Cool Dude Meets Julie Andrews

Harsh words were said. Items were dumped from drawers. A suitcase was packed. A paintbrush lay in a congealing pool of yellow paint in a room half-painted. We, unwilling participants in a dispute over money that churned with childhood echos and blurred images of how things should be, retreated unhappily to our corners. At times, we are both wounded and dramatic and stubborn and angry and confused and ever so vulnerable. Our feelings get hurt. We attack. We go too far.


Coming back to sanity after such a lapse is painful. It's like walking with cement boots. Each step back towards the other requires such willingness. It would be so much easier not to. But here we are, and where else is there?


It feels like pushing through heavy curtains. We reach for each other's hand, someone makes coffee, we sit on the couch in the living room, and gently begin anew.


It was there on the living room couch earlier this morning surrounded by potted plants and our favorite framed art, when I met the Cool Dude.


"Why didn't you come down to welcome me home when I came back from Long Island?" I asked. (This wasn't the basis of The Fight, but a tiny thread in my own skein of resentments.)


"I don't know," Juan the Gardener replied thoughtfully, "But, I think I have certain pictures in my mind about how couples relate. I think you do too. I think most couples do. When our images cross, we begin to have problems."


"Tell me about your pictures," I said. I felt a familiar flicker of fondness.


"Mine go way back," Juan said. "Way back to my hippie days, to when I wanted to be a Cool Dude. I had a good friend and I thought we were Cool Dudes and Cool Dudes related to one another in a certain way. We were, you know cool, laid back. When he didn't behave the way I expected, I realized for the first time that my ideas about how things should be weren't necessarily like someone else's."


"So, a Cool Dude doesn't welcome his girlfriend home with too much enthusiasm, is that it?"


"Yeah, sort of. We're cool, you and I, we don't have to get all caught up in convention. You know how much I love you. We're relaxed, we'll just relax into being back together after you've been away. Not too much effort."


"Well, I have more of a romantic idea of how couples relate," I said. "Sort of a Sound of Music idea. You rush downstairs to greet me, bearing flowers, possibly edelweiss, perhaps singing. An unseen orchestra would swell. Our lips would touch."


We laughed.


"Probably when I was hanging around with long hair imagining myself to be a Cool Dude, people were saying to themselves that guy, he's just strange," Juan said.


We laughed again.


"Yeah, I completely understand," I said. "It's like we don't know our parts in each other's plays. We haven't read the scripts, we haven't rehearsed our roles." 


We misread the cues, we flub our lines.


I looked at Juan and he looked back, and we saw each other, as if for the first time.

I Bought Bought Bought and Survived

Tripp and his mom were napping when I first forayed to the mecca of box stores for new parents: Buy Buy Baby. Clutching my list on which I had scribbled a few simple items like night light, diaper bag, organic baby wipes, kimonos and breast pads, I froze in the doorway in the face of bewildering arrays of... BABY STUFF. Miles of baby clothes on circular racks, a parking lot sized space of jog strollers, walls of car seats from infant carriers to convertible carriers to booster seats, rolling shelves, aisle upon aisle; what looked like striped baby circus tents hung from the ceiling. I felt instantly nauseous. 


"Can I help you?" a cheerful woman piped up.


I may have muttered something unintelligible, but mostly I was backing away.


"Do you have a list?" she tried.


I nodded.


"Can I see it?"


I held it out.


She found me a cart and guided me to where newborn kimonos - what Tripp's dad refers to as Jedi Knight shirts, because they snap cross-ways across the baby's chest - could be found. I took a breath. They came in white, three to a pack.


"N-night light?" I stammered.


"Right over here." She pointed to a shelf, excused herself, and vanished behind a stack of pink musical potty seats that twinkle when baby tinkles. There were yellow star night lights, vintage Mickey Mouse night lights, nights lights with 72-hour ultrasonic humidifiers, night lights that talk and tell time. I chose something jungle-ish with a monkey and giraffe on it, and fled.


I called Katherine in front of a floor-to-ceiling display of designer diaper bags. A video extolling the benefits of temperature-controlled baby whirlpool spas played softly nearby.


"Huminahuminahumina," I stammered into my cell phone like Jackie Gleason from The Honeymooners when Katherine answered.


"Mom? Where are you?"


"D-diaper bags," I said.


"Mom? I trust you completely. Whatever you choose will be fine."

After I finished up the remaining items, having consulted a variety of mothers on the subject of nursing pads and grooming kits, and having bypassed "Boogie Wipes," but scooping up a few bottles of hand sanitizer, I ventured by elevator to the second floor. Katherine had mentioned needing a rocking chair. A saleswoman pounced the instant the elevator doors slid shut behind me.


"New grandmother?" she demanded.


"Why, yes."


"Lunatic on the second floor!" she shouted.


Several people who didn't look much like new parents were seated in what were termed "rockers." One man held a venti-sized cup from Starbucks and was reading the New York Post. A woman was doing her nails. 


"Can I help you find anything?" asked the saleswoman who had denounced me as a crazy person. 


"I think I'm done," I said, overwhelmed by clusters of jungle-themed baby furniture sets, baby swimming pools and masses of stuffed monkeys.


"I nearly got you one of those Baby on Board stickers," I told Katherine later.


"I'm so glad you didn't," she said. "Have you seen those stickers that people paste on their rear windows that tell everyone on the road who's in the family? There's a mother, a father, two children, a parakeet, a dog, a gold fish, whatever."


"Yeah, they're really dumb," I agreed. An open invitation to home invaders I fretted, with some of my usual paranoia. In my day, had we been sticker people, our family station wagon would have boasted cutesy stickers depicting a mother, a father, three girls, two dogs, numerous cats, a few ducks, gerbils, hamsters, rabbits, languishing baby turtles, newts, and a horse named Sam.


"Once, I saw a car with 13 cats on it," Katherine laughed. "Can you imagine?"


"No," I said.  "Can I hold the baby now?"

*

PS: By the way,  no one, not even a lunatic grandmother's first grandson, needs this. Am I right?

Naming Grandmother

I'm obsessed with finding a grandmother name. It needs to be perfect, which is why my daughter (the baby's mother) was 6 weeks old before her older sister came home with the name Katherine from pre-school. It was the name of a classmate's new baby sister. The name on Katherine's birth certificate read "Baby Girl Robinson" until she was 10, when a trip from Vermont to Long Island was required to change it.


Katherine was adamant about me - or anyone else - not knowing the names she and Ty had chosen for Baby Tripp. When Juan the Gardener and I visited at Thanksgiving, The Big Book of 60,000 Baby Names lay on the coffee table. I picked it up and it fell open to a page marked by a small white piece of paper. Despite my determined resolve to say nothing, my mouth fell open when I noticed the name of a well-known Southern writer printed in Katherine's neat script.


"Oh, my God," I blurted, before I could stop, "You're not thinking of naming the baby ---? I mean, I doubt the baby will pen another -----."  I named a literary classic featuring a feathered creature in the title. That's all I can say.


"And that," said my daughter, clanging pans, "Is exactly why we're not telling anyone."


Juan had to walk me around the block a few times while he suggested that I not mention one more word about names.


"Use discriminating awareness," he urged. "You can do it."


Even while Katherine lay post c-section in recovery, babbling happily through exultant tears about seeing the color blue in the operating room, she wouldn't give so much as a hint of a name until Ty was present. I love that.


Back to grandmother names. There's "Granny," which I kind of like. It's just sort of how I feel, and it's light-hearted. My mother, the baby's great-grandmother is known to grandchildren and greats alike as "Gogs," short for "grand old gal." But, that's her name. My grandmother wanted to be called "Grandmere," but the best we could manage, not being French, was "Grumma."  On my father's side, our grandmother was known as "Nan" short for Nancy, or "Nin-Nin," which is what I called her.


Katherine likes "Mormor," the Swedish equivalent, but I don't, particularly as it sounds too much like More! More! which is a failing I wrestle with most days. More peanut M&Ms, more Tate's Oatmeal Raisin cookies, etc. There's "Oma," which is German and which, quite frankly, leaves me cold.


Juan is known as "Yeh Yeh" to his grandchildren, so I went with the feminine version, "Ya Ya." Positive and playful. Perfect, I thought. "Ya Ya."


"I'm Ya Ya," my sister Helen stated, when I tried it out on her and my mother at lunch one day. Even though I was a mite disappointed, she got to be grandmother first, so the only mature action was to defer.


Some other thoughts, returning to Francophilia, have included "Beauma" and "Bellemere."


"Goodnight, Grandma," Ty said, when I left after dinner the other night. 


"Hm," I replied, banging myself with the screen door, "Not bad. Grandma," I repeated.


"Kind of traditional," Katherine commented.


After some serious reflection, I decided "Grandma" sounded like a grey-bun-and-support-hose type of grandmother. I'm more the jeans, tee shirt and Tory Burch flip-flops type.


Next, I looked up grandmother names on-line. There was even a test to match one's personality to a corresponding name. The ensuing results described me as "intellectual" and "literary," the sort of grandmother likely to take my grandson on a museum outing, and to read him The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe and The Hobbit. I was also depicted as "natural." Tripp and I shall splash in puddles and hike Vermont's Long Trail. The name this test produced, however, was an insult: "Me Maw." Me Maw? Like Hee Haw or Gee Gaw? No, thanks.


Then I came up with "Lela," pronounced "Layla," after the Spanish word for grandmother: Abuela. I know a little Spanish, and I spend time in Mexico. Both Juan the Gardener and Katherine liked it, but Jane didn't. 


"What? You're hanging out on the corner in Spanish Harlem?" she snorted. (She doesn't get out much.) "Besides," she continued, "Did you ever hear a baby burbling "lalala"? They can't. Find something else."


Names can be difficult.


"It was a pleasure to meet you, Tree," my mother said sweetly after her visit to the hospital to meet her great-grandson.


"Actually, it's Tripp," corrected my daughter.


"Of course. Goodbye, Trey," said my mother.


Back to the original dilemma: I still have a fondness for "Lela," but, c'est moi?

Grooving on Grannyhood

I waited outside the glass doors that separated "Labor and Delivery" from the operating room, knowing my daughter was on the operating table, and that her husband, clad in white paper scrubs, booties, cap and mask was by her side. I paced. Was that, finally, the unmistakable cry of a newborn? Did Katherine call out, "Is that my baby?"

Then, there was Ty as they rolled out the newest littlest being. Elation lit up his face like a torch. The glass doors opened, a nurse was reaching into the incubator and picking up a little swaddled bundle of baby boy and asking, "Is this the Grandmother?" Ty said yes and she handed him to me. The moment has gone. The feelings are stitched into my heart, that sort of love that is forever, an echo of holding my own newborn children, giddy and tremulous and grateful and delighted and delirious with joy. Someone took a picture. When I looked later it was all face, wet-eyed, stoned with happiness. The baby wore a tiny knitted blue cap.

I followed behind the rolling caravan of nurse and Daddy and baby boy. Ty stopped and pushed the button that caused "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star" to issue forth from invisible speakers, announcing the latest new birth. In the hallway outside the nursery, we ran smack into Katie and Jane, who are two of the Aunties, and the baby's 9 year-old cousin Isabelle. We wept and hugged and bounced and cheered and gazed through the nursery window at Ty as he gazed at his son, squiggling around and howling as the nurse examined him. 

Then Katherine was in recovery, numb-legged and groggy, happier then I've ever seen her, and she and Ty stared at each other in another one of those fat moments where words are unnecessary and they said his name: Anthony Fowler Cirelli, III. "He'll be called Tripp," Katherine said. "With two ps."

Welcome little one. You are perfect.

Baby Coming

"Mom?"


"What's going on?" I spoke into the phone with carefully practiced calm. I had been to a weekend meditation workshop with Pema. I was chill.


"Something's different."


"Different how?" I asked. I gripped the phone and mimed a state of joy to those in the room.


"I've been having pretty strong cramps about 4 minutes apart."


"Hm," I said.


"Should I call the doctor? I probably should call the doctor. I'll call the doctor. I'll just go ahead and call the doctor."


"Sounds like a good idea," I said. "Then call me back."


"Is this IT?" my friend Jane squealed. "This is IT, right?" A burgeoning ebullience lit her face from to grin to eyebrows. "I knew it!" (She always knows it.) "And you're here! Isn't that completely amazing?" She meant that there I was, about to participate - well, if not actually in the delivery room at the end of things, so to speak - in one of the most beautiful experiences ever, and there I was with her. My friend.


"She's going to have a baby girl tonight!" she stated.


"Not necessarily," I said. 


"You got 20 bucks?"


After Katherine had spoken with the doctor, and called her husband Ty, she decided to pack a bag just in case, and sort of putter at home and sort of time contractions. 


"Just come over," she requested.


I nearly drove over Jane backing up out of the driveway, but I was totally present. I swear.

*

"Oops, there goes another one," Katherine said, rubbing her belly and wincing. "What time is it?" 


"7:15."


"Write it down."


"Do you have a pen?" I wrote "7:15" carefully at the top of a white legal pad, feeling terribly important.


Upstairs in the nursery, we looked at all the tiny baby clothes packed neatly away in the built-in bureau painted white. Blankets had been folded and stored beneath the changing table. There were oodles of onesies. A bucket of spackle and a can of paint were under the window. Goodnight Moon was in the bookshelf. A little cow-ish rocking toy stood in the corner. Two little outfits for taking Baby C home from the hospital lay in the crib.


"I know... the paint and spackle cans, but, the baby won't be in here -- ooh, what time is it?"


"7:19."


"Mark it down."


"I'll clean everything," I said. "Don't worry about a thing."


"What do you think?" Ty asked when he arrived home.


"I don't know, I guess this could be it," I shrugged.


"He's asking me, Mom, ooh, another one. What time is it?"


"7:30." Ty said, looking around. "By the kitchen clock."


"7:25." I said simultaneously, checking my watch.


"What does it say on the TV?" Katherine demanded.


"The TV? It doesn't say anything on the TV," I said.


"You two are retarded. Can't you even tell time?"


At the hospital, things were light, joyous, edged with a touch of anxious humor.


"You're going to be so much fun," the admitting nurse proclaimed. "Labor and Delivery is upstairs around the blahdeblah elevator around the blahdeblah corner," I heard. 


Upon exiting the elevator, I went South, Ty went East, and Katherine strode West.


But, we found it, and a young nurse placed a blue disk like a laundry pellet upon Katherine's mountainous belly. We tracked Baby C's heartbeat chugachugging on the computer screen and watched a little rounded hump of a curve marking a contraction. 


"Oo," Katherine breathed.


"That's it, Sweetie, you're doing great," I croaked. Ty's legs danced and jumped. I had no saliva.


But, after a quick examination from the MD on call, it proved to be a non-starter. We checked out.


"Keep the phone by your ear," directed my daughter. "I have a feeling we'll be going back later. Oh, that was a strong one."


I called Will.


"It's started," I said.


"Uh huh."


"She's in labor!"


"Uh huh."


"She's not quite a centimeter dilated and her cervix is 90%..."


"Whoa! Whoa! Hold on!"


"Oh, come on, Will. This is a fact of life. You'll be dealing with this yourself someday," I giggled.


"This is my sister, all right? There are certain things I don't need to know. Boy or girl, niece or nephew,
that's it."


"Oh, for Pete's sake! I'll call you when things get going."


"I love you. Oh, sorry I didn't call you back on Mother's Day. I didn't have my phone."


As I reached for my cell about 6 a.m this morning, it rang.


"We're back in the hospital," Katherine said, sounding exhausted. "It's definitely today."


"Oh, boy," I said. "Or girl."


"Don't rush, but come over," she said.


"Okay."


"Oh, and that breathing thing you were teaching me? They don't do that anymore. You're supposed to go hehehehe now."


"Oh," I said. Note to self: No more suggestions. Just be there.


Then I called Jane. "I win," I said.

Whack it! Ball

We thought it looked fun. It would be a sport we could share, we agreed. Plus, there were the benefits of exercise. So, we signed up to take a few lessons, swinging our racket ball rackets impatiently as we listened to Bob explain the finer points of the game. The truth is: put a racket in my hand and I just want to hit something, I don't want to listen. It was harder than it looked, and we spent hours striking out in every direction like twin windmills run amuck, trying to anticipate where the blasted ball would bounce next. 

"Try not to hit the ball over your heads to avoid shoulder injury," Bob instructed.


"Right!" we grunted, flailing wildly. We caromed off the walls. We collided. We fell to the hard wooden floor, limbs tangled, howling with laughter. 


We bought special sneakers: white with removable colored plastic chevrons. Red for Juan and green for me.


There is something about a racket sport that ignites an aggressive streak in me. I play to win and, as I suspected, so does Juan the Gardener. It began with the rules. 


"If I hit myself with the ball first, is that my point or yours?" Juan asked.


"Mine," I said.


"It wouldn't be a do-over?"


"No."


If we couldn't agree, we went to the front desk like two children to have a grown-up decide. One of us might say, "Ah ha!" if she were right. We limped from the court after an hour's combat, gingerly kneading our shoulders, our necks torqued.


"Isn't racket ball kind of hard on the body?" concerned friends questioned.


"Nah!" we said.


Once, one of us hit the other deliberately.


"That's it! I think we have to break up," I said dramatically.


"No, we don't!  I'm sorry. I just lost it. It can be your point."


I didn't heed Bob's warning about hitting the ball low, because smashing an overhead with all my strength felt so delicious, so within a few weeks I couldn't lift my right arm above my shoulder. Massage didn't help, but two months of bi-weekly physical therapy did. 


Now, seven months later, we're back at it. We've gotten better. We play the angles; we vary our serves. Juan has a sneaky serve that glides along the wall and slides down, rendering a return impossible. When he uses it, I want to bash something. We wear plastic goggles for protection, which proved to be a good thing since recently the ball hit me dead on between the eyes, leaving a red indentation. Yesterday in the midst of a skirmish, a loud thunk! sounded behind me. I made the shot first, then spun around. Juan was prostrate on the floor.


"What happened?" I asked, trying hard not to grin until I had assessed the damage.


"I hit my head on the wall and bounced off," Juan explained.


"Are you okay?" I asked. I rubbed his poor sweaty head and offered him a hand up.


"I'm fine," he panted. "Did you get it?"


"Yeah, I did." 


We quit at two games each, but I've been wondering: is this a game for two Buddhists who believe in practicing basic goodness and non-aggression?


Last night after showers and quesadillas, we sat together on the couch and watched baseball. Juan held the clicker.


"If you rub my shoulder, we can watch the Yankees," he said. "If you don't, we watch the Red Sox."


Is there a grown-up in the house?

Keeping my Mouth Shut (Mostly)

I try to keep my mouth shut - really, I do. But there are just certain subjects, like using pesticides on one's lawn, where I just can't help myself.


"You're what?" I asked someone in my family who owns a dog named Quincy and is about to produce the Baby of the Century.


"Mom, our lawn is dead."


"Okay," I said, with that extra little inflection I sometimes use when it really isn't okay. Then I got off the phone.


The next morning I sent an email: 


Hi Sweetie,
I've been worrying about you using pesticide on your lawn. I really wouldn't, not with Quincy and the new baby. They say to keep off it for 24 hours, but the lasting effects are extremely toxic. What's a little crab grass? Please consider using something organic or just leaving it be. It's just grass, and the risks of pesticides are proven to be hazardous.
xxMom


"Oy veh," my daughter's response began. "Relax. It's not just a little crab grass - it's all brown and dead and looks terrible. I'll look into using lemon juice and vinegar as an alternative..."


I used to blurt things out. I just had to. I believed that keeping things to myself could quite possibly cause cancer. I also used to fire poison darts of emails and then sit back, fingers poised above the keyboard ready to do battle. Eventually I realized that emails sent in anger had far reaching consequences. First, they were preserved in writing and could be referred back to or forwarded on to members of one's family, which made small, interpersonal dramas much worse. There were those initial rapid pulse, heart thumping feelings of self-righteous indignation, but they evaporated leaving me deflated, vaguely guilty, and embarrassed. Ugh.


"You need to practice restraint of pen and tongue," a wise friend suggested. "Give it the three-day rule," she advised. "You can write it all out, but don't hit send." After several dozen false starts, this strategy worked. By the third day, I usually no longer cared; or, if I did feel strongly about a particular situation, I had time to fashion a thoughtful missive.


Back to my daughter. We were discussing the actual birth, who would be where, who would NOT (sigh) be in the delivery room, and I casually inquired would she be attending lamaze classes.


"No," she said. "I don't have time, and besides I know how to breathe."