Special Relativity

a few minutes back… Ms: I’m already making plans for Critter’s … oh, I guess third Christmas. Because she’ll be old enough to understand some things but not really know what’s going on. Mr: Oh? Ms: Yeah, like put Elf on a Shelf around the house in awful positions. Mr: Like butt fuckin’ Mensch on a Bench! Ms: Exactly! Or sitting in the corner of the litter box with little peppermints scattered around! A few minutes before that… Ms: Yeah nobody’s not going to know I’m pregnant wearing this! Mr: Just tell them you have adult onset spina bifida. Ms: What? No! analysis and conclusion We are horrible people who will destroy our child, but I am apparently that much more horrible. *kermit...

Crickets

What a weird few days. We seem to be in a sort of holding pattern right now. By which I mean Ms seems to be feeling not so well and so so tired most of the time, but there’s nothing really new to report. As far as I know anyway. Ms looks about like she looked last week, at least to my eye. It’s like there was an initial foomp in her body and right now it’s waiting for Critter to catch up. We’re not entirely sure what week we’re in, because, er, symptoms don’t seem to be lining up with what the sonogram tech told us. That means we’re not sure if we’re at the stage of a grape or a strawberry yet, or whatever the hell the fruit chart says. No more visits to the doctor until December. No great realizations about what it means to be parents. A couple more people know now (hi!) but the numbers are still low because of that idiotic first trimester convention. Pretty sure Critter doesn’t have a tail any more. I’m still rooting for a tail. A real one though, not some nub. Ok, I’m not really rooting for a tail. According to reports from Ms, even the Doozers seemed to lay low for much of this week. Did we ever explain the Doozers? Pregnancy cramps? Construction site? Doozers from Fraggle Rock building mysterious structures all down in there? This is how Ms and I talk. Anyway, it’s like we started this to chronicle all the interesting, challenging, funny, dreadful, or wonderful things that happen in a pregnancy and just a couple weeks in we get a week in which Ms is scraping the bottom of the energy barrel and I’m sick. Nothing communicable, don’t worry. So, we press on, I suppose. Next week we’ll probably have uterine barrel roles or something like...

Hey! You in there!

Ms and I were lounging around tonight, she playing Candy Crush, me using her as an increasingly comfortable pillow, when she asked me if it was about time for me to start reading to the Critter. Naturally, I turned, tapped on her belly, and said “Hey, you in there!” I think my next move was to put my face on her belly and start reciting strange versions of nursery rhymes. I can only imagine what it would sound like, if only our Critter had ears. We’re still at the translucent-with-flippers stage. If only instead of dust to dust, the arc of our lives were flippers to flippers. How wonderful would it be to hit a ripe old age, leap into the sea, and paddle off into the night. I suppose you’d end up eaten by a dolphin, but at least you’d have some variety. It would, incidentally, also make explaining death to a child a somewhat less fraught process. I only mention this because this is exactly the kind of thing I am built to say to our offspring. Just bizarre, outlandish nonsense. “Where did Fluffy McFluffington go daddy?” “Well, when kitties get to a certain age, they grow flippers and return to the sea!” And this is the point where I really come to terms with the fact that I might fuck up another human being. Holy crap! I’ve written software for a living! I know how easy it is to stick an infinite loop in there with even the most careful effort! Exclamation point! Thank goodness human beings aren’t computer programs. But still. Don’t get me wrong: I’m not lacking confidence. I think I’m a well-adjusted, sane, responsible human being who will do my best to provide enriching activities for the Critter while simultaneously building an environment in which the Critter can explore its (still “it” for the moment) own little destinies. And, really, even if I weren’t, humans have a remarkable ability to outgrow indoctrination. Go back not terribly far in my family, and we had people who thought it was perfectly normal to own other human beings. And then the next generation didn’t. And then the next generation was a quiet revolutionary in the fight for racial integration. Try as you might to screw up a kid, the kid often ends up having the last laugh. So, back to mumbling into my wife’s belly. It’s hard not to do something like that and think along the lines of “oh god what do we really know about human fetal development? could the sound waves have jarred loose some critical connection in the Critter’s brain? are we going to end up with a conservative?!” My brain has gotten really weird since P Day. (Hee hee, “P Day.” Pee. Stick. I am slain.) Could this be why my dad was so … odd? Did finding out he was going to have to teach a mammal more than “sit” and “stay” – trigonometry for goodness sake! – push him into some anti-Zen state of mindlessness? Do all parents-to-be think they’re going to be edgy and show Critters the world-as-it-is only to find themselves worrying about all the profanity in the hip hop music in their music libraries? I have an odd paradox in my head. I want to be honest with this kid. Whisper truths that the child may not understand immediately but will grasp earlier because of the foundation. On the other hand, I’m as certain as I sit here...

Aw, what a cute … thing!

It’s the baby version of Carl Sagan’s famous, beautiful meditation on the Pale Blue Dot. In his piece, Sagan explores the the implications of this photo of our home, our planet, taken in 1990 from the edge of our solar system by the Voyager 1 spacecraft. Not even the edge — Voyager was still 20 years from the real edge separating our little oasis from true interstellar space. Despite being taken from not very far away at all on a cosmic scale, our entire world shows up as a dot. Just a dot. Sitting in a ray of light from the nearby, nearly overwhelming Sun. Sagan says it better than I ever could. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. Listen to it. Then listen again. It’s humbling, to look at that dot and think that’s (almost) all we have ever known. No human has travelled farther than the immediate neighborhood of that dot. Except for a handful of astronauts and robot travelers, everything in the human experience that has been and will be, perhaps for a very long time, occupies that pale blue dot. We saw Critter on the sonogram today. Just a tiny lump, hardly identifiable as anything other than a lump except for the pulsing, eager heartbeat, surrounded by the vastness of the future....

168 Hours in a Week

There are points in one’s life when one becomes the stereotype, despite one’s best efforts not to. Ok, it’s not that I’ve tried not to be a stereotype. It’s just that I’ve never cared much about what I should (or, if you prefer more clarity on the tone behind that word, “should”) be doing with my life, so I’ve bumbled into anything stereotypical about my life in a manner that surprises me every time. I mean, not some of the details. I’m a lawyer, for goodness sake. Much of my waking life involves lurching from one stereotype to another in that regard. But the broad brush strokes of my life, the existential moments, have not followed from the typical life path of a person my age. Perhaps some, even many, are shared with my generational compatriots, but I’ve seen people worried and anxious about things I can barely comprehend, from what fashion is “in” (what does that even mean? can someone please explain to me who gets to decide this and why anyone pays attention to them?) to whether young Rutabaga Rose is overscheduled enough. I don’t even really mean to discount the inevitable crises of adulthood (though, come on, just give up on the whole “what’s fashionable” thing, for your own sanity and ours). It’s just that I haven’t lived the same life. Maybe that’s obvious. Maybe some people who know me would find that comment laughable, because I am pretty darn conventional in many respects. So what does this have to do with impending parenthood? Good question. I feel like Ms and I could reasonably be seen to be, finally, running headlong into the delayed onset adulthood that so characterizes our generation. Before I go any further, I want to clarify one point Ms and I have both alluded to in connection with this blog. There are things about our experience that will be entirely unique because we are individuals whose interactions will produce unique outcomes. On the other hand, there are things about our experience that will be – to any of you who have gone through this – amusingly mundane. So when I write here, I am, generally, not seeing myself as experiencing anything outside the norm but am using this site as a vehicle to communicate our experiences to (a) people who haven’t been through a pregnancy, (b) people who find our writing amusing or insightful (gosh, that’s so sweet of you! thank you!!), and (c) serial killers who make skin suits from their victims. In other words, this blog is never a plea for sympathy. Also, I’m going to talk quite a lot about me. That’s not me being preoccupied with me. It’s me trying to provide an honest and complete snapshot of what this process is like for me. Having gone through all that, what’s bothering me tonight – and “bothering” is an inadequate word if I’m honest – is that … how are two professional, involved, ambitious, engaged, curious people supposed to do everything? I expect Ms will have quite a bit more to say on this point and, indeed, far more serious concerns about it than I will. But tonight we were talking about the things we have to do in the next few months, the things we’ve committed to doing in the next few months, and the things we want to do in the next few months. There simply isn’t time. Or energy. I am working one draining job and teetering between having a very...