Thursday, April 29, 2010

If Not for You Meddling Kids...

Or, in this case, replace “meddling kids” with “meddling in-law”.

I'm glad for a little bit of minor personal family drama. It is something useful to escape from the non-stop attention Pittsburgh media has been paying to the quarterback formerly known as “Mr. Play for Jesus”, now better known as “showing up in the lyrics of Eminem's most recent song”.

Escape has not been as easy as turning off the television/radio and eschewing print and online Pittsburgh media because said quarterback's most recent travails have confirmed the bias I always held against him from the moment he was drafted – that this was a guy I would not want to spend five seconds alone with in a room.

End of digression Number 1. For further digressions, please see the footnotes, they are especially voluminous and verbose today.

J's mother, especially, can be a force to be reckoned with. During one of my less than finer moments in the past ten years I suggested that J's family has some Jewish members in the woodpile(1), such is the amount of passive-aggressive guilt that J's mother can pile on victims unsuspecting and otherwise.(2)

I have a thing about celebrating my birthday which can be traced back to the fact that I share a birthday with my brother, M. My twin brother. For roughly twenty years M and I had to negotiate our birthday celebrations. Some years he won and choose the dinner. Some years I did and got to eat chocolate cake. Some years (all occurring after I reached the age of 30) I've had to pretend that it was not my birthday at all and been yelled at by my mother for telling people that it was. I've had many a horrible birthday in my half-lifetime and have become stupidly neurotic about striving to have a good day.(3)

The thing that has developed with celebrating my birthday is that I want to be the one to plan it. Planning usually involves spending the day with J in some sort of fun activity, such as a visit to the National Aviary or Warhol Museum or making an elaborate and expensive meal for some of our friends. Some years I take the day off from work. Some years I plan for the closest Saturday. We get up, we go to breakfast, we go do something. This year I was looking forward to figuring out something that would involve Baby Alien(4) and toying with the idea of the Children's Museum, as there would be lots to look at and I could indulge in one of the fun things about being a parent – playing with children's “stuff” without fear of censure from other adults. And because doing something fun would remove the taint from the past two years.(5)

All my ruminations have come to a bad end, as my mom tipped me off during a recent phone conversation that my mother-in-law, gods bless her meddling little heart, was planning celebratory-type activities for my birthday and Mother's Day.(6)

My mother knew this because my mother-in-law called to ask her to come for Mother's Day, then attempted to pull a guilt trip on my mother because my parents will be on vacation in a location eight hours away and are rightfully reluctant to drive back in the middle of their vacation for one day.

The conversation moved from Mother's Day to my birthday and my MIL desire to plan my birthday celebration and her desire to gain my parents participation in the plans.

My mother reminded her that it was also my brother's birthday. I'm not sure if she did this because
  1. she still remains under the impression that my twin and I somehow coordinate birthday celebrations,
  2. my twin would be offended by my parents only celebrating with me,
  3. she could not conceive of celebrating our birthday without my twin or
  4. it was the easiest way to bring the conversation to a conclusion.
The more I think about the conversation, the more hilarious it becomes. My mother-in-law was bewildered that my mother would find driving back for one day unreasonable. My mother was bewildered that my mother-in-law was attempting to make her feel guilty and sat in awe of her powers of passive aggressive persuasion. Thinking about it now makes me laugh out loud.

She ranted, a little bit, about how unfair it was that I would not get to decide what I wanted to do on Mother's Day. In a spectacular display of tone deafness she also complained about my twin being excluded from any birthday plans she might want to make.

I, for what is worth, have resigned myself to rolling my eyes and allowing her to plan out both days, as they are taking Baby Alien for a night so J and I can attend a wedding - which is occurring the same day as the graduation party of J's oldest nephew. Payback.

(1) I admit that I put a toe across the border into heavy stereotyping with this comment. However, J's great grandmother was from Poland, came from a part of the country with a large Jewish population and immigrated to the United States in the 40's. It is not outside the bounds of possibility that family members converted to Catholicism to avoid rising anti-semitism, then immigrated. However, I have also been told (guilty of stereotyping again) that the only thing worse than a Jewish mother to pile on the guilt is a mother who happens to be Polish-Catholic. Additionally, the joke seems to be on me as J passed the Jewish suggestion on to his mother, who laughed then quietly admitted that there was a possibility that some of her fore-relatives may have converted.

(2) While I still can't completely suss out when she will strike, my reactions have gone from righteous annoyance to eye rolling, whining, mental shrugging and the occasional conciliation to her desires.

(3) As J expressed to me last night, one would think after almost 40 years I would give up trying.

(4) Going back to original nickname.

(5)The great [non] birthday fiasco of 2008 was followed by 2009, in which J was sick and spent most of what was possibly the only day in the first 20 something weeks of pregnancy that I was not unbearably nauseated, asleep. All I wanted was a card and a cupcake. I got neither. I did, however get a phone call from A in Switzerland (the same friend who sent me photographs of pregnant and newly postpartum supermodels to make me feel better about my increasing girth in late pregnancy. From anyone else this would have been considered highly misguided, as I'm certainly not the kind of pretty or thin that could be classified as “supermodel”. From A, who could never resist looking a beautiful woman, it was kind of sweet and did make me feel better in a weird sort of way) which rescued the day from becoming a tear-filled disaster. 

(As a further digression, A revealed to me several weeks ago that he and his wife (who is supermodel- territory beautiful, brilliant and fabulous) are expecting their first child, thus providing a theory to explain his offbeat obsession with pregnant supermodels – his wife was in early pregnancy when he sent me all the photos and links.) 

(6)I'm offering odds to those in the know on whether these plans include some way of getting me to go to mass.

Monday, April 12, 2010

Hurts Men Too

Saturday night BooBoo decided he was not going to sleep in his crib. Every time J put him down he woke up and began to yell. By attempt number three J was exhausted and frustrated and warned me that he was going to let BooBoo yell it out for a while, to see if he would put himself to sleep. I agreed to let him do it.

It did not work. I did not expect it would work. I've noticed over the past week that BooBoo is starting to understand that he is a separate little person, with a separate little will that does not have to mesh with his parents. I'm proud to see this. Seeing him turn his head and watch me walk away when I drop him off at daycare instead of gazing at the ceiling made me feel pretty good.

So what I see as a normal (albeit annoying) developmental milestone has left J reeling. And anxious.
“What is wrong with him” he asked, exasperated after wrapping the child up in a blanket and handing him to me to hold. While BooBoo stared at me, with eyes wide and full of immense concentration, I threw out a few suggestions – headache, ear infection, tummy trouble, just-plain-lonely.

“Should we take him to a doctor?”

Seventeen weeks into this journey and already I hate, hate, hate when J asks any variation of this question, beginning with the trigger phrase “should we”. What appears to be a perfectly innocuous inquiry from his point of view makes me want to beat down every single male and female who taught J, through words or stupid example, that he is incapable of trusting his instincts and intuition as a father. Not a parent. A father.

“I don't have an instinct for this” J says whenever BooBoo has cried a little too long because he is hungry, or needs a diaper changed or just-needs-to-cry-over-his-incompentent-staff-damnit.

My response – “Yes, you do. Spend more time with him.”

J dislikes that I do not step in or otherwise interfere when he cares for BooBoo. As long as he does not appear to be in danger or downright hysterical, I usually leave J to figure out what BooBoo needs with minimal interference from me. I suspect that he thinks, although he is smart enough to never admit it, that I'm abdicating responsibility.

Which I am. I'm abdicating sole responsibility of BooBoo to his biological father in order to avoid a dynamic in which I become the single decider and doer in all issues connected with the care and feeding of baby. I don't want that level of responsibility.

Still, there remains this idea that men like J are not competent enough to care for their own children. Members of J's own family are still express surprise at how comfortable I about J taking BooBoo to visit his grandparents, hang with the guys at Quaker Steak and Lube and watch J and his friends brew beer – without me along to supervise.