Making room for Baby.


I’ve discovered, somewhat the hard way, that making room for a child requires much more than buying a crib and diapers.

You have to pull out your furniture and clean under there.   You have to pay attention to your air quality.  You have to put away choking hazards, plug up electric sockets, bolt things to walls and put away matches.  You have to get rid of as much as you can (if you’re a semi-nomadic apartment dweller), think hard about what you bring into your home and measure and have decent abstract thinking abilities regarding space, color and light.  You have to be able to use basic tools, a paintbrush, a vacuum cleaner and a caulk gun.  You have to be good at keeping up on dishes, laundry and shopping.

And you have to clear away ISSUES.  Your issues.  Your [immediate and extended] family’s issues.  Your friends’ and comrades’ issues.  “Society’s” issues.

I’ve probably already beaten this dead horse, but we (and especially I) are (am) cleaning out the belfries of our (my) own minds and hearts to make room for Baby there.  I’m always happy to listen to people’s problems and to help out by sharing a beer/coffee or just taking a walk.  I don’t mean to repeat my, “You have issues?  I have a kid.  I don’t have the time for you anymore.”  I think that’s been said enough to make me sound cold and also has been said more than I really actually mean it.

I’m referring now to the fact that we have to protect our child from screwed-up people.  Not violent people or something extreme like that.  Stubbornness, thoughtlessness, ressentiment, spite, etc.  I mean that we have to protect Baby from what other people’s issues cause.

It’s — relatively – easy to directly protect Baby from some of these issues, certainly.  Take a stubborn and spiteful family member or family friend.  It’s simple.  He or she doesn’t get to hang out with Baby.  It’s not Baby’s fault that an individual is an asshole.  It’s the asshole’s fault.  So, the asshole deserves to suffer for the asshole’s own issues (if someone has to suffer for them), if the alternative is that our Baby suffer.  Simple.  Or maybe I buy into existentialist notions of human freedom too deeply and blame people too much for issues that are the result of their societal milieu or their upbringing — or genuine mental illness.

But the problem is that these kinds of issues have an effect on us, as parents, as a married couple and as individuals.  It’s easy to keep Baby away from spiteful or selfish people, but this spite and selfishness gets brought into our home in the effects it has on Mommy and Daddy.  We might come home in a bad mood.  We might fight with each other.  We might teach Baby about rage or revenge without intending to.  If I am going to blame assholes for being assholes (and I do), I have to blame myself (and Mama) for how I (we) react to assholes.

And this is tricky.  Do I follow my revenge instinct?  Or do I attempt to emulate Jesus or the Buddha or another figure who would counsel peace and love?  Do I lie to Baby about assholes?  (“No, s/he is not a mean person.  S/he just had a bad family life and takes the misery it caused out on everyone in the world.  There are no mean or bad people.”)  I’d certainly like Baby to understand that there are, in fact, terrible people out there.  There are a couple of them on my own side of the family, for sure.  But I’d like her to have an optimism about people that I do not have and wish that I did.  Or is that realistic at all?

I feel like what we have to “make room” for is a balance between forgiveness and protection.  Just enough forgiveness to not hate someone, but protection enough to keep mean people and their issues away from Baby.  Or, since this is probably not possible all of the time, at least to minimize the effect other people’s assholery will have on us.  Or something.

Mama wrote her dissertation on love, and I on hate.  Maybe we’ll strike a balance by accident, almost naturally?

Mama and Baby updates, sorta.


(Baby G’s little feet, hopefully not as wide and hairy as his/her Dad’s.)
Wow. There’s a lot going on in our little apartment these days, with Baby trying to kick his/her way out of Mama’s belly, while Mama is on bed rest and trying not to have Baby too soon. We hit 30 weeks this week. So even if Baby comes relatively soon, she’ll probably be Okay. Hopefully.

So we went to the OB last week. I think Mama was glad to get out of the apartment and building! The halls (floors, walls and ceiling) are all being replaced in our building, and she hadn’t seen the nice job the painters did on the first floor. I’d forgotten that she hadn’t been through our front door in nearly a week. Anyway, Dr. Jones had said we’d be going weekly to see her for the rest of the pregnancy when we saw her two weeks ago at 28 weeks (it’s “normal” to go every two at this point). But she said that everything had “stabilized” and that we didn’t have to come back for two weeks last Wednesday. After the scary visits we’d had the preceding two weeks, Mama and I were both ecstatic.  But then she remembered that it meant two weeks without going anywhere. Still, good news that Baby will cooperate with cooking for a few more weeks before busting out into the world and his/her parents’ cuddles.

(Yes, I said “cuddles.”)

I still have a ton of work to do on Baby’s room. There are books to find homes for on other bookshelves as much as possible; a bookshelf to move; dozens of books to give away; storage boxes to be sorted through, thinned out and repacked; a big giant closet that needs to be cleaned out; painting the room (!); going to Ikea to get the furniture we picked out; storing the desktop computer (and giving away the desk), since the two netbooks we ordered last week should come this week or next (thanks for the vague timing, Ma and Pa Dell!); probably things I forgot. It’s for Baby; so I can handle it. I’m glad to do it.

I’m waiting for my apartment building to fix my kitchen phone jack (over which they painted) and to fix some water damage to the wall in Baby’s room so that I can paint.  Maybe I can get finished some leaps this week and this weekend, with cleaning, possibly painting.  Like a half dozen people have offered to help, and it’s just one room with three doors (one to the hallway, one the closet, one to the bathrooom) and a big window.

It won’t be hard.

Oh, now we have to call Mom?

I am gettin sick (literally) because my neighbor has taken to either acrobatic sex or cleaning the bedroom during the wee hours of the morning, when everyone’s in bed but even Buddhists and dog walkers aren’t awake yet.  Now, the rules are, tell the management.  I tried a sweet little note first, but that didn’t work.  I know; I should be a grown-up and talk to them.  But, for one, the office discourages it, and I don’t wanna find myself apartment shopping.  For another thing, me in my underwear, beard matted, eyes red and my tired fury at its peak — would not lead to a pleasant or fruitful exchange.

I think how angry this and other things make me should be a signal that I need to change something.  I’m flirting with resuming a mediation practice (hence the playful jab at early-rising Buddhists).  But meditation is hard work, and I am a lazy man.  So it’s slow-going.

Buzz and run.

So, my old neighbor lives two floors below me now.  No one lives in between currently.  So when I heard thumping a few weeks ago, I thought someone moved in.  No.  He’s just such a loud asshole that I could feel it two floors up.  He was at it again tonight, with it blowing out the open windows, too. I mean, ten minutes of something awesome like The Clash or Tool or Seal or Neko Case shaking the building I could stand.  But this kid listens to some kind of new asshole “rock”.  You know that loser band in School of Rock that is soft and sissy but still tries to rock?  Yeah, like that.  Seriously.  Roxette is Metallica next to this shit (and they’re awesome anyway).  “Oh, blah blah, me, my heart, oh, girl, oh, oooooooooooy, blaaahblaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!’

I should write him a note about his DUI and freak him out.  “Oh, nooooooo.  Who is this?  How did they know?  I’ll never drink again!”

I have taken to buzzing his intercom from the lobby when he’s being an asshole.  Why?  It’s funny.  He’s dumb as a bag of my smelliest turds (OMG).  I like to imagine him running to the box, asking, “Hello?” “Did you buzz me?” “Ooga?” He looks like he could kick my ass, so I have to be clever and not get caught laughing my way up the stairs.

We decided tonight that if we get caught, the conversation will go thusly:
“Uh, ooga, did you just buzz my apartment?”
“What?”
“Someone just buzzed my apartment.”
“Um, Okay.”
“Was it you?”
“Have you seen Good Will Hunting?”
“Huh, what, huh, ooga, wah?”
“It’s a movie.”
“No, I like TV a lot, huh huh.”
“Oh, so you never saw it?”
“What? Oh, I think I seen it once, (ooga) at my friend’s house. We were drunk, huh huh. Ooga.”
“Okay. Do you remember that scene where Jackie is telling that story about his uncle and the state policeman? How the officer came to his house wanting to get in his garage?”
“What? Huh huh. Ooga.”
“Well, to quote Jackie: MUTHAFUCKA, I AIN’T NEVAH SEEN YEW IN MY LIFE!”
“What?”
(Snickers from Johnny and Frankie.)
“What?”
(Dribbles as Johnny pisses himself in the elevator.)
“Ooga.”

Maybe I’m cruel.  But this piece of loud shit helped us stay sick for a month three years ago by keeping us up all night and drove us insane.  And because we didn’t want be the cause of his getting evicted in the winter like the management wanted to do, he was the cause of us having to move in 2007 to another apartment.  I could do way worse things than buzz his apartment when he’s blaring his terrible music.  I mean, I could do it in the middle of the night when I can’t sleep.  I could pee on his door.  I could steal a wheel off of his car and leave it jacked up in his parking spot.  I could put a porkchop under his doormat at night to drive his dog crazy like I joked about.

Buzzing his apartment and joking with my wife about 90s films and what a caveman this guy is are the least service I can offer to my other neighbors.