Spooktacular

It's my favorite time of year again.

Growing up in New York, autumn was a bittersweet time for me. I loved the colors and the crisp, cool scent of fall that still reminds me of new notebook paper, but my appreciation was always hampered by the knowledge that winter was closing in. I couldn't wait for spring and that first hint of warmth that meant the cold and dreary days and short nights were finally coming to an end. But eight years of living in North Carolina changed my mind about that. It wasn't just that the overabundance of pollen made my hay fever go haywire, it was that the spring sunshine was a harbinger of the oppressive Southern heat. Fall, on the other hand, brought the promise of cooler days and blessed relief from the soggy air of summer. Yay fall.

Living in Portland has brought me a new appreciation of fall. Sure the nip in the Pacific Northwest air brings the promise of rain, rain and more rain, but in my neighborhood, along with the multicolored leaves littering the sidewalks, autumn brings the promise of pumpkins, costumes and candy.

Sure, Halloween is celebrated in most places across the country, but I've never seen folks get into the spirit like they do here. Pumpkins have been decorating porches since late September; trees are hung with little ghosties and lit with bat-shaped lights; smoking cauldrons dot yards here and there and graveyards have sprung up on a number of front lawns. And it seems like years since I've seen people take to the streets on Halloween night like they do here, where droves of kids roam the neighborhoods knocking on doors instead of flocking to safe havens like malls, community centers and church basements for apple bobbing and costume contests. Not that there's anything wrong with apple bobbing and costume contests, but there's something primal about running from house to house in the dark till way past your bedtime trying to fill a pillowcase so full of candy that you'll have enough to last you at least till Thanksgiving.

It's all so very Portland, when you think about it. In a place where the local dollar store owner takes pride in her establishment's history as one of the city's many haunted buildings, where men in skirts, boys in six-inch spikey mohawks and women in full Goth garb barely rate a second glance on the bus, where neighborhood block parties are the summer events we all look forward to, it makes perfect sense that Halloween is the most festive day of the year.

The first of many

I'm sure I've mentioned this before, but it bears repeating for our friends out there with children on the way: No one ever prepared me for just how emotionally painful parenting would be. Case in point ...

TheBoy had a friend from school over yesterday afternoon to play. He really likes this kid. I know because whenever I ask him what he did at school, he says, 'I played with Brennan.' (At least, that's what he says when he decides to give me more than, 'Nothing.') According to all the adults, the play date went great. Both boys had fun. Neither one wound up bloody or too bruised.

But when I tucked TheBoy in to bed last night, he furrowed his little brow and told me a different story: "Brennan says I'm not his best friend anymore."

When did he say this? "Today." Why? "I don't know."

There are, of course, two possible responses to this in my world. The inappropriate, gut level one, and the appropriate, adult one.

Inappropriate response: "Brennan is a horse's ass, and I am going over to his house right now to kick his ass."

Appropriate response: "Sometimes people say things they don't mean, just to be funny or to hurt your feelings. It doesn't mean anything, and I'm sure everything will be fine when you see Brennan at school, blah, blah, blah."

I gave him #2, although my heart was screaming for #1. But even the second response brings up all sorts of other questions. Why would Brennan say something like that? What did my kid do, if anything, to prompt it? What happened to my grand plan to ensure that he went through life without ever feeling left out or alone or like anything other than the most popular boy in the room?

And this is just age 3.5. I can barely imagine what the teen-age years will bring.

No class

I'm glad AR is getting something out of these childbirth classes, because for me, it's an interesting form of torture sitting in a room with 20 other expectant parents listening to the birth coach tell us what happens during labor, having gone through about 30 hours of it myself.

I always knew this would be the hard part for me. After all that time, I ended up having a c-section, and I haven't really gotten over the feeling that I messed up somehow. Intellectually, I know it wasn't my fault that my cervix never dialated more than 8 centimeters after 24-hours of hard labor followed by 6-hours of pitocin-induced contractions, and I also know that I'm lucky to have had the option of medical intervention, because babies and women can die when a birth stalls like that, but I still wish I could give it another shot.

So watching those videos of a women giving birth, I feel like I'm sitting in the locker room watching the coach diagram how the final play was supposed to go after I fumbled on the 2-yard line with 5 seconds remaining in a championship game. I keep replaying it in my head thinking, what if we had done this differently? Would it have made a difference if I had done that?

The answer, of course, is no, but that doesn't keep me from getting a little weepy when I'm supposed to be learning massage techniques to use on poor AR while she's having contractions. Don't get me wrong - I'm looking forward to supporting AnnaRay through labor, and I'm glad to be learning ways to help her get through it drug free, because I know she can do it if she wants to (and if there are no complications.) Taking the class is also helping me to get over all this now and not relive my experience while AR is just trying to get through hers.

But I don't know if I'll ever really get over it. It's been more than three years and we have this happy, healthy child - why isn't that enough?

Part of it I think is evolutionary; we have this crazy drive to reproduce, even though we know it's going to be uncomfortable, painful and - for millennia - possibly fatal. But I think there's also this pressure women feel to have the experience - to learn the secret handshake and earn the badge of honor. I don't know whether to laugh or cry about that, because for all I went through - nine months of discomfort, nausea, shortness of breath, back pain and the hours and hours of hard labor - it might have well have happened to someone else. That's the dirty little trick evolution has played on us: we have the drive but lack the memory, so we're sure to go through the experience again and again.

I want to tell my friends who have struggled unsuccesfully to get pregnant that they haven't missed out on much. Anna and The Boy have no biological connection and could not possibly be any more mother and son. Meanwhile, it's easy for me to forget I gave birth to The Boy for all I remember my pregnancy and labor. But that sounds insufferable and obnoxious coming from someone who got to carry to term. I had the experience; the only thing I missed out on was a few hours of draining and painful pushing. Of course, that seems like the most important part to me, because it's the experience I didn't get to have.

A random, yet deep, waste of time

Perhaps it's just because I'm getting really uncomfortable and feeling both subversive and brainless, but ...

Here's my new favorite waste of Internet time. If only someone would do something like this with For Better or For Worse. Or maybe Cathy. Notice that I love and respect you all so much, and I'm not even wasting your time by attaching a link to her nonsense.

They teach this stuff in school?

And here I assumed pregnancy class would be, if anything, a waste of time. After all, I've been through a birth, and I'm a reasonably intelligent person, and I've now read Dr. Sears' birthing book over twice.

But the classes we're taking, four sessions of two hours each, are actually proving both valuable and kind of stressful.

First, the valuable part: The more time I spend listening to other people who clearly have no clue what childbirth is like talk about their fears and expectations, the more I think 'Hey, maybe I can do this without screaming for my mommy!' That's not to demean the other students, although it was hard not to snicker when one guy essentially asked whether seeing the baby come out of his wife might make him never want to have sex with her again. (Of course, I caught myself wondering something similar when the instructor mentioned that we moms could get a mirror brought in to watch the baby pop out.)

Now on to the stressful stuff: Apparently, childbirth hurts. A lot. The second class, we saw a video of a woman going through it naturally. Screaming, I could take. But this lady did not utter a sound, as if the pain were so intense that nothing would. Last night, our third class, we saw another video: This mother's labor began when her water broke. She went to the hospital, but they sent her home to labor more. So, as she recounted it, "I put my husband to bed, and then I sat up through the contractions. I threw up with each one."

Have we mentioned that I'm something of a hurler myself? Now I have to adopt a new strategy for the next five weeks: Eat nothing I would rather not see again.

Once again, I have never felt so attractive.

Saint or psychopath

I can't resist sharing another couple stories about The Boy as he continues to veer between heart-melting sweetness and brain-arresting cruelty.

The other day a friend of mine was over, entertaining The Boy as the Tickle Monster. The Boy - who is really into Spider Man these days - managed to neutralize the Tickle Monster by ensnaring him in his web (ie. throwing Blankie over my friend's hands.)
"What are we going to do with the Tickle Monster Now?" I asked.
"Put him in jail," The Boy said.
"Oh, that's a good idea," I said.
Then slowly, slowly, as if dipping in a toe to test the waters of an idea, he said, "And let's cut out his eyes with a knife."

:-0

Fortunately, The Boy restored my faith in his humanity yesterday when we were making French toast. We had plopped the pieces of bread into the bowl with the egg batter, and he told me to make them into a family.
"How do I do that?" I asked.
"You put those around in a circle," he told me. "Then that one goes in the middle. See? They're taking care of each other."

:-)

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

This is what AR's belly looked like a couple of weeks ago when she finally started looking pregnant, though I still say she can hide it pretty well when clothed:


This is what AR's belly looks like from The Boy's perspective:


The Boy has been taking a lot of pictures lately. Here are a few more:

SELF PORTRAIT



BLANKIE



GEORGE

Super lame

I am 34 going on 60.

We've got a babysitter tonight. TheBoy is going to stay with a friend for a fun-filled evening of little guy activities -- jumping on each other, running into each other, rolling over each other, etc. Which means we have an entire evening free and open before us. Judybat has spent the week bugging me about what I want to do. Should we go to the theater? Should we go hear some music? Should we go to a comedy club? She's very eager to do something adult, beyond dinner and a movie, while we still can.

Here's the problem: All I really want to do is ... nothing. I'd go see a movie, except there's nothing playing here that I really feel rises to babysitter level. I'd go eat someplace swanky, except that only covers about 90 minutes of our night. I don't really have any interest in going to see Molly Ringwald in a travelling version of "Sweet Charity," -- insert your own "Sixteen Candles" joke here -- or Portland's version of improv, or music that is going to be too loud to actually understand the lyrics. (See, that's old lady talk!)

Maybe if we lived in a bigger city, there would be something out there that sparked my interest. But I'm not so sure. Quite honestly, I'd be perfectly happy staying home, playing with the kid, reading a little bit and crashing by 10. And here's what's sad: That's not the pregnancy talking.

I am the lamest person in the world.

Life lessons

You try to teach your kids, you know, the difference between right and wrong and few other things you think might help them get along in this world, maybe even be a force for good. But The Boy is just 3 years old, and I'm beginning to think I'm just a bystander as he barrels through life.

At times he shows a self awareness that stuns me. I do not know where it comes from, and I find it achingly sweet. Like the other day, we were playing Candyland, and I asked him what will happen if he loses. "I not cry," he assured me, but just as he was about to win, he picked a card that would have sent him all the way back to the beginning (it's a harsh game, really) and the corners of his mouth began to sag. He refused to move his little gingerbread-man piece, and I asked him if we needed to put the game away for awhile, until he's old enough to lose without crying. He nodded and said, "We'll play again when I'm 4."

Other times, however, he demostrates all the understanding and empathy of a psychopath. Today for instance, we were looking at pumkins growing in a neighbor's yard, and he asked me what was on one of them. "That's a bug," I said, looking closesly. "Oh," he said, peering at the tiny thing. Then he squashed it with his thumb. "Why did you do that?" I asked, horrified. "I like to kill things," he said. "That's not nice," I said, and rattled, I rattled off all the reasons I could think of not to squash tiny things with your thumb when they're crawling around minding their own business. But no matter what I said, he insisted, "It's nice to kill cute little bugs."

So much for Innocence. Is this how serial killers get their start?