Flotsam

Those of you who follow me on Twitter know that we had a spot of excitement this past weekend, including a baby with a fever of 107, an ambulance ride, and a febrile seizure. It was…well. I think it was the most afraid I have ever been, including all 96 days in the NICU. Apparently these things happen, and it was just a small, fierce virus, but if some Friday you are thinking to yourself “gee, wouldn’t it be funny if my two-year old had an absence seizure while her brain began to poach?” the answer is NO. Also, if you are a NICU mother who stole retained one small oxygen tank (Just in case! You never know!) after the home medical company retrieved the rest, and if your husband discovers this a few months later and makes you return it, and if your baby then refrains from breathing after having a seizure, you should feel free to take this to mean that if the worst had happened, said husband would have been liable for all funeral expenses.

And that is all I will say about that, because revisiting that night, and the way I screamed to Scott to call an ambulance and pressed frozen sweet potato fries to my baby’s back as I thought I might very well be watching her die—is not something I can do, right now. You should know, by the way, that JUST BEFORE that happened I had started a post wondering what unpleasantness January had in store for me THIS year. Ha HA! Next year I am spending the month in a bunker.

So, let’s move on. I have another horrifying story to tell you, one I would be far too ashamed of myself to share, if I had any dignity left at all. Luckily (?) for you, I do not.

It was a dark and stormy night—or dark, anyway—when something occurred that caused me to close my laptop earlier than usual, with a terrified snap. Something that made it suddenly, strikingly clear that I was a danger to myself and others. Myself, because it was my own beloved book I was writing, and others, because they might, one day, have to read it.

What happened, you ask?

USEN.
Does that look like a word, to you?
(Hint: IT SHOULDN’T.)

I’d been typing merrily—or at least persistently—along, and when I paused to look over my last few paragraphs, I noticed that spell-check had a problem with one of my words. “Usen,” to be specific.
I reread the sentence. And again. Huh. Maybe it was some sort of glitch? I erased the word and retyped it, then reran spell check manually. Still, the accusing red squiggle remained.
I was annoyed. “Usen,” as I well knew, was the past participle of “to use.” For instance, in the past perfect: “She’d usen that verb many times in the past.” Or maybe with an auxiliary verb in the passive voice: “Handkerchiefs were usen for staunching the flow of exhausted tears.”

Typing “usen” in the first place was bad. Not noticing anything amiss until spell-check pointed it out was worse. But worst of all was that EVEN AFTER SPELL-CHECK SUGGESTED I REPLACE “USEN” WITH “USED,” I was unconvinced.

Friends, I Googled it. I Googled “usen,” determined to find evidence that it was an actual word. It was only then, as I scrolled through the results, that I realized what should have been obvious: I had been writing for far, far too long that day.
I wouldn’t have thought anything short of head injury could cause me to forget how to conjugate regular English verbs. I remembered past participles, even while insisting that “usen” was among them. I have been conjugating the verb “to use” for nearly 30 years, and I think I do a satisfactory job of it. In fact, when telling this story to my mother, I used (SEE? THERE!) that particular verb several times—correctly.

(My poor mother, by the way. You should have seen her face. The horror. The concern. The fear!
“Usen?” she kept asking, incredulous.
“Usen,” I whispered, hanging my head. I had broughten shame upon our family.)

In addition to being horrifying, I think this story is an excellent illustration of just how hard I have been working, hard enough to slowly liquefy vital parts of my gray matter, the parts where my grammar were stored. So you will excuse me if I am still more absent than I would like to be, here. (USEN. USEN!)

I’d planned to attend the Mom 2.0 conference in Houston next month, as it fell fortuitously on the weekend after my manuscript was due. Alas, I discovered that the editing part of my book schedule is as XXXTREME as the writing portion, the entirety to be completed within a harrowingly slight window. Any changes I want to make must be complete by the 22nd of February, and then the copyeditor and editor work in a flurry, and I implement their changes before the first week of March, when my manuscript is sent away to the design department to be tarted up into a book. My publication date is so near (August 10th! Unless you are at BlogHer! In which case you may buy a copy DAYS in advance!), that the pages read by reviewers and any Fancy Persons I wish to ask for blurbs will be only exactly as polished as they are when I relinquish them to design. Later I will make corrections to the typeset version, but there you have it: FIN.
For some reason, this news threw my spleen into disarray.

It’s silly, because it’s not as if I’d planned to turn in a BAD manuscript on my deadline, but somehow I thought there would be all this time afterward, for editing or changing my mind about things should I wake covered in a cold sweat, convinced that Chapter Fifteen ought properly to be Chapter Four. I have a week after my original deadline of the 15th to edit, but still, knowing that what I turn in on the 22nd may not be terribly different from what ends up on someone’s SHELF, next to real authors—James Thurber, maybe, or sandwiched between Ian Frazier and Joan Didion, the two of them drawing their covers subtly away from mine in distaste—means I’m not going anywhere next month. (Related: anybody want to buy my non-refundable Mom 2.0 early-bird registration pass?)

This weekend, I am taking my Crazy Person’s Bulletin Board to a sort of hippie Wellness Retreat Compound Center Spa Inn, where I shall lock myself in my room to work, emerging only for the occasional calming dip in the therapy pool, or to have my third eye massaged. It’s a vital and luxurious expanse of uninterrupted time, and if I DO lose my mind as I hurtle down the literary homestretch, at least I will already be at what amounts to a sanitarium, eliminating the need for padded transport.

It is odd to know that in less than six weeks, the task that has consumed the last six months of my life will be complete. Though the only reward I require is a book that doesn’t make my copy of The Fran Lebowitz Reader curl its pages in disgust, I have scheduled a small vacation to celebrate. I will be visiting Philadelphia, where I have never been, with one of my very best friends—whom I have technically never met, lengthy daily telephone conversations notwithstanding. I’ll see my editor, and plan to shuffle gratefully into her chamber to anoint her feet with sacred oils. Afterwards I’m off to peruse a nearby museum of medical curiosities, so it is virtually guaranteed to be a successful trip.

You’ll hear from me before that, though. Simone’s birthday (TWO??) is on the 8th, and naturally I’ll want to do some sort of victory lap here when I turn in my manuscript, and again after I finish incorporating the editorial changes and send my baby on its way. I will probably cry a little, remembering all the good times we had, my book and I, wrestling playfully with one another over tense and prodding newborn metaphors forward on their wobbly legs.
But THEN I will finally get back to business, the good olde fashioned business of boring you with discussions of toilet training, and what my Jersey Shore nickname would be (“The Tacit Premise”), and my newfound obsession with polygamy. So wait for me, please, like I’m in prison and you’re unexpectedly carrying my child. I think of you often.

The holidays were lovely, here. I mean, it doesn’t get much better than a baby in fake hair, does it?

I had Christmas Eve pasta at my brother’s/mother’s house, alternately gazing up at the giant tree festooned with familiar ornaments and watching my daughter discover our old wind-up toys beneath the branches. Simone developed a bizarre obsession with Ray Charles, and worked on her dancing (adding a slow, deliberate twirl.)

Having remembered a tearful and unattractively petulant pre-Christmas screed about how there wasn’t ANYTHING I wanted except more time in the day and a fluffy, welcoming king-sized bed (neither of which I could HAVE, woe unto ME), my mother surprised me with a certificate for the latter. I had a sort of shopping-related seizure at IKEA yesterday, wherein I bought not only the bed and a mattress and bedding but also a dresser and laundry hampers and bookcases to replace our VERY child-unfriendly tottering shelves, all despite the fact that our current furniture is still…here. This will presumably be worked out this weekend by fate, my husband, myself, and Craigslist. I’ve undertaken a massive apartment overhaul, which, while ill-timed, makes me happy. Being under crushing quantities of stress is more difficult when the place where you are supposed to relax is not relaxing. (I’ll post some before and after pictures, once there is an after.)

I wrote through the holidays, while it snowed and snowed. Though my overstimulated toddler required much tiresome wrangling at the family festivities, Schmutzli spared her a beating. I even gave her some presents, most notably a chair and a doll.

Finding the doll was quite an adventure. Simone is in an affectionate, doll/animal/anything-with-a-face -loving phase, and I wanted to get her something nicer than the tiny “baby” from Target that she carries about, the one with TWO LEFT ARMS, poor unfortunate thing. I thought a doll with hair might appeal to her follicular obsession, and also, yes, give her hair to pull at night besides my own. I like Corolle dolls quite a lot: they are well-made, BPA-free, machine-washable, come in many sizes, and have expressions that are neither creepy nor inappropriately blow-up-doll-esque (I’m looking at YOU, Baby Alive). But have you noticed how many baby dolls have blonde hair and blue eyes?
I have nothing against blonde hair and blue eyes—I have both, myself. But, for whatever reason, it seemed important to me that Simone have a doll that looked like HER, especially given the seeming omnipresence of blue-eyed toys. I know, I know: it’s silly, and even Simone had blue eyes when she was a baby, as most light-skinned newborns do. If I hadn’t been looking at BABY dolls, with hair, there would have been a greater variety, instead of the current triumvirate of Blonde/Blue Eyed Paleface Doll, Black Doll, and Asian Doll. Options were also limited because I wanted the doll to be small enough for her to manage, and thought short hair would be best, to reduce the odds of it becoming a vast synthetic dreadlock. I finally managed to find a discontinued model that was at least Simone-esque (brown eyes, where hers are olive; red hair, where hers is indeterminately colored), though I was given the impression that it is “supposed” to be a boy.

Simone was pleased with my selection. She kisses her baby, and picks at its eyes with affection.

In fact, Simone was delighted by everything this holiday season—from Duplos to her discovery of apples—the one fly in her ointment being the glasses she refuses to wear. She has an eye appointment next week, so let’s hope it shows that her reluctance is due to improving eyesight rather than rapidly escalating TWO-ness. Her birthday, after all, is next month.

I find it hard to believe that it has been a decade since 2000, but on the other hand, it seems impossible that I fit so much—my best of times, my worst of times—into only ten slim years. In January of 2000, I was a 20-year-old virgin, home from my first semester of college. I was very certain (and very, very wrong) about what lay ahead for me. It’s so startling when things don’t go at all how you’d planned, and yet manage to turn out better than you’d expected.

I hope you ALL had a happy start to your new year, and that only the very best things follow you through it.