Hit by a Pitch

In general, Ben is responsible for providing food in our house. He does the vast majority of grocery shopping (usually he and Soren go to the grocery store while I go to the gym, although sometimes I go to the store with them). He also does the vast majority of cooking (I like cooking, but I’m often tired from going to the gym and lazy, and I always feel like he doesn’t like my cooking as much as I like his cooking). We’re still working out feeding Soren (usually we take turns, although dude still isn’t very interested in solid food). I want to get to the point where we all eat dinner together, but we’re not there yet (usually Soren eats after I get home from the gym [good lord with me and the gym, right?] and Ben and I eat way later, like at 8:30 or 9:00, which kind of defeats the purpose of baby-led weaning where we just give the baby some of what we’re eating).

Yesterday, I had to take Soren to Target (I go to the nice Super Target in Stapleton) to buy some stuff for him (specifically, Up & Up infant formula, and don’t get me started on how much that pains me but I kind of want to be out in the open about the fact that sometimes, women can’t breastfeed for as long as they’d like or at all and feed their babies formula and it doesn’t mean they suck at life, and butt wipes for day care [we use cloth at home but I'm happy enough that they let us use cloth diapers at day care and I don't expect them to go for cloth wipes and butt spray, too]). (I’m going so nuts with the parentheses I can’t even keep track of where one begins and the other ends, holy hell.) While I was at Target, I remembered why, as someone with ADD who is unmedicated, I don’t do the grocery shopping. I got the formula and butt wipes. Then I spent about 10 minutes looking at bath toys that won’t even be relevant for another few months (including fish basketball, which I’d actually already ordered while internet shopping). Then I picked out a t-shirt for Soren with broccoli on it, right? And the broccoli is saying “I’m delicious! Trust me!” or something like that, which is hilarious when you consider the context, which is a baby who is more interested in watching baseball on tv than eating solid food. Then I got some shorts and a shirt with a collar and an octopus.

Then I picked out the following Father’s Day cards:

• one for Ben from his son, featuring a golden retriever
• one for Ben from the dogs
• one for Ben from the cats
• (I am clearly trying to make up for the fact that I felt underappreciated on my first Mother’s Day)
• one for my dad, featuring a bunch of golden retrievers.

Then I tried on all the cute hats I saw. They were all too small. I have a big, giant head. So does Ben. Soren is doomed. Then I considered which cashier would not judge me for buying infant formula, got in line, and talked to a woman and her kid. It’s amazing how babies are into each other, like the way I am with other Lithuanians (“Hey! It’s my people!”). I talk to Soren during this entire process, and when we’re done, I half-run and half-walk back to the car, where I cram the bags into the trunk, where the gigantic jogging stroller lives, still covered in balloons from the Sunday meetup nobody but Ben and I attended, and lodge the car seat into its base while suspiciously eyeing the guy parked in the spot next to me who’s just sitting there eating his lunch (I watch a lot of Criminal Minds).

After he got home from work, Ben was all, WTF? Did you get any food? See, that was kind of the whole point. We haven’t had food in the house for days and tonight Soren had applesauce and we had weird quesadillas with random cheese (because Ben is an awesome cook, these were delicious) because there’s, like, nothing here. We have no food, not even buns for fake hamburgers or avocados that haven’t gone bad. And I did not buy one food item while at Super Target.

(I have a feeling that if I blog more often, which I’d like to do [why??!], there will be a lot of posts like this.)

As a white person who has spent most of my life enjoying the relative stability of a middle-class existence (with a few dips in the pool of abject poverty here and there), like all relatively privileged people with nothing better to think about, I am prone to the occasional existential dilemma. I first realized this tendency when I was in college and named my cats Nietzsche and Kierkegaard. Even now, as a thirtysomething adult, I still sometimes catch myself gazing into the abyss, wondering whether it will stare back at me. Most of us who have our basic needs met do this sometimes, right?

My mental state these days reads like the Wikipedia page on Existentialism. That’s not to say I’m depressed, although maybe I am to some degree (the hormonal crash that comes with the end of lactating is not something I ever want to experience again, and let’s not even get into the lactation-failure angst). There’s sadness overseasoned with anxiety, along with anxiety’s good pal insomnia. And a lot of stress. I’m not one of those people who lacks a spine and refuses to say “no” to anyone (which apparently means I’m not the target audience of every mom-oriented magazine that exists, because apparently moms in our society don’t say “no” to anything). However, I’m learning that saying “yes” to too many things results in saying “no” to everything, because you’re left stressed, exhausted, and sitting on the couch in your pajamas watching two teams you don’t even care about play baseball while secretly fantasizing about cutting your hair into a snappy new mom-cut because you’re so sick of the baby pulling it and it’s all falling out anyway.

I’m sure most new-ish moms struggle though angst, freedom, facticity, authenticity and inauthenticity, despair, the other, reason, and the absurd, in the context of hormonal whackitude, all while trying to figure out, like you did back in college: What does it all mean? (I used to wish that question on guys I dug who weren’t that into me — that one day, they’d be married to boring, brown-haired women who wear unattractive pants and a bird would shit on them while mowing the lawns of their boring, suburban houses and they’d wonder: What does it all mean? You can tell I was one of those pink-haired, social smokers who drinks a brown-bagged bottle of Boone’s on the steps of Old Capitol instead of participating in Homecoming festivities.) I’m sure we all wonder what it all means. It’s not always a pleasant process, but, like I mentioned earlier, it indicates a certain level of privilege and comfort in life and, done right, can probably lead to something good.

There are many things I hope to pass on to Soren — a love of sports; grammar skills; the understanding that once you know the rules, it’s okay to break them if you have a good reason; kindness to animals and usually to humans, too; the willingness to question authority and tradition; and stuff like that. I hope he doesn’t get stuck with my phobias, anxiety, tendency to over-engage in introspection, and susceptibility to the existential dilemma.

The thing is, I already see the existential dilemma happening with him, although to be honest, the baby version of it is kind of cute. It goes something like this:

• Baby rubs eyes and indicates that he is tired.
• Baby is deposited into crib with pacifier.
• Although baby wants pacifier, he removes it from his mouth and plays with it or flings it out of reach.
• Baby wants to go to sleep but doesn’t, perhaps feeling that sleep is an inauthentic reflection of his existence.
• Baby tries to grab mobile that remains frustratingly just out of reach. He wonders if one day, the mobile will wonder what it all means.
• Baby stares at the turtle on the side of his crib and wonders what it means to be a turtle.
• Baby kicks the mattress repeatedly, thereby earning the nickname “World Cup.”
• Baby rotates counterclockwise until his feet are where his head used to be.
• Baby rubs eyes and indicates that he is tired.
• Baby makes pterodactyl noises.
• Baby realizes that if you stare at the pacifier long enough, somebody reinserts the pacifier into your mouth.
• Baby rolls over onto side to get a better look at the turtle and ponders the essence of turtleness.
• Oops! Baby rolls over onto tummy even though baby is not particularly fond of being on his tummy.
• Baby drools.
• Baby forgets the authentic truth that it’s easier to roll from front to back than it is to roll from back to front and stays on tummy.
• Baby would like to sleep but instead does pushups.
• Baby ponders, in Either/Or fashion, the relative merits of pushups and sleep.
• Baby realizes that this all is actually kind of funny and probably doesn’t really matter after all.
• Baby is turned over by the Great Hand of God, or the Universe, or Nothingness, or baby turns himself over.
• Baby eventually goes to sleep.
• Baby actually is pretty smart.

I saw this link posted on Twitter today and it’s so awesome I have to share. If you like Hawk Harrelson, check out the Hawk Harrelson Soundboard, where you can listen to 45 “hawkisms,” including “sit back relax strap it down,” “stay fair it will,” “dadgum it,” “this game is ova,” and of course “you can put it on the board yeeeees!”

I’m going to suggest that Ben work some of these into a mashup. If this happens, I’ll post the result here.