*kendraspondence*

Dear Loverpants,

I have a strong feeling that neither one of us will emerge from this weekend without having met Newbie ‘Nother Baby.  And by strong feeling, I mean that reminders keep coming every 5-10 minutes like an alarm clock vibrating along my uterine walls.  Nay, the weekend shall not close, I suspect, without Newbie coming out some manner of hatch on my person, God-made or man-made, and that is both exhilarating and terrifying all at once and over and over again.

That said, I just want to put this out into the Universe:  If I die in childbirth, which I likely won’t, but, ya know, in the event of a fatal nosebleed from all that pushing, I just want you to know that I think you are wonderful and through the prism of parenthood, I got to see your wonderfulnesses exponentialize and consider myself the most blessed wifemum ever!  Even if I harped on you not doing things immediately…you taught me to remember what really mattered was not expediently putting away the pyjamas off the bathroom floor but having lots of laughs and tea parties with Baby Girl and wanting what we have and nothing more.

Please give yourself a hug and an earlobe pinch for me everyday, and tell Baby Girl that she was the most extraordinary treasure I’ve ever been lent.  Also, hug her daily for me and tell her that the best days will be those when she helps others.  Also, that she will someday be a great climber, maybe of rock walls or corporate ladders or ivory towers.

Tell Newbie how much he/she was loved his/her whole womb life by me, and how I know what a great kickstarter he/she will be in this life, and I’ll look forward to meeting and holding him/her in the next life.

Finally, do promise me that if I die in childbirth, your next go-round with marriage you’ll find yourself a kinder wife, less given to theatrics such as in this blog post.

Love Love Love,
K

P.S. I loved what you wrote here.

When I graduated from grade school (it was a K-8 type establishment), I thought I was going to become a great feminist orator, taking down the patriarchy one impassioned Gloria Steinem speech at a time.

When I graduated from high school, I thought I was going to become a great humanitarian, an eventual czarina of the American Red Cross, traveling the world on a campaign to suck the world of its healthy blood.

When I graduated from college, I thought I would move to Boston, drink a lot of martinis, work a mediocre job while applying to law school, and eventually become a great attorney, vanquishing injustice one power suit trip at a time.

When I graduated from graduate school, I thought I was really in a pickle because I would have loans and a kid and a mortgage and no time or no energy reserve to produce anything worthwhile for the next eight years.

And I have to say that pretty much none of these projections have really come true.  There are letters next to my name that don’t mean a lot.  There are bills in my name that should mean more but don’t.  There are clips in my portfolio for which I nearly killed myself and for which I was paid a pittance.  There are dozens of jobs on my resume that led me closer to more detours that led me closer to more doubt and self-loathing.
Yet I wouldn’t trade any of it for a smarter dossier, a shinier car, a more assured career path.

I want this life, this one that I never expected.  This union with my best friend, my laughing partner, Saturday nights spent unloading Trader Joe’s of all of its inventory.  This urbane home of the dirty, cluttered, creaky floors and the neighbors who like to bang upstairs.  This full-time job of motherhood where the overtime pay comes in chubby fingers reaching out to latch on to yours.

Not even 30 and my stock portfolio includes a closet full of lip gloss and an enviable supply of cloth diapers.

Happy Mother’s Day to those who never expected to love the job as much as you do, and for all those who will join the force soon, I’m wishing you a blessed journey.

And to you, Newbie ‘Nother Baby:  We’re keeping a “wook-out” for you….

P.S. Here’s a Mum’s Day-ish column I wrote.  Enjoy.

The FamiLee could use a prayer right now.  Oh, not for me.  Or my belly baby.  We’re staying put.  Fetus Baby knows that Mama has to give a final and collect papers and answer groveling e-mails about why she has to be such a witch and not grant extensions of mercy BECAUSE TWO THINGS WAIT FOR NO ONE:  DEATH AND DILATION, SONNY!  We could use a prayer for Baby Girl, though.  She’s experiencing the inevitable regression of a toddler-not-yet-a-woman precariously teetering on that precipice of Big Sisterdom.  Who wouldn’t need to yank out the infantile rattles and ask to be rocked at intervals of every 2 hours every night and suddenly revert to some cryptic cavegirl code of, “Ahenna wanna flum wum wahhhh” when you and I know that girlfriend just wants another pack of fruit snacks–a request for which she is totally capable of articulating????

Poor Baby Girl.  She knows her world is about to get rocked.

We know in time, though, she’ll be singin’ and slingin’ like a seasoned sister.

(Huge Huzzahs to my awesome neighbor mama friends who pitched in for a new Moby wrap for me and a wee one for Baby Girl).

Dear Newbie,

I suppose I’m being unfair in assuming you’ve already gotten a good read on me.  I feel as though I know quite a bit about you, even though I haven’t heard your cry (will it be one of those bleating polite ones or one of those incessantly demanding ones?) or examined your dimpled knuckles or eaten any of your toes yet.  I know that you’re a tenaciously strong kicker, that you take an interest in your sister’s voice, and that you have a really cute nose.  I saw you on an ultrasound yesterday as the midwife (the one who sometimes reaches into Mama’s Lady Garden with cold instruments?  Yeah, that lady) thought you might be in breech position.  But the good news is that you’re head-down, which means you are the more cooperative of my children these days.  Your sister has been, to put it gently, enthusiastic about negotiating the terms of everything.  I am looking forward to meeting you, and being deliriously in love with you, as I was and still am with your sister, even though she requires a puppetry play in two acts to coax her onto the toilet multiple times a day.

We’ll have a lifetime to get to know one another, which is wonderfully daunting, isn’t it?  But one thing I can tell you about me, in case you haven’t yet quite gathered it all from your corner of my uterus, is that I really enjoy being a parent.  It’s one of the few things I think I was created for — that and diagramming sentences.  And writing the occasional sympathy note or consumer review.  I’m good at those, as well.

I love having my own family because we get to figure things out together and erect our own little totems of tradition (e.g. one of your daddy’s and my favorites is taking some kind of boat ride around our wedding anniversary every year, which is odd since your mama gets extreme motion sickness just from walking and glancing down at her watch…but anyway, just a conundrum I guess).

I am also a bit of a loner by nature. I have heaps of good friends but for such a small woman, I do prefer a lot of space to myself.  So having a family has refined me into a person that actually prefers the din of coffee makers and toy pianos and NPR and pitter-patter of feet all competing for airtime at the same time.  I’m looking forward to you joining the chaotic melody of our home.

I suppose everything else we’ll just have to learn about each other when we meet. And since someone asks me every .04 seconds when that will be, the choice is really yours as to whether you want to make a liar out of me.  Heehee.  I’m funny.  And passive aggressive sometimes, too!  And so much more.  Come out soon, won’t you, Newbie ‘Nother Baby?

Love,
Mama

***

Please come soon, Newbie ‘Nother Baby.  There are so many toys that await….

And Big Sister gets lonely for a companion sometimes…

…and girlfriend can’t handle all these chores by herself

To my dear self of the future,

In case you are retracing your blog steps to investigate What It Was Like to be pregnant in the 9th month for what will most likely be the last time ever (unless God decides otherwise and/or you get invited to host your own reality television show “John and Kay Plus Three in a Condo the Size of a Skechers Shape-up”), here is what was happening way back then:

- You and your smoking hot husband went to a concert (Ben Folds) in which you were asked where your 3rd ticket was (hyuck hyuck hyuck) and in which you gave yourselves away as the couple who had not been out on the town since ’96 because you asked a police officer where the Red Sox Free Shuttle was.  Oh, you mean the one that was discontinued last year?  Yeah, that one.  Kay bye.

- You had heartburn that made you wonder if hot lava was going to come spewing out of your ears.
- You got a free Coke at Chipotle because the manager clearly felt sorry for you in your enormity.

- You banned yourself from going to the grocery store because every time you went, it was as though you were preparing to stock a bomb shelter for a year.  Every time you thought about leaving Baby Girl to go have another baby, it filled you with nervousness that there wouldn’t be enough fruit snacks in the house with which to pack her lunch.

- You did not have bad swelling (yet).  Your wedding rings still fit.

- Your fetus baby kicked constantly and kicked hard.

- You made yourself a Bucket List.

- You were grumpy toward your smoking hot husband 95% of the time.

- You looked at this picture a lot.
- You were unseasonably hilarious at times.

- You tried to enjoy this last month in which you’d probably ever be pregnant again, which basically meant you sniggered at the couples on TLC “Home Hunters” and drank a lot of seltzer limeade mocktails and blew through whole bottles of TUMS.