Yay for Baby H!

Today was hard. Counseling was hard. The six hours I spent crying after counseling were hard. Alex not wanting to go to sleep was hard. The thoughts in my head are hard. Being completely worn out in the middle of the night yet not able to sleep is hard.

Getting a phone call from my brother Forbes telling me that Baby H (female) was here one week early – wonderful. For many reasons.
1. I was 12 days overdue, someone needed to go early to keep the law of averages… well, average. I wanted A to get all 12 of the days I’d banked, but 7 is good too.
2. Mom and Baby are healthy and okay. Some incident with the placenta delivery, but no lasting concern.
3. Asking my brother what her name was and him saying “Baby H”. My brother with all the plans has decided to take the weekend to decide with A what the right choice is.
4. Alex and Baby H have birthdays exactly one month apart.
5. Most touching – the thing that brings me tears when I should be all cried out – he called. He cared enough to pick up the phone and call me. I heard it from him, not from someone else. Not days later. And interestingly – I text messaged him when Alex was born. A text in the midst of all the other texts I sent. I’ve spent years reaching out, and in one phone call he trumped all my reaching. I don’t even know how to explain how wobbly this makes my heart.

He cared enough to call.

I never talked to Alex about what made me so cranky last night. He screamed for a while to mirror my swift mood change and settled in to the hard business of snuggling my anger down to simmer by the 3am shift change.

At time of said shift change and the sounds of doors opening and latching he woke up, requested some bottle and to be placed on his back in the opportunity to stretch out – because snuggling mommy is hard work but someone had to do it.

And then the most wonderful thing happened.

He let rip with 5 or 6 adult-sized-give that one a score of ten butt cheek wiggling farts. Farts I think were productive. He was quiet and peaceful and innocent just in time for me to calmly pass him off to hubs with a “I think he may need to be changed” and wander of to bed.

Motherhood has not made me kinder and gentler.

It makes me grumpy when it appears it opens the door to have inane conversations about “Do I have a good baby?” Well duh, I could have birthed the son of satan and I wouldn’t realize it. I’d wonder about the horn poking me under the chin when I snuggled with him, but I wouldn’t realize what was really up.

So I got to talk to my father in law today.

And my own father. (Which was actually fine)

And my mother in law. For the second time this week. Granted this time I pretty much cut her off because once a month is my limit with inane mother in law conversation. In our conversation earlier this week she asked if my sixteen day old son was sleeping through the night. Um no. No he’s not. Seeing as how his stomach will hold about 2 ounces of food he wakes up every 2 hours or so and demands to be fed. Loudly.

Have I mentioned she’s coming for TWENTY FIVE days in June?

Seriously. I have figured out some serious shit today.

In reading the book The Sweet Potato Queens’ Field Guide to Men: Every Man I Love Is Either Married, Gay, or Dead the author talks about “Man Ears”.

To quickly sum up – Man Ears is what all men have that make it so that everything we say somehow becomes an invitation for sex. Example: “Let’s watch a movie” becomes “I want to watch nasty porn with you and have sex with you while watching it” Example: “Would you pass me the newspaper please?” becomes “I will give you a blow job”

You get the idea.

So today, I get the following email from my brother Professor (of “Hi I’m Prof, wanna fuck?” famed pick up line – only continuing to prove the “Man Ears” theory):

“When are you moving?? I saw Dad yesterday and he said he knew nothing about you moving until last Saturday when he was at Gma’s.”

My response to him was:

“That’s because he doesn’t listen – I told him in January, A mentioned it February, and when she mentioned it he had no idea what she was talking about, she thought she’d said something wrong. By the time I talk to him again he will probably have forgotten about it again. Granted, it’s not like it’s the most important thing going on in his world right now but still… its’ just situation normal on that memory thing.”

To which he replied that he figured this was the case, and I replied that I figured he figured, and we went on to rag on Dad’s girlfriend and such, as is sport whenever two or more of my family are gathered….

But I digress. (shocking)

I began to ponder just why it was that my father was incapable of retaining details that I shared with him.

And then it hit me.

Man Ears!

Man Ears are programmed to turn everything a woman says into an invitation for sex. Now CLEARLY it is inappropriate for a father to hear something his baby girl says and turn it into an invitation for sex. THEREFORE, I can only conclude that what happens is that when a daughter says something to her father, the Man Ears kick in, sending a whole bunch of feedback sounding noise from the Man Ears to the brain, overloading the Man Ears “I hear sex invitations only” receptors with noise rather than the actual words the daughter is saying.

THIS is why fathers and daughters can’t communicate.

I am ready for my Peace Prize now.

I always knew where I fit with my mom’s pack of family. To screw me up, all you had to do was throw me to a weekend at my dad’s during the teen years and I knew I was the octagonal peg and I had no clue what shape the hole was I was supposed to fit.

Fast forward a decade or so and I learned that all four of us kids felt that way. I didn’t know till two years ago that my oldest brother actually moved out his senior year of high school because he couldn’t take it anymore. I should have clicked on the fact my middle brother had to feel out of sorts what with all the locking himself in bathrooms and volatile outbursts he had, and the youngest, well, he was just screwed, he was stuck in that nest of insanity after the rest of us fled for college and never went home on the weekends. I finally realized that none of us fit in that family, and that out of place feeling may just be what bonds us together now. If nothing else, we have tons of fodder to discuss over many beers.

I know my mom can’t watch Bonanza (it might be Gunsmoke) or Lawrence Welk because of uncomfortable, hair on the back of the neck standing up sensations left over from growing up. I was watching a little Kevin James stand up on Comedy Central a little while ago and he mentioned growing up in a home with a/c but with a father who would rarely use it. I think my blood pressure actually went up as I remembered hot sticky?Ǭ† summer nights when Dad would turn the a/c to … oh lets say 90 just for exaggeration sake … and not understand why we bitched about being hot. Guess who’s bedroom had a fucking fan on full blast? Guess who’s bedrooms did NOT. I remember Deacon used to pile on all of his covers while he was sleeping on the TOP bunk (hot air rises) and crawl under them for several minutes, just to feel the relief of the cooler air when he’d throw the covers off. Kinda like hitting yourself in the head with a hammer just b/c it feels so good when you stop.

I was huddled on the floor today trying to take some pressure off my back and contemplating Alex being an only child. Which is a sure sign of how ready I am to be done with this preggers thing b/c this would mean I would not be having a daughter in my future. I think mostly I’m afraid of getting pregnant again and having it be another boy. This led me to think of my step mom and how she had three boys, then married my dad – who had a girl. I wonder if she was excited b/c she was getting the daughter she’d wanted. Then I realized that I really must have been disappointing to her, b/c I really never was the kind of daughter she would have imagined. This isn’t a pity party statement (for once). This is actually me learning to understand this woman who I really rarely understood while growing up.

Deacon says I should write the book on our family, change the names and see how many people wouldn’t buy it because they would assume it was just too far fetched to be taken seriously.