How Do They Kill Children?

The last 24 hours have been a blur of tears, spit-up, piss, ass and ointment. Kind of like what I imagine a typical Sunday in the GG Allin household must have been like.

Part of what has made it stick out in my mind — as opposed to every other day, most of which feel remarkably similar — is the dull thud of ineptitude that kept beating in my overtired head. I suppose I'm exaggerating, but not by much.

It started gloomy enough last night when I turned the television while I was folding two days of laundry and tuned it to CNN just because the highlights on SportsCenter were starting to repeat. I caught Anderson Cooper's show when he was interviewing Marie Colvin about the state-sponsored massacre in Homs. Perhaps you've seen this interview. It's the interview that features footage of a baby dying.

Now I feel like I've seen my share of mortally wounded children — especially in the last ten years, world events being what they are — but this was the first time that I really started to cry while watching. I don't know if it's because Animal is so new or whether having a child permanently alters the way your brain perceives things, but it was unsettling, and not to mention kind of difficult to reset my headspace once I finally got to bed where Jen was up to Season 3 of 30 Rock on Netflix Instant.

This morning I got out of bed early even though I could have slept a lot longer because Monkey has been keeping Jen up during the night and she probably could use the extra sleep — and because I needed to get as much done as I could as soon as I could on account of the fact that Jen had to make her first trip into "the city" since we left the hospital and I'd have to bottle Squeak until she returned.

I'd been stubborn about two things since Monkey was born — one, that I'd be able to take care of him once Jen had to go back to work and two, not reading Dr. Sears.

It's not that I am against reading Dr. Sears — not at all — because I freely admit that I have no idea what I'm doing, and the little idea I do have is just stuff that I heard once and repeat endlessly after not really getting it in the first place. Good thumb rule: Don't listen to stuff I repeat because I probably got it wrong. It's just that Jen got so many books about child care that I don't know where to start. And then there's the time factor. When it takes ten minutes to write a single sentence in an email, sometimes you have to prioritize. (Funny truism: If you ask people if they've read The Happiest Baby on the Block, nearly all of them admit that they've only gotten through the accompanying DVD.) (Funny note: apropos of me saying that "the little idea I do have is just stuff that I heard once and repeat endlessly after not really getting it in the first place," the concept of the "Fourth Trimester" that I like to talk about apparently comes from Happiest Baby, which I only barely started to read.)

Which is to say, after quickly trying to get through the unread items in the reader and seeing the news that Marie Colvin actually died not long after giving that interview — and thinking "Yikes" — I tried to get my head around feeding Animal.

My initial idea was to punt: I encouraged Jen to feed him as soon as she got up from her morning nap (a terrible necessity on certain days when she needs to squeeze in one or two hours of sleep). This gave me a few more hours until she finally left the house, at which point Animal began fussing as if he wanted to eat. So this was about 12:30 or 1. We finally got through that bottle at 5:45.

That's not to say that it actually took five hours to feed Monkey — there was that phone call I had to make during which I desperately paced all around the house with him in the carrier in the hopes that he'd refrain from really crying. During the phone call, I just finally changed his diaper, even though it didn't need changing — somehow this always soothes him. It's nothing I'm doing and must be a sort of Pavlovian response, though I like to think of it as his method of "self-soothing" in which he soothes himself by signaling his irritability, and forcing you to change him whether or not he needs it.

At one point I tried using a glass to pour milk in his mouth. Like I said above, I thought I heard you could do this. When Jen returned home she told me that I almost got that part right; it's a good thing he didn't drown.

You can't really sit down and work while he's fussing, so I did what I could do to keep occupied. Today, this meant finally watching that Daniel Johnston documentary that I'd DVRed a while back. (It aired on Starz; Liz Lemon gets Starz; I can't quite figure out if her quip about it was meant to be facetious; Starz is better than Cinemax, for example.)

I don't know how many ounces (ha!) we got through during the movie — it couldn't have been very much of the bottle — but the movie was really sad in parts, too. At least I think it was — sometimes it was hard to make out certain stuff over the baby's yawp and yell (at one point, for example, I think I was meant to understand that Gibby Haynes gave Johnston the hit of acid that made him totally insane, but it was hard to discern, especially because he was interviewed while getting dental work done) (another time — did I get this right? — Johnston crashed his dad's plane — huh?).

Suffice it to say, now I'm worried about my child's mental health.

Sometime after Around the Horn began Monkey miraculously just decided to start chugging from the bottle. And we dispensed with the last three-and-a-half ounces like this was the most normal thing in the world.

And of course that's when Jen finally arrived home with ten pounds of boob waiting to be expressed. So of course we put him on there and hoped he wouldn't spit up.

And then I got started on the next load of laundry.

Posted: February 23rd, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: The Cult Of Domesticity | Tags: , , , ,

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