Due Date

Not July 3, which is my due date. But the movie with Robert Downey Jr. and Zach Galifianakis, which we watched last night.
I think the problem with my blog is that I have more thoughts than I have patience to write out. I have mentally written out a long review of this movie that examined how it made the father/son dynamic an unnatural relationship, or a naturally contentious one which requires the overcoming of one's instincts -- a lesson allegorized in RDJ's journey of disasters with ZG. In the end, though, those lessons become irrelevant since it turns out he has a girl, which the movie seems to imply is easier for a dad to relate to (not only does he get a daughter, but the pregnant mom goes into natural labor before her (unaccounted for) scheduled C-section appt. So the natural order is restored?).

The reason I was thinking about this movie for so long is because it put Dave in a bad mood -- it's a comedy of errors but without the absurd guffaws that made him love Dumb and Dumber. But I like the two of them, RDJ and ZG. One of my favorite jokes is ZG doing an impersonation of a 5-year old with a beard.

So -- this movie was keeping me occupied this morning (also, I just finished a draft of a chapter which I've vowed not to think about again for another couple of months, at least (please!) but now my brain is in academic mode and is apparently looking for any old thing to "examine"). Before that I'd been trying to put into words exactly how Dave and I have become crazy people. Or how having a kid has brought out the latent crazy in us. Not so much that we fuss over him or protect him from the dangers of non-existent mountain lions or the polio virus. But the way we go totally off the rails when our daily routine alters in the slightest -- like when we take a weekend trip to LA, for example, or when Desmond comes down with a cold, or when these things happen at once. It's not like we become raving lunatics. Exactly. I mean, we might become kind of raving lunatics, if there's such a thing.

This is what makes me the most worried about the entrance of baby number two. Desmond and Dave and I have a really nice routine going on -- we know what to do, how to live our days and even, mostly, handle tiny little glitches. But throwing that routine out the window is liable to . . . to cause something big to happen (too many big things have been going on recently for me to find an appropriate metaphor).

But this is only my irrational fear talking. Rationally, I realize that somehow Dave and I figured out Desmond -- and we had NO idea what we were getting ourselves into with that one. We got slapped in the face hard and look, everything's pretty much awesome (I brought Desmond into bed with me at 5:50AM this morning and when the digital clock read 6:00 Desmond said "Look! Two Oh's." He's a genius, that's the long and short of it). And, at least with this new one, I know it's going to be crazy -- but also it'll stop being crazy at some point. Even all the recent mothers-of-two I've been chatting with lately who've been warning how "really hard it is" to have two kids (two boys, especially) and whose warnings have sent me to my bedroom, biting fingernails, shooting my eyes back and forth, mumbling "it's not true it can't be true is it true?" -- even they can't really convince me that I'm in for a life of hair-pulling misery. Especially since most of them seem really happy.

Update: I just got back from a playgroup with one of the Cassandra-moms predicting my hellish future with two kids. It's so strange -- she's such a calm person with two really well behaved kids. Well, one of them is five months old, but he's not a cry-er. Just a feeder. But, man, she won't let up. Everything I bring up, she replies -- in her calm, thoughtful voice -- with a story about how really difficult it is to manage her two children. Even when I try offering her an escape route from all the difficulty by asking if she feels less anxious about her second child and more apt to let him cry things out than she was with her first -- her reply is still a bummer: "Well, kind of, but only because my first son doesn't really give me the time or energy to allow me to pay attention to my second son. It's just so hard." Great.

Much has been thought

These last two months have seen me up in the middle of several nights thinking things over. I thought out a very long blog entry about Betty Draper and the questions she raises about Mad Men's views on motherhood (she's the only fully present mother on the show, and she's barely that) and middle-class suburban femininity. But it was such a long, and probably tedious, entry that I couldn't bring myself to actually write it out.

I've also been -- okay worrying about everything. Libya, Japan, baby number two. Mostly baby number two. What will he be called? How will Desmond take to him? How am I going to manage without sleep again? What if he's colicky? Thanks to a recommended amnio (cause I'm so old), I am fully reassured that baby number two is genetically sound.

On top of these worries, Desmond has entered a phase that is full of energy and aggression -- most of it expressed by random screaming and then a burst of short angry tears, usually caused by nothing at all but sometimes triggered by my attempts to get him to pick things up he'd rather leave be. Mostly, I'm not really worried about it, I just try to think of ways for him to playfully expel his energy/aggression (like by not spending too much of my time on the computer, ahem). But sometimes, like on Tuesday, when our biorhythms aren't aligned, there is screaming on both ends. I try not to feel bad about that either -- I mean, I can't be smiling mother all the time, reasoning with a two year old with a calm voice. Right? I ask seriously . . . I can't, can I?

But I'm hoping this super-aggressivity will pass before July 3 or thereabouts when baby number two arrives.