Wherein I reveal my secret antifeminist past

My dining room table is covered in glitter from the 37 Dora valentines I had to prepare for Cletus the Former Fetus' various social obligations this week. Fifteen cards go to her preschool class, along with some kind of card-holding vessel I have yet to concoct. Another fifteen go to the weekly music class she attends on Wednesday evenings, in which four of the participants are named Chloe. And the final seven go to her friends at daycare. Since those friends are special and she hangs with them every day, they get suckers affixed to their cards. We play favorites, and suckers are expensive.

The husband proposed to me on Valentines Day eight years ago. We had been living together for a couple of years at that point, and I had harvested up all of my unused girly energy to yearn for an engagement that felt like it was never going to happen. We argued a lot. I had yet to be beaten into submission by his workaholic tendencies, so I both harbored and expressed my fantasies about occasionally seeing him before 9:00 PM. This caused strife. One Christmas, I thought I was going to be receiving an engagement ring for a gift. I received a sleeping bag. This caused additional strife. He wasn't sure we could make things work. This caused strife plus angst.

Not long after the Sleeping Bag Incident, I issued a manifesto, which basically went like this: I have been in love with you for many years, have made an ass of myself in your name on many occasions, and would like to marry you and be fruitful. If you don't want those things with me, if I am not part of the life you ultimately want, that sucks -- but I would like to know soon so that I can start listening to The Cranberries' "No Need to Argue" on eternal repeat and get on with my life of neverending sorrow. It was about a half-step shy of an ultimatum shameful enough to be featured in your garden variety Lifetime movie of the week.

We went on with our lives. I was prepared to give things six months or so and then start thinking about other options, other places to live, other jobs. Valentine's Day rolled around. Neither the husband nor I have ever been very good at doing Valentine's Day. I do believe the first time we ever celebrated it was after three years of dating when, on a visit during a year living in separate states, the husband bought me carnations and a bag of Red Hots. (On one hilarious occasion after we were married and living in Boston, he grabbed me a last-minute bouquet of roses from the flower stand in the Porter Square T station, all of which turned out to be blackened and dead. LIKE OUR UNION, we mourned. But I digress.)

Anyway, it was Valentine's Day, and so certain was I that we had no plans of celebrating that I agreed to cover someone else's on-call shift at the Hideous Women's Anti-violence NonProfit of Doom where I was employed. Because of this, I came home late and grouchy, walked in the door ready to eat frozen pizza in my pajamas. But instead found the husband standing in a room full of candles (who knew he could light one, let alone shop for a handful at Pier One?) with the Lloyd Dobbler boombox theme cued up on the stereo, a seafood dinner on the table, and a freezer filled with little heart-shaped cakes he had molded himself out of frozen yogurt.

And then we got engaged. And married. And had a daughter. And soon will have a son. And my husband is still just the best, funniest, smartest, most effortlessly kind person I know. And I say that now, even knowing that the seafood dinner and heart-shaped cakes were just a ruse, to be followed by years and years of chili and tuna noodle casserole and Boboli pizza crusts topped with bagged shredded cheese.

Which actually taste pretty good when you're eating them on the couch next to your valentine.

So grateful

In response to the Focus on the Family-sponsored Tim Tebow anti-abortion ad that CBS is going to air during the Superbowl this weekend, two professional athletes teamed up with Planned Parenthood to make the following video. Warning: if you are pro-choice and pregnant with a baby boy and struck dumb by the responsibility of teaching feminist values to your future son AND absurdly hormonal, get out your hankies:




Look. I don't have anything unkind to say about Tim Tebow's mother or the choice she made. (Although it bears noting, as many liberal media outlets have pointed out, that she HAD a choice.) I'm happy she ended up with the family she wanted. I don't want to get all pissed off about how CBS is airing this overtly political ad during the Superbowl; while I'm sure we can all agree that it will be a cold day in hell before they air a commercial featuring a woman celebrating her reproductive freedom, I don't have any concrete proof of that claim, so... you know, there's that.

All I really want to say is how grateful I am that two male athletes are speaking out publicly about trusting and honoring women's choices. That takes guts, and so few guys would be willing to do it, and I really just feel like it's a gift. And I appreciate it. And if either of these guys' mothers ever writes a parenting guide, I'm totally buying multiple copies and setting them to memory.

Memo to myself

When you suffer from a well-documented and debilitating fear of flying, and when you are -- in spite of that fear -- about a week away from leaving your daughter and husband behind and boldly putting yourself, your unborn child, and your golfball-sized ovarian cyst onto a flight to North Carolina for a mini-retreat with your BFFs, you might want to just consider refraining from clicking that New York Times link right there.

Why, to which link are you referring, self?

This link. The one that references the wretched last-minute crash of a commuter flight in Buffalo that took place almost exactly a year to the date before your planned flight. The one that details how said crash looks to have been caused primarily by multiple pilot errors, rather than simply by weather as was previously thought.

I'm going to go ahead and advise you, self, to not read about how the pilot and the first officer entered contradictory preflight information into the plane's computer system, thus delaying a warning signal that could have prevented the crash. Or about how when that warning finally did go off, the pilot's response was the exact opposite of what he should have done to keep the plane in the air.

Oh. You say you already read all that, self?

Well, then I promise you that you do NOT want to read the bit about how the first officer was sick with a cold, admitted to the captain that she should have stayed home but couldn't afford to do so, and was sending text messages from the cockpit before takeoff. Nor will you benefit in any way from learning that the captain had failed five performance checks over the course of his career as a pilot, but was still allowed to fly living, breathing human beings through the motherfucking air in airplanes on a regular basis. Like, as a job.

And for the love of God, under no circumstances should you look at the picture of the first officer, who appears to have been juuuuuust about old enough to have the training wheels taken off of her bike, or at the interactive graphic showing the plane weaving and bobbing before -- oh look. You went and did it. Well, don't say I didn't try to warn you.

But anyway, don't worry, self. I'm sure this was just an isolated incident, a freak joining of two less-than-stellar pilots combined with bad weather and crappy luck. I'm sure that whoever operates your regional commuter flights out of and into Peoria will be completely separated from this whole -- i'm sorry, what's that you say, National Transportation Safety Board? The crew on the Buffalo flight was "set up for fatigue and inattention before they even took off, partly because of the structure of the commuter airline business"?

Oh. Well. Who wants a free Sprite and some pretzels??

Add to the list of things I do not find charming. . .

. . .old men whose schtick involves "flirting" (read: making sexist comments, telling Reader's Digest-quality jokes, and crossing physical boundaries without permission) with young women and girls who are working in customer services roles and thus often feel forced by the constraints of their job responsibilities to be polite and sweet in response.

There is an old man who comes in on a regular basis to the resale shop where I volunteer. He always makes some kind of grand show of walking in the front door (shouting "Fancy meeting you here!" while stomping the snow off of his work boots), spends 5-10 minutes picking out a small item to purchase (a stocking cap, a mug, something for a quarter, usually), and then makes his way to the check-out counter to be lecherous.

The man seems to have a standard repertoire of material from which to draw. Sometimes he asks the volunteer running the cash register if she would shake his hand, then compliments her on how firm her grip is given the softness of her skin. Other times he opts for the time-honored "No ring on that finger? Pretty girl like you should be murried!" Most times, he pulls a Hershey's Kiss out of his pocket and asks if he can "give you a kiss." One volunteer reported that he asked to put the candy into her palm, but when she held out her hand Grandpa grabbed it, pulled her toward him across the counter, and tried to kiss her on the forehead. Several volunteers have been given a cheek stroke.

There are generally two approaches you can take with this guy. First, you can swallow your dignity, play along, and rest assured that he will amble out of the store before too long, as he always does once he's achieved physical contact or at least a girlish giggle. Or alternately, you can refuse to engage, not laugh at his jokes, speak only in reference to the transaction at hand ("Would you like a bag for that? Would you like your receipt?"), and claim to not eat candy. The trouble with this approach, of course, is that it upsets and confuses him, causing him to stay longer and keep trying to win your affection.

Yesterday -- and, if we're being honest, most days, but REALLY yesterday -- I had zero patience for the routine, and was entirely not capable of playing nice when I saw Mr. Hershey walking towards the counter. I rang up his baseball cap to the strains of "So a doctor calls this woman on the phone, and says 'Honey, I've got good news and bad news'..." I couldn't tell you what the punchline to that zinger turned out to be, as I was busy staring and announcing "That will be 54 cents."

This displeased him greatly, so he responded by reaching his hand down into his pants pocket and bringing up a palmful of loose coins, cough drops, hard candy, and a kleenex. "Can you find 54 cents in there for me?" he asked. I grabbed three quarters from the top of the pile, ignoring the pennies and nickles wedged in between the Werthers Originals and the snotrag, and then handed him back the change.

"How old are you, honey?" he tried next. But I pretended not to hear him and moved on to the next customer, coincidentally an elderly woman who had been quietly waiting her turn. The old guy was silent for a couple of seconds, then turned to the woman and said "Hmm. Never ask a woman for her age. No sir. They don't like it."

And then, God love her, the woman turned her head, looked him straight in the eye, and said "I'm a woman. You want to know how old I am?"

A reasonable person might have taken that moment to shut the hell up and move the hell along, but alas. Grandpa did not. He elected to take the next best option, which was, naturally, to spew the following: "I don't know how old you are, but I bet you're old enough that you used to pee in them cloth diapers back in the day. You know, the ones with the pins?"

To her credit, the woman did not take out her dentures and wave them in the air like a declaration of war. Instead, she simply stood stone-faced and said, "I'll be 90 next month, sir." And at that, our friend finally retreated, with a half-assed "Well... just keep on doing what you're doing then, honey. You look just great."

Dude will be back next week. Dude gets away with it because he is old, and because handsy old men are allegedly as cute and as sweet as puppies and kitties and baby birds and sunshine, and because there will always be 17-year-old girl cashiers who haven't yet learned that they have the right to not be touched by a stranger, even if said stranger looks a bit like Wilford Brimley in "Our House."

Awww. Is it your time of the month?

Apparently someone snuck into my bedroom while I was sleeping at some point last week and injected me with a bucket's worth of hormones, because I am suddenly, completely, So Very Pregnant. I have looked and felt pregnant with a little p for a couple of months now, but now we have officially entered Big P territory. The discomfort, the nocturnal tossing and turning, the round ligament bullshit, and the weeping. Oh, the weeping.

Yesterday, the husband worked past my arbitrary deadline (known only to me, as I had not communicated it to him in any way) of 10:30 PM, causing me to dissolve into hysterical sobs while washing the dinner dishes. When he heard me banging saucepans around and hiccuping and moaning he came downstairs to help, which somehow made me even more upset and caused me to exile myself to the bathroom for another half hour of solitary wailing. The husband eventually tried to join me, but he was denied access. All the while, a voice in my head tried to be reasonable. "Why are you crying?" it asked. "You are crying for no reason. You are just crying to cry. You can decide to stop crying whenever you want to. Like now. Or now." But I didn't stop, and I didn't stop. Until finally I did. And then I came out and laid on the couch and watched tennis on TV and felt sorry for myself until I could barely stand it. And then I went to bed.

And that was actually a vast improvement over a few days earlier, when I wept in my bedroom for the better part of an hour over the out-of-nowhere realization that someday, somehow, my mother would die. Bear in mind, please, that my mother is neither sick nor old nor someone who engages in anything vaguely resembling risky behavior. But I was sitting there just thinking about Newt in the Ute and Cletus and about taking care of them, which segued into thinking about my mom taking care of me, which segued (naturally) into thinking about her funeral and my subsequent empty motherless life.

It is only days, I fear, before the husband begins a series of dramatic deaths and heartbreaking extramarital affairs by way of my pregnancy-induced nightmares. As it stands now, I am still situated in the relatively benign second-trimester territory of Weird-Ass Dreams, including last night's offering in which I and Detective Greggs threw Lucy Kaplansky (whose music I haven't listened to for, like, years) a baby shower featuring a spread of bacon, eggs, mozzarella sticks that I passed around to guests on a greasy paper plate, and a massive professionally decorated chocolate sheet cake that occupied a table stretching from one end of the room to the other.

File under "social anxiety disorder"

Yesterday was Cletus the Former Fetus' second day of preschool. Catholic school, if you can believe it! We're hoping she will learn to both kneel and submit. And if we keep her enrolled there through both pre-K and Kindergarten -- which we're thinking we might do given the scarcity of in-town educational options that don't end with pregnant nine-year-olds -- she'll get to wear a uniform, and who doesn't love an actual schoolgirl wearing an actual schoolgirl uniform? They're not just for Halloween costumes and pole dancers, you know.

Anyway, what I wanted to tell you was this: when I picked the child up yesterday after class, her little backpack was already (already!) stuffed with little papers and flyers. I've now officially been asked to volunteer in the classroom, contribute to a bake sale, and donate money or items to the "preschool class basket" for a charity auction. On the second day!

One of the flyers was signed by the preschool "class mom." I've got hives already.

Affects, seasonal and otherwise

Last week was not a good week. I realize that saying as such makes me an asshole of the highest order, since I am lacking in neither food nor water and am not currently mourning the loss of 50,000 of my country's citizens. I mean, how do you even start to process all that, you know? We use the New York Times as our Explorer homepage, so countless times a day I find myself looking at those images, piles of bodies like a genocide. I feel like I should be looking at them 24/7, as some kind of penance for being privileged, for worrying about my own little shitstorms. But I guess at the end of the day, your own little shitstorms are the ones you ultimately have to wade through...

Cletus the Former Fetus has been diseased, first with a gross viral cold, then a double ear infection, and finally a stomach bug of demonic proportions that kept her up all night, vomiting and writhing. How do all you single parents deal with the stomach flu, man? Because between the husband and myself, we barely get the situation contained. It's all divide and conquer: you hold the girl upright, I'll go get the barf bucket. You change the pajamas, I'll strip the bed. You crate the dog so she stops lapping up the vomit (I. KNOW.), I'll throw up quietly in my mouth in response.

This was only our second family experience with any kind of prolonged pukage; our first, if you recall, landed us in the hospital for three days. I feel that I am sorely lacking in appropriate context as a result. After six hours of the plague, having really no idea how much was too much, I was ready to haul the child off to the ER in the middle of the night. She finally drifted to sleep, though, and went a few hours without hurling, and then I managed to get a couple of sips of fluid into her, enough so that I felt confident that I wasn't killing her off with dehydration-via-gross-negligence.

Also on our family's list of recent happenings? An ultrasound that revealed the presence of wee boy parts dangling off of Newt in the Ute. [Insert references to The Penis Inside Of Me here.] A boy! On which to inflict my radical feminist agenda! To defiantly dress in Cletus' pink onesies! (Really, though, that's just because I'm cheap.)

That news might have brought more uncontained excitement and joy, though, had it not been paired with the finding of a man-eating cyst taking up residence on my right ovary. Hello, stray golf ball. Nice to make your acquaintance. May I introduce you to my internal organs? Oh - I see you've already met. My midwife assures me that as long as the beast doesn't grow, twist my ovary, or start unionizing in there, it shouldn't pose any problems for the baby or the pregnancy. I do have to have it continually monitored by ultrasound, though.

I have got some serious midwinter cabin fever, people. Caaaaaaabiiiiiin fever. Makes every damn thing seem ten times worse than it is.

Hey, did any of you watch the Golden Globes last night? Did you stay awake long enough to see James Cameron's acceptance speech for best picture? The one where he invited the room full of sparkly rich people to give themselves a round of applause for being so awesome? For real, he did: he was all "we have the best, funnest jobs, people, we bestow the gift of movies upon the common folk, let's all give ourselves a gold star!" He also said something in his made-up Avatar language as if it were a Real Thing. Which it isn't. See the above paragraph, James Cameron. You are suddenly ten times more annoying than ever before.