Maternal Insomnia

It is 2:00 a.m. where I live.

About an hour ago, which was about 3 hours into my sleep for the night, my little girl seemed to sleepwalk into our room, crawl into bed, cuddle up against me, and immediately turn to dead weight. Heavy breathing and all of it. Sweet-smelling little kid noggin, hyper warm, but wiggling, as kids are wont to do.

My romantic partner, who suffers interruptions to his sleep poorly, asked what was the cause of the wiggling, and persisted in vocalizing his discontent until I was good and awake. As I am now.

The sweet child turned on the hall light, and the romantic partner shouted, "What the hell?!" I said, "Hey!" I brought the child back to her room, procured some water for her, and tried going back to the grown up bed. I laid there, stared at the lights that blinked off the ceiling for an hour.

The romantic partner, who can be cuddly in the night, asked me for some cuddles and reminded me that he loves me. I think this was his means of apologizing for being so vocal and impatient and annoyed.

Still. My sleep was interrupted at precisely the right moment that my body believes that I should be awake for the day's work. This may also have something to do with hormones.

Leaps...

Dear Faithful (and unfaithful) Readers of this Blog,

This is the day that I have committed to my new life. My new life full of uncertainty and mastery of my own destiny. I suppose it could be argued that one is always master of one's own destiny, but this new endeavor of mine is a vocational commitment unlike others because the stakes are higher.

The stakes are higher because as of May 7, I will be a fully self-employed human. And I will be self-employed without the trappings of some other company giving me the tools. I will be president, CEO, and sole proprietor of April Line Writing. April Line Writing delivers newspapers for the moment, too.

The scary part: I am leaving an EXCELLENT job. One with benefits and a 401K and paid vacation. I am releasing myself into the cold, cruel, shit-economy reality that is America in 2011. There are people who will tell me I am crazy for making this leap of faith. That is for them. Here in my boots, I would be crazy not to make this leap of faith.

This is a leap of faith I have been waiting to take. I have reached a moment in my life as a freelancer wherein I have more work than I can manage with a full time job, but need more to match my present income.

More important, however, than the remarkable self-examination, neurosis, and slow beginning that will occur in the next several months is that I will once again be able to be a present mom and partner. I will take Pearl to the library and be able to hang out with her during her summer break. I will be able to make dinner every night and organize myself comprehensively. And I will have enough. I will not have more than I need, but I will have enough.

What this means to you: Maybe you will see weird stuff on my blog, and blog posts that don't make exact sense (these may be posts that I am being paid to write, banners I am being paid to post), and you'll get more of me. My loony thoughts, and probably my sedate, philosophical ones, too.

Cochran School Nurse II

The war wages on.

Pearl had a potty accident today. So the Cochran School Nurse called me and requested a change of clothes.

Yesterday, Pearl had the balance of her immunizations and her physical check up. Dr. O'Hara, her pediatrician (who is simply lovely), said that her school nurse is also a beastly, naggy person. I wondered out loud why someone who likes neither children, nor even people, should want to be a school nurse. We all laughed.

After Pearl's appointment, I dropped her and a copy of the physician's report (complete with immunization record) at school.

So today, after I helped Pearl change into her fresh clothes, the school nurse, who now has a name (Mrs. Miller--Pearl asked her), said, "Pearl showed me where she had all her shots. Can you give me a record of those?"

I explained, with a chill in my heart and a sneer on my face, that I turned them in with the office. She said, "Oh. Mrs. Thompson must have them."

Why are these elementary school professionals such poor communicators?

This side note is interesting to me as a feminist: When she called Brad, she called him Mr. Miller. When she called me, she called me April. I mean, I generally dislike being called Ms. or Mrs. Line (I get Mrs. a lot now that I have a kid. It's a bit creepy since I'm not a missus), but for the Cochran School Nurse, I would make an exception, and I am curious about the higher level of respect she shows to Brad. Hmmmm.

Robot Brain

I had a conversation with little Pearl this morning that went like this:

"Mommy, do you remember when I went with you to buy this fix it tape?" she asked me, waving my white-out tape dispenser in the air.

"No, Pearl, I do not."

"That's because you don't have a robot brain like me, mommy."

*****************************************************

Last night, she was dismissed from dinner because she was not eating. Stomping up the stairs to her room, she looked at me with daggers in her little eyes and said, "Don't look at me!"

Mr Bubble T-shirt Offer

So I'm in the shower thinking about how my multi vitamin is working because I'm losing less of my hair now (ah, 30). Pearl's new bottle of bubble bath catches my eye. It is Mr. Bubble. I practically forced her to get it, because like Dum-dum wrappers, the Mr. Bubble T-shirt offer always fascinated me as a child. I Wanted that T-shirt. I thought maybe I'd get it for Pearl. And one for me, too.

So I'm reading the offer, and I get to the part about, "while supplies last," and I think, Who are they kidding? Supplies have lasted since at last the late 70s, I'm sure.

I do some web research. Go here. Vaguely creepy, but some vintage commercials indicating that the T-shirt offer supplies may have been lasting since the 1960s!

The Village Company? Too evocative of The Village People to ignore. If it wouldn't be inexcusably tacky, I'd make a label called "things that make me go hmmm."

What do we become?

This morning, I woke at twenty to six, shut off the a/c, padded downstairs. I unrolled my Yoga mat for the first day of my mid-year-resolution: Yoga at least 4 mornings a week. 45 minutes of Yoga later, I put on the coffee and went out for the Sunday paper, which I signed up for at the supermarket because of the $20 gift card they offered. I unloaded the dishwasher and had coffee and the paper on the porch while the air was still wet, before the sun had her way with all of us.

Little Pearl came downstairs at around 7:30. She got her juice and her freggie and began her day with Charlie and the Chocolate Factory A la Mr. Burton.

I put in some laundry, wrote some lists and planned the menu for tomorrow evening when my sister, Ellen and her new boyfriend, John will join us for Dinner. Then I remembered the Challah I bought the other day and made some french toast for our breakfast. Pearl still preferred a hot dog or Dog!, though she fed her toast to the air and the couch.

We saw Kung Fu Panda. It was great.

The point of this minutae is that I am really happy with this day. 8 hours later, I'm really still energized from my Yoga with Shiva Rae, and I'm looking forward to dinner at my parents' house.

A friend just told me on the phone about his, er, encounter with a young lass on a Porche 911 in an alley in our Fair Nation's Capitol. A few months ago, I think the tale would have made me rather jealous and nostalgic for my own days of steamy encounters. Today, though, his story made me worried and glad that I no longer have those worries.

I've been giving myself space and permission to really hate men lately. To really bad-mouth them like my angry-bra-burning-super-political sisters and mothers of yore did. I have been angry in a way I never wanted to be, in a way that would have disgusted me because of the ways in which "feminism" seems to fail to notice or accept responsibility for the way it has affected (ahem, confused) men. I am still disgusted, but I am healing. It is easy to be angry at men because I work with a lot of them. It is also easy to pity them. And it is easier than it has ever been to fancy myself in a domestic relationship (with a man) wherein I accept the "female" role. It is easier to get peace with the hate when I indulge it. It is easier to see ways around it, to imagine the possibility that not all men are ridiculous swine.

I hope this process seems obvious to some of you. I hope that more of you have never felt the need to hate men, though they are loathesome creatures on a great many levels. I imagine some men feel the very same way about women, and with good cause. But they are not allowed to express it. If they do, they are suspected of the desire to beat women or to rape them, and these are unspeakable things.

I used to romanticize unhappiness, depression, self-hate. I have always been able to barrel through those periods of my lfe, but lately I have been seeing fewer of them.

So what do we become? Are yoga and a slow morning the answer to all of my problems of adulthood? Of identity? Where does this peace for today come from? I have become, in a short almost-four-years just about EVERYTHING I never wanted to be. A mother, a (looks like) permanent resident of South Central Pennsylvania, sentimental--openly and sloppily, a junior spinster, a man-hating feminist, a car-salesperson, a manager, celibate, complacent, a fan of chick flicks, fat and happy.

I suppose the good news is that I have not actually become my mother. Yet.

the lovely hair salon

My friend from High School, Justin Kelly, owns this salon, Studio 3. It's this fabulous high-ceilinged space over near the Target Plaza in Carlisle. He's got his own line of products and tons of Ikea furniture.

He says he's living the American Dream. He has a house and two dogs and a partner and a Volvo and his own highly successful business. If I wanted him to do my hair, I'd have to book 2 years in advance.

And I LOVE giving him and his stylist Jeannean my money. And I LOVE the whole grown up hair salon experience. I had a cut and highlight, and it cost $80, which is probably more than I've spent on ALL the haircuts I've had in the past 10 years, but I swear--I got my head shampooed and conditioned not once but TWICE with this awesome Studio 3 Mint shampoo, and the most excellent moments of utter self-indulgence and femaleness and estrogen-laden energy.

I'm finding that indulging all of this womanhood, or maybe not womanhood because I am a woman every day and I'm mostly comfortable with that. Maybe I mean that I'm experiencing a new kind of comfort with my own femininity, my own interest in prettiness, in nice hairdos, in nice creams, lotions and skin treatments. I have started moisturizing my face and getting excited about eyeshadow, mascara, moisturizing conditioners. I'm finding all of this to be both an extension of my newly realized militant feminism and in reaction to the fact that my job puts me in the presence of almost exclusively men on an hour-to-hour basis. And the whole thing kind of freaks me out. I'm not comfortable in this comfort or in my level of involvement in the comfort.

I have to admit that it's also a bit about Pearl. How am I going to be a mom to a very feminine little girl who will eventually have very feminine little friends who will pressure her to get her eyebrows waxed? How will I negotiate? How will I navigate unless I learn myself?

I don't want Pearl to be 20 before she learns that people actually do wax their eyebrows. I also don't want her to be shocked. Perhaps I should like it if she found the whole thing to be an horribly barbaric expression of cultural vanity, but I'm not holding my breath. I think she might possess her father's disinterest in a critical inner life which is another thing I shall have to learn to negotiate.

Mazel Tov.