Rattled: It’s Okay for Dads Too

I’ve been writing this column for three years, and I have largely focused on the moms out there. Dads out there, are you rattled, too?

Dads get flustered and overwhelmed just like moms, but different things get male noses out of joint. Just the other day, I sat in a Mexican restaurant enjoying the bliss that is a plate of chicken flautas topped with guac.

After a couple of minutes in my cumin cocoon, I began to wonder what had become of father and son. They’d gone to the restroom. A few minutes earlier, a waiter summoned me at my husband’s request — the Pull-Ups were in the car.

With that remedied, what was taking so long?

The guys returned, and my husband looked like Kermit the Frog with his face all folded in disgust.

“Was it bad?” I asked.

“He didn’t go,” said the frog. “I waited and waited, and he didn’t go. He just wanted to waste my time.”

The flauta in my mouth should have but failed to prevent my commentary. “I don’t think he put that much thought into it,” I suggested mildly.

That’s when I got the salsa stare. It had been an ugly experience where a hungry man had to do battle with a son wanting to touch every germ-ridden surface with the efficiency of someone hunting for a secret passage.

I can hardly take myself to the bathroom, so I’m glad that this is largely my husband’s job.

Just this evening, I was walking through the Publix parking lot and discovered my fly was down. I pulled my sweater low and tried to right the situation. Good, Christine. Get her up before the security camera at the entrance spots you. I did but then realized the security camera on the outside ATM had caught the whole thing.

Our child also has a love of buttons; more specifically, pressing them.

This is a little infuriating for me, because he’ll come up and press my laptop keyboard as I’m writing. Dad has an iPad, though. He’s been waiting all day to read that one story on ESPN.com, but Elliot’s little hand comes in and swipes the story away. Another brush across the touch screen, and he’s got dad’s tale of a pro-athlete choking on Donny Deutsch’s garden gnome locked deep in the bowels of the Library of Congress.

“What,” I ask, like my partner’s snit is a cat turd in my freshly raked Zen garden.

All I see is Elliot cuddled in his lap, snug as a bug.

It’s not that we don’t understand a man’s right to be angry or even annoyed, but we scope out our peace and defend it.

We got over our own snit minutes ago. Plus, fellas, we’ve got so much oxytocin running through us that we’re bonding with houseplants and pencil sharpeners half the time.

It’s got us empathizing with our young as much as we can, and then we move on to grieving for half-eaten Fruit Roll-Ups and bananas.

When we make peace over it, don’t you come in here and cock it up. Men only get surges of oxytocin during orgasm. Too bad.

We’ve spent all day long caring. We’re tired of caring. Well, all right. Give us a little red wine, and we’ll try to care some more.

Really, most dads work as hard and care as long as most moms.

Dads are at the park wiping runny noses, fixing snacks and doing the potty thing, just like us. They’re facing tantrums and trying to teach and tell bedtime stories. They’re allies who parent with a slightly different accent.

Dads don’t always make it clear when they’re worried, and moms don’t always see through our own haze to understand.

I guess the only thing we can try to do for each other is be aware, not just of the kid but each other.

Recognize each other’s tells. We do it for the children. Aww, you’re rubbing your ear. That means you’re tired.

Let’s look at our spouse, too. When mom puts her hair in three ponytails, I take over for a while. When dad starts a bitter search for every screwdriver he’s ever owned, that means he’s cooked.

Let’s take our own advice and try to shake more things off than we take personally.

Let’s encourage each other by granting solitude, me time, renewal.

Then, as a family, let us all go out and make fun of other families not doing it as well.

Christine Lucas writes about being a first-time mom and adventures with baby. Contact Christine at christineslucas@yahoo.com

Rattled: Insights from the house of confusion, communication | savannahnow.com

Published today in the Savannah Morning News

I’m not sure whether Mercury was in retrograde or whether His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama perhaps stubbed his toe. Something happened yesterday, and the butterfly effect fanned the flames in my house of communication.

I went to Darien last week and did a bunch of interviews, only to have my voice recorder corrupt the files before I could transcribe them. The morning I thought was going to be productive was spent rescheduling interviews in which I’ll have to coach my subjects time and again: “Pretend you didn’t tell me this. Can’t you say it more colorfully like the last time? Was the shrimp good, or did it, in fact, make you smack your mama?”

It never ceases to hurt when technology that was meant to make our lives easier is but an unsupportive brace on a serpentine spine. Just last week I updated my one-and-only Mac to Snow Leopard from plain old Leopard. It’s just a CD install, a $20 upgrade meant to allow me to then install Microsoft Office. I went to get Elliot at day care only to discover the install failed, the CD was stuck in the drive, and the old system software was giving me the finger. So, my voice recorder’s bird was just the icing on the cake.

After three quarters of a wedge of brie and more salami than my cholesterol medicine deems appropriate, I took a nap. I’d have to get Elliot soon, and there was no way I wanted him to see me cheesed to the gills and muttering about my career going down the toilet thanks to a $35 piece of equipment from RCA. I’d regroup, carry some worry stones in my pockets, and take him to the park.

It started well at first. The park is a piece of rawhide for Elliot’s inner wolf. I let him out of the car, and he heads into mass of kids covering the entire surface of a merry-go-round. Elliot even enjoys pushing but inevitably falls to the ground once or twice like a hampster who has got his wheel going too fast.

While this is going on, I take a seat by a picnic table and notice how I’ve graduated to one of the outer rings of playground mommies. The innermost are standing in the mulch with the kids. Some of them are pregnant again, and I can’t even imagine a second. I am a whole swatch of grass away from the chaos caressing polished stones in my coat pockets. Elliot’s fallen again and calls mama this time.

We escape the fray for the calm of the baseball diamond. A couple kids are drawing in the red dirt with sticks. It’s nice until Elliot gets in the middle of two adult men kicking a soccer ball. He has to move their cone thing and wear it like a hat. I remove the cone, and it crashes the hard drive that is my son. He spits, falls to the ground, screams some MS-DOS commands that I don’t understand, and forces me to carry him to the car like an ungreased tin man.

It’s a long walk to the car, and I explain that he wasn’t playing nicely. Tantrums mean we go home. I’ll play nicely. I’ll play nicely, he says. Nope. You don’t show your tush, spit like a camel and get to stay at the park. I put my son in the car seat, and he’s essentially gone into the Macintosh spinning rainbow wheel mode. Nothing is getting in or out of him.

He’s screaming enough to make himself choke, and I make a great sacrifice by inserting the Barney Christmas CD. I don’t like Barney, he tells me. Great! Me neither. I take it out. I like Barney! I like Barney! We go back and forth inserting and removing the CD a few times until I say forget it and play Lindsey Buckingham’s Big Love. Elliot calms a bit, because he’s waiting for the dog barking at the end. I use this time to suggest he say the months of the year. I don’t like it, he says. The months are your thing! Come on: January! I get nothing except I want Barney. If you’d just give Lindsey a chance. Wait! The dogs are at the end of Holiday Road!

Finally, we’re on the final approach. I ask who do you like better: Cookie Monster or Grover? He snarfs a bit and then cries, January.

Rattled Follow-Up: Eating Crow

Well this handsome fellow will have to be eaten thanks to poor housekeeping on the part of myself and my husband. You may recall how I complained, in my Savannah Morning News column, about the lack of RSVPs I got for my son’s third birthday party. I moaned about how people today have no manners, how they don’t understand that it is a money issue. You’re trying to plan a rather expensive party, and who are these people that can’t be bothered? The second of two parents who actually did RSVP had this conversation on the phone. She had the same trouble with her daughter’s party. Some people, she said, even said they were coming and didn’t. The nerve. People are horrible, careless, beasts with – wait…what’s this on the kitchen counter?

We have a basket on our kitchen counter where we unload Elliot’s backpack from day care and repack it for the next day. Today I decided to go through the stack of his artwork and put it in a place where it could be preserved for future generations – or me twenty years from now. In the middle of this stack what did I find but a birthday invitation from the mother I mentioned above. It was her daughter’s third birthday in November, and we didn’t RSVP! We completely overlooked the invitation in the stack of papers. I immediately called this mother on the phone and left a voice mail asking her to call me. I couldn’t bring myself to leave my apology on a recording. Mostly, because I need absolution.

So, I am not finding crow recipes on the Food Network web site. I’m guessing low and slow is the best cooking method. Maybe add a little salt, pepper, and thyme.

Rattled: Claus Law

Rattled: Well, we all survived Christmas – sort of | savannahnow.com.

12 More Days of the Not So Terrible Twos – Still Rattled

The First Month of Parenting Can Be Rattling

Published February 8, 2010 in The Savannah Morning News

The first month of parenthood reminds me of speeding around the roller rink as a girl. You’ve got fresh lip gloss, you’re singing “The Safety Dance,” and then all of a sudden, you slam into a wall.

Funny, even now, a cute boy is nearby to see it all.

Weeks 1 and 2

I remind myself that babies under a month old don’t have great vision. Our little butterbean might not have seen his mom cuddling her 22-pound tuxedo cat in the dark that first night. He probably didn’t hear her tell the same cat, in a quivering voice, that a tiny bald man had moved into the guest room. As my eyes filled with hormone-induced tears, I imagined his retort: Hey, I was 12 weeks old before you brought me home.

It’s what goes on in the first month that makes you a parent. Your actions during this time mold you into the type of mommy and daddy that you will be. One day, after our son was born, the U.S. Postal Service ad campaign with the slogan, “If it fits, it ships” caught our eyes and ears. We looked at our son and the size of the boxes, then back at our son again. Mom did seem eager to see her grandson.

We didn’t do it.

We did place a baby monitor beside our bed, on my husband’s side.

Just listening to the low hiss it made unnerved me. What if he made a noise? What if he didn’t? We left the light on in his bedroom at night. I guess we were more fearful of a baby in the dark. Before his birth we removed the regular door to his room and replaced it with a screen door. It keeps the cats out but allows a peek inside without disturbing the little guy. A latch prevents the cats from pushing the door open. I don’t believe they’d steal his breath, but I have seen “Lady and The Tramp.” Better safe than sorry.

Week 3

I started to feel like that cocky girl at the skating rink again. I’d psyched myself up for my husband’s first day back at work. We seemed to do alright alternating middle of the night feedings. Four hour chunks of sleep were better than none, but then it happened. The night before I was to go solo, gas tucked in the lower digestive track of our son caused him to shriek in a way that would cause Blondie’s ”heart of glass” to shatter into a million pieces. We found a 24-hour pharmacy; not a post office.

Mylicon drops, people. Wrap them up with a bow and give them to anyone you know that’s expecting. Place a bottle in every room of the house. We worried that we might be giving him too much. The heartbreaking cries of a newborn can make you want to spray the stuff in his mouth with a hose. Picture that carnival game with the open-mouthed clown and the balloon you’ve got to inflate. Our pediatrician assured us that the only way it could hurt is if we threw the bottle at him. No matter how much liquid magic we squirted into our son’s cheek, it didn’t replace the sleep we’d lost.

That day at home, alone, with my son was the worst.

Week 4

We got it in our heads that junior was constipated.

We’d started supplementing breast milk with formula, and his regular bowel movements were lost like a sock in the dryer. How long could something that small go without one? Surely he would explode any minute.

We tried Karo Syrup in the formula and after 18 hours still nothing. Finally, I couldn’t stand watching him strain and cry. We stood by the changing table, my husband with his hand on our son’s rear end and I with a glycerin suppository in my hand. A few minutes later when the boy’s diaper puffed up like a blow fish everyone in the house, including the seven cats, took a collective sigh.

I’ve got my skates on again. This time around the rink I’m singing Rob Base’s “It takes two to make a thing go right…” Even though life still has me going in circles, I am happy to report that, for now, there are no cinder blocks in sight.

Christine Lucas writes about being a mom for the first time and adventures with baby. She formerly wrote “Thicket to Paradise.” Rattled will appear biweekly.

Rattled: Published Today in The Savannah Morning News

Elliot and I have this “Benjamin Button” thing going on. We are tackling the same issues at different stages in our lives, and it ain’t pretty.

It’s hard to believe, but Elliot is two weeks shy of 3! That bumbling Winny the Pooh movement of a toddler has given way so that he’s starting to look like Christopher Robin. He’s climbing solo above our heads on the jungle gym. He’s saying please, thank you and you’re welcome without being asked. I admit, Elliot is still in diapers, but that’s my fault. It’s kind of like putting a giant plastic saucer under the peace lily sitting on the heirloom coffee table. OK, no it’s not, but I’m trying.

Lately we’ve had a lot of these moments where you say, “Did you hear what he just said? Did you see what he just did.” In the car he keeps assuring himself of our genders. You’re a woman, mama? Yes, I’m a woman. Da-da, you a man? I’m a little boy? Every night for the last week or so it’s been the same. Then the other day he switched it up. Mama, you have boobs? Yup. Sure do. Daddy no have boobs. He has a belly. True dat, son. I don’t have boobs, mama. Right, again, Elroy.

Elliot’s gotten into comfortable routines at home that mimic our own. He brushes his teeth, washes his hands. When his hands go through shirt sleeves, he’s confident they’ll come out the cuffs. There’s no panic over the way I lift his entire body to get his pants up. Tantrums are becoming rare. When he has them, they leave without word like the UPS guy. Elliot seems as mystified as we are at the comings and goings of anger that roll like tumble weeds. For quite a while I’ve been attributing this to him growing up, but that can’t be true. If it is, what the heck is happening to me?

I’ve started clothes shopping more over the last year. After spending seven years working at a plant nursery where jeans and T-shirts were the uniform, and then having a kid, my wardrobe had some evolving to do. Only now there are pieces of clothing for sale, and I don’t even know what they are! I went to Kohl’s for the first time today, and I was seduced by the lines put out by Jennifer Lopez and Vera Wang. Vera makes these things that look like jeans, but they are really stretchy like tights. Oh, and they are sized small, medium and large. I picked a medium (right) and inside the dressing room became half woman and half little boy.

Just one leg at a time, I told myself. Wait, somebody help me get these things up my legs. They’re too long, I wanted to scream. There’s 3 feet of bunched up spandex around my ankles! Should the crotch be mid-thigh? Maybe they are meant to be worn commando, because two cheeks worth of granny panty balled up in the seat isn’t sexy. Getting them off was like taking the wrapper off two Slim Jims.

The sequined tops that I tried on next, well. I may have tried to put the moves on Ben Affleck while watching Argo, but I’m no Jenny from the block. No matter how I straightened my back and pinned back my shoulders, it wouldn’t happen. I gave up when I accidentally put my right breast through an arm hole.

I am happy to report that Elliot continues to be a wonderful sleeper. I, on the other hand, am waking up three and four times a night. The cats hear my eye lashes move and start revving their engines. That used to make me lay awake and wonder which animal might be my spirit guide. For the longest time, I was sure it was a white rabbit, but now I’ve learned it’s a jaguar.

So now I lay awake and imagine a jaguar attacking a defenseless bunny alongside some crudite. The horror causes me to get up and walk directly into the end of our bedroom’s half-open door, stumble backward and kick an empty Tinker-toy cylinder across the floor. That’s when I cuss and go to the bathroom for a Prevacid.

Once I’m back in bed, I look at the ceiling fan and imagine what my friends around Savannah are doing. Just as I’m about to fall asleep, I choke on my saliva and that starts the process again. I need some juice.

Christine Lucas writes about being a first-time mom and adventures with baby. Contact Christine at christineslucas@yahoo.com

Rattled: Moving from couples life to kid on a tear | savannahnow.com

Rattled: Moving from couples life to kid on a tear | savannahnow.com.

Rattled: Be original. Introduce Your Kid with an Ultrasound on Facebook! (In Saturday’s Savannah Morning News)

If I don’t have an ultrasound to put on Facebook, what can I do to get a lot of comments?!
Painting Copyright 2001 Christine Lucas

Christine Lucas: Social networks up the ante for show-off mommies-to-be | savannahnow.com.

Rattled: The best seat in the house

 

Rattled: The best seat in the house | savannahnow.com.

Today’s column in the Savannah Morning News

RATTLED: Elliot wrecked Toddler Tuesday at Oatland Island for his mom | savannahnow.com.