Blueberry cornmeal pancakes and I'm tired as shit
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Gargantubaby is still two and a half. He's using more words more correctly with more correct inflection and grammar. As usual, I'm not sure how I feel about this. Mostly I'm amazed. The rest of the time I envision a bleak future, where the two-year-old who currently throws his arms around my neck and sits on my lap under a blanket reading book after book and professes his love for me will no longer let me play with his butt cheeks.
I'm not looking forward to that future.
He thinks kiwi is "bikini" so he asks for his bikini. He has mixed feelings about his Skuut bike because it's "very, very ouchy for my penis."
He imitates us:
Me: Use your fork, please.
GB: Yes, my darling.
He has a unique dismount when he's standing on the couch or one of the beds: Instead of climbing down (safely), he throws his feet out from under himself, lands on his butt, and jumps off.
He has gone from being super-excited to be awake to being a grumpy teenager from an Eastern European country. I opened the curtains in his room one morning and he said, "Why you do this? It sleepy time. I just gonna sleep." Then he crashed back onto the pillows and went back to sleep.
We keep catching him saying, "Holy fucking shit," and are trying desperately not to react. But mostly he uses it correctly, which makes my heart swell with pride. For example, the dog often sniffs around him looking for food, and one time, after unsuccessfully demanding she leave him alone, he held his cracker above his head and exclaimed, "Holy fucking shit!"
(Once, though, when "we" were drawing—meaning he was instructing me on what to draw—I drew a train, and he said happily, "Holy fucking train!" Which I maintain is a correct usage.)
When he's not freaking out on the dog, things are "happily good": "It's happily good in my tummy!"
When SJ presents him with his absolute favorite combination of shredded wheat and milk with a little spoon, he raises his hands to both sides of his head and says religiously, "Oh my god."
I catch him standing in front of the mirror, threatening the dog Travis Bickle-style. Later I catch him trying to tell the dog a knock-knock joke.
SJ wrestles with him WWF-style every night before bed, which GB has come to expect and thus demands if anyone looks to be "too tired," a concept he does not understand. He runs into the bedroom naked from his bath, and to get him into his diaper we have to hold it flat on the bed so he can do a somersault into it. Then SJ, or "Pops," as he is known to the children, does the announcing: "Iiiin this corner! Weighing in at thirty-five pounds … wearing the red flannel pajama pants and polar bear shiiiirt … it's Gargaaaan-tubaby! Middle-Name! Last-Name!" During his announcement, GB scrunches up his nose and clenches his teeth and squats and wiggles his butt and waves his little fists above his head and at the end he beats his chest like a gorilla.
One morning a couple months ago, GB climbed into bed with me and mentioned something about being a doctor. Although my brain exploded—no one in my family is a doctor, and academic achievement, although modeled on all sides, is not valued above artistic expression, BUT STILL A DOCTOR I'M HIS MOTHER I'M SUPPOSED TO BE EXCITED ABOUT THIS—I kept calm and asked him, "What does a doctor do?"
"Check my penis," he reported.
Which should have been funny, but his doctor does not check his penis so immediately I went to WHO IS CHECKING MY SON'S PENIS AND DO THEY HAVE HIS PERMISSION. I have a vague memory of being surrounded by children behind a couch at Mrs. Hall's overrun home daycare in Ras Tanura, Saudi Arabia, being examined by preschool-age "doctors" who had managed to get my underpants down, and me not particularly enjoying it. GB is never with anyone besides us or the daycare. Still, it took me a couple of weeks to ask them if maybe the kids were playing doctor (it nagged at me, but I guess I wasn't panicking).
They took my question very seriously—honestly, more seriously than I intended it to be—and said it hadn't been happening. I told them the story about GB saying doctors check penises, and the daughter gave me the choice piece of information that they don't use those words there.
A light—and a slow sense of dread—began to glow. We use those words—"penis" and "vagina"—and in fact I frequently check in and ask GB what everyone in our house has, and sometimes I ask him about extended family. (Jenny: "What does Gramps have?" GB: "A penis!" Jenny: "What does Nonna have?" GB: "A gina!")
If anyone is instigating a game of doctor at daycare, it's probably Gargantubaby.
How I know he's my son: "I don't like people. I just like blueberries."
So apparently, I'm hanging on by a thread. First of all, after two weeks of holiday vacation, an ENTIRE WEEK of working from home because my car was in the shop, and my family being in town for 10 days, I still wasn't ready for 9-to-5 life. On my first day back in the office after nearly five weeks, I put a maxi pad on at a stoplight while driving Gargantubaby to daycare LIKE A BOSS because I was DEAD. FUCKING DEAD. I DID NOT CARE WHAT A SINGLE PERSON SAW OR THOUGHT ABOUT WHAT THEY SAW.
The exhaustion is hard to quantify. It's not the punch in the face of having a newborn. It's being dragged to the bottom of the ocean with anvils tied to each limb, except the bottom of the ocean never comes. Time off is not time off. Mornings and evenings are not breaks. I run errands at lunch. Working from home is the only thing that approaches relaxing, but I don't take naps anymore. I do laundry. I order diapers. I meal plan for the week, then make a grocery list, then pick the grocery store that's the best bet for that list, then organize the list by which products will appear in which order as I walk the most efficient route through that grocery store.
So about that thread. At around 4:45 p.m. last Friday, when I was steam-cleaning a rug with a rental from Lowe's (YES REALLY), SJ walked into the living room holding something in his palm and yelled, "My tooth fell out." It took a minute for me to understand he wasn't joking. Commence emergency call to the dentist.
The next day started well enough, with the three of us cuddling in bed in the morning light, behind these white linen IKEA curtains I'd bought from the Goodwill on Third Street. Somewhere between me getting up from bed and walking to the bathroom to pee, a blood vessel popped in my right eye.
Seeing my eye filled with bright red blood in the mirror was a shock. I showed it to SJ and explained to GB that it didn't hurt. We agreed it couldn't be serious, but just to be sure I looked it up on WebMD. That's when it started: a vague memory of sitting in the exact same place, looking at the exact same website a year earlier, after I'd left Kaiser having been told I probably had ovarian cancer.
BOOM REALLY SHORT BREATHS AND A CERTAINTY I COULDN'T MOVE FROM THE CHAIR.
HOWEVER.
I had the sense that before it got too bad I should alert SJ. I made it to the living room couch, and when SJ walked in from the kitchen I managed to relate that I wasn't sure whether I was having another panic attack or experiencing a serious medical condition.
SJ: What are your symptoms?
Jenny: I can't breathe and my fingers are tingling.
SJ: Panic attack.
By now I was kneeling on the rug, trying to catch my breath. The whole time I was thinking, Thank god Gargantubaby is sitting at the kitchen table eating a Nutri-Grain ® Eggo waffle and isn’t witnessing any of this.
This time around, I had Klonopin, ordered five months earlier for just this type of bullshit. I followed SJ's instructions to take deep breaths—the way the EMTs had instructed me a year earlier—and lo and behold, it fucking worked. I listened to the sounds of SJ cutting a Klonopin in half with a kitchen knife, and then he appeared with a small white plate with reindeer on it, a plate I am not allowed to get rid of because it has "emotional significance" because it "belonged to his grandmother" BOO-HOO, and I swallowed half a Klonopin with water at 8:30 a.m. and canceled my plans to drive a car that day, and we spent the next three days RELAXING.
Because between the exposed nerve in SJ's mouth, the panic attack, and GB then acquiring a stomach virus and vomiting throughout that night, we were forced to stay home for the entire three-day weekend. Like, at home. So all my plans to exhaust everyone with ACTIVITIES were foiled, and we spent most of three days in the backyard, hanging out in the beautiful green mess that SJ has planted over 18 years with orange, apple, loquat, and plum trees, where he gardened and worked on his beehives, and where I swept out the cobwebs from my stepdaughter's tree house and sat up there on cushions with GB, watching the nascent plum blossoms and Oakland and the bay in the distance and feeling the motherfucking sun on my skin.
I'm still tired. But at least this week, I think I'll live.
Jenny: What does your ice cream taste like?
GB: Like a starfish from the sky.
These pancakes are from my favorite recipe from my best friend from eighth grade, Kristianna Gehant, an organic garlic and lamb farmer in South Dakota, proprietor of Prairie Coteau Farm, who is such a badass that an interview and life-size photos of her were included in South Dakota State University’s exhibit of three-year project FarmHer. She fucking rocks.
I put cornmeal in these pancakes, which I’ve written about before. But I just discovered something:
Frozen blueberries work better than fresh.
SMALL frozen blueberries work better than regular-size frozen blueberries, such as these from Trader Joe’s:
