I Went To See A Baby

Babies, who doesn't love 'em? Here is one right now, and this one is fresh and new. He is baby Carter, who is fast becoming one of the most blogged-about babies on the interwebs. (Take that, Marlo! I kid.) Seriously, his mom told me that she was determined to put up a post about him every day for the first week, so she wouldn't forget how he was changing. I am amazed that she's actually getting that done, but other people seem to handle the whole newborn thing better than I did. My hat is off to you, Kelly!

I truly think some people just handle the disruption of a first baby better than others. I would never have predicted that I would be less than good at it, but I must say, it really threw me for a loop, especially the first time. I just remember thinking that everything was different and I was different, and the baby wasn't feeding that well and I was so, so tired. It did not help that, when Laura was born, we were living in a one bedroom apartment in a crap part of downtown San Jose, next door to a meth lab run by a guy we called the Junk Man. The Junk Man got all kinds of late-night shipments, dudes unloading things from pick-up trucks, and sometimes he would stand out in his backyard, which was about six feet away from us, and glare at our windows. I don't know if he was crazy, or if he was the savviest meth lab proprietor in the biz, or both. He was a little bit scary.

And! And the apartment was one of several that had been carved out of an old house. The landlord and lady were named Bernie and Betty, and they were greedy assholes. I say that with utter objectivity. They didn't live there, but they would send around their man-of-all-work to handle things on the property. This guy's name was Alan, and he was a mysterious character. I think he had been in jail. One day he was in our apartment to figure out why all this black junk was coming out of our faucets. Or, more accurately, to try to convince me that black junk wasn't coming out of all the faucets. He had to leave, abruptly, because he had to make it to class. I, trying to make nice with this person who was our only hope of ever getting anything done around the place, said, "You're taking a class? What kind of class?" And he said, "I'm just trying to figure out what went wrong."

Oh.

Since the campus of San Jose State was just down the road, and our bedroom faced the street, sometimes in the wee hours of the morning, we would be entertained by troupes of stumbling, drunken students, living out their loves, cares, and more usually, their disagreements right on our sidewalk. We called them the Fuck You Players, because those words were the concluding lines of most of their performances.

The kitchen had been the back porch of the house until they converted it. And the bathroom was in the kitchen. Ancient nasty plumbing. And a mouse lived there.

Betty and Bernie charged us $1200 a month for this place, after I'd talked them down from $1600. We moved out to Silicon Valley at the height of the real estate boom, and they thought this was a conscionable price. While we were negotiating this rate, Betty told me a long, sad story about how her adult son had gotten lost in the woods around Boulder Creek and frozen to death. That turned out to be a lie, but I think she kind of believed it.

What got me writing about this place? Oh, because this was the home that we brought Laura to from the hospital, and we lived there until she was seven months old. I am grateful that I did not go crazy in that little place. I had a hard time. After Matt had to go back to work, some mornings he would make me a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and leave it on the kitchen counter, because otherwise I might not eat until he came home. I was not yet good at doing things with one hand, and I didn't know that I could and should put the baby down sometimes.

Somehow it is doing me good to write about that apartment. There is some part of me that still feels tender and sore from how hard those early weeks and months of parenting were. Of course, we were happy too, at the same time.

With Hank, things were much better and I was only weepy and crazy for about three days. I just see people doing the newborn thing serenely and well, and I think, "Wow! Go you!"

Anyway, three things about the two pics at the top of this post:

1. Look how adorable that baby is. Exhibit A, his little nose. Exhibit B, his luxuriant hair.

2. I am wearing the same American Apparel shirt that Woody Harrelson wore for the entire movie Zombieland. It's true.

3. I needs to get my hair did.

I hope you guys are having a happy Saturday.