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(Note to reader: like many blogs out there, this contains a couple salty words.)

The first time I read the script for Sarah Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis, I was sitting in the dayroom at Kansas City Research Hospital. That’s a loony bin, by the way. I was there detoxing from a four-month long bender. (Note: self-medicating major depression with alcohol? Not a great idea. That way lies madness, and liver failure, and suicide, or at the very least a bad case of the DTs.)

I know people who were unable to read past the first page of this play. “It hurts too bad,” they said. And these are people who have never been institutionalized, even! A particularly empathetic young man who had volunteered to run the lights for the production had to bow out halfway through our first tech rehearsal, out of fear that he’d pass out mid-performance. While I was composing this blog, I was messaged on FaceBook by someone recently treated for mental illness, wanting to know if this show was “safe” for her to see. Yeah, it’s that bleak. It’s that dark. It’s that fucking good.

Anyway, the first time I read it, half-looped on Librium and seeing things move out of the corner of my eye, I didn’t quite know what to think. It’s abstract. It’s like nothing I’ve ever read before, at least not for the stage. It’s more poem than play. The script has no scene delineations, no character assignments, just 30-some pages of gorgeously-worded pain, with a lot of “fuck”s thrown in for good measure. It resonated with me, as someone who’s battled with depression for half my life, who’s tried to die on one occasion, but I had no freaking clue how one would go about staging it. (I’m an actor, not a director.) My first thought, on finishing it, was “This is either going to be really, really great, or a piece of utter shit.”

Luckily, Dan Born is a director, and a damn good one, at that. Aside from having the excellent judgment to cast me in his production, he’s managed to take the most abstract play I’ve ever come across and make it real and accessible. From a pile of proetry that seems more incoherent rambling than narrative, he picked out four distinct voices—a therapist, a central voice in extreme suffering, and the two evil fucks who live inside her head. (I get to be one of those evil fucks—how fun is that? It’s been good for me to be on the other end of that, for once.) Several of us involved in the production have fought against mental illness, and he had the grace to take our input, and that of those participants who are perfectly sane but unusually insightful, into consideration when hacking out a meaningful performance. It’s not the production I had in my sick head when I read it—it’s a thousand times better.

This show hurts. It’s raw and unforgiving and brutal. That’s because it’s unflinchingly honest. The playwright never lived to see it performed; she offed herself shortly after its publication, and all of the despair and pain and humor and passion that drove her to that act is flayed open, laid bare, in this 78-minute suicide note. She dies again, and again, and again, every time it’s performed. In a really perverse way that only those who’ve fought that same blackness can ever understand, I am honored and humbled and excited to be a part of that continuum of death. Am I glad she caught the bus? Hell, no. Am I glad to participate in her ongoing memorial murder? Yeah, I have to admit, I am.

And I’m also exceedingly glad that the folks at Bert Nash (which godsend the proceeds of this show benefit, I must add) are hosting a talk-back session with the cast and director after each performance. (Two shows are left, tonight and tomorrow night.) The show is great, but the dialogue that takes place afterward, between crazy folks and the people who treat crazy folks and the people who portray crazy folks and all of us who fall into one or more of those categories . . . well. That’s every bit as powerful and affecting as the play itself, but unlike the play, that dialogue is positive and helpful and hopeful. I think Sarah would like that, very much.

As many of you know, my world has been a little weird lately. From managing my father's pallative care to wrestling with the question of whether or not I should put both him and my mother into a nursing home, to my husband's recent severe and as-yet unexplained illness, it's been a really rough couple of weeks.

Luckily, the astronomers at NASA and several wonderful anonymous YouTubers are helping me keep it all in perspective.

Here's some linky goodness I'd like to share with you all, you know, for those times when you, like me, need to be reminded of your own insignificance for your own damn good.

Or, as I put it to my five-year-old:



But wait! That may just be only the beginning!

And if you need help coping with all those big numbers, I find this always helps:



If you want some illusion of significance, here's one for you: The LJ family of websites (three counts as a family, right?) is fast approaching its 1,000,000th comment. Considering the puny number of comments here on Lawrence.com versus the vast amount of inane bullshit that passes for comments over on the LJworld and KUsports boards, I think it's y'all's civic duty to start commenting like mad over here. Serious, well-thought-out, philosophical comments. Comments that could change the world. Or at least make me snort Coke out of my nose, for once. Seriously, I've been on here for longer than my children have been alive, and something in me will die a quiet, bourbon-soaked death if my beloved site's millionth comment is an "LOL!" posted in response to some other idiot comment over on the Very Special Rodeo that is the LJWorld's boards.

We could see that you weren't yourself And the lines on your face did tell It was just as well You'd never be yourself Again . . . . . . stars in your eyes free from the life that you knew . . .

My Daddy is dying. He's been dying for years now, but he's doing it in earnest these past few days. I thought I was prepared, I thought I'd done my grieving a long time ago. I didn't know that these last days would hurt so very fucking much.

I never realized how much he'd shaped my life, how much he'd influenced who I am, who I looked for when I went looking for a mate, how much he shielded me from my mom's pyschosis. I didn't realize how much he'd meant to me, how much it would hurt when he left me.

He was my Daddy. That sounds juvenile, but let me explain. Dad is that guy who pays the bills and yells at you when you piss your mom off. Daddy is the Man. Daddy is taller than the sky, stronger than the storms. Daddy picks you up when you fall, he scares the monsters out of your closet.

Daddy makes the world safe when you're small and scared, Daddy bails you out when you're not so small but just as scared and don't know how to fix the mess you've just made.

I wasn't his blood, I wasn't his son, but he raised me like I was both, and more. I have never known a day in my life when I didn't know deep down where you don't think about it but where it really counts, that my Daddy was there to fix it all if it went wrong. And that day is coming, soon--oh, fuck, it's happened already, but as long as his body was here and breathing I didn't have to deal with the knowledge. Sometime in the next few days, the next few weeks at most, I'm going to have to put my Daddy in the ground and it's fucking killing me.

Fuck me, but this hurts. And I don't get to break down and be weak and weepy, I have to stay strong, because as I've grown up, my Mom has regressed. She's as gone as he is, and I'll have to deal with that later. I cant' deal with both at the same time, even though she's been gone for longer than he has, and will follow him very shortly into the grave. It sounds maybe callous to say this, but I have a replacement Mom in my mother-in-law, but there will never be a surrogate for my Daddy.

It's fallen to me to be the "Durable Power of Attorney", the one who has to make the hard calls, the one who has to tell the hospital to send him home, he wants to die at home, who has to deal with the hospice staff, who has to protect my mom from the predators that will descend on her once he's gone. And I know it tears him up to leave this to me, but he's too weak, too worn down, too beaten and too broken to do anything else.

And there's this horrible part in me that believes I did this to him. Intellectually, I know this is bullshit. I know that it was Viet Nam, and a life of alcoholism and uncontrolled diabetes and a botched epidural that did it, but he had his first heart attack when he was cleaning out my apartment, without any idea if I was dead, alive, brain-dead, or whoring myself on the streets of some unknown city, when he found a bottle of dirty rigs under my sink and couldn't deny any longer that his little girl had become a needle junkie.

I know this is bullshit because by the time he was paralyzed and began his long, slow descent toward death I was married, safe, sane, and pregnant with his grandchild. I know this is bullshit in my head, but my gut still feels sick and rotten with guilt.

And once he's gone, my work will have just begun. My mom is sicker, in body and soul and mind, than he is. And there's not a goddamned thing I can do about that. I can't make her stop smoking, I can't make her see that a diet of seven Cokes, three cookies, and a spoonful of peanut butter won't keep her alive much longer. I can't make her see that all of those fantastic deals on QVC aren't the bargain of the century, I can't make her spend that credit on a new set of teeth to replace the ones that are rotting out of her head instead of three new $200 handbags that are going to triple in price if she doesn't order them in the next ninety seconds. I can't convince her to not light a cigarette when she's just eaten three Vallium and a 100 mg Morphine tab because she's already burnt off most of her hair while nodding off and she doesn't have much to lose. Fuck, I can't even convince her that pissing in a coffee can really isn't that great an alternative to walking five steps to the toilet.

Worst of all, I can't convince her that my Daddy really did love her even if he didn't spend two hours a day talking about her feelings and deepest desires and what she dreamed that night. Fuck me, if I have to hear her say, in my Daddy's hearing, one more time, that he's made a "cripple" out of her by not "letting" her go anywhere when she sees quadruple out of one eye and double out of the other, I swear I might just strangle her myself before she can burn the house down around her with one more cigarette.

And this is another source of my guilt. I don't take my children to see them, their grandparents, as often as I'd like, because I don't like them to be sick for days after from exposure to the tarry air. Mom doesn't believe in the dangers of second-hand smoke (among other things, like carseats, and nutritional education), she also doesn't believe in opening windows, or the idea that dying men maybe don't need to have their abilty to analyze their every thought and emotion mocked and vilified every minute she's awake.

Please excuse me. I'm maybe not in my right mind right now. I have a one-or-two-hour window in every day where I'm not a wife or mother or daughter, but just me, Misty, and I don't always spend it wisely. These days, I spend it in mustering my inner troops, using the lull in the storm to remind myself that I will survive this, because I have no choice. Every now and then, though, I have to wallow, and spew. I'm a spewer. And right now, I'm a very sad, melancholy, and grief-ridden spewer.

Later, maybe, I'll be able to write about what an awesome fucking individual my Daddy was. And maybe even my Mom, but that will take a little more time and distance. Right now I'm just wallowing in grief and fear and this overwhelming sense that things are being left unsaid, things are being left undone, and if I were a better and stronger person I wouldn't be wallowing in my own grief but sucking it up and getting on with it.

And maybe that's the biggest legacy my Daddy has left me. That no matter how bad things get, no matter how fucked up your cirucumstances, you suck it up and get on with your responsibilities. In the morning, I'll do just that. But for right now, I'm wallowing.

So I’m finally facing the fact that my child will be going to public school in the fall. We originally planned on homeschooling, but we’re realizing that I don’t have the patience or, with the new baby, the time and effort resources, to do that. The fall-back plan was Catholic school (despite the fact that I’m a Jew and my husband is agnostic bordering on atheist—if you instruct your kids to take the Jesus stuff with a grain of salt and completely ignore the bits about Hell, it’s a damn good education) but it’s turned out to be too expensive. Oooh, you get a thousand-dollar discount if you tithe to the parish! That’s a damn good deal! Maybe if you work at McDonald’s . . .

Public school it is, then. Please excuse me while I go vomit and breathe into a paper bag for a while.

My own experiences with public school were horrible, bordering on hellish. It left me suicidal at the age of 11, homicidal by 14. For the most part, I hated the teachers (with a few notable exceptions, one of whom I just found on FaceBook, OMG!), I hated the administration, was bored to tantrums by the curriculum, and hated with passion unrivaled the other kids.

And this is what’s causing my current panic attack. My child’s future peers.

May I regress to my former profanity-laced, hyperbolic, and knee-jerk blogging style for a moment? Most kids are worthless little shits. I love children, in theory, but in practice . . . Jesus tits. They’re whining, ungrateful, unmannered, and in some cases, psychopathic miniature thugs. They have no manners. They have limited grammar skills. Their hygiene is atrocious. They are so unworthy of my shining perfect child’s company that my fantasies of retreat to a desert isle are growing more grandiose by the day.

Okay, so my child isn’t perfect. She can be an utter brat sometimes. But at least she says “Please” and “Thank you,” doesn’t deliberately hurt other children, cleans up after herself with a minimum of attitude when asked, and is intrinsically kind and cheerful, helpful and sensitive.

I don’t want her to be soiled by other asshats’ accidental loinspawn.

I am a snob when it comes to the children I allow her to interact with. My recent experiences with the neighbors’ psychopathic brats hasn’t helped my attitude on this, I’ll admit. (Update—turns out their father, aside from being a probable drug dealer, had beaten up and raped a sixteen-year-old girl while his wife was pregnant with their second of five children. I don’t know which of those parents I think is the bigger criminal—he, for committing the act, or she, for taking that stupid Tammy Wynette song too much to heart.)

She gets to play with her cousins, with the children of friends whom I’ve vetted (although not always successfully), with the terribly young hipster neighbors who race her across the fence while clutching cans of PBR (hey, at least they’re polite). She has the occasional interaction with other children at the park, where she instinctively gravitates towards the 10-year-old boys roughhousing and then gets hurt feelings when they won’t let her play with them because she’s a little girl (joke’s on them—she could dislocate their shoulder if they’d grapple with her). But for the most part, I keep her away from other children because, frankly, I don’t like them, don’t like their parents, don’t like how said parents are raising said children.

Yes, I sound like an asshole. But this is my genetic immortality we’re talking about. This is my little girl, and the thought of her being tainted by kids whose parents didn’t even want them in the first damn place, who have raised them with that lurking in the background, who let them do whatever the hell they want regardless of the consequences, who don’t enforce artificial consequences for bad behavior, who don’t care what the fuck they do as long as it doesn’t interfere with the episode of “John and Kate” they’re trying to watch . . . . AARRRRGGGHH!!!!!!!!! I might have to go back to punching walls.

Yes, I realize that not all of the children she’ll be going to school with will be like this. I realize that many of them will be “wanted” children, will have been coddled and nurtured and generally spoiled by good intentions. This scares me almost as much as the “bastard” hooligans. (Again, I’m being hyperbolic. Y’all should be used to this by now. Many of you love me for it, dammit.)

I have very specific, and very unpopular, views on child-rearing. Most of them come from observing my friends and peers—I know a lot of people who got the shit beat out of them as children, and I know a lot of people who were treated like Faberge eggs made out of spun sugar, and the former set generally turned out less fucked-up, in the long run. I don’t beat my child, but I don’t hesitate to discipline her, either. I tell her about ten times a day that she’s awesome, that she and her sister are the most wonderful thing to ever happen to me, but I also tell her when she’s screwed up, and punish her (yes, sometimes physically) for awful behavior.

And I observe the way that other parents deal with their children, on those occasions when I have the strength and the stocked flask to be around them. I watch them “tsk tsk” their kids’ atrocious behavior, I hear them murmur “Jackie, that’s not nice,” when their oldest knocks their youngest to the bottom of the jungle gym and bloodies his nose. I hold my tongue while they bribe their kids with Happy Meals to please come with Mommy, when you’re done with that, if it’s okay with you, okay, just one more go-round, then that’s it, I’m going to start getting angry.

And I wonder how the hell a public school teacher with 40 other students, to whom she can’t so much as say “boo” without legal recrimination, is going to keep that child from hurting mine. I wonder more about the lessons regarding action vs. reaction that she’ll bring away from those encounters. Bruises heal, I’m not nearly so worried about those as I am the real-world lesson that you can fuck other people over without recrimination from the world at large, represented in this case by authority. God forbid she turn out a bullied child, but God help us all if she turn out a freaking anarchist or some such bullshit.

I had much less anxiety when contemplating her in a classroom with an ovarily-frustrated nun wielding a knuckle-bound ruler, to tell you the truth. I’d much rather my child get whacked a few times for insubordination that learn from her peers and authority figures that it’s not only okay, but cool, to talk back, to disrespect, to feel like she’s the center of everybody’s universe and that nothing she does will ever have consequences. I fear for her well-being much more when thinking about her being in a classroom full of “snowflakes” than I ever would thinking about her in a classroom with Sister Mary Ignatius Explaining It All To Her.

I know that the upbringing she gets at home will be much more influential, in the long run, than the influences she gets, or doesn’t get, in her school setting. But God dammit, I don’t want to watch my child suffer. Anything. Ever. And even more than that, I don’t want to have to correct those other, horrible influences. I’m too old, too tired, and too lazy. I’ll do it if I have to, but I can’t help but be pissed off at the thought.

Anybody have an island for sale, preferably packaged with a Mary Poppins who’s willing to work for booze and free tailoring? I’m willing to barter . . .

So I admit, I don’t really think about race that often. For one thing, I’m a white middle-class suburbanite living in Johnson County—that means my daily exposure to non-white people is the Hispanics who mow my neighbors’ lawns. For another, I somehow managed to come out of my racist, small-town upbringing relatively unprejudiced (my mother panicked when I transferred from an all-white high school to one with a large population of black students, saying I’d get raped if I wasn’t careful, and admonishing me to “stick to my own kind.”).

The issue has been coming up lately, though, and in vastly different ways. First, my father-in-law has been having some seriously strange issues trying to buy a new car. He wonders, as do I, why dealerships find it necessary to send the twenty-year-old part-time black salespeople to him each and every time he sets foot on their lots. I wonder if it’s prejudice on their parts, or their perceived prejudice on his. He’s not so old (was it Chris Rock who said that there’s no racist like an old black man? My FIL agrees wholeheartedly, and you would, too, if you met his dad) that I would think, upon first seeing him, that he would be uncomfortable or intimidated dealing with a white salesperson.

I’ve noticed this, myself, on several occasions. Most recently, I went into my local Verizon store to resolve an issue with my new Alias (which kicks ass, btw—I heart me some softkeys). There were three sales associates in the front of the store—one Hispanic, two black. But rather than helping me themselves, one of them went into the back and brings out a young white guy to work with me. None of the others were busy with other customers—I was the only customer in the store. And to be perfectly frank, the white guy was kind of incompetent, and I wondered why the black manager didn’t handle my issue himself, since it was a glitch with the hardware, an issue which he identified before sending out the junior associate who clearly struggled with resolving it, to the point of having to ask the manager’s assistance at one point.

Anyway, I had another rude awakening a few weekends ago. I was back down in good old SEK, visiting the folks and friends from high school. We ended up spending the evening with said friends, our children running wild through the eight square blocks of the tiny town I went to school in. As I sat on the front porch swing sipping whiskey with the lady of the house, she was waxing nostalgic about the benefits of living in a small town, namely that you can let your kids wander around and as long as they know to stay away from the highway, you really have nothing to worry about. “Well, you know, this town doesn’t have anyone in it you have to watch out for. You know what I mean. There are some Chinese across the street, but my kids know not to talk to them.” I pretended to not understand her meaning, then a few minutes later managed to “casually” mention that my kids’ grandfather is black. “Well,” she said, “you can’t control who your in-laws marry. As long as your kids don’t pick up any bad habits.” I responded with, “Yeah, like voting for Sarah Palin. They ever pull that shit on me, I’ll beat them senseless.” She just looked at me funny and changed the subject.

If I had been up for a fight, I would have pointed out that when I regularly check the sex offender registries for various neighborhoods, the white offenders greatly outnumber the non-white offenders, way out of proportion to the ratio of white-to-non-white residents, and asked if she’d checked out how many good, white child molesters were in her town. Had I not been a guest in their home, and just cancelled my hotel reservation, I would have called her a racist bitch and grabbed my babies and bailed. Maybe my silence was just as bad as her blatant racism. Probably.

But my kids give me hope. My four-year-old has no idea that there’s anything abnormal about her grandfather being “brown”, as she calls it. One of her favorite people in the world is her black great-grandmother. The cousin she’s closest to is a gorgeous mixed race child, black, white, and Puerto Rican, which prompted her to tell me, soon after I brought Wendy home from the hospital, “Mommy, next time I want you to have a brown baby. They’re so pretty!” She speaks Spanish to the work crews in the neighborhood, runs up to Asian kids in the store and screams out, “Ni hao!” And yesterday she sang her baby sister this improv lullaby: “Oh, there are all kinds of Wendys in the world, there are brown Wendys and pink Wendys and white Wendys, and they all sing together because every kind of Wendy loves to sing.”

Sure, it was kind of like a four-year-old’s version of a Benneton ad, but it still gives me hope. Maybe I need to crank out another kid who’s going to be race-blind from birth, just to tip the scales a bit.

Warning: the following blog is nothing more than a blatant abuse of my status as “blogger” to update my friends and the modest yet loyal following of readers I’ve amassed over the past half decade or so of blogging on this site as to the past eight months of my life. Any expectations of this blog being topical, or even mildly entertaining to those who aren’t parents themselves, will be grossly disappointed.

Now that that’s over with, hello, all! It’s been, what, roughly eight months since I blogged here last? Too long, I know, but with good reason—I don’t write when I don’t drink, and I don’t drink when I’m pregnant. Also, when I’m pregnant or caring for a cuddly newborn, I don’t spend nearly so much time paying attention to the world outside my home, or getting pissed off at those few events I do manage to witness. And it helps that the rabies neighbors moved away—ooooh, update on that—it turns out that Mr. “I Can’t Reduce A Simple Fraction” also had some serious impulse control issues, since we found him on the sex offender registry for beating the shit out of and raping a teenaged girl while his wife was pregnant with their second child. Yeah, it was a little difficult explaining to our four-year-old daughter, who thought the neighbor girls hung the moon, why she wasn’t allowed to play over there any more. I overheard her at the fence telling the eight-year-old, “I can’t come over. Mommy says it’s complicated.” I know, I know, he wasn’t a convicted child molester, but still—court records of past circumstances documented a marked lack of judgment on the parts of both mother and father in that situation, even if our own experiences with them hadn’t shown them to be hysterical morons.

On to more current events. Gwendolyn Claire, more commonly known as Wendy, arrived at a little after 6 pm on March 27, weighing in at a whopping 8 lbs, 8 oz.

wendyblue1.jpg

And no, your monitor’s color is not off, she was very, very purple. “Blue”, they called it, but I say it’s purple. Apparently it’s difficult to fit that much baby and an umbilical cord through the average vagina without them both getting a little smooshed. No worries, though, all was well within a minute and a half, and she’s as healthy and smart as you’d expect any spawn of mine to be.

Oddly enough, labor was easier this time around, as was delivery. The fact that I wasn’t deathly afraid of an epidural probably helped—with Penny, I had seen my father become paralyzed for life by a botched epidural when I was four months pregnant, and was therefore understandably terrified of the procedure. No matter; after about eight hours of pitocin-induced hell I told the nurse that I really didn’t care if I never walked again, she was going to get that goddamned needle into my goddamned spine and she was going to do it now. I still lasted seven or eight hours before getting a spinal piercing this time around, but those hours were spent fucked up on Versed, watching “Juno” (highly overrated but still entertaining) and the previous night’s episode of LOST on my husband’s laptop. (When my OB told me the dates of my hospital check-in and induction, I tried to talk her into moving it all forward or backward a day, because I had only started watching that show this year, and gorged on four seasons in two weeks, so having to wait a whole week between episodes was hell enough without adding an extra DAY into the equation. Yes, I am completely addicted. If you watch, you understand, and if you don’t, then you need to shut up and go Netflix it.)

This time the epidural was apparently pushed too far into my spine—I felt that part, and dammit, but that was one of the strangest sensations I’ve felt in a life spent mostly chasing unique sensations via drugs and unhealthy sex. Anyway, for several hours I was feeling the contractions in one half of my uterus, which was again, really freaking strange. At least I didn’t feel my episiotomy like I did last time, thanks to my apparent resistance to all sorts of anesthesia—more on that later, when I recount my experience with the Asshole Dentist From Hell. Luckily, they had another anesthesiologist, this one competent, on hand to fix the problem while uttering off-color witticisms, which I always enjoy.

And extra bonus—the literally crippling lower back and pelvis pain which had me spending most of my third trimester shuttling between my physical therapist and the pharmacy that refilled my Vicodin prescription cleared up within hours after birth.

Anyway, Wendy. She’s perfect, of course, because we make excellent babies. She has my hair and eyes and feet. Penny is proving to be pretty much made for the big-sister gig—the only jealousy issues we’ve had to deal with so far are of the “Mommy, you’ve had Wendy long enough. It’s MY turn now!!” variety.

wendypenny1.jpg

She resembles, expression-and personality-wise, her non-biological grandfather Lawrence, who many of you may remember as the infamous troll “Snoop” here on the blogs---she looks quite concerned most of the time, although she’s nowhere nearly as grumpy as long as she’s allowed to nurse as much as she likes.

Warning the second: the following passages contain graphic discussions of nipples and breasts, and nothing that will turn on anyone but three Japanese teenagers and one German man who collects pictures of decapitated grannies over the Internet.

That took a while, though. When I nursed Penny, I had issues with nipple pain, cracking, and bleeding, but thanks to a convincingly friendly RN who told me that since I was fair-skinned, it was to be expected, and I just had to soldier through it, and a mother-in-law who recounted how she had rubbed her nipples bloody-raw with steel wool to toughen them in preparation for nursing, I just gritted my teeth (and cried a lot when no one was looking) and we got through it somehow, and with flying colors—Penny had maybe half a can of formula between birth and weaning at 20 months. This time, however, our first visit to Wendy’s pediatrician confirmed what I had been suspecting due to her incessant, panicked crying, her increasing jaundice, and signs of dehydration—that my milk was taking far too long to come in, and that even if I was producing it, the enormous scabs I had to soak off before each nursing session were probably prohibiting delivery. We started supplementing her with formula, and thus began my three-week Trial By Lactation Consultant. Between the La Leche League and the hospital’s consultants, I spent the first three weeks of my baby’s life in a constant haze of confusion and inadequacy. You function as best as you can on the two or three hours of uninterrupted sleep you’re granted per day, and count yourself blessed to get another hour of not-baby-time in which to shower and maybe even take a poop in private. When you have to use what mental energy and time in which both hands are free to consult via email and expensive appointment with counselors of varying sorts, to search every possible cause and correction for your nursing issues, it gets even more exhausting than the average new-mom experience.

We managed to finally resolve all that within three weeks or so, and nursing is back on track. Thank god, because I’ve got even more weight to lose than last time—I started the pregnancy off a good fifteen, twenty pounds overweight, and then put on 40 on top of that. With Penny I got pretty damn skinny (for me, 125 is skinny. I’ve been down to 104 as an adult and was an emaciated wreck, despite what the superficial bitches in my dorm said), but this time I think I’m going to need a little help. This past year I’ve watched my mother-in-law go from triple-chinned and waddling to “rawr!” on the South Beach Diet, and it’s not too far off from what I had to follow to keep my gestational diabetes in check, so I’m going to be starting on it soon. I fucking HATE being fat. I’m miserable. Not only do none of my clothes fit, but my thighs rub together when I walk, I’ve got a pretty substantial double chin going on, and I’ve got incipient bingo wings at the age of 30, for christ’s sake. This is not acceptable. I don’t like it, my joints don’t like it, and despite his kind words and healthy erections, I’m pretty sure that my husband doesn’t like it. And I’ve struggled with insulin issues for the past six years or so, any “diet” that re-trains my metabolism to not think it needs refined carbohydrates is hardly an unhealthy step to take. I’m just going to really, REALLY miss my sourdough baguettes for a month or two, until I’ve got my pancreas bitch-slapped back into shape.

So there you have it. I’m back, in all my fat, exhausted, cranky glory. I hope to be blogging more in the days to come, but if I don’t, you’ll know why. It’s because I’m sitting in my kitchen, shoving cotton in my ears to dampen the sounds of infant wails and wondering how many carbs are in real baby-back ribs.