Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

thoughts

Gestational Delusions

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The eventual baby is really starting to have its own personality – or at least one that we’ve ascribed to it – while still in belly.

Maybe that’s because it’s so obviously a unique unit from E now. There are parts of it pressed assymmetrically against one side, practically screaming, “I am not your wife’s biology; I am sentient and sovereign.”

So we have stories. Stories about its kicks and throttles, its hiccups and turns. We’ve done that very criminal parental thing that I despise, anthropomorphizing a living thing that is just a simple fetus. It turns out, I just cannot help it.

This makes me happy and certain about not finding out the sex of our offspring. For the first four or five months the first question people asked was “Was it planned?” (which: unless you are my bestie best friend (which many of you are; this is the internet), that is such a gross and overly familiar question and I cannot believe you asked it), and then like flipping a switch it became, “Will/Do you know the sex?”

Let’s lay this out. People want to know the sex so they can build a narrative on the behalf of your unborn child. They do not have the benefit of unlimited belly time that you or your partner(s) have to make up all those little stories, so they are grasping at a straw.

A harpy

A few months ago I sat in a meeting where a man just as pregnant as me (that is to say, not at all, but with a wife as far along as E) revealed he was expecting a girl. I watched as harpies bearing weather-beaten cliches descended from every direction, their sagging breasts flopping in the air.

(That’s not a dig at their actual breasts. I’m just working the harpies metaphor.)

“Girls are so precious.”

“You know she’ll be daddy’s little girl.”

“Better to have a girl first. Boys are so difficult.”

It was then I learned the true meaning of the phrase, “I’m so angry I could spit.” The harpies kept unspooling their stories. The dreaded “princess” was wielded. Not one tale was about how smart and capable his little girl would be, how strong and bold.  Nope. This wee four-month old fetus would be cute, loving, and submissive, as all girls are and should be.

Excuse me, I’m going to spit right now. I Invite you to do the same.

Okay, we’re back.

I’m sure our eventual baby is going to be cute and loving, but that is not the only story we are painting across E’s belly. Our eventual baby is also going to be intelligent, conniving, adventurous, curious, and a fan of Douglas Adams. Yes, even if it is a boy. ;)

After careful consideration, I have decided to be okay with becoming that standard parent who makes up his own in uetero narratives, because I know that my narratives will always be unique.

Baby McFidgets

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Our unborn baby is a veritable battering ram.

I am not stating this in a bragging way. No. I am quite certain this is relatively average fetal behavior. Instead, as with all things baby-related, I am coming to you from a place of deep and enduring ignorance.

Yes, I was aware that when babies “kicked” they weren’t really just kicking – really, they were doing any manner of nudges and somersaults in the womb that could be felt from outside of it. I did edit our maternity program manual that one time, you know.

However, I was under the impression that this was mostly after said fetus had feet larger than a quarter, and that you couldn’t get a visual on the kick activity from outside the belly until pretty far down the line. Oh, and that it was not a constant internal artillery barrage that would keep my wife awake for months.

Actually factually, E was being “kicked” by Project Sidecar as early as 15 weeks into our joint venture in genetics. Possibly earlier, but at that point any sort of interior motion seemed more a fit of whimsy than of unborn baby breakdancing. Yet, around 15 weeks the kicking became quite distinct. If I watched extremely closely I could see E’s stomach make the tiniest of jumps.

Now we’re nearly twice that far along, and  Sidecar is all motion, all the time. Kicking, punching, twirling, and apparently hiccuping several times a day, because that is also a thing.

I honestly had no idea about the whole range of motion we’d be experiencing, and so I had no expectation of the result: that the baby has become quite a character in our lives. She or he already has nicknames and favorite times of day, as well as activities that wake her up or put him to sleep.

While I’m sure the little thing probably cannot help causing such a commotion, I also wonder about the evolutionary role of it. Our eventual baby is reminding us all of the time that it’s on the way. Every kick is another chance for E and I to worry about where it will sleep or if we have any clothes for it. In that way, the kicks are pretty good for our eventual babies eventual health. Sure, these days even America’s shamefully high infant-mortality rate bodes well for a baby’s longevity outside the womb, but what about in places where it’s even higher? What about 100 years ago? Did a more kick-tastic baby wind up with better-prepared parents?

Of course, I was going to worry about everything anyway – it’s not like I was going to take a more lackadaisical approach to parenting if it had kicked less. This is just one of those child-rearing topics where my mind wanders away from the neverending how-to books and parenting blogs to a time when someone as ignorant as me really was at a disadvantage when it came to being an eventual father.

The kicks can’t teach me how to diaper, though. For that I’m going to need diagrams. And coaching. Possibly anxiety medication.

Breaking: Big News, All Week

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12-yr-old-newsboy-7496117758_9f31af2840

Public Domain photo by Lewis Hines: 12 year old “Newsboy. Hyman Alpert, been selling three years. Spends evenings in Boys Club. New Haven, Conn, March 1909”

Over five years ago I told you all that E and I were getting married.

Four years ago I live-posted my vows on our wedding day.

Three years ago I shared the story of buying our first home.

Those nuggets were just about the biggest news I could ever conceivably share with you until last month (and in some older posts I have un-privatized) when I revealed that we are expecting a baby.

While the impending summer 2013 birth announcement of Baby Krisis (not his or her official nickname) (yet) will likely remain the biggest news ever to break on CK for possibly all of eternity, this week I have two amazing pieces of information to share that rank only a few rungs on the news ladder below  “I am committing to stay with my partner forever” and “I am buying a piece of property three time as old as me.”

Stay tuned, true believers. I am shaking it all up in 2013.

The Run Around

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I would look for any excuse. Forgot my gym clothes. Wore boots instead of sneakers. My eczema meant I was predisposed to asthma.

Anything not to run a mile for the Presidential Fitness Test in gym class.

I look back and laugh to myself. I barely weighed anything at the time. How hard could it have been to locomote myself 5280 feet? Certainly easier than now, where every galumphing step makes me acutely aware of just where I’m storing all that ice cream I’ve been eating lately.

Actually, now that I think about it, it wasn’t really the running I was avoiding. Well, okay, it was the running a little. Mostly it was where we were running it. I attended a city high school with a tiny school yard on its roof. There was no track anywhere to be found, and letting us loose in the surrounding neighborhood could result in any number of side trips to buy cigarettes or hook up with reprobates lurking outside the college across the street.

No, to keep things contained we would need to run around the parking lot. Just the west half of it, actually. Nine and a half times.

I like to think if they loosed us up and down Green Street I might not have minded as much, but the utter drudgery and the hurdling over mounds of trash bags was too much to bear. Some kids sat it out in protest, no doubt earning a firm note home to mom and dad. I protested, but I was and have ever remained averse to official forms of reprimand, so I would run.

Actually, now that I think back to my time, I was pretty fast.

I was doing just that, yesterday. Not running fast. Thinking about my time. Because I found myself in the drudgery of all drudgeries – running a mile on a treadmill without any music to run along too.

And why was I undertaking this Sisyphean task, you might wonder? Because I was taking the Presidential Fitness Test, along with three of my co-workers. We worked up a devilish little challenge for Q2 of 2013, and it started with timing ourselves on a mile jog.

Now, I had gotten pretty good at jogging by this time last year. Once, a single time, I managed to come within a hair of an 8:30 mile, which is as fast as these luscious Italian thighs should ever have to carry me over that distance. The past year has not been especially kind to my body and I, so that time is now far behind me. I had no illusions of matching it on my personal hamster wheel. No, this was a run for my life. Gasping and wincing and biting my lip and humming one of my own songs just to cut through the digital tick tock tick of the timer on the screen in front of me. I would defeat this electronic taskmaster and its 5280 feet of endlessly looping pavement. I would run that damned mile.

In that moment of sureness I had a feeling not unlike what people might refer to as someone walking on your grave, but in reverse. I knew at that very moment that somewhere in the continuum of time a version of me half of my age had been cajoled into taking nine and a half laps around the parking lot, and was hurdling over a trashbag with secret glee.

If you’ll excuse me, I’m due for another run.

No Fooling

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When I was age seven or eight I wanted to be a comedian. I never told anyone.

My mother really liked to watch comedians on television. I guess my parents had that in common, because I could always seem to unearth yet another comedy routine of Robin Williams or George Carlin from our pile of dubbed Beta tapes. My mother would always say they were not appropriate for me, but she never stopped me from watching them.

At the time I didn’t especially enjoy being in front of people.  I had to be dragged into performing a simple narration in a school Christmas pageant at age 10, which I have absolutely no recollection of due to what I have to assume was my blacking out from fear.

I did not want to be in front of an audience, but I wanted to be clever. I liked the idea of making people laugh for a living.

Even eight-year-old me understood the precarious economics of the Comedy profession. You would have to be super, ultra funny to get as many people to sit in front of you as Williams or Carlin, let alone Gallagher with his watermelons. I loved Gallagher. Jay Leno. Tim Allen, too. They were zany, and they were clearly very talented. I was sure they wrote their own jokes, which was an awful lot of jokes.

(I cannot speculate on whether that lead me to focus on writing. I didn’t write things that were especially funny at that age. I preferred the macabre. Too much Stephen King, I guess, another one my mother was never sure about but kept letting me read.)

Eventually I gave up my secret comedian wish in favor of one more typical for a bright kid – doctor, I figured. Yet, that early urge to be funny probably informed my profession more than most of my math and science scholastic endeavors aimed at a future in medical school.

Now I don’t like most funny things. Jokes, pranks, comedians, sitcoms – they mostly elicit a groan from me. I still laugh, mind you, but I like my humor sarcastic, or ironic, or soaked in pop culture. Nothing overt. No cartoonish hammers wielded against watermelons. Joss Whedon and Tina Fey are my comedy gold.

Sometimes I catch myself thinking, “comedy is for kids.” When you are a child, every joke is a new one. Every episode of I Love Lucy or Looney Tunes has a gag so funny you think you will stop breathing. Sitcoms play out tropes you’ve never seen before. Talk show hosts tell groaners, but you don’t understand that you should groan.

I do not want to be a comedian anymore. I don’t think I ever did, to begin with. I wanted to be what comedy represented. An innovator. A trailblazer. Something novel, every time.

Little did I know how in demand that would be when I grew up.