Power Pose

I'm Parental Leave right now, but due to the nature of my business (and, uh, my personality) I have a really hard time staying completely Hands Off.  One of the ways I am keeping a toe in the game (who... who is writing these metaphors?) is by staying involved with my networking group (this is aided by the fact that I am allowed- nay, encouraged- to bring the Youngest Spawn along).  Well this past week we had a fun little "challenge" during our meeting, in which we were to swap 60-second "elevator pitches" with one of our peers.  We had about two weeks to prepare, and I was pretty excited to do my Bit.  So excited, in fact, that I volunteered to go first, and my attempts at humor were a great hit (or else my friends have gotten really good at making Pity Laughter sound genuine).

The next person went, and then the next, and we're all cracking up at the impersonations and different twists on the familiar presentations, and it's great good fun.

And then we got around the table to the gentleman who had taken on the role of Jenny O.

He stood up as he normally does but then- then a giant grin split his face as his chin went up, his chest went out, his legs took a dynamic stance and he slammed his fists onto his hips, proclaiming loudly "I'm Jenny Owens!" and I about died laughing (as did the rest of the room).

Try not to judge me too harshly, Gentle Readers who know me in Real Life, when I tell you that until that moment I was actually unaware of the percentage of my life spent in various Power Poses.  I've been to my fair share of Corporate Rah Rah Events where they talk about the importance of Power Poses to confidence, and encourage you to get up and get into one, and I've always complied and thought, "Yes, it would be good to do this more often," without realizing that... uh... I do.  But as soon as he started his impression of me something clicked in my brain and I realized, Oh my gosh I do do that!  Later on one of the others in the room laughed and informed me, "Basically you're Wonder Woman at all times!"

I think I can live with that.

Leisurely Thunderbolt: Another Birthing Story

August 18th, 2019

It's 0330, and I'm awake.

Not because of contractions, or anything like that- it's nearly two weeks to my due date, and I haven't had much in the way of Braxton-Hicks this time around.  No, no, I'm awake for your standard old middle-of-the-night-pregnancy-pee-break.

I've gotten to the point where I can more or less take care of things in a sort of half-slumber (it's great practice for when the Spawn actually comes along and needs feeding and such), but when I get back into bed I pause- does that feel... wet?  The question wakes me all the way up, and I pop back into the bathroom.

Oh.  Well would you look at that- I've lost my mucus plug!  Huh.  Didn't have that experience with TLG.  Well, no worries- mucus plugs can come out weeks before the baby.  I mean, I saw my doctor on Friday, and he seemed pretty sure there wouldn't be any action this weekend, so I clean things up and head back to bed (for real this time) worry-free.

It's Sunday, but Nathan is only playing one service this week, so I get to sleep in a bit, which means I don't get up until closer to 0800 than 0700.  Heavenly!  But then, around 0830, I spring a leak.

Huh, I think.  I... I think my water's broken?  But it's hard to tell, because it's not a gush- it's just a trickle.  And really even that trickle is hard to pin down, since I'm wearing a liner.  But eventually I do confirm it for my Self (by walking around sans pants for a while, whee!), and so I let Nathan in on The Situation.  "It's possible I'm going to need you to stay home from church," I say mildly.  Mildly, because I still haven't had even a twinge of a hint of a contraction.

Nathan looks a touch skeptical, and I can't blame him.  "Yeah?" he asks

"Well..." I hedge, "The internet says I ought to call my doctor and see what they want me to do, so we'll go with that.  You can probably head to the service- if they want me to come in I'm perfectly capable of driving myself since, you know... no pain."

"Cool," says Nathan.  "Keep me posted."

I call the doctor's office, and they tell me that they'd really like me to come in within 3-6 hours of my water breaking, regardless of whether or not I have any contractions.  The doc explains that studies have shown once you go past a certain amount of time with ruptured membranes but no contractions, the chance for C-section starts to go up, and they'd rather I not have to have a C-section.  Turns out I'd rather not that, myself, so although I grumble about induction, I tell Nathan that we'll be heading to the Birthing Center sometime after noon.

Then I call my Mom to tell her what's happening, and she just starts laughing.  See today, August 18th, is my Oma's birthday, and my Opa has been saying for nearly eight months that this baby will be born on the 18th.  I kept telling him, "No, no, that's like two weeks early... maybe the 22nd but certainly not before!"

"You tell him this is all his fault!" I growl.  But it's a loving growl.

It's a little before 1pm when we pack TLG into the car and head to BurgerVille to grab some on-the-go lunch (this isn't my first rodeo; I know they won't let me eat once things Get Started, and I also know it takes a hell of a lot of energy to birth a baby, so I'm Fueling Up, damn it).  We waltz into the Birthing Center around 1:30pm, and I am still 100% Contraction Free.

Well, it turns out that when you show up to the BC not in the throes of Hard Labor there's a lot of  testing and paperwork do be done before they'll take you to your birthing room.  I get it completed while Nathan manages to keep TLG from braining himself on hospital equipment more than, like, twice...

Eventually we make our way down to my room (I get to walk without assistance!  So novel!) where I change into a gown and they start my pitocin drip at the lowest possible setting.  It's about 3:20pm, and things are very boring, especially for a three-year-old, so I soon take pity on Nathan and TLG, and send them home.  As for me?  I work on some embroidery.  Yes, embroidery.  That's how not-having-contractions I am.

My contractions finally show up around 4:20 (after they've upped the pitocin a smidge), and for all that Common Knowledge is that "oh pitocin contractions are so much worse than natural contractions!" I am here to tell you that statement, in my personal experience, is some grade A bullshit.  They feel exactly the same level of excruciating, so I guess I'm glad I'm not one-upping the worst pain in my life?

Mom shows up not long thereafter.  This is a bit of a coup for her, having completely missed the entirety of my labor with TLG, despite flying in over a week early (her plane was literally landing as he was being born).  She and the nurse sit with me through a couple contractions, and then the nurse asks if I'm ready for my epidural.  At first I'm ready to refuse, to wait a bit longer, but then I think, "...but why tho?"  For real.  Why in heaven's name should I continue to be in pain like this?  I think back to them trying to give me an epidural through my continuous contractions.  Nope.  Far better to get it now, while there are still breaks.

It's about 6:20 when the anesthesiologist comes in to give me my epidural, and immediately I can tell he has a much better bedside manner than The Other Guy.  As a result (and possibly because I'm not forced to hold still through contractions) the process is smooth and as painless as possible (although we still have to do the roll-to-the-the-side trick).  It takes effect and the doc checks on me- I'm 100% effaced, but only 4cm dilated, so she decides I'm still a ways out, and I send Mom home to relieve Nathan on TLG duty.

As I lay there alone, calmly watching my contractions on a monitor, and listening to Little Brother's heartbeat, I muse to myself what a different experience this is from the last time, when I was pushing as soon as the epidural took effect.  The chance to just sort of... chill during labor is... a bit surreal.  But nice!

The doc checks on me again around 8:40, and declares me 7cm and fully effaced, but the baby is still stubbornly at a -1 station, which leads to her saying, "I'll come check on you in about two hours if there's been no action."

The nurses keep telling me that I should let them know if I feel an increase in pressure, and a while later I don't feel an increase, per se, but I feel a definite shifting, away from my rectum and towards my bladder.  When I mention this they hook up a catheter to empty my bladder, and that's that.  Nothing to see here, move along.  They ask me again about any increase in pressure, and I say, "I mean, I feel moderate pressure, but nothing like what I'm feeling during the actual contractions."  

And then... the quality of the pressure changes again (still not increasing, just feeling different) and I'm getting awful heartburn before each contraction, which strikes me as super weird, but I do the sensible thing and call in a nurse so I can request some heart burn relief.  And then for some reason I cannot quit understand, I reach down under the covers to feel around, and it seems to me that my labia are, like, unusually distended, and in fact it sure does feel a hell of a lot like what it felt like when they asked if I wanted to feel TLG's crowning head.

I say tentatively to the nurse, "Um, I think maybe the pressure is increasing?" even tho' it isn't- I just want her to check me, and don't want to look like an idiot if I'm wrong in my suspicions.  She glances at the monitor and sees that the baby's heartbeat has disappeared, so she goes to move the monitor- and can't find him at all.  Then she lifts up the blankets at the foot of the bed, lets out a shocked gasp along the lines of, "His head is out!", and slams a button on the wall.

Suddenly there are four or five very serious, fast-moving, efficient people in the room, swarming around me, and one of them says, "This is happening right now!" and by the time Nathan has made it the eight feet from the couch to my bed, the baby has been born!

And then the doctor walks in, looking very shocked at the situation at hand.* 

But my eyes are all for my new son, who is a dramatically darker purple than his brother was, and then they're toweling him off and putting him on my chest and he's red as a red, red rose, and softer than a moth's wing, and I coo and call him my Sweet Velvety Thing.  Later I will take note of his lovely dark hair, so like his father's, and his adorably cleft chin, so like mine, but for now all I can do is love him unreservedly.

*(Nathan later jokes that we should get a discount since we didn't have an MD do the delivery.)

6 Weeks

Yesterday marked six weeks since I gave birth, and I cannot help but acknowledge that milestone with a profound sense of gratefulness that I do not have to go back to work today.

I remember hitting this point when TLG was small (back when he was still Neeps), and thinking, "How on earth could I be expected to leave him, when he's still so small and helpless?"  Now, Little Brother is much less small than TLG was at this age (like, shockingly less small, who is feeding this child?), but still... how could I be expected to leave him?  And yet that's exactly what my Mom (and countless other mothers) had/have to do.  And it sucks.  So I just really want to appreciate the fact that I have this freedom to keep my career on track and also spend the first few months of my child's life extra-bonding with him.

The Lady and the Milktiger

Once upon a time there was a Young Lady- twenty years young, to be exact- who was, for the first time in her life, going to live alone.  She was an introvert, so this wasn't as daunting as it might have been, and anyway several of her best friends were living in the apartments across the hallway and directly beneath her- but still, it was going to be odd, to come home to an empty apartment every day, and so she decided to get a cat.

She went to the animal shelter with her grandfather, and when they got there a small, pale orange kitten yowled at them, and reached out and popped the Young Lady's grandfather on the head: they took to one another immediately.  The Young Lady, however, diligently walked through the entire shelter and saw all the available cats and kittens, before coming back to the noisy one, who was still "talking" loudly to anyone who would listen.

It would be nice to have someone answer when I say hello, thought the Young Lady, and so she adopted the kitten, whom she dubbed "Milktiger Kink" for his stunted, kinked tail, and the fact that his markings made him look like nothing so much as a tiger cub who had been dipped in milk.

She called him Kink for short, and brought him home to the little one-bedroom apartment, where he did, indeed, fill it with noise.

Kink, as it turned out, was a bit of a hellspawn.  An evil, demonic hellspawn that gave the Young Lady (and others) a number of scars over the course of his kitten-and-young-adulthood.  But the Young Lady had claimed responsibility for his life, and that meant sticking with him, no matter how bloodthirsty and vicious he could be.

Fortunately for the Young Lady, Kink finally mellowed out around age seven.  How much this had to do with her moving him 3000 miles cross-country so she could get married, the world may never know.  But the fact remained that Kink eventually settled down into a perfectly reasonable, non-attack-cat, who shared his human with first a husband, then a second cat, then two rats, a dog, and eventually two small humans who could be a little hazy on the concept of "gentle"- and not a one of them was ever so much as bloodied.

And then one day, about eighteen years after he'd come into her life, the Lady noticed that Kink seemed to be... going blind.

And she knew that the Downward Spiral was beginning.

Or, rather, that it was Accelerating- after all, it had been nearly a year since they'd had to start giving him fluids, and changed his diet to support his kidneys.

So the Lady took Kink in for his annual check up, and the doctor confirmed what she'd feared: he had gone completely blind, his blood pressure was high, and his kidneys were failing.

There were things that could be done to extend his life, the doctor said- but the Lady chose not to do them.  Instead the Lady chose to bring Kink home so he could have a few final days of cheese and tuna and goodbyes to family and old friends.  And then, two weeks later, she took him back to the doctor for his Final Visit.

Because the Lady had claimed responsibility for his life, and that meant sticking with him, no matter how painful.

Good With People

It's been way too long since I put any fiction up, so I thought I'd share this little bit I wrote back in May.  It was a story seed that arose from a discussion about the sorts of people you'd want on your Team in case of Zombie Apocalypse (my Special Forces brother is 100% my Team Leader, so I'll be just fine), and after listing a variety of specializations (hunter, gardener, spinner, carpenter, etc), I was feeling like I'd more or less be dead weight.  The only thing I might have going for me is, in the immortal words of Martin Blank, "a certain... moral flexibility".  Which immediately got my writer's brain a'spinnin' about how White Collar Peeps might survive the Apocalypse, and I sat down and pounded out the following.  And then left it there, because I didn't actually have an idea for a narrative, just the characters for what would essentially be a glorified fanfiction of myself (in which my stand-in is way more bad ass than me, and those inspired by others in my life are slightly less so, so as to make more room for my stand-in's bad-assery).  I recently had a conversation that kicked off a tentative idea for what the point of the story might be (hence this was back on my mind again) so we'll see.  I'd like to do NaNo again this year, all 50k words since I'm on Parental Leave, so maybe I'll use that time to dive deep on this one...

Anyway, enjoy this unearthed noodling, and hopefully there will be more fiction in the near future!

***

The Apocalypse happened about fifteen years ago, while my mother was pregnant with me.  I don’t remember life Before, and my brother- four years older than me- doesn’t really, although occasionally he’ll surprise me by having a personal familiarity with something like “milkshake”.

We don’t live “near” anyone.  No one does, these days. Well, some people do, people trying to rebuild the Cities, but Daddy says they’re short-memoried idiots.  But there’s about a handful of us families that look in on one another, none closer than about five miles, and we all get together about once a month for trading and courting and that kind of thing.  Mama says they’ve all been carefully vetted, they’re all the “right” kind of people, by which she means sensible folk. My brother says dryly that the Apocalypse did a pretty good job vetting our species in general, but talk like that always makes Mama angry.

“There were a lot of good people who died, a lot of smart people who just got unlucky,” she’ll say.  “Not to mention the smart people who got lucky enough to survive, but were a hell of a lot worse for us than the dumb ones who died.”

Daddy says we were smart, and that’s why we made it through the Bad Years.  Mama says we were smart, but also lucky.  “Being smart just lets you take advantage of good luck when it comes along,” she says.  “And good luck comes more often to those who don’t count on it.”

“Smart, and lucky, and ruthless,” Daddy will say, and kiss Mama.  Mama says nothing. I know she considers being ruthless part of being smart.  And I know she considers the biggest piece of luck having been married to Daddy.  Daddy is the one who knew how to survive in a world suddenly stripped of modern technology.  Sure, it was theoretical knowledge, knowledge he’d gleaned from a passionate interest in history, but between the two of them they turned theory into practice, and even refined it in places.  And Daddy’s the surer shot when it comes to hunting anything on the move. Mama has said multiple times that we might have survived without him, but we never would have been so comfortable.  Daddy always says we’d have done just fine.

“There’s no stopping your mother, boys,” he’ll say.  “Once she puts her mind to a thing, it gets done.”

Daddy used to work with computers, before the Apocalypse.  People would have problems with their computers, and he’d use his to fix them.  He’s explained it to us a couple of times, but it’s sort of hard to understand. And Daddy says there’s really not much point in trying to understand, because we’re not likely to get computers back on any sort of a widespread scale anytime soon, and even if we did, they’ll be different.

Mama was something called a financial planner, which she says was even more worthless than what Daddy did.  “I made a lot of money helping people prepare for retirement,” she says. “But when the Apocalypse made money obsolete, it became apparent that all I really did was tell stories.”

Mama is good at telling stories, tho’, and she’s a super-good planner, so I’m sure she was good at her job, even if there’s no such thing as “retirement” anymore.

Mama had a passing interest in history, but not like Daddy.  She always liked art and literature and philosophy best, which she says are all very important things to individuals and societies, but not very good for building shelter or putting food in our bellies.  She’s much better with people than Daddy is, tho’. Better at charming them, better at bargaining with them.

Better at killing them, when it needs to be done.

It's Hard

So remember when I was all, "Why did I think having a newborn was 'boring torture'?  This is fine!"

...I remember now.

See, once that initial New Baby Adrenaline is past (ie, once you've had 2+ weeks of no more than 2 hours of sleep at a whack) it starts to get really, really hard.  I'm in that place right now.

It helps that I know it will pass- in fact I know it will pass in just another month or so, and while it will still be hard, it will be a different kind of hard, one considerably more well-rested (mostly).  And it helps that when I posted about wanting sleep more than anything, several friends reached out just to say, "You've got this."  And it helps when my husband reminds me that he is perfectly capable of cleaning the kitchen himself, and to take a freaking nap already.

The Golden Angel and the Dark

I am now the mother of two boys, both of whom, for the moment, are rather Angelic.

please disregard my inability to sketch baby heads.

I know this is not a state of affairs that is likely to last for the next 12-18 years, so I figure I'd better enjoy it while I can.

You may recall that TLG was not originally on board with getting a Little Brother, but that we eventually brought him around.  Well he has stayed around, and he is stoked as hell about LBB.  He helps me with diapers, lets me know when I need to feed Little Brother (you know- in case I hadn't noticed the grousing infant) and bestows millions of kisses upon him.  For his part, LBB is still kind of indifferent to TLG, although he did smile at an appropriately-timed moment in response to TLG tickling his feet, so who knows.  Strangers things, Horatio.

When we got the anatomy scan of LBB the tech switched it over to 3D, so we got to see LBB's facial features- and we were pretty shocked by how much he looked like TLG.  Once he made his Exterior Debut, however, two Main Differences jumped out immediately:

1) He has his father's dark hair
2) He has his mother's cleft chin

TLG was born with sort of medium-brown hair, and it shocked exactly no one when, after he rubbed that initial fuzz off, the new growth came in golden.  Blond/e babies are fairly ubiquitous in both of our families (Nathan notwithstanding), so it was more or less expected that any child of ours would follow suit.  LBB is the first grandchild on either side (that's one in fourteen, mind you) to come out with truly dark hair, and we're hopeful he'll grow up to be as black-maned as his father.

As for the chin- I'll admit, I was a bit wistful when TLG showed absolutely no evidence of my ancestral chin-dimple, and in fact I spent probably way too much time staring at the aspect in question, attempting to will an indentation into existence (and possibly also poking at it in an attempt to encourage one to develop... don't judge me...)  So when I first saw LBB from not a crown-down angle (visibility is limited for that immediate, skin-to-skin contact) I literally let out a little gasp of delight and squeaked, "He has my chin!"

See, the beautiful thing about TLG is that he blends our familial features so perfectly that it's really hard to consistently say, "Oh he looks like so-and-so!"  More often it's a certain expression he makes that has us going, "Oh yeah, he's related to Cousin _____ for sure."  But with LBB it's like he's taken specific traits that are immediately identifiable as one or the other of us, and arranged them in the best possible way.

Other differences include:

-LBB has a wider mouth (but whenever he makes a moue it looks exactly like TLG's, especially in conjunction with their identical noses)
-LBB has a wider jawline, which right now codes as a rounder face
-LBB is built on longer/narrower proportions than TLG, and in fact he may end up being a throwback to my paternal grandfather, judging by his feet

Granted it's been all of three weeks since LBB emerged, so we'll see how it all pans out.  But in the meantime- genetics, man.  Some crazy stuff.