The Most Humiliating Day of My Life

My parents were here visiting for the past week. Whenever I see them, it makes me wish I lived closer to them. It's always hard to see them go.

My dad is a workaholic, and the entire time he was here, he worked on various projects to keep him busy. For example, he scraped, stained, and painted our entire two-level deck. This is a project my husband has been meaning to "get around to" for over a year now.

My dad, however, is not a handy person. The old family joke is that if he can't staple it, tape it, glue it, or tie it in a knot, he can't fix it. My husband is pretty much the same way, although he takes great offense to any mention of his lack of handiness and is always scheming some hairbrained idea or another to fix whatever ails our house, much to my chagrin.

So last Sunday, my dad and Brent set out to sodder an outside faucet back together. This is the same faucet that I told Brent to drain and cap last fall, but he thought I didn't know what I was talking about, and so in February, the pipe burst, and the faucet fell right off the damn house.

But what do I know?

Brent has spent the past four weekends trying to sodder the faucet back onto the pipe to no avail. In order to water our gardens, we have a hose hooked up in the basement and trailing out through a hole cut in the side of the basement wall. I'm just waiting to head down to our basement and be attacked by some hairy little critter that has taken up refuge there.

I showed my dad the faucet and pipe while he was here and Brent was at work, and my dad went on about it being copper this and that and he'd have to check the pipes in the basement, etc. and it just really sounded as if he knew what he was talking about. So on Sunday, when they headed off to the hardware store together and came back laden down with various soddering equipment, including a blow torch, I was feeling rather positive that they would be able to fix it.

Stupid, stupid, stupid.

Things seemed to be going along fine. My dad was outside with the blow torch and Brent was inside in the basement holding the pipe so that it stuck further out the wall of the house. I was inside getting ready to go on a hike, and I heard my dad mutter, "Shit, shit, shit. That's the last thing I need..."

About two minutes later, my husband bolted upstairs and grabbed a glass of water and ran into the dining room, tore the screen out of the dining room window and handed the glass of water to my dad. "Could my dad be that thirsty?" I thought to myself. "Why would Brent be running towards him with a glass of water, and yanking out the screen to get it to him?"

But the fact that Brent had hurried worried me. If you knew my husband, you would know that the man NEVER hurries. One more time for emphasis -- NEVER. I've always said that someone would have to light a pretty enormous fire under his ass to get him moving.

Or, as I found out, light a little fire in the foundation of our 100+ year old house that is just a timber box waiting to explode.

Somehow, my dad had managed to not even come close to soddering the faucet back on the pipe, but he had successfully ignited our house. And the two of them were using glasses of water to try to extinguish it.

When this didn't work, they hurried to get the hose over to the fire. I went back to tell my mom that Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum had set the house on fire.

"I'd call the fire department," she said calmly, not even looking up from the email she was typing.

So I went back to my dad and Brent, who were madly trying to put out the fire that was now filling our house with smoke.

"I'm going to call the fire department," I told them.

"For chrisakes, don't do that! Then everybody in the neighborhood will know we're incompetent," my dad said.

So I paced through the house for awhile, but when Brent started breaking the stucco off the side of our house with an ax so that they could get the fire out, despite their protests, I dialed 911.

I tried to make it sound as if it wasn't a big deal. I even told the operator that it was a "small fire." And I did try to save face for my dad and Brent but I had to admit to her that it was caused by a "home improvement project gone bad." She told me to get everyone out of the house, so I went and got Mikey up from his nap and dragged my mom off of her email.

About five minutes later, four full-size fire engines were parked in front of our house along with two smaller trucks. About a dozen firemen in full fire-fighting gear, (carrying axes and various other fire-fighting equipment) were traipsing in and out of my house and trying to find "hot spots" in the wall. And every single neighbor within a five-block radius walked over to see what was going on.

The firemen were all there for about a half hour. Mikey got to sit in a fire truck and get his picture taken with a fireman. It turned out that my dad and Brent had managed to put the fire out after all, but the firemen told us not to leave the house for the day just in case it wasn't totally out.

After all was said and done, my dad never apologized for setting our house on fire; he just kept saying that we would never let him live it down. My husband declared it the most humiliating day of his life and asked that it not be brought up again.

I can't wait to see the pictures of Mikey and the fireman. I'm going to get it blown up and framed, and maybe will send it out as this year's Christmas card.

Sweet 16

Dear Mikey,

It is the day before our two year wedding anniversary, and you are 16 months old. Someday when you're older, maybe you'll do the math. You were a month early, so no, there wasn't a shotgun wedding. When I look back at wedding and honeymoon pictures, I can't believe that there you were growing inside of me and I didn't even know it. During our honeymoon, I think I did every single thing a pregnant woman isn't supposed to do: from drinking to taking sleeping pills to eating soft cheese and raw fish. I even took a whalewatching boat ride out in the ocean and completely ignored the enormous sign that said, "This boat ride can be rough and may cause miscarriage. No pregnant women allowed." But even with all of that, you came out o.k. Somedays, I think you came out better than others.

Two years ago, your dad and I had all of these plans, all of these things that we wanted to do -- just the two of us. We were going to travel and we were going to make a lot of money, and we were going to buy a big house, and we were going to do at least a half-million things. I remember thinking on my wedding day that the whole world was a possibility -- that I could do anything and I had a great partner to do it with. And then a few weeks later, I found out I was having you.

Your dad and I scrapped everything we had ever wanted to do as a couple, and tried to start realigning our thinking into family mode. Things happened so quickly that 16 months after you were born, my head is still spinning.

You are amazing. You are my perfect baby. And whenever I complain about you, mostly to your grandparents, they remind me that you are difficult only because you are the most intelligent child on earth. Anything you do is a result of your superior intelligence, according to Grandma Fran and Grandpa Mike. You won't eat? It's because you get bored by having to sit in your high chair. You won't sleep? It's because you want to explore and not waste anytime in your crib. Sometimes I believe them, but sometimes I think you are just difficult.

You have gotten your mom's pushy genes, and if someone or something is in your way, you now just lean into it and get it out of the way. Your dad says he's not going to be pushed around by two people in his house, but we'll see about that. You're pretty good at pushing him already.

You continue to talk and to learn new words with amazing speed. I think your vocabularly has got to be well over 120 words now, though if you don't know what something is or how to pronounce it, you assign it one of two names: baba or nene. Your grandma was all excited when she was visiting because you kept calling her nene, and I think she was a little deflated when I told her that's also what you call monkeys.

You make noise all of the time. If you're not talking, you're singing, and if you're not singing, you're squealing, and if you're not squealing, you're moaning. Which is what you do in the car virtually from the moment I snap you into your little seat until we arrive back at home. That makes for some fun driving experiences.

You discovered balloons this month and chewed on yours until it popped. When we took you to the neighborhood barbeque, you were so excited to be around so many people that you literally ran around in circles squealing. For two hours. Then you drank the water in the dog's bowl. I don't know if we'll be invited back.

You hiss at the cats and call Louie "Moo Moo" after the cow in your favorite book, "Moo Moo Goes to the City." You still love trucks more than anyone should ever love trucks. We have about 50 truck books, and trucks of various shapes and sizes in every room of the house. A highlight of the week is Tuesday morning when the garbage truck comes; the driver honks and waves at you now. And I think the highlight of your young life may very well have been when your grandpa set our house on fire and you were able to crawl in the fire trucks and pat all of their tires, the whole time saying, in awe, "Truck. Truck. Trucccckkkk." Thanks Grandpa.

In addition to singing "Camptown Races" and "The Bridge Over the River Kwai," you have added "Twinkle Twinkle" to your repetoire, and you now make up your own songs to sing. Your sweet little voice always can make me smile. You have started honking my breasts (a nice trick learned from your father), but instead of saying, "Honk honk" like your dad does, you say, "Zsa zsa." You have started to like to "sit," which is one of your new favorite words, though mostly you sit for about three seconds and then you're off and running again.

I didn't think it was possible, but I think I love you more each day. It is hard to describe just how much I love you, but I have never been happier than when you are in my arms, and you are laughing and you pat my arm with your little hand and give me one of your big kisses, always with tongue. You bring me true joy; you amaze me.

Love,
Mama

The Milk Nazis

I was at the gym the other morning, and couldn't believe my luck that I actually got my hands on the current issue of People magazine. (O.K. So I read complete trash while I'm at the gym, but come on people, it's 5:30 a.m. What am I supposed to read? The gd Economist?) Anyway, after finding the interview with Britney Spears and her new hubby a little out of my league, I flipped through a few more pages and found something that caught my eye. It was about breastfeeding.

Apparently, there is this Web site called feedmybaby or something to that effect. To preface this whole thing, I should probably inform the audience here that breastfeeding is not something that every woman can do. There are lots of reasons why women can't breastfeed, such as breast enlargement or reductions, breast cancer survivors, and women that suffered with pre-elcampsia during their pregnancy. Anyhoo, on feedmybaby, you can get expressed (as in pumped) breast milk from some kind mommy with too much milk expressed (as in Fed Exed) to you so that you can give it to your baby if you can't produce the milk yourself.

Very interesting concept. I didn't read the whole article though, because really, who reads the whole article in People?

My own experience with breastfeeding was something of a nightmare. In no way did it resemble the relaxed, calm mommy holding her peacefully nursing baby to her breast such as what you see in new mommy magazines. As a matter of fact, I would be willing to wager that my breastfeeding experience more closely resembled something out of Mommy Dearest.

Throughout my entire pregnancy, I had planned on breastfeeding my future little monster. That's what is best for baby, right? So whatever is best for baby is what I was planning to do.

But then I developed pre-eclampsia, and in short, my milk never "came in" the way you hear about (you know, boobies that leak or that become as hard as footballs.) I was never a leaker or a squirter. I was more of a dribbler.

There was milk there, but it wasn't enough to feed my son. I had to supplement his breastfeeding with formula. And so, feeling like a complete failure and a biological FREAK, I tried everything under the gd sun to get those boobies of mine to crank out the good stuff in huge quantities.

I worked with a "lactation consultant" who was slightly insane and kept grabbing my nipples and rolling them around in her fingers.

I paid $350 for a breast pump that I dutifully hooked up to my boobies every other hour 24 HOURS A DAY and pumped for 20 minutes at a time like I was a gd heifer over at Milk Inc.

I took hot showers; I tried warm compresses; I drank hot milk; I drank wine and beer; I tried meditating (and trust me when I say this, I am NOT a meditator); I took some terrible drug that caused depression (NOTE: Do not take drugs that cause depresion when already suffering from post-partum depression); I took an herb that made me smell like black licorice, which I will never be able to eat again as long as I live; and then I paid like $300 to buy some breast milk drug through a pharmacy in New Zealand over the Internet (NOTE: If the FDA won't approve something, there's likely a good reason for it.) I even prayed to God that I would produce more milk in order to do the best thing for my new baby.

And I'm a god damn atheist.

So at my six-week post-partum check-up, I had something of a nervous breakdown about having to supplement my baby's feedings with formula. And my doctor said, "You're about that age...Your mom didn't breastfeed you, did she?"

No, in fact, she hadn't. That bitch! That's what's wrong with me!

"Well, I was a formula baby too," my doctor said. "And we seemed to turn out all right. Though if my mom had breastfed me, instead of having my own practice, I probably could have been president!"

And suddenly, it dawned on me that I was doing the best that I could for my baby. And just like with the rest of life, doing the best you can has to be good enough. He wasn't starving to death. He was growing like a weed. And I was slowly making myself crazy because breastfeeding is best for your child. If you can breastfeed, that is.

I would like to say that is the end of this happy story, but it isn't.

I really wanted to make peace with this whole breastfeeding situation, but the general public wouldn't let me. As a matter of fact, COMPLETE FUCKING STRANGERS would come up to me and ask me if I was nursing my child. I was nursing, in fact, but having had so many difficulties with it, I took this question very personally, because what they were really inquiring was whether or not I was an adequate mother. And even though I kept telling myself that I was doing the best thing for my baby by supplementing his feeding with formula, I still felt like a terrible mother.

Even my son's sexpot pediatrician (in whom I had confided my entire breastfeeding nightmare) kept reminding me at every well-baby check-up, "Well, you do know that breastfeeding exclusively is what's best for baby..."

Yeah, jackass, I know.

I finally quit nursing my son when he was around 7 - 8 months old. Around this time, the American Academy of Pediatrics came out with a report saying that children should be breastfed until they're two years old. (At which point, I realized the American Academy of Pediatrics is probably all men who have never had their shirt clawed off by a hungry baby, or been extricated to a backroom in a restaurant, or had their nipples SCAB over, or been hooked up to a milking machine for any length of time at all.) As a matter of fact, I felt as if I deserved a gold medal for making it that long, and am slightly in awe of, and extremely curious about women that nurse their babies until their kids are, like, in kindergarten. I think my hormones went back to normal shortly after I quit nursing Mikey, and I once again began thinking like a rational adult.

What a glorious day that was.

A few weeks later, I ran into this woman that had been in my pre-natal yoga class. She was a lawyer and had twins. And she told me that she got up at 3 a.m. every morning in order to pump her breasts so that her kids didn't have to have formula while they were at daycare.

I thought she was totally nuts.

Why? Why? Why?

I often wonder to myself why it is that I live in Montana. I mean, there are a lot of reasons why one of the biggest states in the country is home to under a million inhabitants. In my opinion, here are a few reasons why nobody lives here:

1) The "wilderness tax" we pay for living here. I've actually seen jobs for Ph.D.s that start under $25,000 annually. I am NOT kidding.
2) A Montanan's definition of ethnic food is Tostitos and Pace salsa from the local Safeway.
3) The nearest Saks Fifth Avenue is in Seattle. And that one pretty much totally blows.
4) Any place where you need to plug in your car to get it started should have a warning sign posted at the state line for folks not sure what you do with a plug hanging out of your car engine. Our weather can be "inhospitable," with winter lows often hovering FOR WEEKS AT A TIME around 40 to 50 BELOW zero (and that's without the windchill.)
5) Some folks do get bothered by the number of people that ride around with rifles in the back window of their pick-ups. I'm from rural Michigan originally, so this doesn't bother me much. Though it would have bothered me in Detroit, I suppose.
6) Lack of decent food -- I have given up on ever having anything exotic in a Montana restaurant again -- unless you want to count steak with a butter sauce on it.

But then there are days when I think that I wouldn't live anywhere else. And this morning, I had one of those "Montana moments." Since having Mike, I've suddenly come to understand why my own mother is a complete insomniac who was never able to sleep past five a.m. because now I am the same way. I used to just lay in bed, waiting for my alarm to go off, getting more and more frustrated because I was unable to sleep. But now, I just get up and go do something -- by myself. Yes, from 5 - 6:30 a.m. is the only "me time" I get all day.

Normally, I go to the gym, and work my ass off only so I can consume more delicious calories throughout the day. Steak with butter sauce. Mmmmm. Tostitos with Pace salsa. Mmmmmm.

Lately though, I've been getting up and going for a morning hike, which is what I did this morning. Because we are so far north, this time of year, we have incredibly long days, and when I roll out of bed at 5 a.m., it's very close to being completely light outside and all of the birds are already singing. Our house is situated at the top of a pretty steep hill with public lands behind it. From our front porch, you can see for miles -- all the way out to the valley and beyond to the mountains that surround us. It's a view that I've had for a long time, and I still don't take it for granted. I hope I never do.

It rained all day yesterday, and this morning, as the sun was coming up, there were still heavy purple clouds hanging at the tops of the mountains, which were again covered with snow, and the sky was red and orange and violet and yellow as the sun worked its way up to its daytime post. Then as I climbed the hills behind my house, I was just surrounded by that amazing smell of wet earth, and the knee-high grass was dripping and glistening. Everywhere there were wildflowers -- shocks of pink, purple, and yellow -- and the sweet smell of pollen was hanging in the blue, blue sky that seems to go on forever here.

That smell of wildflowers, of wild grasses, of clean air and clean water -- it's a smell that I've smelled in no other place I've ever lived, and it's about as clean and simple and pure of a smell as I think I will ever know. I hope that if I move away from here that I always remember that smell -- the smell of spring in Montana, of the earth growing, of the flowers blossoming, the smell of promise, of bounty.

What Does a Kitty Say?

We have three of the surliest cats you will likely ever meet. Mr. T is practically a feral cat, who only comes inside to eat and use the litter box (for some reason, he refuses to go outside). Stanley is just plain nasty, and Louie is scared of his own shadow.

Take these three lovely animals and mix in a toddler and you have some good stories to tell.

When all Mike could do was crawl, he could never catch up to the cats when they were inside and so they were essentially a constant source of frustration. But now that he's walking -- look out. He spends the majority of his day running after the cats and trying to pull their tails. And he discovered that if he shakes a can of treats, they'll come closer to him. So as he runs, he's shaking this little can of treats (with the top duct-taped on after a rather unfortunate incident that ended up with cats heaving after consuming a nearly full can of treats) and he yells in his sweetest possible voice, "Ditty! Ditty! Eaaarrrrr Ditty!!!"

The cats hate him. But they tolerate him because of the treats. At least sometimes they do.

One of Mike's greatest talents is his wide range of animal impersonations. He will grab a stuffed bear and say, "Rooooaaaarrrr!" And he'll grab his rooster magnet and crow just like a rooster (kind of anyway). Or he'll grab his monkey puppet and start chirping like a little monkey.

But the other day, he grabbed his stuffed kitty and said, "hhhhhiiiiissssss."

I laughed so hard I almost peed myself. Now whenever he picks up any of his "ditty" toys, he hisses.

The other thing he has figured out is that if he feeds the cats while he is eating dinner, they will actually come near him. So the majority of our meals are spent with Mikey trying as slyly as possible to hand his dinner to the cats and saying, "Ditty, ditty, ditty" with me saying, "That's for you Mike. That's NOT for the cats."

The worst part about mixing cats and toddlers, however, has got to be the cat food situation. The cat's food bowl is in the kitchen, and while I'm preparing dinner, Mike will hang out with me, usually banging on pots and pans, throwing rolling pins on the floor, and generally creating a collision course from Hell for mommas. But every once in a while, when I pick him up to put him in his high chair for dinner, he will have some nasty-ass Meow Mix breath. So I will ask him, "Did you eat the kitty food, Mike?" And he always says, "Yum! Ditty! Yum!"

As Big As My Forearm

I've been a little constipated as of late, and the other day, as I was sitting on the toilet, trying to squeeze out another little rabbit turd, I had a flashback -- complete with dizziness, the sweats, and the whole nine yards -- a little bit of PTSD, if you will.

Now for those that have known me for a long time, you all might assume my pooping PTSD came from my days as a poor college student when I volunteered for a medical experiment that will forever be known as Operation Rectal Probe. But no. Operation Rectal Probe, where I sat awake for three days playing video games with a probe up my butt the entire time, was a sunny walk in the park compared to what brought around the PTSD episode.

I'm talking about my first after-birth poop.

I feel a certain responsibility to women everywhere to spread the news about the first after-birth poop. Because if someone had warned me about this experience, I would have likely had my tubes tied right then and there. But, like most of the pregnancy and birthing experience, valuable information, like having to birth the placenta AFTER YOU HAVE THE BABY, and the first after-birth poop is closely guarded, I assume so that the human race may continue.

So here's the deal. You shoot a baby, weighing anywhere from five to ten pounds OUT OF YOUR VAGINA. During this process, your vagina likely tears or if your doctor is from the stone age, he/she will cut your vagina all the way back to your pooper. Yes, you heard me -- BACK TO YOUR POOPER. Then you get stitched up. Are you squirming yet?

Sooner or later, you must pee so a nurse hands you a little squirt bottle and warns you not to use any toiletpaper. I remember being very apprehensive about peeing, because the idea of getting pee on a freshly stitched wound did not much sound like a lot of fun. But what really made me apprehensive was when I sat down on the toilet and was almost 100% certain that all of my guts were going to slip right out of my butthole. You see, all those muscles stretch down there so that the baby may be pushed out, and then your innards are all slipping around because all of a sudden there is a WHOLE lot more room in your abdominal cavity than there was just a few short hours before, so your stomach and your intestines and your bladder and kidneys and lungs and, hey, I'm no biologist, but all those inner guts are like, "Hey -- look at all this room!" and they're jockeying around for their former positions. And I was really and truly afraid that all of my guts, in their new roomy interior, would look around and see a hole and slide right on out to freedom. At least that's what it felt like.

Along with your pee rinser bottle, you are also given a lot of stool softener at the hospital. I didn't really want to take it because I frankly had no interest in pooping again as long as I lived. But a nurse convinced me that I would indeed eventually poop, and for the time being, I should consider stool softener my new best friend. Little did I know.

The day that I checked out of the hospital, I met with the OB on call who asked me if I had pooped yet. When I told her I hadn't, she assured me this was normal, but that I would want "to make friends with fiber." Her words. She advised me to eat a lot of cereal and things that would make me poop. But like I said, I didn't want to poop so I didn't go near a bowl of cereal for a looooong time.

I had Mike on a Friday afternoon, went home on a Sunday afternoon, and on Tuesday afternoon, my doctor called me at home to see how things were going. She asked if I had pooped, and I told her I hadn't but that was o.k. with me.

"Well, it's not o.k. with me," she said. "If you don't poop by Thursday, you're going to need an enema."

I was not ABOUT to suffer one more indignity, such as an enema, and so I decided that if I hadn't pooped by then, I would just lie and tell her I was pooping right along. But the fact of the matter was, I was starting to really feel as if I hadn't pooped in five days, and I was feeling rather, um, full.

So on day 6, I set about the business of pooping. I took a lot of stool softener in the morning. Then in the afternoon, I went to work. My husband was at work. The baby was sleeping. I took a copy of the New Yorker, and settled down to do the job. Trying to poop when you have no muscle control down there is significantly harder than it sounds. I was worried about my guts still falling out, but I was also worried about my stitches popping and more tearing of my very sore vagina. But I managed, and when I stood up, I admired my job with amazement. Because I had never pooped so much in my life. And it was as big as my forearm.

One more time for emphasis: MY FOREARM.

And I am not a little forearmed person.

So I flushed, and was rather delighted that the whole experience was over, but wait.

The week before I had the baby, we had to replace our toilet because our old antique pooper was leaking. So the plumber put in one of those new fandangled models -- the LOW-FLOW toilet. You know, the kind that saves water and is better for the environment. I personally don't care if it takes 500 gallons to wash down a poop; I just want it gone.

Well, the new low-flower was not interested in swallowing up my forearm poop. And so it clogged up, swelling right up to the top of the bowl, though miraculously not spilling over. At least not too much.

I didn't quite know what to do. The baby was now awake and crying. Call it baby blues or complete insanity from lack of sleep, but I was also crying, and knew I could not stomach plunging forearm poops and coaxing them down the low-flower. So I called my husband at work and told him he needed to come home ASAP.

Which he did. Lucky for him.

And he plunged my GIGANTIC poops down the toilet, cleaned up the mess, and only remarked that he had never seen such a huge poop in his life. Then he went back to the office.

Traumatic. To say the least.

When I was recounting this experience to my mother, I asked her about her own first after-birth poop, and she visibly shuddered -- OVER THIRTY YEARS LATER.

"I probably should have warned you about that," she said.

But if she had, she would likely be grandchildless.