envelopes, which is to say both a Target dress and a business envelope will melt in the rain though technically both can be used to cover one’s nakedness, supposing you had enough business envelopes.
Every dress I tried looked awful on me, so with Molly screaming and beating her chest and chewing on my keys and calling out loudly to see if there might be other similarly discontented babies in the vicinity I managed to choose the three least eye-gougingly revolting ones before she finally melted into a Molly Patented Stage Three Tantrum at the cash register and home we went, trailing fumes of exasperation.
Then, for a change, I cooked and cleaned some more, did the weekly grocery shop (we’re having pork chops on Tuesday! Stay tuned!), ate dinner with my darling family, pouted at my husband like a little kid, rode my bike down River Road to feel the wind in my hair, panted back up River Road like the out-of-shape blob that I am, supervised my children’s bicycling for a few minutes, bathed Molly, fed her a bottle, and bathed the boys.
And then Owen read me a book. SkippyJon Jones In The Doghouse. He did the Spanish accents and everything and sometimes you just have to sit there and watch your kid be amazing for fifteen minutes in order for you petulant mood to disappear. Also Iain said I looked nice in dress No. 3, so that helped.
And here we are, blogging and eating hummus on tortilla chips before bed. Thanks for humoring me thus far, Supa Friends. Or Friend. It’s OK if you want to bow out of reading this for the next few weeks because honestly I can’t promise it’s going to be any more interesting than this. Good to write, pointless to read. Although I will update you on Ol’ One-Arm on Tuesday (pork chop night! Send recipes!)
G’night.
Life in the monkey house
Committing to writing something every day was a dumb idea. I’m so tired I could spit and I just don’t have the gumpf to write. Well, no, the *writing* is easy — typey typey type! — it’s the brainpower required to come up with something worth saying/reading that I so sadly lack.
Nonetheless.
We went to the zoo today! My kids, god bless their discontented little hearts, got pretty grumpy toward the end, but underneath the bitching and moaning I detected some enjoyment. I also ate at Eat’n’Park for the first time in my whole life. I expect native Pittsburgers might find that weird. I don’t know.
Then we came home and I cleaned some more (always be cleaning!) and made dinner and cleaned up dinner and fed the baby and we put the kids to bed and I stared at my Amazon shopping cart for five minutes (trying to decide if I’ll have time to get to Target this week or if I should just order my stuff online) and wrote this post and Iain is picking out some horrible creature feature for us to watch on Netflix before we collapse into bed.
Happy Saturday!
If you look close, you can see all five of us in this shot.
Whose idea was this anyway
Well! Look at that. Three days into Junepoblahblah and I’m completely out of things to write about. Quelle surprise!
… Unless … unless you are super interested in the scintillating details of my daily drudgery. Are you super interested in the scintillating details of my daily drudgery? ARE YOU? ANSWER ME QUICK BECAUSE I ONLY HAVE LIKE 45 MINUTES LEFT TO POST TODAY AND I AM WAY TIRED.
Too late! You didn’t buzz in in time. And anyway, housework is boring. But Molly did cut her first tooth yesterday and climbed three stairs when Iain wasn’t looking. Kid is only eight months old but she’s got the terrible twos down pat. Can I get an OY VEY?