What's "enough?"

Tonight, my son fell asleep downstairs while we were watching a movie. I watched him sleep for a while, and felt a little choked up. Nothing new there -- seeing him so helpless, so beautiful, so wonderful, it usually makes me a little emotional.

But then I picked him up and carried him upstairs, and I thought to myself, 'wow, he's getting heavy.' And then I wondered how much longer I'd be able to hold him. And I began to cry. This is the flip side of the joy of watching him turn into a person. Every day, there's more there there; he can crawl! He can stand up! He can almost talk! But that other side is that every day, we mourn a little the baby he was yesterday. We love him and only love him more and more, but we'll never see that baby again. That's the joy and that's the tragedy.

And then I thought -- and here's where the tears really came full force -- "did I hold him enough when he was small enough to hold?" And the answer, of course, of course, is 'no.' Not even if I clasped him to my chest non-stop day and night. And I didn't, of course -- I had websites to look at and meals to cook and movies to watch. We should always and ever spend more time with those we love, but we can never spend enough time, and that is another joy and another tragedy.

I could never, ever hold him enough for me. I could never love him enough for me. And I realize that this pain is not the barest tip of a very, very long knife, and I am afraid and amazed. I think of my mother and father, and I know they wonder if they held me enough, if they loved me enough. And they probably feel like they didn't -- how could they? But you did, mom and dad, you did, and I hope I can, too.

This is learning how to celebrate and mourn, to love a hurt that will only hurt deeper with time. This is learning to sing while your heart bleeds.

Is it enough? It never will be, and always has to be.

Only human . . .

Here's another one of those weird thoughts I have from time to time.

Ollie is a little person. We call him an angel, our golden boy, perfect baby, but the truth is, he's just a person. I'm not demeaning him by thinking of him that way -- quite to the contrary. It's actually better for me, Jess, and him if we don't idealize him or our family dynamic.

This morning, Ollie woke us up at 4:00 a.m. to eat. He did this because he didn't eat enough last night before bed, and then he woke us again at 6 to eat, and wouldn't eat more than a couple of mouthfuls before becoming disinterested. Now, our primary impulse is dismay: "Why is our perfect angel doing this? Why is our perfect baby acting this way? What's wrong with him? What's wrong with us for being kind of annoyed at the lack of sleep? What kind of monsters are we to be annoyed with our angel?"

But if you think of him as a little person, that perspective changes. He's a human being. He has needs, and wants, but sometimes, he's just going to be a jerk. That's the way people are. And so long as we don't shout at him, or display our annoyance, it's okay to be annoyed when a person is being a jerk. It doesn't mean we love him any less -- it just means we could have done with a little more sleep.

Loving someone unconditionally doesn't mean you're blind to their flaws. In fact, I don't think you can really love someone all the way if you *are* blind to their flaws, because then you don't really know them well enough for love that strong.

I guess we ought to get used to the "wanting to hug and strangle at the same time" kind of love. I mean, soon he's going to be a terrible two's toddler, and a teenager, and a grown man telling his dad, "you're wrong about everything." Best get used to the idea that he's his own person, and sometimes his desires are going to run absolutely contrary to our own, but that we won't love him any less for it.

You Did This To Me!

Some day, Ollie will be a teenager. He'll want to stay up until 3 a.m. partying with his friends and sleep until noon. He'll wonder why Mom and Dad insist on going to bed before midnight most nights, and why they get up at 6 or 7 even on the weekends. What kind of strange people are these? Don't they know that all the fun stuff happens at night?

And we'll try and tell him that we used to be exactly the same way. We'll talk about those nights where we didn't notice it was late until the sun came up, and the days we rolled out of bed groggy to have breakfast at noon. But then we had a baby.

That baby was an awesome baby, and he slept through the night, which meant he went to bed around 9 or 10 and got up at 6 or 7. No matter when Mom and Dad went to bed, he got up at the same time, so they started adjusting to his sleep schedule. They found that when they got up early, they got to spend more time playing with him and having fun -- that the morning was actually good for something. Since most of their friends were having babies, too, most of the fun stuff quit happening before midnight.

So the answer to "why are Mom and Dad so lame?" is "you trained us to be this way."

Somehow, I don't think he'll get it, though. After all, it took me fifteen years to understand it :-).

Life in the Kinetoscope. . .

So a few people have said, "your blog for Ollie is great, but we want to know what you think about being a parent, not just what he thinks about being a baby." I've resisted posting my thoughts, just because I was afraid they weren't new or insightful. Y'know, "my baby's cute," "I love him," not exactly ground-breaking material.

But, I do see the value in recording some of these thoughts, if not for posterity, then for myself. What's life with Ollie like?

While I know it's a radical departure and a complete change in every aspect of my life, it doesn't really feel that way. It feels more like another puzzle piece slipping into place, rather than a boulder dropped in a lake. It's the same way I felt when Jess moved in, or when we moved to Minneapolis -- there's this process of turning my life into what it's supposed to be, not giving up what it was. Caring for Ollie is sometimes easy, sometimes hard, but it always feels exactly right. Like there *should* be challenges in my life, there *should* be responsibilities, and frustrations, there *should* be this purpose. Jess filled a void that I didn't know was there until I met her, and so did Ollie -- he made one more set of restless, empty feelings go away.

That's probably why for the most part I don't reflect on the ongoing miracle of him. It's not often that I step back and go, "this is my son. He has half of my DNA. He went from an embryo to this little person who can almost stand up and talk. This is part of me, and part of Jess, and yet totally his own person." When I do think that, it blows my mind, of course, but for the most part I'm just enjoying his company.

There are rare moments when the whole truth of the matter threatens to burst forth and make me dissolve into happy tears, though. Last night, Jess read Ollie a few books and got him sufficiently sleepy that it was time to put him to bed. I cradled him in my arms and sang him a lullaby that my grandmother used to sing to me. It goes, "close your sleepy eyes, my little buckaroo, while the light of western skies is shining down on you . . ." When I hit the next verse, a lump rose in my throat and my eyes filled with tears: "don't you realize, my little buckaroo, that t'was from the little acorn that the oak tree grew / and remember that your dad was once a kid like you . . ."

I had a brief flash of my father, about my age, holding me in his arms and singing that song. Then of his father, about my age, holding my infant father in his arms and singing. Then flash forward to Ollie, 25 years old, holding his baby son and feeling that same connection to all the fathers and sons that came before him. It made me think of a kinetoscope, an ever-repeating loop -- the father cradles the son, the son grows up and become a father who cradles his son.

Now I can see that a father is not some different kind of person -- a different species, like I thought when I was a kid. A father is no more or less than a son, imbued with no special knowledge save that he has become part of that recursive loop, doing his best to transmit the earth-shaking love he feels by rocking his son to sleep.

And remember that your dad is still a kid like you . . .

The imminent arrival...

So this weekend Jess started having some seriously strong contractions.  I looked up what she was experiencing in that essential pregnancy guide, "All the Things You Should Freak Out About When Pregnant," and all signs seemed to point to actual labor rather than pre-term labor.  The contractions weren't regular, but that was the only missing piece.  We called the OB/GYN on call and he told us to come in to the hospital immediately.

So we calmly got dressed and got ready to go to the hospital. I said, "it's okay if the baby comes now. We have the crib and the co-sleeper and the pack 'n' play and the carseat and bottles and clothes and everything -- and my god, the house is so messy," and started to cry.  Then we got in the car, and it had a bunch of trash in it, and I actually hyperventilated a little.  I think that's a good taste of what having a baby will be like -- everything that's been good enough for me and Jess will not be good enough for our child.

These feelings are like messages from another planet.  I wasn't even aware that I was freaked out until I started hyperventilating, and then the panic threatened to swallow me. I didn't even think about the house being messy until it was in the context of imminent baby arrival, and then I just wanted to collapse on the floor.  That's a really scary amount of love to feel for someone I haven't even met yet.

Thankfully, the contractions were just a bump in the road, and they're under control now.  Still, we are probably looking at having a newborn before Christmas.  All the time in the world wouldn't be enough to get ready for my child, but I still can't wait to meet the kid.

Here's hoping we'll be good parents. I know that's a moving target, being a good parent -- it's easy to not be an evil parent (don't hit the kid, provide for the kid's needs, show love and provide boundaries), but being a good parent? That's tricky. All we can do is the best we can.  

The only solace is knowing that every parent will fail in some regard, and will be blamed by the kid for some grown-up neuroses. Because let's face it -- we're all neurotic. I've met people of every conceivable background, from super-conservative to crazy-permissive, and we're all screwed up in our own special way, and on some level we all blame our parents.  

What's also heartening is for all those people I know (and myself included) who are screwed up and blame their parents, we all love our parents deeply and know, deep down, that they're not the reason we're screwed up.  They, like us, like everyone, were screwed up to begin with, and they did the best they could.

My highest goal is to combine all the wonderful things my parents did right, and all the things Jess's parents did right, and maybe we'll end up with a neuroses-free child.  Or, at least, we'll give the child an open space to screw him or herself up in new, interesting ways, for which they will blame us.  And then they'll stare down the barrel of an imminent baby arrival, and they'll realize that we did a pretty good job, after all.

Election fatigue...

You know, every time I watch the candidates debate, I find it harder and harder to believe that anyone buys what John McCain is selling. Thank goodness the Democrats are branching out from their time-honored, "roll over and accept smears" tactic, and actually fighting back. But the end result is Obama has to spend more time correcting McCain's lies than talking about the issues.

Then Obama screws himself by giving complex, well-thought-out answers to the questions posed, while John McCain goes for crowd-pleasing, empty answers. "Sure, we can fix social security, it ain't hard, and we're going to. Sure we can work on all of my priorities at the same time, while cutting taxes, freezing spending, and spending $300 billion so the government can own your home mortgage, while regulating Wall Street more, while making sure the government isn't too involved in your life! U.S.A!" And the crowd goes wild.

It's something I noticed with the Bush administration: no one pays attention to whether the Republican candidate's claims are true, plausible, or even possible: when a Republican says they're going to do something, they get the credit as if they had already done it. It's weird and off-putting.

It's like Bill Maher says: Republicans are very good at winning elections. They're willing to lie, dumb it down, use scare tactics, and pander to people. They're good at this game. What they suck at is governing. I just can't believe people seriously think that John McCain is going to "go on up to Washington and straighten those corrupt politicians out." He IS a corrupt politician. H8is campaign is run by lobbyists. He's been there for 30 YEARS and hasn't made anything better, how is he going to start now?

And then the people who decry Obama's 'elitism' and root for Sarah Palin because she's so down-home and folksy. People, when did those two things become qualities of a good leader? We TRIED voting for the guy we'd want to have a beer with, and how did that work out for us? Palin's a moron, and a dangerous moron at that.

You know, even after all the crap McCain has spewed in this election, I think the nation could do okay with him. We'd hvae to be better off than we were with Bush, if only marginally. He wouldn't really change much, but at least he's been around and knows his stuff. We'd be all right. But when McCain dies two years in, and we get President Palin -- oh good Lord. She's Dolores Umbridge -- self-righteous, utterly convinced in her narrow world-view, and determined that everyone share it. *Shudder*.

I just hope Obama can get enough reasonable people to the polls to counter all the ignorance I've been seeing. I just got an email forward that's been circulating in the uber-conservative camps, and it scares the pants off of me. People really believe that Obama's a white-hating secret terrorist who wants to overthrow Washington with his liberal agenda?

I know the answer is that it doesn't matter if these fundies believe that or not -- they won't vote for Obama because the Republican party has convinced them that the Republican party is the decent Christian party. Hell, I know Christians who are voting for Obama, but feel guilty about it. They have to hide it from their friends and loved ones, and they still secretly feel they're selling out God by doing so.

Like I said -- Republicans are really good at winning elections. They're just terrible at running the country, and that's never more obvious than now. I wish people would look past the rhetoric and look at the state our country is in after eight years of clueless Republican rule.

The cool.

So when I turned 25 or so, I remember thinking, "it's going to be weird not to be in the most-coveted demographic anymore." I mean, most advertising at that point was aimed squarely at the high-school kids or college kids, those with either their parent's money or student loan runoff to spend. I thought it would be kind of nice to not have advertisements constantly crammed down my throat; thought this was the time where one breaks free from corporate-sculpted personas and begins to cultivate an original style.

Now that I'm 30 and have a baby on the way, though, I've discovered that there's no such thing as being outside a targeted demographic. Case in point: we spent our teenage years obsessed with being cool, and now we're at the age our parents were when we thought our parents were the least cool people on the planet. So we're freaking out, and we want to start families and whatnot without turning into our hopelessly square parents. I thought I was alone in, for example, wanting to dress my infant in hip, groovy ways that showed I wasn't into the whole pink-and-blue, lace-and-butterflies thing. Then I saw all this:

Cool baby clothes
Punk rock baby clothes
Retro Baby

Yup. Now instead of worrying that I'm being too square or too trendy, I can worry if my baby's too square or too trendy. And all I wanted when I started that google search was a onesie with a skull on it, for Baby Skullhead. Now I'm wondering when we get to stop worrying about being cool. I'm guessing when I turn 80, there'll be an entire product line of walkers, depends, and pill counters with flames, skulls, and rock band posters on them. Funny ol' world.