Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

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on naming a baby

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A seeming eternity ago (really only about nine-and-a-half months), I set out my initial rules for baby-naming. Essentially, that there had to be good evidence that we would only occasionally meet another baby named that same thing ad that the name was not some random noun – like a fruit or cardinal direction.

As with almost every collaborative aspect of our pregnancy (and, so far, our child-rearing), this was easier in concept than in execution.

Boys names were not so difficult, once we got down the basics. Nothing monosyllabic, and preferably with three. Nothing too biblical or All-American, but nothing too new and trendy. I was fixated on “Sebastian” for a while, because as a kid I would never have even heard the name save for The NeverEnding Story. However, our research on Baby Name Wizard (which quickly became my favorite site due to its excellent data visualizations) (and this was before I went to work at a data visualization company) told me the name had peaked in 2012 near #50 after a steady climb since around the time The NeverEnding Story was released.

See, fellow 80s nerds – we are not alone.

Eventually we found a name from Greek myth we both adored, and the matter was settled. If only the girl side of things had been so easy to resolve.

Photo by chrisinplymouth @ Flickr; some rights reserved.

Photo by chrisinplymouth @ Flickr; some rights reserved.

You see, I always had a hypothetical rule about girl names for my hypothetical eventual offspring. In my mother’s family, all the women have had E-names. My mother, her mother, and her mother’s mother too. In fact, a few months ago I asked my mom to poke around the more wizened members of my family and she came back reporting even my great-great-grandmother had an E name.

(I asked her if she had been aware of this -would I have had an E name, if I were a girl? – and she said it had never really come up. Yet, in looking at my maternal family tree there are tons of E names. It’s not like it’s an Italian thing, either, because many of the names were Americanized and my paternal, equally-Italian family has no E-names to speak of. All coincidence? This X-Files fan thinks not.)

Clearly, an eventual Ms. Baby Krisis would have to have an E name, if only I could convince my hypothetical eventual wife of the importance of this (unintentional?) tradition.

Then I married E – really, the first E-named girl I had ever even seriously fancied. So, game over, end of story, E-name settled upon – right?

Not necessarily. First, E wasn’t strictly wild about the E-theme. That aside, there are only so many E names, and some of them are just too mega-popular to even consider under my rules. The essential Elizabeth? I can’t even count how many of them I know! The enchanting Emma and Emily? Each in the top ten. My personal favorite, the elegant Ella? Recently crested at number six! Even the enduring Evelyn was on the rise.

E effusively trumpeted the excellence of Euphemia, but I thought it sounded elderly. Anyway, I had something more elfin or ethereal in mind. We both enjoyed Eponine – which embodies both of those qualities – but with the emergent success of Les Miserables we did not want to become unintentional participants in a sudden trend.

Finally, we settled upon a name. Another Greek one, actually, although we both agreed it also sounded a bit French. It was unusual, but not made up, and beyond rare. Even Google had a hard time coming up with good examples of it on pages in English, and it had a seemingly endless number of nicknames tucked inside of it.

We agreed this name was our first choice, so long as our hypothetical daughter didn’t simply look its complete opposite. Yet, it was a little tricky to say and to spell. I wanted to try it out on people, but we had each sworn to secrecy on the baby first-name front, so I couldn’t even say it out loud outside the house! I just kept looking it at it spelled out on our baby name spreadsheet and having misgivings. I wanted something unique and memorable, but I was afraid of picking a bullying magnet by mistake. I briefly tried to back out, but E held me fast – we had decided together. I could at least wait to see the baby before having misgivings.

As with many things baby, life decided the answer for us. When she emerged from the womb all wailing and purple, I felt instantly that we had the right name for our baby – somehow both strong and delicate at once, never fragile. Yet, everything was so busy with the weighing and measuring and Apgar scores (8, by the way, on account of her being so purple) that it wasn’t until the next day when one of our wonderful midwives visited and asked that we realized neither of us had actually spoken the name out loud since the birth.

We said it to her, tentatively, as if asking permission to name a human being that name. She nodded her head and said, “That’s lovely.”

So it was decided.

occupational hazards of fatherhood (part 1 of many)

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On day three, prior to the formation of my "always hold head to right" bad habit.

On day three, prior to the formation of my “always hold head to right” bad habit.

I have sustained my first child-rearing injury.

I have spent a lot of time holding our daughter because, duh. And also because a two week old baby really deserves to be held by real humans with beating hearts as much as possible rather than be relegated to a carrier or a swing (although those alien bobbing-and-weaving pod swings were looking really tempting on day three when the only way she would got to sleep was with vigorous and continual swinging).

It’s that beating heart that got me in trouble. Not metaphorically, either. I noticed – or, at least thought I noticed, it’s not like I did an extensive empirical study – that it was easier to swing her to sleep if her head was over my heart. I’m sure that enhanced newborn hearing can probably pick up my heartbeat from the other side of a chest, but when you have a week old baby and have discovered a method that may be giving you even 1% extra efficacy in stopping her from crying you just do it like a fucking Nike ad.

Of course, always holding her with her head to the left creates a cascade of other behaviors. My left arm and shoulder remain slightly weak from my pre-CK collarbone break, so I lean ever so slightly to the right to compensate. Similarly, I have to crane my neck sideways and then down to peer into her eyes – which, even if not deployed in a constant, doting fashion, is necessary to tell if I have successfully ensleepened the baby in my arms.

(Yes, I made that word up. Is there a better verb for causing another person to go to sleep that isn’t “knocked out” or “roofied”? There’s a whole other post rolling around in this head about words and concepts it is probably wrong to apply to your baby due to their adults-only context, but like seeing lightning strike, you kind of have to write them down as you are saying them because they would never occur to you in any other context.)

The Munchkin Lulla-Vibe Vibrating Mattress Pad.  Because what the world of child-rearing was missing was a combination vibrator/whoopie-cushion.


(Okay, here’s one: we had this little battery-operated buzzing pad thing at her photo shoot to lull her into a brief state of peaceful complacency for each photo, and at one point in trying to calm her one of us (possibly the photog) said, “Everyone likes a nice vibrator on their bottom.”)

(And, scene.)

I’m sure there are a hundred other little bodily ticks I’ve been performing to compensate for holding her on the left side of my chest. Understandably, I developed a little twinge in my back as a result, but it wasn’t enough to stop me from holding her or going about my life.

That is, until about two o’clock yesterday afternoon, when in miming my utter fear of dogs for Ben at the office as part of my argument against office pets I tweaked my neck a little bit wrongly and all of those little ticks enacted one big portion of revenge on my levator scapulae muscle and I had to go lie on the floor in our nap room for twenty minutes before I could use a keyboard again.

Levator Scapular shown in bright red, which also indicates my white-hot blinding pain.

The Levator Scapulae is shown in bright red, which also indicates the area of my white-hot blinding pain.


I’m pretty tough when it comes to pain that I know isn’t resulting in one of my organs exploding inside my body, so I just jammed a few thousand mg of ibuprofen down my gullet and continued managing accounts.

Except, by the time I got home it wasn’t just a little back and neck ache. It was a paralyzing back and neck PROBLEM. Like, I tried to take the car out and almost rammed it into the telephone pole at the end of our driveaway because every time I turned my head to look behind me I wound up turning my entire body with it, along with the wheel.

This culminated in a depressingly amusing sequence where I was in too much pain to hold the baby or move or sit up on my own, so I laid on the floor and we attempted to drape her strategically across my body as a sort of counterweight slash organic heating pad. I was physically incapable of providing her any assistance with sustenance, changing, or comfort. If she was my organic heating pad, I had been reduced to her organic mattress.

I’m happy to report that the searing pain (which I’d say reached about a 7.5 on my pain scale) has retreated this morning, as evidenced by my sitting in a chair and using a laptop, but that took hours of heat and ice and excruciating stretching and equally as excruciating not holding my baby.

(This is just one more situation where (a) I have realized that parenting is incredibly hard physical and mental work and (b) I have no idea how people do this themselves or mostly themselves with a partner who can’t or won’t make the time.)

I’m sure this is just the first of many injuries I will sustain while parenting, and  it maybe explains my friend Chaz’s obsession with becoming a powerlifter post-baby – that way, a little child-cradling will never even approach his threshold for muscle annoyance. Despite being a rather harrowing 12-hours, I’m not sure it’s going to drive me to join CrossFit. If anything, I just think the next time I muster up the strength to hold her I might appreciate the privilege a little bit more.

Oh, and I’ll start alternating sides of my body every hour.

Oh, Baby

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The first image of her I recorded somewhere other than in my gray matter. She is about 15 minutes old.

The first image of her I recorded somewhere other than in my gray matter. She is about 15 minutes old.

Despite all of the hilarious and challenging things that happen in your home when it houses a newborn baby, I haven’t found the right way to articulate any of them for you.

Last Sunday night as our midwife drew our baby out of the womb she was purple. My father and mother both warned me – “The baby will be weird colors. It will be alarming.” It wasn’t. She was lovely and purple fading to pink like a violet, wailing all the way with a wide mouth and a broad nose. In her face I saw my father’s mother smiling at me for the first time in twelve years.

There was no card in the camera. All these things they tell you to remember – remember the onesie and remember the paper you want the footprints on – and not one list said “remember to put the card in the camera.” So there are no purple pictures. E didn’t see it, either. It’s one of those memories, those crystalline moments, that resides only in my own mind.

Minutes later I was sitting in a rocking chair with this tiny creature wrapped in my arms, singing her the song I had been singing to her in the womb, a song about grandmothers and taking things for granted that I wrote while crying.

She did not cry. Not then, but afterwards. The entire way to the nursery for her first checkup and all throughout as I sat with my head resting against the other side of the glass, fighting off sleep. Eventually I was satisfied that she would not stop crying anytime soon and I returned to E’s side to wait to hold her a second time.

The next day I did not want to put her down. How could I put her down and miss her face for an instant? I am writing that here for posterity, as since then I’ve found plenty of reasons to put her down, but the recovery room is a honeymoon and I had never seen a newborn before in person. I didn’t want to miss anything.

The first night at home was hard. I told E I would take the night shift, only waking her to breastfeed – after all, she had done all of the hard work in the past day. But I kept falling asleep in the rocking chair, coming to as my head dipped forward on my neck, afraid I would drop her. I would set her down in the crib, knowing full well she would wake up as soon as she noticed my arms were gone, and sleep fitfully on the floor for three or five minutes at a time until I heard her cries and quickly scooped her back up. I have stayed awake through blogathons, benefit concerts, and music festivals, but never was every minute so hard as that night.

I wish I had written every day last week, but what would I have said? That swaddling was easy when we were in the hospital, but impossible once we returned home. That I quickly learned how to change a diaper and don’t gag at it the way I do whenever I’m tasked with cleaning a toilet. That I am spouting constant puns at her, an endless stream, narrating her every move with pith. That after our most frustrating night so far I played Amanda Palmer singing Carole King and Maurice Sendak’s “Pierre” and cried softly as I sang along. That I decided Curious George was too facile and with bad grammar, so I am reading her The Tempest instead.

My daughter is eleven days old and she now looks like my mother’s mother. It’s uncanny, actually, to peer down at a new human being and see an old one that you can’t have back even while knowing this this moment, too, will pass and never return.

Does that baby come with a side of time?

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Last night I found myself in a dire situation.

I was out of clean underwear.

To put this complex issue in the correct framework, you need to consider the source. I am not the kind of guy who has just five or ten pairs of underwear, or who has one massive heap of undone laundry. No. My underwear drawer is multitudinous, and my laundry is sorted into six equally-laundered segments.

I might run out of fitness clothes, fashionable colored bandanas, or pink button down shirts, but even with my general aversion to folding and stowing clean clothing, it ought to be an utter impossibility that I ever run through underpants unless I have a recurring gnome problem.

Yet, there I was, unable to fight the downward drift of my eyelids with a load of laundry just beginning, not knowing what fabric would cover my backside in the morning.

Never fear, friends and people who have sat next to me on the subway today, for I did not go commando. No. E, knowing my distress, woke up before me and moved a small quantity of underwear into the dryer to rush them to a state of readiness. For that and many other reasons she is awesome.

However, my point here is not that I need more underwear (trust me, I don’t) or that E is awesome (we’ve known that here at CK for over a decade now).

No, my point is: baby.

Allow me to expand.

There are barely enough hours in the day as it is. I work and sleep and create and perform and mow a little of the lawn every time the trimmer battery recharges and occasionally mainline a new series from Netflix in half-season increments. Yes, I could excise that brief bit of media-consuming brain-deadness, but otherwise I am always looking for a few more hours in the day to read, blog, exercise, balance my budget, finish mixing our EP, or – yes – launder undergarments.

That’s okay, though. I have kept all the plates spinning and all the progress happening for years now.

Then there’s this idea of a baby. I’m still coming to terms with it and how it’s going to be here in five-ish weeks. I got over the “The baby is real” phase, the “How will we afford this baby?” phase, and even the “Where exactly is this baby going to go?” phase. What I am having trouble with is, “When am I going to pay attention to this baby?” – or, more accurately, “When am I going to do all of the things that make me me and also keep my in clean underwear?”.  Because, if the baby requires, say, thirty minutes of attention per day, that is going to result in way less songs rehearsed or words written, you know?

(Disclosure: I am pretty sure it is going to take more than thirty minutes a day to keep the baby alive, let alone make it a super-genius congressperson or UN ambassador with a theatre background and a degree in engineering.)

And I’m thinking it probably will require more than thirty minutes of attention a day, so something’s got to give, and I think I’ve exhausted the slack in the laundry department.