My Family or My Ideals

As you could see in my second-to-last post, I'm pretty bummed about our political situation right now.  I think we'll be fine, but I've never been more concerned about the environment than I am now, and I don't think those fears are unfounded.  This has caused me to reflect a lot about how I live my life.

A lifetime ago, I was an embarrassingly idealistic biology major at an ag school in Wisconsin.  I was going to teach high school science, and I was going to change the world one student at a time.  I believed this hard.  At one time, right after I finished watching Patch Adams, I turned to my parents, and with utter sincerity said, "I'm going to change the world."  I can only imagine what an insufferable little prick I must've been (I mean, even more so than I am now).

My god, what an unbelievable, unrepentant idiot I was.  I thought changing the world would take no more effort than it took to get As at a school that didn't give a + or -, so a 90% was good enough for an A.

As I got older, I realized that I don't have what it takes to change the world, but I still wanted to live my life such that I felt I was doing more good than harm.  I rode my bike everywhere.  I joined a CSA and bought local and organic.  I composted what I could, recycled what I could, and grudgingly threw away the rest.  I tried to fix rather than replace.  Of course, the cynic (realist?) in me knows that even at my best, we'd need 6 or 7 Earths to sustain that way of life if all us Earthlings lived as I was living, but I slept ok at night.

Flash forward to today.  I'm happily married, with one kid, and The Wife and I are talking about thinking about talking about Baby 2.  I love my life.  But when the snow fell, I stopped composting because shoveling a path to the compost bin would be too much work.  We drive an SUV.  We booked a winter vacation which will necessitate our 6th or 8th flight in the last year or so.  We still eat red meat on the regular.  After Baby 2, we'll pretend that our current house is too small and we'll look for something bigger, that will take more energy to heat and cool.  We'll probably shop for a bigger vehicle, or maybe a second vehicle.

I want to be the first to say, "BOO FUCKING HOO."  I try not to take what I have for granted, and I know that bitching about my CO2 emissions in the context of another vacation is insulting.  I know.  But this is my life and these are my thoughts.

These choices do occasionally keep me up at night.  The Wife is a willing partner in all these decisions, good and bad, but this will cause some fights in the future.  She will likely want a bigger house than I will.  That's a battle I'm willing to pick, but how hard should I fight?  There's nothing unique about it; you can argue that marriage is nothing but a series of battles exactly like this and you wouldn't exactly be wrong.  But it's like Calvin (of Calvin and Hobbes) says: "A good compromise leaves everybody mad."

My Baby Made Me an Asshole

I maybe mentioned elsewhere that, before baby, I thought of myself as a pretty easygoing, laid back kinda guy.  Patient.  Some time in the last 14 months, that guy turned into kind of an asshole.

I used to be generous with my time.  Now, if The Baby is asleep, it's My Time and woe unto the poor soul who asks anything of me during that time.  The Wife just called me from her office to ask that I find an official document for her, and I was wildly disproportionately annoyed by the imposition.  All I had to do was walk to the kitchen, the next room over, and look at a piece of paper for her, and I was pissed.  All I was doing at the time was reading the newspaper...

I used to be really laid back, going with the flow, up for whatever life had to throw at me.  Some of that is still there, but if anything messes with my routine, I am again disproportionately annoyed.  So The Baby decided to nap long, or short, and all of a sudden I need to change when I go to Trader Joe's?  OH HELL NO.

Some of it is lack of sleep.  I just don't sleep restfully anymore.  I know this isn't unique to me; I just didn't think it would happen to me.  The Baby sleeps great.  Down for the night at 7:30pm, sleeps straight through until at least 6:30am.  At least one good, chunky nap during the day.  But I toss and turn at night.  I wake before my alarm and can't get back to sleep.  I have one great but very specific responsibility - keep The Baby alive - but all the other stupid shit runs through my head.  Is the snow blower ready to go?  Did I get the garbage out?  What are we gonna get the in-laws for Christmas?  All this stupid shit that, while too important to ignore, is not nearly important enough that it should keep me awake.  But it does.

Anyway...  Pity party for one, now service this pathetic asshat.

What Just Happened?

Long time no talk.  The Baby continues to be good.  She's taking her sweet-ass time walking.  She's 14 months old, and will only pull herself to her knees yet.  We can get her to stand with assistance, but she hates it.  I've never worried too much about milestones, but this delay has gotten even me down.  The Wife is worried.  But we've got her set up with a physical therapist through our local school district, which is awesome, and brings me to the real point of this post - politics.

What the fck just happened?!

I really tried to dislike Hillary.  Failing that, I tried to understand the hatred for her.  Because people don't just dislike her policies.  They hate her as a human being.  And that I just cannot understand.  I have friends who are against Hillary, and to hear them speak about her, you'd think she had personally killed their dogs and stolen their homes.  Despite my best efforts, I just don't get it.

I really tried to like Trump.  Ah, that's bullshit.  I've thought Trump was a walking, flesh-colored pile of shit since I was old enough to know who he was.  But I did try to understand the reasoning of the people who do support him.  I've really tried.  I have quite a few relationships whose health depends on my gaining some level of understanding of why seemingly-reasonable people support him.  So far I'm failing.

Since the election, I've been way down.  Enough that I've considered getting back in touch with my therapist, but I don't know what good it would do.  Rereading that sentence makes me think it really would be a good idea - "what good would it do" could be the motto of the depressed (and I've tried to be up front that what I'm feeling is not Clinical Depression, or anything close to it).  Today has been better.  The Baby has been cheerful, and she's napped well enough that I could make what I think will be a kick-ass pie for Thanksgiving tomorrow.  I try to remind myself that it won't be as bad as we fear it will be; it never is.  I've thought about the various ways Trump could bring down civilization as we know it, and while I still think they're all scarily plausible, I'm trying to remember that A) Trump isn't the first president, even in my lifetime, whose policies were opposed to my beliefs, B) those turned out OK, and C) there were millions of people who felt about Obama the way I feel about Trump.  I don't understand exactly why, but I can appreciate feeling like you've been steamrolled and railroaded for 8 years.

Anyway, this will never be a political blog - I'm not smart enough to argue.  But this is just the first of many times I'm worried about The Baby's future.

The Family Gets Smaller...

We had to get rid of our dog, The Dog.  My heart is broken.  We got her two years ago, and she came with some baggage.  She was a rescue, brought up from Georgia as far as anybody knew.  Despite her baggage, I worked with her a lot.  We took a couple obedience classes, and we had fun with it.  She made a lot of progress, and given that I worked from home, she was a really good dog.

When we brought The Baby home, it was OK.  The disruption to any semblance of a schedule was tough on her and there were some accidents.  We got through the worst of it, but she was never the same dog after The Wife went back to work.  She was always a nervous dog, with a little bit of separation anxiety, but it got worse.  She'd overreact to movements and sound.  This was all before The Baby got mobile.

So The Baby is crawling now, and she got underfoot while I was making dinner the other night.  I scooped her up and set her down in the living room.  She and The Dog tried to go through the door into the kitchen at the same time, and it was too close for comfort.  It was like The Dog looked over and thought, "OH SHIT WHAT'S THAT THING DOING RIGHT THERE?!!!"  She barked and nipped The Baby.  Game over, no more dog for us.  I called the rescue society from which we'd got her the next day.

I know we did the right thing.  Hell, it's not even really a choice, is it?  I love that dog so much.  We were inseparable for the first year we had her.  But I can't risk the health of my baby girl, and I can't keep the two of them separated and hope for any quality of life for The Dog, and it will be years before our kid (kids if all goes according to plan) are old enough to understand how to act around a dog.  So it's not a choice.  The Dog needs a calm, quiet house and a routine.  We don't have that now, and we won't for a long time, if ever.

So David French, How Strong Do I Need To Be To Be A Man?

You fucking idiot.

But I digress.  I'm writing today, of course, in response to this whole diatribe of douchebaggery: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/439040/male-physical-decline-masculinity-threatened

Go ahead, read it.  I'll wait.

Preface: I'm a liberal.  I used to be an apologetic liberal, because the rest of my family leans more conservative, but I'm done apologizing.  I'm a proud liberal, but I don't want to plant myself in an echo chamber, constantly listening to the soothing murmurs from NPR that tell me exactly what I want to hear about the world.  I did that for a while, appropriately enough when I was in grad school, and then I started disagreeing more and more with my dad, who is conservative and leaning farther and farther right the older he gets, and then I realized that his primary news source is FOX News, and I thought, "Well that's bullshit.  All he's gonna hear from them is the conservative view."  And it hit me that me listening to and reading NPR and not much else is no different.  So I started reading The Atlantic and National Review and The Wall Street Journal in an effort to better understand where the other side is coming from.

Most of the time, NR and David French are conservative viewpoints I can understand, if not occasionally respect.  But he lost me big time on this one.  There are many reasons that physical strength as a prerequisite for masculinity is such bullshit (how strong do I have to be to be a man?), but I want to get right to the point.  I think it's this kind of toxic masculinity that breeds "men" like Dylan Roof, Eric Harris, Dylan Klebold, etc.  There is no answer to the question of how strong a man needs to be.  There will always be a stronger man out there, so if you measure manliness by strength, you will always be found lacking.  To an insecure young man, that really fucking sucks.  Maybe you've got understanding parents who support you through this, but maybe you've got a big strong macho dad like David French who tells you if you're not strong you're not a man.  Maybe your dad is so macho he verbally or physically abuses you because he knows that's the best way to toughen you up so you can be a big strong man.  Maybe you get shoved in lockers or pissed on in the showers because you're not strong enough to physically defend yourself.  Maybe the girls laugh at you as you're walking through the halls at school because they found out the big strong macho men peed on you in the shower.  Or maybe none of this shit happens, but you still feel horrible and weak because you just can't figure out how to fit in.

What do you do?

Thankfully, most guys just get through it, somehow.  Positive friends, a hobby, burying their noses in books, listening to death metal while they scream into a pillow, whatever.  But maybe none of that works.

What do you do?

What's the most powerful tool easily accessed in America?  The tool that instantly equalizes all physical limitations, assuming you have use of at least one of your hands?  If you're an insecure you man, feeling like you don't have a place in the world because you're "weak," what do you do?

You get a gun.  Because nobody is weak if they've got a fucking gun.  What's the most powerful thing you can do with a gun?  You can take the life of another human being.  Call me weak now bitches!  BANG BANG!

Weakening grip strength is not what's killing masculinity in the US of A.  It's this toxic idea that you can't be a man if you're not strong.

Sigh...

So much for my seemed-reasonable-at-the-time goal of posting something, anything, at least once a week.  Sigh...  Life and stuff.

But I was corresponding with an old friend of mine, a new mother herself, and she asked if I had any tips, since with my 10 months of experience, I must've figured something out by now, right?

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!!!!!

The dearth of posts is due to one big thing and a billion small things.  First, things are really, really, really good right now.  The Baby sleeps great.  She wakes at 6:00 or 6:30 and stays happy until 7:00 or so when we get up.  Goes back down for an hour around 9:00 and takes a good long nap around 2:00.  The house is clean, meals are still mostly cooked by me in our kitchen, the yard and garden are in OK shape.  We're doing good.  No, Superman does good.  We're doing well.  Thank you Tracy Jordan.

Anyway, when things are good, I don't write.  I think I mentioned how there's no way to write about the joys of parenthood without sounding trite.  BUT LOOK HOW SMALL THEIR HANDS ARE!!! MY HEART FEELS SO FULL I'M AFRAID IT'S GOING TO BURST!!!!!!!!!!!!!  It's all true, but geez, let's try harder to express how wonderful it is, eh?  To that end, I'm not feeling particularly poignant or original this morning, so I got nothing.  Except when I look at The Baby and make her laugh, it really does feel like my heart is gonna explode.  Goddamn I hate being trite.

I really did try to think about what I might've figured out though, and I could only come up with two things.  The first is to do your best to live in the moment, because they all, good and bad, pass so quickly.  The bad ones don't last forever, so don't let them get you down too much, and the good ones don't either, so enjoy them when you can.  I've really been trying to appreciate how good we have it right now, because it's only gonna get harder, even if that too will pass.

The other is the idea of holistic familial health, which I've talked about elsewhere.  I can't blame my postnatal depression on being so focused on The Baby's health that I neglected my own, but there was a correlation there and I knew I couldn't be a good father or husband if I was angry and sad all the time.  I needed to focus on myself for a little while to figure my shit out so I could get to a better place mentally, at which point I was able to focus on being the father and husband I needed to be.  I can happily say I think I'm there, but it's like a marriage - every day I need to decide to be that husband and to be that father, and it doesn't happen automatically.  Wake up to find The Dog has peed on the bathroom rug again?  I need to decide to pause, check my emotions, think about what I'm feeling, think about how I want to react, and then think about how I should react.  And being pissy with The Wife is not how I should react.  Well that got a little rambly and tangential.  My point is, don't forget to take care of yourself if it's going to increase the wellbeing of the family as well.

That's it, in 10 months, that's all I've figured out.  Oh wait - also, check the diaper for poop before you undo the tabs, and if there's poop, lay out your wipes.  Because when you're trying to keep your little shit factory's hands out of their poopy privates, you don't want to be struggling to get a wipe out of the container.

Travels with Baby 4: Poopmageddon

Sorry for the radio silence.  We've settled into a nice rhythm, and since things are good and mostly smooth right now, I've been enjoying myself rather than writing.  So, without further ado...

Poopmageddon.

Last time we talked, I was telling you about the stress of traveling and the fear of being judged a "bad" parent.  The important question by which to judge all travel stress is, "What's the worst that could happen?"  Some may argue that a screaming baby is the worst that could happen, but unless you've got a colicky baby, it's more likely your little one will tucker him/herself out at some point.  And if you're flying with a colicky baby...  God help you.

I maintain the worst that could happen is having your baby puke or shit on a total stranger.  This...didn't happen to us.  So the second worse thing happened to us.  Poopmageddon.

Our stay in California was wonderful.  Nice weather, relaxing, and The Baby was pretty darn cooperative.  We didn't really start to worry until the two days before our flight, when we realized it had been a couple days since The Baby had pooped.  No biggie.  She'd gone three or four days in between poops in the past, and we were confident we'd see some action before the flight.  Day before the flight - still no poop, but still not too worried.  Day of the flight - no poop, getting a little worried...

For some reason, I was still confident though that our beautiful little daughter would never do something so cruel as save up four days' worth of shit just to let it fly during a full flight.  I am a stupid, stupid man.

The Wife is nursing The Baby when she feels a sudden and unexpected warmth in her lap.  Her hand comes away smelly.

FUCK.

Our sweet little shit factory had given us a Level 3 Code Brown.  (Level 1 Code Brown is a minor breach of the diaper; confined to the waistband and/or leg holes.  Level 2 is above the waistband but below the armpits.  Level 3 is armpits.  Level 4 is neck.  Level 5 is hair)

Thank god our neighbor was a flight attendant who was deadheading back home.  She figured out what had happened and investigated the bathroom, and lo and behold, it had a changing table!  This was the first plane upon which I'd flown to have a changing table in the bathroom.  We took our little shit nugget back and worked on a plan.  Onesie was a total write off - we stripped it from the neck down.  I started grabbing handfuls of Kleenex and wiping the bulk of it off.  At this point, I looked around and realized what a horrible, awful mess it would make to try to use the plane's garbage, which features a spring-loaded door that swings closed strongly enough to trap you like a weasel.  I poked my head out and asked a flight attendant for a garbage bag.  Onesie and soiled Kleenex went in the bag.  Then I went to work with wet wipes.  Wipe after wipe after wipe until they started coming away clean.  All into the bag, which I then tied up.  A smart man would've just thrown the whole thing away, but as I mentioned, I'm not a smart man.  I'm a stupid, stupid man who cannot bear the thought of throwing away a five dollar onesie just because it'd dirty.  Plus it has little popsicles on it!  The bag came off the plane with us and I later donned rubber gloves and separated that onesie from the disgusting jumble of wipes and Kleenex and washed it.  Did I mention I got the flu the day before we left?  So I was feeling great.

So that was Poopmageddon, and is realistically the worst thing I can imagine happening on a flight.  And you know what?  It wasn't that bad.  We got far more sympathetic nods than dirty looks (we didn't get any dirty looks as far as I could tell).  The onesie came out clean, The Baby still wears it to this day, and I've got the perfect story for her wedding day.