Comatose Parenting - Redux

Husband and I were kind of unprepared to be parents, at least to a baby like Bar Mitzvahzilla. Born a pound and a half, he came home after ten weeks in the hospital weighing almost four pounds and hauling a lot of medical equipment, like an apnea monitor, an oxygen tank, special foods and medications, and he had to go to various doctors and specialists three times a week.

Also, he was a smart little baby. The hospital was a twenty-four-hour-a-day atmosphere and all the nurses loved him so he learned to stay up and play with them, as well as a tiny little baby can play. Let me tell you, besides saving his life, the nurses in the NICU and the Continuing Care Nursery really knew how to love a baby. The problem was, he didn't really get the whole Sleep During the Night schtick, much to Husband and my chagrin.

So suddenly there was this tiny, needy, scary looking thing plugged in, really, all over the house to various machines, and he was awake all the time. Husband and I coped as best we could. We set up four-hour shifts of sleeping and caretaking and rotated them so that both of us could be sure we'd get some sleep and our share of middle of the night misery. We'd each hit a breaking point, kind of rotate a breaking point between us, if you will, and, depending on our mental state, our general bug-eyed appearance, the pallor of our skin, and how much of our hair was standing on end, we'd give each other a break.

That's kind of how life feels right now. Not because Bar Mitzvahzilla is in any kind of fragile medical state, which he's not. But because of our wild-eyed frenzy. We assess each other each day. Who's been driving since 6:45 in the morning, and it's now 9 PM? Who has poured herself in a heap on the bed and can't move (that's always me)? Who drove to the high school five separate times in one day because of various football-related pick ups and drop offs? Who can handle the moment, at 9 pm on Tuesdays and Thursdays, when five hundred Jewish parents descend on the JCC all at once to pick up their teenagers from Hebrew High and who will melt down?

So who would have thought that at this late date in parenting we'd get this strange reminder of the earliest days of parenting, and via the same kid - Bar Mitzvahzilla? And that, somehow, we'd remember how to do the same thing all over again. The last one standing, the last one not crying with fatigue - that one goes for the final pick up.

Do you remember those days of bringing home a newborn? Did you have a method to balance the exhausted partners? Any random acts of lovingkindness to those you love lately?

By Any Other Name

Because I won the Oh My Blog Award (thank you Robin!) I am going to tell you about my most humiliating moment. In a lifetime of humiliating moments, it was hard to pick one, but I've tried my best. I tried to balance great moment of happiness and triumph with crushing embarassment. That should do it, right?

In late 1992 I was ordering the wedding invitations for my marriage to Husband and was having some trouble with the wording. I had been married before, see, and I had not gone back to my maiden name after my divorce, mostly because I hated it like poison. My dad, an immigrant, had come to this country as Harry Burstein but had changed our last name to Burt. My twenty-six onerous years as Linda Burt (just say that ten times fast and you'll see what I mean) weighed heavily on me when I was getting divorced at twenty-nine. There was no way I was going back to that name. So I kept my ex-husband's name, Maric*.

So how to word the invitations? Linda Jayne Maric? Linda Burt Maric? I did the latter and everything moved forward.

The day of the wedding dawned. I got to the venue. Big sign outside: The Maric/Pressman wedding. I cringed. I could now see that when I kept my ex-husband's name I hadn't quite thought this thing through completely. Like to the next marriage day.

Then we got married. The chuppah. The Rabbi. The rings. Whew. I was officially Linda Pressman. That should be the end of that torment, right?

But then the Best Man stood up to make a toast. To the Marics, whom he thought were my family. Who, of course, were not there since they were my ex-husband's family. Would any woman want the ghost of Husbands Past brought up at the wedding of Husbands Present?

The Best Man's wife gave his coat a hard yank and said in a loud whisper, "Burt! Her family's name is Burt!" and he continued with the toast.

But still.

Have any humiliating moments you'd like to share? Excruciating moments at your wedding? Toast difficulties? Or would you just like to join in the chorus and laugh at me?

*ex-husband's name changed.

I'd like to pass the Oh My Blog award to the following bloggers, all of whom I think may have some fun with this one:

Maria at Mom of Three Seeks Sanity
Amber at Making the Moments Count
mommymommymommy at KISS - Keep It Simple Sister

The rules of the Award are:

1. Get really excited that you got the coolest award EVER!
2. Choose ONE of the following options of accepting the OMB award:
   (a) Get really drunk and blog for 15 minutes straight, or for as long as you can focus.
   (b) Write about your most embarrassing moment.
   (c) Write a “Soundtrack of your childhood” post.
   (d) Make your next blog a ‘vlog’/video blog. Basically, you’re talking to the camera about whatever.
   (e) Take a picture of yourself first thing in the morning, before you do anything else (hair, make up,
        etc) and post it.
3. Pass the award on to at least three, but preferably more, awesome bloggers as yourself.
    Don’t forget to tell them.

A Pintele Yid

My parents weren't very into Judaism while I was growing up. Because of the Holocaust, because of seeing things during the war that they felt were incompatible with the existence of any God, none of that was part of the Jewishness I grew up with. Food was, Yiddish was, and, of course, the Holocaust was. As a matter of fact, instead of my parents picking between Reform Judaism, Conservative Judaism and Orthodox Judaism, they simply made up their own denomination: Holocaust Judaism. Our worship consisted mainly of repeating over and over again all of the horrors our parents lived through during the war, until we all ran shrieking from the house into the arms of non-Jewish spouses.

But I had a longing for more. I had a pintele yid - a little Jewish spark inside me.

In 1989, I got divorced from my first husband. There were a lot of reasons for this but they can be boiled down to the most important one: I was dying inside my marriage. That's all. My pintele yid reared its head hopefully. Could the little Jew come out again? I didn't know anyone in the Jewish community, I hadn't been to a synagogue in years - I'd been hiding in fact, believing I didn't belong. But I also believed one thing absolutely: if I had to start all over again I was going to get exactly the life I wanted.

This past Sunday was the Israel Independence Day Fair in Phoenix. Husband and I went and walked among all the tables and booths and I saw what my pintele yid and I had built in the twenty-one years since my divorce, and in the seventeen years since my second marriage.

I wasn't alone anymore; that little Jew inside of me has nothing to hanker for. My synagogue, my Rabbi, my kids' Preschool teachers, their Jewish Day School teachers and staff, their camp, my chavurah friends, the moms and dads I've met, the charities with which we've been involved, and so much more. A rich life. A life that at one time eluded me. From Holocaust Judaism back to Judaism, one step at a time.

The life I dreamed of the day I watched my ex-husband drive away, his car loaded with his belongings.

Did you ever have to start over? After a move, in college, as an adult? Did you ever have to start with nothing but your belief in a different life?

A Marriage Built for Three

First there was the way that she "just liked" our shower better than her own. We figured anything was okay as long as we could get her to take a shower by herself, right?

So suddenly there were Herbal Essence products lined up on the windowsill next to my Redken stuff and Husband's generic cheapo shampoo/conditioner combo product. And bathtoys lined up here and there, filling up the whole shower stall.

And then it was her shower too.

Then there was the way she set up a little pretend office in my office so she could work alongside me each night. A little makeshift desk, a tufted stool, some busy work that involved using reams and reams of all the printer paper in the house.

And then, suddenly, it was her office too.

Finally, she managed to finagle her way into our room each night she was sick - the coughing, the hacking, the miserable Daughter coming out of her room so many times she was a blur. Finally we'd succumb, make up a bed on the floor out of couch cushions, pillows and blankets. Trip over her all night. I catch her in a secret smile. She thinks it's now her bedroom too.

Tonight, the realization. The ten-year-old thinks she's part of this marriage. She has no intention of moving out of our room.

When the kids were little, Husband was firm about no kids in the marital bed. They had bassinets, then cribs in our room, and then one day Husband took the crib, moved it down the hall to the nursery and, just like that, they were out. Living independently. The worst roommates you could ever imagine, but still, they had rooms of their own.

But Daughter apparently doesn't like this living arrangement. She's ready to move back in. She'll use any tool in her arsenal - from hysteria to illness to nightmares - to get back in our room. And she has no interest in Husband. She will step on top of him and leave footprints on his head on her way to me. She wants to merge her soul with mine into a more perfect union. Or, at least, she wants to live on the floor next to me.

But Daughter got her marching papers from Husband a few days ago, when her antibiotic started working. She needs to stay in her room, even if she coughs, even if it takes a while to fall asleep.

Husband and I look at each other as she stalks down the hall, wondering if she'll stay in there. And I think about the more important thing: will I ever get my bathroom back?

How have your kids encroached on your turf? Do you remember doing this as a kid - trying desperately to sleep in your parents' room when you had a nightmare or were sick? What qualifies for a kid to get in there now?

Little Cabin in the Woods

When Husband and I were in Northern Arizona recently we went to visit my mother and stepfather who stay up there for the summer in my mother's cabin.

Of course, my mom wanted us to stay with her. I hadn't seen her cabin for about four years but that horrific memory was enough for me to make up any excuse to get out of it, despite her telling me that since her last burst pipe incident, the place looked great. I think I told her we were packing a lot of Viagra for our trip. That was the end of our invitation.

My mother has a blind spot where that cabin is concerned. There it sits, on the main road into the national forest, headlights lighting up the windows and forest vehicles zooming by making a racket, and she thinks she's living in the center of peace and tranquility. It's made out of beige clapboards with a peeling porch and a circular black-top driveway with weeds poking through, but what does she see? A log cabin in the woods.

But that's just the outside. When we got there I noticed that her decor included every piece of furniture that had left my house, my six sisters' houses, and her own house, in the last 30 years. In the main room there were three rocking chairs - including a glider rocker - along with a pink arm chair and ottoman, and two leather couches. There was an enormous cow-patterned rug on top of the carpeting. The walls were covered from top to bottom with pastel Southwestern art and hooked rugs of sunsets made in the 70s. In the only open space in the room stood a portable evaporative cooler as tall as a human being, blowing so loudly that it drowned out all conversation.

My mom yelled, "ISN'T THE FAN GREAT? IT COOLS OFF THE WHOLE HOUSE SO WE DON'T HAVE TO OPEN ANY WINDOWS!"

I asked her if she could turn it off. Then I counted all the seating. I said, "Ma, are you expecting a crowd? You've got enough seats here for nine people but there's only the two of you each night."

"Well, you never know. Someone might come up. Doesn't it look great? I found a place for everything!"

"Wow."

"My neighbors - they have junk in their cabins. Junk!"

"Hard to believe. Junk?"

My husband was on red alert because, like a dog, he can enter any home and immediately sniff out its problems. The last time we stayed at the cabin, we walked in and within 5 minutes he was on the roof fixing the TV antenna and then crawling beneath the house. I swear, he was burying a bone. This time he had the place pegged: leak in the hall bath, no water in the evap cooler, rotting porch. He was holding back on fixing things, though, because we had to get back to town. He sat down on rocking chair number three but refused my mother's offer of fruit salad. She was eating it with her hand out of the serving bowl.

Soon my mother yawned. My stepfather yawned. It was 5:00. Time for dinner and bed. We took the hint, made our excuses and left.

We heard the fan going back on as we crossed the porch.

The Anecdote

I was reading a book recently called, Why I'm Still Married - not that I'm thinking about not staying married - it's just a compilation of essays from women writers about why they stay married, probably because the whole world is divorced. In that book, the really long-term marriages are the ones who have been married 16 years. Well, I've been married 16 years too.

Since I have a marriage of such awe-inspiring duration, here's what I believe our secret is. Every night when my husband comes home I ask him how work was, kind of like I'm Donna Reed, except that I never have dinner on the table and the house is a wreck. Then he tells me how business was that day - we own a retail flooring store - and then he ends with his "annoying customer" story. Apparently every single day, a customer comes in the store, looks around, and then says that they can get the same thing cheaper somewhere else. This makes my husband crazy. Why don't they just buy it there then?, he says. He tells me this anecdote every day. Does he wake up with amnesia every day? How can he be both a member of Mensa and not remember that he's told me this, like ten thousand times?

This is marriage in a nutshell: you have to be willing to listen to the anecdote, no matter how much you want to pull your hair out at the thought of it, no matter how much you want to pull his hair out at the thought of it. There just might be something equally as annoying that I do that he puts up with.

For example, even though we've been married 16 years, any time we fight I think we're getting divorced. This is because I was married once before in my twenties and it ruins you a little, or at least your sense of optimism. He's always ready to talk everything out, work out whatever problem we're having, while I'm wondering how we'll handle custody of the kids. Of course, ten minutes later, the problem's resolved.

It's probably hard on him, being married to a nut. But, hey, I have to listen to that anecdote.