Inner View

I've been unemployed for what, 3 months now?  I still have dreams that I'm working at my old job -- like somehow I just forgot that I quit and I show up at work and everyone shrugs their shoulders and I find a computer and I start working. Of course in all things dreamy, and nothing makes sense and my "job" consists of smoothing used coffee filters onto a bulletin board or something. I wake up confused trying to convince myself that no, I really don't have a job anymore. 

I've been continuously employed for more than half my life, I started my first 'real job' at age 14 -- RAKS Building Supply, I'm looking at you.  And it's weird for me not to work, I almost wish there was a time clock in my kitchen so I could log my mommy hours and make sure that the government was pulling out their fair share of taxes from my non-existent wages.  I'd stuff the paystub of zeros into a junk drawer and forget about it, but it would be soothing just to know I existed. 

That said, I just applied for a part-time-work-from-home-writerish kinda gig (I know how that sounds, but trust me the company is legit) -- and I have an interview on Monday! I'm excited but it's been YEARS since I've had a job interview so I'm trying to psych myself up for a good interview. 

That said, I'd interviewed so many applicants at my previous jobs (both office and retail) that I almost lost faith in humanity and I feel like I have a good grasp at least on how NOT to blow an interview.  Here are some of the more interesting tidbits from interviews past:

ME: Can you describe the outfit you are wearing to me as if you were selling it to a customer? 

CANDIDATE: Well, uh, I'm wearing a red shirt. Because, I uh, like colors?

ME: Can you tell me about the most difficult situation you've ever had with a co-worker and how you handled it?

CANDIDATE: This one girl at my old job kept mad-dogging me and I went up to her and told her to knock it off because I don't take shit from nobody. 

ME: What is your biggest strength? 

CANDIDATE: I get along really well with minorities.

ME: What kinds of decisions are the hardest for you to make?

CANDIDATE: Can I come back to that one?  LATER:  The hardest decision for me to make is what to wear every day. 

And I could go on, and on. These aren't even the worst -- the worst are the people who cannot answer a question if their life depended on it.   Just minute after minute of awkward silence trying to coach them into saying ANYTHING and when they do its a one or two word answer. At this point I would usually dismiss them or start awkwardly rambling into my own life story because I felt obligated to hold interviews for at least 20 minutes.    I don't understand why people are so bad at interviewing, some people say that it's a "skill" but I feel like it doesn't take a lot of skill to not sound like a total idiot. Do you want the job or not? If  you do then act like it. It's so frustrating that people seem to think they deserve a job simply because they managed to show up to an interview.   No wonder our country has such a sky high unemployment rate -- would you hire any of the  above? 

Anyway, if my competition looks anything like the above, I've got this one in the bag.  Wish me luck! 

Mama glasses: a new perspective

So, since, I am now, like officially responsible for the well being of another human being, I have been forced to look back on some of my pre-child thoughts and actions and reconsider my past opinions, here are are some of the more prominent things that I would like to take back.

YOUR DOG IS NOT A CHILD
Oh man, I'm going to be in the dog house with some people on this one.  I get it, I've got three dogs and I'm about a pet away from having an Animal Hoarders episode of my own.  And I love my dogs, I really really do.  And there was a point that I thought that my dogs were my children and I loved them as much as any mother ever loved any child.

Wrong.

I get it, sometimes your dog will pee in the house and you have to clean it up, or sometimes you've gotta rush the dog to the vet and it's really stressful, or maybe your dog wakes you up in the middle of the night and you seem like you are making a huge sacrifice.

It's not, in any way, at all, ever, the same as having a child.  A human child is 100% lifetime commitment that requires more money and insanity than you will ever have the time to tally up.  You cannot leave a child in the backyard all night if you want to go to dinner, you cannot just fill a child's bowl up with dry food and leave it out for them to eat at their leisure. Even if you have had to pick up an unfair amount of puppy oopsies, it is nothing like waking up at 3 in the morning to your screaming child because they have managed to crap all the way up to their neck and the only possible solution is to bathe the child and decontaminate the entire nursery, and by the time you are finished it will be PLAY TIME in the kid's mind and before you know it you've pulled an all-nighter.

And I can promise you, this is just scratching the surface. Anytime I hear anyone call their dog a baby I cringe and have to keep myself from saying "I'm sorry, I didn't realize that you were permanently, physically scared and disfigured bringing that Pomeranian into the world."

BREASTFEEDING IS A BITCH
I knew that the second I got pregnant that I wanted to breastfeed my child. Because, I'm like, a dog lover, I had seen more than my fair share of puppy shows, where some golden retriever gives birth to like, 14 puppies and they immediately  meander their sleepy little faces up to the mama dog and drink to their hearts' content. It's natural and beautiful, and totally instinctual- if a dog can do it, I can too, yes? I secretly judged all women who gave their children formula as selfish and ignorant.

The truth is, it's SUPER HARD and absolutely nothing feels natural about the whole process. You and your newborn child are both total idiots when it comes to this, and you will likely spend two weeks screaming at each other trying to get it right.  Not only that, it HURTS. Plus, you know that post birth margarita you've been thinking about for 9 months? Forget about it. Anyone who has the audacity to say 'pump and dump' has no clue how hard it is to actually produce that milk, and for the love of Jesus, you DO NOT THROW THAT STUFF AWAY.

On top of all of this, everyone has a GD opinion on breastfeeding. From the people who think it's downright disgusting to the proud liberated women who whip a boobie out in the middle of REI to feed their three year old, it's a total hot button issue. I didn't feel like talking about it with anyone because it made me so uncomfortable knowing that the person was going to lean one way or another and either way, I was probably doing it wrong.

That said, the baby got his first tooth at 7 months and I happily celebrated by running to the store and picking up a tub of Enfamil and a 6-pack of beer.

NATURAL CHILDBIRTH IS FOR THE BIRDS
I was, absolutely, positively convinced that I was going to hypnotize myself into having a beautiful, natural childbirth. Women have been giving birth this way for thousands of years right? What's the big deal?

Thank god for modern medicine. I spent 6 hours of terrible unmedicated labor and I really couldn't figure out if I was alive or dead anymore. When I finally got the epidural right before my c-section it was the greatest relief of my entire life.

Really, what the hell was I thinking? There really is no reason to put yourself through that type of pain if you don't have to. And you don't 'owe it to your child' to give them a natural birth. The kid is not going to give a crap, trust me. You will spend the rest of your life laboring over that thing, so really, why start it off so painfully if you don't have to?

I think what really bothers me is the amount of guilt that is laid upon mothers who don't manage to go natural. I get that women are in a constant game of trying to prove that they are better than one another, but I don't think that a good mother is defined by whether or not she took pain meds to aid her in becoming one.  Yes people in the middle ages did it naturally, but the infant/mother mortality rate was significantly higher than it is now. We live in a modern world. Embrace it.

TODDLERS ARE NOT EVIL CREATURES
But they are really good at acting like it in public.  Before I had a kid of my own, I kinda hated children. Every time I saw them in public they seemed like dirty, demanding little demons set out to destroy the lives of their parents.

My kid is generally a pretty decent little guy. He's smiley and loving and causes me minimal grief.  You would never believe that if you saw him at the grocery store. He manages to lose half his clothing before I get inside and has this lovely little trick of 'pulling my shirt down' whenever I try to put him in the basket. Also, the florescent lighting in a grocery store has the amazing ability to illuminate every speck of dirt on his body. I'll look down at him and he looks like he's been playing in the mud all day. I swear I bathe my kid.  Talk about hell in a basket! I'm 89% convinced that they pump something into the air at the store to make kids act up.

So when you see a screaming, dirty, half dressed child in a grocery store, just remember that he might actually be an OK kid once you get him home.


Let's see what I have to say about teenagers in 14 years.

Holy Mother...

So, I might be crazy. I just willingly left a job that paid an English major a ridiculous amount of money so that I could become the unpaid CEO of PB&J. I was in a long-term, complicated relationship with corporate America, we had our ups and downs, but I think we parted amicably.

I have always firmly believed that you should put 30 years between you and your kid so that you have enough life experience or something.  Of course human biology is like, "f that shiz" and you end up pregnant in your twenties right as your career starts to take off. It's cool, whatever. I was not going to be 'one of those moms' who stayed home. I was going to work and raise my kid and that was the way it was. 

And then, once again, human biology was like, "f that shiz" and while my husband happened be out of town (for 10 freakin' days!)  and I came down with a serious case of bronchitis. I didn't want to take any time off from work because I wanted to save it unless my kid got sick (hello, priorities!), so instead it escalated to a situation where I infected my entire office with the plague and I had to leave a meeting because I was coughing so hard I almost passed out.  I went straight to the doctor, picked up some codeine-laced cough syrup and left my kid with my parents for the next two days while I stayed home in what was pretty much a narcotic induced coma. 

Aside from some trippy dreams in which I may or may not have seduced Matthew Mcconaughey, I had some serious revelations.  I was not happy where I was. My life was a disaster. I had zero time for my kid or my husband or my dogs and I was visiting Taco Bueno so often that the window guy knew it was me just by my order (vvegetarian black bean burrito, large Diet Coke). And my work was suffering.  I'm gonna tout my amazing work ethic here,  I pride myself on working my butt off. And I wasn't. I was giving half an effort to my job and even less of an effort to my family. To top it all off, I couldn't get along with ANYONE. And really what is the point of doing a whole bunch of things if you're not going to do a good job at any of them and everyone hates you (and the feeling is mutual).  I decided I'd rather fail at being a career woman than fail at being a mother and took the leap into stay-at-home motherhood. 

I've been at it a little over a month now, and I must say, I'm doing a bang-up job at this whole domestic house running thing, here are some of the amazing feats of motherhood I've accomplished thus far:

My first ever grease fire!  Because, you know, I am the next Julia Child, I decided to make my family a lovely pasta dinner.  This started by me warming up a pan with a little olive oil and then promptly forgetting what I was doing because my kid has a fascination with stove knobs and I had to remove him from the situation. When I came back to the task, I poured an entire can diced tomatoes and their juice into that pan and holy thermodynamics we had major combustion.  I started screaming "FIRE FIRE FIRE!!!" as I watched the flames leap as high as the ceiling, followed by "WHERE THE F IS MY BAKING SODA?!" My husband calmly walks in, looks at the blaze and says, "Eh, that'll burn out." He was right, it contained itself to the pan and that pasta sauce did turn out lovely, if I do say so myself. 

Finding fire extinguishers at Wal-Mart. Is there really any place on earth that is as terrible as Wal-Mart?  I think what makes it so bad is that, like death, Sam Walton's big box dream is inevitable. YOU WILL GO TO WAL-MART and YOU WILL SUFFER. This trip in particular started out with the bambino screaming his freakin' head off because he thinks that his 25+ pounds needs to be carried everywhere and to be put in a cart seat is a total insult. Of course everyone in that darn store looked at me like I'm torturing the child and I needed to think fast. I grabbed a JUMBO Push Pop off the shelf and give it to my darling dear and he instantly stopped screaming. I believe in positive reinforcement? Anyway, Push Pops are pretty much the world's greatest vessel for generating/collecting saliva, and combined with the size of the thing and the fact that my kid is composed of 98% drool, we were at turbo speed with this one.  The kid was quiet but covered in/leaving a trail of blue goo everywhere. Aside from being paranoid that I was going to get busted for shoplifting as we had not paid for that silencer, I could not find the darn fire extinguishers anywhere.  I went through every aisle of that store while my child munched on his unpaid merchandise, finding many many ways to start fires, but none to put them out. I would not give up. Plan B: ask an associate. OH SWEET JESUS TAKE ME NOW. I was directed to camping to automotive to hardware. Finally, taking a chance and heading to what was literally the farthest corner of the the store, beyond the tire department, I found those extinguishers. I picked up two because I didn't know if I'd ever be able to find them again and headed to the check out. The cashier grudgingly scanned the Push Pop with the hand scanner, I think we both knew it would be a disaster if we took it away from the kiddo, and the we got the hell out of there. Worst 2.5 hours of my life. Until the next week... 

Locking the kid in the car. I'm told this is a rite of passage and I think I've earned my mommy badge on this one. I was holding my keys in my teeth while buckling the kid into the car seat and I accidentally hit one of the buttons on the remote, and rewarded with a shrill beep. At this point I thought "Ooops! You almost pushed the panic button, better put those keys down." So I threw them on the front seat with my purse and phone, finished buckling in el boyo  and slammed his door shut. When I went to open my door, it wouldn't open, it was locked.  I had hit "lock" with my teeth.  I still had hope. Although I've used the lock function many times, I thought that maybe, this time, it didn't lock ALL the doors and tried in vain to open each door and tired the driver's side door a couple more times, just for good measure. No go.  I couldn't get into my house because my house keys were on the key ring that was sitting on the seat of my locked car. My husband had the spare key 30 miles away, and it's not like I could call him because my freakin' phone was in the GD car. At this point I went across the street and asked my neighbor if I could use her phone.  I haven't memorized a phone number since 1995, and the only one I knew by heart was my parents. And that is how, on the cusp of 30 years old, I had to have my daddy come rescue me (and his grandchild.) Luckily, my dad has worked with cars his entire life and had not one, but two ways of getting into the car which didn't involve my method of 'throwing a rock through the window.' Luke spent around 20 minutes locked in that car and I'm happy to say that only time he cried through the whole ordeal is when he saw his grandpa and mean ole mommy refused to let him get out and play. 

And you know what? I am CRAZY.  It would be much easier to stay in my air-conditioned cubicle, doing officey things, avoiding the risk of petty theft/child endangerment, but really, what's the fun in that?  

Doing it Family Style

I married a guy with five cousins.

If you're like me, you'd re-read that previous sentence a couple of times trying to find the typo. Five cousins. Total. There has to be something wrong with that sentence.

I've got 19 (first) cousins. On my mom's side. Add in the other 12 from my dad's side and we're up to 31.  And then 31 cousins plus their kids is 52 -- we're more than halfway to a hundred here. With my mom coming from a family of 10 kids and my dad coming from a family of 6 we've got a lot of aunts and uncles in there too. By the time I start adding in spouses, it's more math than my feeble English major brain can handle. The point is, my family is HUGE.

So yeah, five. Well, ok...

Needless to say, when I started introducing my husband to my family there was a bit of culture shock. He couldn't keep anyone straight, and he kept pairing the wrong kids with the wrong parents and I'd spend days after every family gathering trying to sort people out for him. "No, Erica is the one in grad school -- Maryanne is Diego's mom and Maria is my aunt, not my cousin."


One of the things that he absolutely could not grasp was the way my family told stories.  He was always perplexed by the fact that anytime anyone started telling him something, they were interrupted a few sentences into the conversation and the subject was abruptly changed, a new story was started. The cycle kept repeating itself and he would leave hearing the beginning of a lot of stories and the end of none of them.

This never occurred to me, and it never bothered me.  I never left a family gathering feeling like I didn't get a full story.

And finally, I figured it out.  Even though a story is started in one conversation it will be ended in another.  The trick is to to actively listen to all conversations going on at once and let the conclusions naturally come to you (in stereo).  By the time you leave you will have absorbed everything you need to know. If  you grew up  this way, you don't even realize you're doing it.

What an amazing way to communicate. Instead of conversations being complete and segmented, they overlap and re-overlap, and through it all the family is unified and our shared history is solidified. We share and laugh and relive our happiest moments with each other, time and time again.

It's one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen.

When I was a little girl we'd all go to my Grandpa's house every Sunday after mass (duh, we're Catholic, as indicated by our ability to be fruitful and multiply).  Those are some of my most treasured memories. The simple joy of being with the ones you love. I'd give up facebook forever if we could go back to that.

I'm not saying that having cousins in the single digits is a bad thing, but I do consider myself seriously blessed to be born into such an amazing (large) group of people. They've made me who I am and I can't imagine it any other way. Plus you can't go to Wal-Mart without seeing at least one of them.

And the husband, well, he gets it now. And sometimes I don't even have to explain everything after we leave.

Oh My God. This is what we have done.

First, let it be noted that I debated for quite some time about whether I should blog my birth experience. One, because it seems kinda cliché. Every woman on the planet who has given birth seems to have also written about it. Women who have never felt the urge to put two words together on paper and their only written communication consists primarily of phrases like “omg” and “lol” over text message will find the ability deep within themselves to blog out their birth experience. We all know I avoid clichés like the plague. Two, because birthing a child involves lady business. I have a deep-seated conservative, Catholic ideology that I will never be able to shake. Try as I might, sometimes I cannot help being embarrassed/ashamed/confused about the womanlyness that God has bestowed upon me. I DO NOT talk about my parts. Especially on the internet. Thanks Eve.

I quickly realized that as long as I am a mother, I will never completely avoid being a cliché. I have found that we mamas cannot stop behaving in some kind of predetermined pattern. Apparently this is called instinct and most women are born with it. I’m planning a trip very soon to JC Penny to try on some Mom Jeans. Also, once you give birth you realize that there is no discretion involving your lovely ladyness. Everyone and anyone is up there and you might as well get over it and save yourself a lot of grief.

So here it is, three and a half months after little Luke came into this world, I’ve finally wrapped my head around the fact that I am indeed a giver of life and here is the story of how he got here:

I think I was pregnant forever. There was a point when I couldn’t remember there ever being a time when I wasn’t pregnant. When I first went to see my midwife, she gave me a due date of January 15. My first ultrasound put my due date at January 27, but throughout my pregnancy my midwife maintained that she thought the baby would be born around the 15^th. Since she accurately guessed that the baby was a boy just by hearing her heartbeat, I chose to trust her majestic earthy years of experience over medical science. I adamantly told everyone that the baby was due on the 15^th of January, I was going to have a little Capricorn. After January 15^th came and went I woke up every morning thinking that that day would be the day only to sadly watch the minutes tick into midnight babyless. When January 27^th came and went I got outwardly impatient and started doing everything I could think of to urge the baby to come on out. By the way, sex does not work. This must be a myth that men came up with because they know that once the kid is here you will be off-limits for a good two months.

I REFUSED to carry the baby until February.

When February rolled around my midwife encouraged me to induce labor. Partially because the baby was looking BIG. I had one final ultrasound that estimated he was around nine pounds. Mostly, though, because I was looking big. I was not one of those cute, glamorous pregnant women. I had the distinct pleasure of being pregnant at the same time as the outrageously beautiful Penelope Cruz, and the paparazzi could not get enough of her looking like a stunning curvaceous mamacita flaunting her bump on the beach. I looked more like a gordita. I was so swollen that my face turned blue. I had neck rolls. It was disgusting. I had a very detailed birth plan and inducing labor was not part of it. I really wanted to have a drug free natural birth but I was so tired and I just wanted the kid out, plus the midwife assured me that I could go without pain meds, even if we induced, if that’s what I really wanted.

We decided to induce on February 3, which happened to be the coldest day of my entire life. This is not an exaggeration. It was so cold that the heater cracked the windshield on our family-friendly station wagon and the entire state suffered a natural gas shortage. I arrived at the hospital fully prepared for the journey at hand. I brought my birth plan printed in triplicate, with the finer points also reduced to 3x5 index cards, as well as an iPod loaded with soothing music for welcoming my son into the world and an entire bag full of supplies I had packed weeks ahead of time and deemed absolutely necessary.

I was adamantly opposed to using pitocin, the drug often used to induce labor so I agreed to use a drug called misoprostal, which is a drug normally used to treat ulcers, but somehow they figured out that if you stick it up there it makes the baby come. I would really like to know what led that experiment: “Hey what would happen if we stuck ulcer drugs up pregnant women’s vaginas?” I got my first dose of miso at around 11 am, and after hours and hours of walking around the hospital with no progress I was given another dose around 8 pm and I dozed off, trying to save my energy for the long night ahead. At around midnight I woke up and I was FINALLY having contractions around 4 minutes apart and I lost my mucus plug (yuck). Yes! I was in labor! The nurse came in and I told her what I’d discovered and she told me I wasn’t dilated enough to be in labor and that I needed another dose of miso. So, because apparently this nurse knows more about my body than I do, I let her go ahead with giving me another dose of the drug even though I felt like it really wasn’t necessary. She also readjusted my fetal monitor because they baby was moving away from it and they kept losing his signal. I practiced breathing and I was super proud of myself for getting through the contractions like a champ. They were painful, but not skull crushing painful. This wasn’t going to be so bad after all.

Around 3 am my water broke and I was even more excited. The baby was coming! The baby was coming! I called in the nurse who became concerned because the baby still kept moving around too much and she and the midwife on duty decided that they would need to put me on an internal fetal monitor. As they were setting this up, the contractions suddenly, without warning, got intensely, thereisnowayimgoingtolivethroughthis painful. My whole body felt like it was in a vice and my legs could not stop shaking. So this was labor. Holy fuck.

The internal monitor did not remedy the “baby is moving too much situation” and they determined that that his heartbeat was actually stopping – they weren’t just losing a signal, luckily it would quickly recover. So they put me on oxygen and started making my try different positions “to get the baby off the cord”. As I was on my hands and knees, trying to support my massive pregnancy weight on my shaking legs and not pass out from the pain, the baby’s heartbeat stopped completely and did not recover.

The situation quickly went from just a midwife and a nurse to what seemed like the entire hospital staff in the room. I don’t know how everyone got there, but there was a lot of running. I couldn’t keep track of faces or hear what anyone was saying. It was chaos. I was being poked by a seemingly endless series of needles and people kept shoving papers in my face for me to sign. The OBGYN seemed to appear out of thin air and told me that we were going to have to deliver the baby via c-section. For reasons I will never understand, possibly because of the blinding pain and confusion I was going through, or maybe just a genetic predisposition to stubbornness, I still thought there might be a way to salvage my carefully thought-out birth plan and I asked the doctor if I could have five minutes to think about it. The doc gave me probably the most serious look I have ever seen in my life and said “You can have five minutes to think about it, but I’m going to go prep the OR. You have less than 20 minutes before you lose this baby.”

This was when I just let go of everything. I knew that I had absolutely no control over the situation and whatever was going to happen was going to happen. The only thing I could think of doing was pray the Hail Mary over and over again while I was being wheeled to the OR and I decided not to say a word until the whole ordeal was over. I was convinced that my body had failed me and quiet was the only thing I knew for sure I was capable of.

I was given a massive epidural and I didn’t even have time to think about the giant needle being jammed up my spine because the drugs instantly calmed me into a painless oblivion I had not planned on needing. I started having all sorts of blissful thoughts and was only vaguely aware that I was about to become a mother. It was absolutely hilarious that the nurses forgot to shave me and had to go the razor from the nurses’ station. Apparently they have one razor for all the patients. It was delightful that they were missing a crucial legal document and there was a scuffle between the doctor and a nurse as to whether they could proceed with the surgery without it. (The doctor won and I signed the document later). I was vaguely aware that my body was being cut open and that the tools that the doctor was calling for were responsible for this they sounded sharp.

I became aware of the fact the radio was on and that Hotel California by The Eagles was being played and I this seemed like the perfect moment to break my vow of silence so I said, “I fucking hate The Eagles.” This was a great joke because I was quoting the The Big Lebowski and everybody loves that fine piece of cinema. However, nobody else thought it was funny as this was also the moment that my son stuck his little hand out and was then pulled from my body into this world. There were a lot of OH MY GODs from the operators and a small bundle was passed to a group of NICU nurses who began to work furiously over it. What the hell just happened?

Then a tiny cry filled the room and reality hit. I was a mother. I was shown a tiny little human, who was already asking for food via his trademark 'milk face' and I loved him forever. All of the waiting, planning and song picking, and I had just become a parent during the vocal styling of Don Henley. And it was the most amazing moment of my life.

I later learned that when they cut me open they discovered that not only did Lucas have the cord crisscrossed over his chest, but when he dropped into the birth canal he took his hand and some of the cord with him and had it stuck between his hand and his head. Hand in birth canal = bad. Cord in birth canal = bad. Both = very bad. Every time I would have a contraction this combination would constrict the cord and cut off the baby’s oxygen, and that is why he was in distress. We got him out just in time. We got very, very lucky.

Despite a scarily low initial APGAR score, Lucas turned out to be a healthy, hearty 8lb 2oz eating machine and doesn’t seem to have suffered any ill-effects from his dramatic entry into the world. He is also the most amazing thing to ever happen, ever and everything he does is unique and wonderful. He might be the only baby that was ever born ever as I am the first mother to ever be a mother ever.

His mama, with the aid of some healthy doses of Percocet has also recovered. Although she still cries every time she hears Hotel California. She’ll probably never get over that.

OH MY GOD. What have we done?

It was exactly a year ago that I found myself obsessively running 5 miles every morning and surviving off of about 500 calories a day trying to lose an inhuman amount of weight in a very short amount of time. I was also doing daily facials and exfoliating like a madwoman. I know, it sounds like the beginning of a Lifetime movie which involves some kind of dramatic family intervention and me ending up at resort-like rehab facility and through some serious soul searching I heroically overcome my demons. I wasn't crazy. I was just getting married. And I had to look perfect, and this was the most important thing in the entire world. Ever. I did, and it was.

Fast forward to 8 months of marital bliss: Memorial day weekend. The husband and I decided to go see the Symphony under the Stars because it's the the kind of thing young newlyweds do because they are young and in love. It was also SALUTE TO AMERICA night and what is more romantic than the 1812 Overture? (Side note: how come we associate that piece with patriotism? Wasn't it written for RUSSIA's independence?) Anyway, we had bought a terrible yet overpriced bottle of wine and I poured us each a glass and then promptly knocked the bottle of wine over into grass leaving me with a single Dixie cup of rancid grape juice, which was ok because all those cannons were giving me a headache anyway.

The next morning I woke up and I was HUNGOVER. I couldn't believe that I got that sick off of a single glass of wine -- but it was really bad wine so I figured it was the tannins or the sulfates or something. As the day wore on I drank a gallon of water and I still didn't feel any better. I tried to eat a turkey sandwich and it was the most disgusting thing I'd ever tasted. I felt like crap, but something else started nagging at the back of my mind: when exactly was my last period? I added up the weeks and I was late. My pill prescription had just expired and I hadn't had a chance to get to the Dr. yet - but we were using alternate methods of birth control and I knew that it takes your body some time get back on track so I tried to tell myself not to freak out over nothing. The chances of me being pregnant were one in a billion or some official statistic like that.

But I couldn't get the thought out of my head. The next day I had the husband drive me to Walgreens and I picked up a 3 pack of EPT pregnancy tests. He figured I was being my normal drama queen self but he knew if he didn't just let me prove it to myself that I wasn't pregnant I'd just spend the rest of the weekend making both of us miserable. When we got home he actually offered me a beer before I took the test.

Pregnancy test instructions are pretty simple. You pee on the stick and wait five minutes and then you know your future. So I took the test and within seconds a blue plus sign appeared. I figured I'd done something wrong -- because I was getting a result before the recommended wait time. I threw that test out and took another one -- this time I turned it over and waited the requisite five minutes before I looked at the results. Another plus sign. At this point I re-read the entire box, the directions in English and in Spanish and then looked up the directions again online for good measure because I knew I had to be reading the test wrong. They all confirmed that plus sign = pregnant. So I then I turned the test upside down, looked at it from a 75 degree angle and 10 feet back - still a plus sign. I then confirmed with my husband that I did indeed know what a plus sign looked like because I've never been that good at math. Things were getting strange. The next Tuesday before I went to work I took another test -- this one came up with a totally blank result even half an hour later. So I knew for sure I did something wrong -- the logical conclusion was that I just didn't know how to take a pregnancy test. When I got home from work that night I looked at that test, and it had somehow developed a plus sign too. Hmm...

It was time to go to the Dr. because something must be wrong. I knew she was just going to tell me that my hormones were out of whack because I'd just gone off the pill and to stop freaking out. Instead she told me I was 8 weeks pregnant. I wasn't just pregnant, I was pretty darn pregnant. That night I went home and read everything on the entire Internet about pregnancy. Turns out I had pretty much every single pregnancy symptom in recorded history . I'd just been too oblivious to figure it out on my own.

My first reaction was fear. I had not been taking care of myself for the past 8 weeks and I was terrified that I'd hurt my baby somehow. I'd been drinking and smoking a little and god knows what kind of junk I'd been eating. Plus, the internets are particularly cruel to pregnant women - there are 5 million super rare things that can happen to a developing baby that WebMd will tell you for sure are all happening. Thankfully an early ultrasound and an understanding midwife confirmed that the baby was healthy and developing on track.

My second reaction was fear. My husband and I were not equipped to have a baby. He had just finished up his first year of grad school and I was just getting started with my career. We had a carefree existence of randomly taking off on the weekends and drinking for 3 days straight in Vegas. Don't get me wrong, we wanted kids, just later. I had always said that I wanted to be at least 30 years older than my first child -- and we were ahead of schedule. Hell, we didn't have the kind of car you could put a child in.

However, my most intense reaction was pure love. I was instantly and forever attached to this tiny being developing inside of me. I knew that whatever it was I used to think my future was had been all wrong. This was the most right, most incredible thing that had ever happened to me. I instantly devoted my life to giving this child the best life possible. I find myself crying daily at the unfathomable miracle that a baby is -- how so many things in the world had to come together at just the perfect moment to create this little life. And although I knew that I loved my husband from the moment I first saw him, I began to love him on an entirely different level once I found out he was going to be the father of my child. It's like ultralove or something . All I know is that I used to think I knew what love was, and now I know I had no idea.

I guess I've become a cliche. And I don't care.

So now as I approach my first wedding anniversary I'm fatter than I've ever been in my life. I couldn't run five miles even if my feet didn't ache in every pair of shoes I own and I have skin like a thirteen-year-old. And it is the most perfect thing. Ever.

Not Everybody is Catholic

And other religious lessons learned in small-town New Mexico

When Mike and I decided to get married we were faced with quite the conundrum: My parents said that their only request was that we get married in the Catholic Church. This "tiny request" presented us with quite the conundrum, although Mike was raised Catholic he was not confirmed. Further, Mike and I were already living together and couldn't even consider ourselves Christmas and Easter Catholics, big no-nos that would require major reconciliation in most churches before we'd be allowed to walk down the aisle. We looked around at churches and finally found a liberal church that would let us get hitched with minimal adherence to Vatican doctrine. I was delighted with our new church's lack of pews and what can only be described as "Happy Dancing Jesus" in place of the crucified Christ that adorns most Catholic churches.

Despite the church's lack of conventional furniture I was still not prepared for our first and only meeting with the Priest. We walked into his office and the first things I noticed were his lack of a collar, the giant bottle of gin and a giant, friendly chocolate lab. He started off the conversation by asking if I was on birth control and I freaked because I was afraid if I told the truth we'd be kicked out right then and there. Imagine my surprise when he encouraged me to remain on the pill until I was ready to have children, and further explained that this wasn't the 50's when we knew nothing about child psychology and we weren't "raising a farm" so I should not feel obligated to have tons and tons of children. My jaw nearly hit the ground when he said that we should encourage said children to explore their sexuality and to never make them feel ashamed for masturbating. At this point I gave a quick look at the priest's pupils because I was sure he was on acid. After I confirmed his sobriety and got over the sheer embarrassment of having such a conversation with a priest I realized that even not all Catholics are the same and started thinking other times when I realized that not everyone believed exactly what I believed.

Lutherans make the best snacks

The first time I ever went to a Lutheran church was when I was 4 or 5 years old and my mom sent me to a vacation bible school at a church a few blocks from our house. I must have been a particularly annoying child that summer for my mom to hand me over to the Lutherans, but nonetheless, I LOVED that place. Particularly because every time we passed the church, which was often because you couldn't leave our neighborhood without passing it, I saw my first true crush: the Holy Grail of swing sets. It was big, shiny and had a spectacularly amazing looking slide. This is the kind of thing that can stir up incomprehensible longing in a young girl. I must have told my parents that we should join that church at least 10 times a week. After what seemed like years of yearning the bible school finally gave me my chance to swing to my heart's content, teeter-totter like an Olympian and scorch my baby thighs on the slick metal of that glorious, glorious slide heated to a perfect 200 degrees in the July sun. The church service itself seemed pretty familiar: I had to sit still, be quiet and listen to some old guy talk endlessly about stuff I didn't understand. The upside was they gave me my very own miniature bible (which I couldn't read but didn't have to share with my brother and sister -- even though I'm sure Jesus would've appreciated it) and introduced me to one of the greatest culinary delights known to man: the cupcake in an ice cream cone. This little confection took the two most incredible known kid foods and made them into one harmonious child-size delight covered in gobs and gobs of icing. I was in heaven -- however, I must have liked the Lutheran vacation bible school a little too much because for some unknown reason I was taken out halfway through the week never to go back again.

More recently I attended a Lutheran service for passing of a dear friend's father and found myself thinking many of the same things: It was a lot like the Catholic church (they even do the Apostle's creed!) except there was more singing, less standing up and sitting down and once again the superb snacks. I ate something that can only be described as chocolate, marshmallow ecstasy as well as about 20 different types of miniature sandwiches.

Oh, and as life would have it, I now pass the old Lutheran church of my youth on my daily commute to the cube farm and that old longing creeps back up. Over the years they've upgraded to a FULL PLAYGROUND. It looks so awesome that most days I am tempted to call in sick and swing all day long.

Jews are Catholic because Jesus was Jewish, right?

In the first grade my best friend, Bristol, was the coolest person I'd ever met. She was smart, fashionable, sassy, and always smelled really, really good. She was also Jewish and this was totally awesome in my six-year-old mind because Jesus was Jewish and most of the songs I knew at the time were either about Jesus or jump roping. Needless to say, I wanted to be just like Bristol. I didn't understand why my family didn't own a menorah (probably because I was a mini-pyromaniac, but that's another post) and I wanted to go to Hebrew school rather than catechism. I even went so far as to select the one and only RIF book specifically laid out for the two Jewish kids in school (Bristol and her brother) at one of the bi-yearly book giveaways. It was a bright shiny Hanukkah activity book and had stickers and wicked cool pictures of colorful soldiers. I actually remember Bristol being seriously peeved at me for choosing it because for whatever reason I was allowed first pick of books that day and she really wanted it -- but I didn't care it was the coolest book in the world and it was MINE. I think that book lasted about 1 week in our house until it some how disappeared in the way things that parents don't exactly approve of do.

The hardest thing for me understand at that time was why I couldn't be both Catholic and Jewish. Maybe it's because a lot of the stories used to teach young children about the Bible are from the Old Testament. Think about it: Noah's Ark = practically every nursery's decor in America. I seriously felt like they were one in the same and didn't understand why the adults had to constantly point out that they were different. We were different: Bristol was one and I was the other. The older I get the more I understand that these kinds of definitions have caused 90% of the wars in the world. Stupid adults.

The Rapture is not the same as a raptor, but almost.

In high school, still believing that essentially everyone believed in same thing that I did, I started to get involved with the Born Again Christian movement that was growing mighty popular at that time. The Left Behind series could be found at any local Wal-Mart end cap, Mega-Churches were the new Club 54 and anyone who was anyone had a deluxe personalized bible cover. I know it's hard to believe, but in high school I was determined to do exactly what everyone else was doing, so I tagged along with my to the charismatic services and pizza buffet Bible studies with glee.

The thing about these kids is that the kept talking about THE RAPTURE (which I'm pretty sure always appears in all caps). I had no idea what the fuck they were talking about. Let's be clear here, the Catholics have more books in their Bible, not less, so we definitely have the Book of Revelations. We just don't take it that seriously. I once asked a priest about it and he said something like "Eh, we kinda take the Book of Revelations with a grain of salt -- it was written long after the other books of the Bible and we don't know if those guys really knew what they were talking about. But it's a good story."

It scared the shit out of me. Of course I never actually took the intuitive to read it, but my friends were more than happy give my all the gritty details. There were horsemen and Prophets and some kind of global speaker system. You were guaranteed to either to get vaporized or your have head chopped off. And most of all JESUS HATED CATHOLICS. Believing in Mary or Saint Anthony was pretty much the Mark of the Beast itself -- I was destined for hell.

Still, even though many of my Catholic friends were more than happy to give up Communion wafers for Vanilla Wafers, I was not so sure. Instead I created some kind of religious hybrid -- I was determined to reconcile both religions within myself and cover all my bases. I threw my hands up and sang Christian Rock and went home and prayed the Rosary. I went to two youth groups a week and spent copious amounts of time defending each side to the other. I was intensely religious and I probably freaked a lot of people out. I wore a gold necklace that said "Worth Waiting For" and I once spent 45 minutes in drama class explaining how the greatest wedding gift I could give to my husband was my virginity (ha ha).

And Now? Where will I spend eternity?

Eventually just became too much or maybe I just went to college, but either way I pretty much gave up on all of it. I stopped listening to everyone and just listened to myself. I haven't been excommunicated but I guess I'm still technically a Catholic. I can't believe in a God who sends people to hell based simply on semantics and I don't understand why you'd ever start a war over God because I think that would seriously annoy him. I call God him because there isn't a respectful genderless pronoun but I don't think he really cares. I guess I'm just like every other cliche 20-something bleeding heart out there and I really don't know if you go anywhere after you die but I think you shouldn't live your life any less because you're afraid of the answer. I'm just trying be a good person and that should get me points with someone, somewhere. :) OH MAN, I couldn't resist ending this with an emoticon!