Anne Nahm

I’ve hit that strange hormonal crossroads of post-baby.  My smallest child turned 16 months yesterday.  She’s started sleeping a little more reliably, and she’s hit that developmental milestone where she can occasionally entertain herself quietly for fifteen minutes or so.

This is causing me to freak out.  Some tired, beat-down portion of my brain is now occasionally freed up for thoughts beyond caring for another human. Can you feel me?  It’s not a big portion or anything, but some axons are no longer firing on AIR RAID mode anymore.  My hair has stopped falling out.  When a car backfires in the middle of the night, I only wake up gasping for air and half out of bed, instead of finding myself standing above the baby’s crib, arms outstretched, nursing bra unlatched, and leaking milk on my toes.

Of course, the sleeping/entertaining herself combo arrives jaggedly, with two awesome days followed by three nights filled with screaming, or some family wide illness that throws everything into the toilet.

You know that feeling when you go to Vegas and gamble?  And everything is exciting, and sometimes you lose, but you are always thinking about winning on the next game and everything is kind of drunken and magical?  Well, if that feeling was a sock, what I am going through is that sock inside out.  The sock’s evil twin.  El Diablo Legging.

On the good days, I don’t know what to do with myself and all the energy suddenly available.  So I sleep and lie fallow.  The baby can sit in the bathtub and entertain herself while I sit on the toilet with the lid down and read instead of watching her hawkishly or staring at the bathtowels and drooling on myself as I’ve done in months previous.

I’ve read Sookie Stackhouse books like they are crack (possibly doubling the amount I’ve been able to read this year.  Whoo-hoo), and OMIGOD.  After years of being clean, I have gone on a Tetris bender that has left me with claws for hands and twitching in my sleep. Yesterday, I hallucinated the refrigerator landed on the linoleum in the kitchen and the whole floor blinked out of existence.

Of course, the moment I get it into my head to actually do something with all this extra energy, the baby goes on a two day crying jag, or gets shots.  And then I am back in Vegas, watching somebody sweep away the very last of my free time chips that I foolishly laid down on the PLAY TETRIS FOR TWO HOURS square and wishing I had placed those tokens somewhere useful.

Sorry.  I had to leave the writing of this post for a few minutes and go play Tetris.  AM back.

This is the third time I’ve been at this crossroads (what with this being the third kid and all), and I am always stunned at how base and animalistic it is, the time when my body has recuperated enough to get pregnant again*.  Have periods!  Am preoccupied with sexy stuff.  Have noticed guys looking at me – for a while I was completely invisible to the male population (maybe it was my special Amulet of Baby Carriage, or my Sweatpants of Invisibility, but I could have robbed an all male bank and no one would have been the wiser.  Too bad that the brain power needed to come up with this idea arrives just as my physical body seems detectable again.)

It is somewhat unnerving – like despite all the polite society, and me obviously being married and teeming with children, I am wearing a sign that says Womb for Rent:  Inquire Within.  Like somehow this is the opportune time to get me knocked up again, when I haven’t really had a chance to get my wits about me.  Anyway, I get the feeling this is overshare: y/y?  Oh well.

*Oh, I would beat my own uterus with the Detroit section of the Yellow Pages, screaming Haven’t you learned your lesson yet?!? If I thought it would help.

Went to the fair this weekend.  In the huge catacomb of the bathroom area, my kid saw another kid she knew.  Natch, they started laughing and hugging and squealing and doing O-M-G-I’m-at-the-fair-dance.  The other kid waved her hand under the stall door to say hi to me.  Sweet child.

I trudged out the stall with little enthusiasm, because.. well, not that this kid’s mom is a total yotch or anything, but I’m not sure how to otherwise finish that sentence.  She’s the kind of person who makes a point of saying hello to everyone in the group by name except me.  Even though we are all having a discussion right there in a circle before she showed up.   Hi Jane, hello June, hello Sarah.  Until I am the unnamed person left.  Then she smiles and looks everywhere but where I’m standing and clears her throat and shit, and there is this uncomfortable silence among everyone in the group and finally I say, “Uhm…. HI?  NAME OF PERSON.”  Because omigod, isn’t that what civilized people do?

And every. single. time.  she says, “yeahhhhh. Um.  Hi.” rolls her eyes, and smirks.  This is inevitably followed by her saying, “Annnyyyyyyway….” and turning to talk to some person in the group.   What the eff type asshole does this?  I don’t even know why it drives me so insane, but it is only my Jane Austin like sensibilities keeping me from breaking my foot off in her lower colon by way of response.

So naturally, I know by the time I’m walking out the bathroom stall that Fate will converge upon us and I will end up having one of those interactions that leaves me seething with awesome comebacks approximately 14 hours after the whole of the conversation has taken place.  But I walk over like some weary dodgeball player, trying valiantly to avoid each blob of 7th grade assholery this person can throw at me.

As such, right away, I’m all, “HELLO NAME OF PERSON,” in my loud, I’m Educating You in Social Propriety, JackHole, voice and go to wash my hands so she can get through her whole stupid yeahhhhh…um….hi thing.

And as I’m washing my hands, a guy in a bright yellow shirt that has SECURITY emblazoned on it comes in through the EXIT ONLY door of the bathrooms.  And he says, “Is it OK?”

I look around.  Everything seems OK.  No one getting mugged or puking.  The guy looks really nervous.  You don’t want to see a security guy looking nervous.  I look at my nemesis, who shrugs and appears to ask the ceiling tiles if it is OK up there.  This all happens in about 5 seconds.  Our kids are squealing their happy-happy-fair squeals.  Security guy looks to us for assurance and says again:  “Is it OK?”

So I give him a thumbs up.  “I think it’s OK,” I say.

Then he walks into the bathroom stall, closes the door behind him, and uses the facilities.  In the women’s bathroom.

And like a FOOL, I say out loud, “Did I just give the OK to that guy to pee in here?”

And giving me some 1990′s RuPaul style face-neck- *snap!* combo, my nemesis snarls at me and says, “Yeah.  You did,” and tromps out of the bathroom.

Oh ZING.  Damnit.

Am mortified.  And kicky.  Very kicky.

On vacation, I read The Bell Jar, by Sylvia Plath.  Word to the wise:  Best not to read a story about a chick losing her mind while you yourself are on vacation and are trapped in a hotel room while taking care of three kids who have been eating a steady diet of gas station cheerios and complimentary hotel breakfast donuts.

It was a little disturbing how much 1950′s style mental crumblings did not strike me so much as OMIGODCRAZY as kind of familiar  and how easily I found myself whispering at the book do not drink the sexually unliberated Buddy style KOOL-AID, Sylvia!  Get your diaphragm and be free!

Then I got to the part about crawling under the house and taking 50 sleeping pills, and I closed the book and decided I’m going to think much more seriously about my mental health.  So I took the kids down to the hotel pool and we all had a great time.  Yet, my head still kind of feels like a helium balloon that is floating around, way above the rest of my body.

In other media, I am totally in love with True Blood.  Since I live in a cave with no HBO or understanding of current viewing trends, I am just now watching Season One.  How did I not know this show was like a thousand times better than Twilight?!  All that Edward pillow biting bullshit I had to read over a thousand pages to get to? Worthless!  Especially when True Blood is basically soft core porn.  Am even reading Sookie Stackhouse books because I am completely infatuated.  Is kind of embarrassing: my first tv crush since Remington Steele.  If Bill has an episode where he is pointing that butt at the camera (and that is like every episode)?  My husband automatically is getting some.  Thank you God, for making fireplaces, and counters, and all those other waist high objects that Bill can lean against so the camera gets a good angle of his butt!

OK, re-reading, this is clearly a little TMI on thirty-something sexual repression, so am leaving the house for a while so as not to have to think about what this post says about me.

I don’t feel like I’m breaking with reality, but I do have that spacey feeling lately, like I’m in the back bedroom at a party, and for some reason I’ve tied a necktie around the doorknob and have decided to creep slowly into a strange dark room and swing my free hand through the air until I find my coat.  Don’t worry – I’m tethered!  Necktie!  Just a little spelunking.

I suspect one of the reasons is that the baby is 14 months old now.  A year must be how long it takes my body to recover enough so that it could consider getting pregnant again without losing its damn mind.  You’ll note that I (Me! The one holding the tie) am certainly not considering another pregnancy.  It is simply the biology of my body (that creature in the dark, barking her shin and cursing), finally getting to the place where I am (we are?) no longer (as much of a) sleep deprived lunatic.

Here are some ways my body has decided to let me know it has recovered:

*Periods!
*Leg hair!  Growing like a chia pet.
*Sudden interest in painting my toenails.
*Coffee works a little!  To make me happy (instead of merely keeping me from falling face forward into the carpet).
*Wearing high heels occasionally. And not immediately tripping because whoa! Those ligaments aren’t quite tightened up there yet, Anne.

Also, my brain has been asking me all these Job Interview questions, and I have been sweating it out.  Dude!  I know the right answer.  But when you ask like that, I freeze up.

One of the stupidest and also painful Job Interview episodes this week was while reading this link from Jezebel, which in turn links to the NSFW Playboy online article When Your Breasts Go Out of Style.  I like Jezebel, because I can read something that pisses me off and while I usually point my finger and stutter and then scream into a pillow, usually someone in comments is able to convey what I wanted to say.  But, you know, using words.

So I was looking at Playboy,  I could possibly get my boobs to look like those pictures if I were photographed under water.  Or naked on a space station in zero gravity.

And I know that looking to a spank magazine to feel good about yourself is like falling into the stupid well and complaining about the lack of smarts at the bottom.

But it happened anyway. This Job! Interview! moment: If I am not listed in any category of attractive boobs, do my boobs exist anymore?  Am I attractive?  Or do I need to turn off the lights when I have sex now? I felt so embarrassed that I had been walking around with these curdled milk type boobs that are clearly past their 20 year-old expiration date.

And here was kind of the worst part: I’m fairly sure I know intellectually that whether I am attractive or not to someone else, I should still be able to be attractive to myself.  Or really what I mean is: ain’t nobody should take my O-card.  Here, let me try again, since I’m apparently having difficulty owning up to this:  I should be able to continue to have orgasms and sex even if my tits look like prunes and my vagarnicle looks like an old man who has been lost at sea.  There!

But somehow, while trying to locate my 35 year-old boobs in Playboy, I was as lost as I had been in 8th grade – standing in the mall in front of one of those cursed You Are Here! Maps and near tears of desperation, all WTF is Sam Goody?!?!  I will die if I don’t get my hands on some Def Leppard! Except now the thought that was tied to that bewildered feeling this time was I think they can take away my O-card, because as I’m patting myself down to check, I seem to have left it in my other pants pocket.

So here is how my eardrum bursts*.

Allergy season arrives.  Whether it be a year in which there is all out Bacchanalia orgy in the plant world, or it is a prudish year, there is always some bits of pollen and flotsam being generated.

A gentle wind blows.

At some point, I go outside.  And the gentle wind blows on me.

Meanwhile, thousands of years of selective breeding have resulted in the Awesome Package of Anne you see before you.  For some reason, my package also Darwined itself an immune system that don’t take no shit from nobody.  Pollen?  I KILL YOU POLLEN!!!!  That is what my immune system says.  And when it says it, it doesn’t just politely roll down the window of the Rolls Royce it happens to be driving in to whisper I will kill you, pollen, and also, do you have any Grey Poupon? Oh no.  It yells a lot, and spits at pollen’s feet, and tears its hair, and screams I will boil your bunny, because this immune system will not be ignored, pollen!

Things start out pretty minor, like me sneezing until I see stars.  My nose and mouth itch, and although I want to be all ladylike and merely give the former a blot with a Kleenex and be done, the more I blot at it, the worse it itches.  The worse it itches, the more I rub, because I CAN TAKE YOU, ITCH!  I AM THE BOSS HERE.

I end up in masturbation like throws of frenetic nose wiping. Like have you ever seen a dog try to lick itself, and it gets so excited that it scoots around in a circle?  That is me itching my own nose.  I rub (making this hideous fap-fap-faping noise) until I chafe the skin.  My nose weeps in response.  Then everything is lubricated by loads of snot.  Then I blow my nose, and my ears pop.  And I rub my tongue on the roof of my mouth like I’m Mr. Ed and some asshole is trying to make me look like I talk by putting peanut butter on my soft palate.  Like I’m people!  I make that tongue itching face,  and rub my nose, and weep snot, and my eyes swell up.

And then like any rational person, I start taking allergy medicine.

It doesn’t help at all.  Every morning, I wake up with my eyes swollen shut, and my nose crusted with boogers, and generally feel like I slept next to a dead body in a ditch full of pet dander and cattail fluff.  After two or three days, I get tennis elbow from all the nose wanking.

So, three days later, I say, Bis Allergy Mebicine Boesn’t Boo Shib. So I quit taking it.

And OMIGOD.  Apparently the meds were the only thing keeping my head from exploding.  Whoops.

The next morning I wake up and my immune system is shitting itself in panic.  My ear canals swell shut, as does my nose, the whites of my eyes, and my butt.  I spend the day feeling like I’m wearing a meat helmet.  In a desperate attempt to get rid of the dizziness and hearing loss, I  attempt to squeegee out my ear so I can hear again.

This pisses my ear off so fantastically that my ear canal swells as I’m squirting water in it and my squeegee gets stuck in my ear.  It is kind of reminiscent of those porn shows they do in Amsterdam where a chick holds a banana in her… uhm… personal banana holder.  Which as I re-read that last sentence, I guess, here in America, we call it a vagina.  Anyway, the Amsterdam audience is supposed to be impressed, because:  Wow!  that is a tight/muscle-y/something banana holder that can hold a banana so it doesn’t fall out! Anyway, that’s what my ear feels like, clamped onto the squeegee and all.  Like vaguely impressive and also disgusting that it could swell up and hold a foreign object and prevent gravity from doing its job.

At this point, I know I am in trouble, but damn if I could even see the phone, let alone get it together enough to make an appointment with a doctor and also find someone to also take care of my kids for that exact moment in the week.  Instead, I  decide that surely allergy season will end tomorrow.

Around bedtime, I hear my own pulse in my ear.  I know what that means, because this has happened to me since I was a wee little child:  Ear infection.  In fact, I remember being less than five years old and telling my mom about the “butterfly flapping its wings in my ear” which to this day is how I think about it.  Stupidly, the worse it gets, the more I am convinced that it will be better by tomorrow.

And then, of course, stabby pain that wakes me up in the middle of the night and lots of drippy ear the next morning.  Annnd then I go to the doctor.  Who can’t even see in my ear because it is swollen and crusted up.  He takes my word for it that my eardrum might have ruptured, writes me a script, and looks at me like I’m a hot dog someone left in the sun.

I am now on antibiotics for the eardrum, steroids for my ear, topical antibiotics for the staph infection inside my nose, steroids for my lichen sclerosis which is flipping the eff out, and my period decided to come back this week.  I did feel better after taking antibiotics for two days, and so I took the kids to the pool.  Which is where I got an antibiotics-related sun rash on all exposed parts of my body.  Right about now, taking birth control pills makes me laugh, because:  AS IF.

* To Stimey & Sara, who asked about last post.