Everything Happened | vol. 155
Our friends Dani and Anthony came up from D.C. yesterday! They took us to dinner, making them our first non-family visitors since we moved to this weird, charming, confounding town on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. (Nota bene, friends, it very much is a contest.) Anthony is from southwestern Ohio like me, Dani is from New Mexico but went to grad school with Nick in Columbus, and it felt like home to all be packed into a booth in our town’s one “sit-down” restaurant with decent vegetarian fare that doesn’t close at 3 p.m. “Home” meaning, I guess, talking shit about people we used to know. Ain’t nothin’ better.
I can’t remember the last time I ordered dessert out, because we are usually bolting out the door with an unraveling child while chucking the check presenter at our server like it’s a ninja star, and because years of waiting tables programmed me to think that ordering dessert at restaurants is a rip-off. It’s fine to get ripped off sometimes though, especially if it’s crème brûlée . (Although, nothing is a rip-off if you aren’t paying! Thanks again, dudes.)
Desi did great at the restaurant, which, if you don’t have a baseline knowledge of what “great” is for a three-year-old, it means he did not throw objects or run away from the table. It helped that we were stuffed in a partially enclosed booth which had carpeted walls?? that I hope served to dampen some of his shriller ululations. (Earlier in the day we’d received on our stoop a Christmas parcel from my sister in Ohio, tucked into which was, thoughtfully, a copy of the novelty Christmas CD that my dad and thus, we kids, cherished in our youth. It should not surprise you that the album is unfunny and a little blue and serves as aural torture to anyone who isn’t me, my siblings, or my dad. I made the mistake of playing the track of the barking dogs doing “Jingle Bells” for Desi, which means that he is now and perhaps forevermore on a kick of atonally barking Christmas carols, making no exceptions for semi-fine dining occasions.) It also helped that the restaurant inexplicably had french fries on the menu, as my kid doesn’t eat real food because the universe plucks from the cosmos for you the child best suited to subvert your most precious vanities.
On our way out, I told the couple at the table nearest us that things should quiet down now. Before she had the presence of mind to politely demur, the woman blurted out, “Oh, thank God!” and then laughed uncomfortably at her unintended honesty. I laughed, too. We all heard what we heard. What we heard was a child imitating a dog barking “Jingle Bells” on a loop.
A n y w a y, Dani reminded me that three years ago, she had her graduation party in Columbus. I was 39 weeks pregnant and I rode my bike there. In August. Impossible that it was a degree less than 85F outside. Her mom, a L&D nurse also in attendance at the party, was like, What….is happening. Why. And now present-me, a.k.a. future-me, is also wondering why!! I can’t imagine why! It was not to be a show-off bitch, though that is the only way it tracks for me now. I barely remember this event but looking back, I scraped together a few facts: my first pregnancy was a fresh, salty, sea breeze compared to this one, the venue was within a few miles of our apartment, and parking is always tricky there. So we biked. Ha ha ha ha ha ha. What a show-off bitch.
This anecdote could have made me feel ashamed that I’m not magically as able this pregnancy, but it cheered me instead. It reminded me just how incapacitated I’ve become. And how close I am to reclaiming much of my ability: taking deep breaths with lungs that can unfurl fully, climbing short flights of stairs without wheezing at the top, walking paths with an incline of more than five degrees without pausing to catch my breath every few yards. Breathing is most of it, apparently, but I also look forward to sitting down without letting out an involuntary death rattle, and carrying a basket of laundry without getting spotty vision. And also, of course, there will be a new BABY soon, who will smell like spring laundry drying on the line and have froggy little coiled-up limbs, and who will not be able to bark Christmas carols directly into my ear canal.
My version of nesting is in service of something, but I’m not quite sure what. Like, it was Nick who got the infant car seat out of the storage unit and presumably vacuumed out the dead spiders and got it installed. And it was Nick who made the nightmare open storage situation in our rental house kitchen a little less nauseating to behold. I still feel low-grade anxious about the state of the house (cluttered! no diapers on the premises!) but fixing that is not where my motivations lie. What have I felt suddenly, terrifyingly passionate about then?
Setting up a 529 for my older kid. I hate to do the college-educated middle-class millennial parent flex of “actually I hope my kid learns to weld instead of going to college, are you dazzled by my class ambivalence, squares????” though it’s true that sometimes I hope that he doesn’t. On one hand, I don’t know that college is a good deal, or that it will be a good deal in 15 years, and on the other hand, I generally feel sad about my kid being out there alone someday in a punishing world!!! (I’m working on getting over this.) I don’t know what the future holds for my three-year-old but it recently occurred to me that if he is indeed four-year-college material, there exists a middle ground between paying for all of his college (which Nick and I have never considered to be within our means) and contributing nothing at all. And then once I realized we should set up a savings account for this purpose, it haunted me until I did it. Now it’s done! Also FYI he can use a 529 for trade school should he wish to call his parents’ bluff and learn to weld.
Shortening or removing the hairs that grow out of my head. Arranging my eyebrows into a shape and getting my bangs out of my face had me walking out of the salon 10% more attractive than when I walked in. I admired myself in the glass storefront, surprised at how much better I could look with just 30 minutes’ time and $20. Finally, here was that pregnancy glow I’d been promised, thirtysome weeks into the project. I felt lightened of the psychic load of having to hate every picture taken of me with my newborn at the hospital because my stupid bangs are in my eyes, which is how I feel about the few thousand pics of me in the hospital with Desi. The next morning before work, I filled in my eyebrows and put on makeup for the first time in weeks. My head and face were a friend who deserved respect, not just an acne-ravaged, bloated ghoul haunting me from my phone’s self-facing camera.
Buying matching pajamas for Desi and the baby.
Let me live.
You probably won’t hear from me again until I have the baby. In the meantime, here are some words on giving birth that I cherished this year, though Katie’s is technically from last year, it still feels this-year-y to me, ok??:
Katie and the precipitous second labor
Kate and the enormous pancake twins
Emily and the nadir
Laura and the arrival of Chance
yr mate,
Evie
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