American Girl

She waits another week to fall apart...

If there must be trouble, let it be in my day, that my child may have peace. ~ Thomas Paine

I suuuck at blogging.  Let's all just accept this as fact and move on.

So, I went back to work.  I have to say that they made it very easy on me.  Someone, and I'm guessing it must have been someone who has given birth and come back to work and lived to tell the tale, must have warned them that they shouldn't all line up at my desk, single file, and ask "How are you doing?" one by one.  Instead, I got a lot of "Oh thank God you're back" as they shoved papers at me.  Which is fine.  You know what they say about idle hands and all that.

The little man who keeps me stocked in Altoids recognized me right away, pointed at my belly, and made a baby-rocking motion with his arms, with a questioning look on his face.  I told him that indeed, I'd had my baby, and she's a girl.  He nodded eagerly as he rang up my Altoids and Caffeine Free Diet Coke (Ahhhh!) and then, as an afterthought, grabbed another can of Altoids, held them up with a smile, and plopped them into my bag.  Love his heart!  He must think I really like Altoids.  Or have curiously bad breath.  Either way, in a city of millions, it feels good to be recognized.

I have been working long hours, and spending every moment at home with Ryan and the girls, which is why this place has so many crickets chirping in it.  I still like my early morning hours - I start the day at 6:00 AM and should leave at 3:00. (Except that I don't but soon things will settle down, and I will)  And if I hurry that gets me home by 4:30, and that's not really so bad, right?  Before I know it the girls will be in school till three.  Ack - wrong path!  Forget that last part. 

It's good, Ryan is doing great, the girls are thriving, and when I walk in the door at the end of the day, Hope just stands there and screams and clenches her fists as if she hasn't seen me in years and was completely surprised by the fact that I just walked in the door, and every day it's the same exact reaction and it never gets old and how can anything be so wonderful and so heartbreaking at the same exact time?

Poor Carly suffers from second-child-syndrome and I just noticed that she doesn't even have a birthday  ticker on my blog - How sad is that?  But she'll be two months old in a week and she is the most wonderful baby to ever have been swaddled on the earth.  I know it's wrong to compare, but Hope cried a LOT when she was a baby, and Carly just eats and sleeps and coos and now she can smile and she's just so happy that I'm convinced that Hope cried so much because her parents had no idea what they were doing and she was frustrated with how uptight we were. 

The other day I downloaded pictures from the camera to the computer and there was  a picture of Hope in her little Yankee jersey standing at the window looking out and it made me pretty blue because i'm just self centered enough to think that she was waiting for me to get home so she could scream, when really she could have just been watching a squirrel or something equally fascinating like the sprinklers.

Aside from the obvious having to walk around the city without your heart in your chest, one of the lesser perils of having a man in charge of the children, and worse, a man with a sense of humor, is that sometimes you come home to your child dressed like this:



WHAT?!  I know!  He thinks he's pretty funny.  I suppose it's a right of passage, like when I tease my mom about dressing me up in those pink bell bottoms with the giant watermelons all over them and she swears it was the cutting edge of fashion and you just know she's lying and they were on the clearance rack at Sears.

I need to balance out her "cool" factor with more pictures like this:



What's cooler than being cool?  Ice Cold!

Last week my boss and I were walking to meet a client for dinner when there was a gigantic explosion and a huge cloud of smoke and he looked at me and I looked at him and he said "Penn Station?" and I said "Yeah, let's go." and we went to Penn Station and my brother has introduced me to my new favorite acronym - FTS.  Fuck that shit, we're going home.  This, just days after the chief of Homeland Security says he  has a "gut feeling" that we'll be victims of a terrorist attack this summer.  Because sure, when you can't go by an official memo that says you're about to be attacked by your own airplanes, you go with your gut.  One thing we learned from 9/11 - Run faster next time.  What do we still need to learn?  Wear a mask when you respond to such a thing.  Baby steps.

posted by: AmericanGirl at 00:14 | link | comments (14) |

Today is the last day of summer vacation.    Tomorrow, Friday the 13th, I'm going back to work.  I picked that day special because it's a Friday, and all day long I can be at work, miserable, but thinking "Hey, at least it's Friday."  Much better than starting life with your heart ripped out of your chest and having to leave it that way for five days, right?  I know in the grand scheme of things it makes little difference, but taking everything day by day is a must around here.


I've been trying to psyche myself up and remind myself how much I love my job.  I've loaded my ipod with all kinds of new music for the train.  With a little help from the stomach flu we all had, I've lost all the baby weight and can fit into my cute clothes.  I can wear high heels, and jewelry, and makeup.  Ha, I can brush my hair.  I miss the little man who sells me Altoids and Caffeine Free Diet Coke every morning.  And there will be donuts and gossip and lunches out and, I don't know...stuff, to catch up on, and not all of it will be about deadlines and threats and target markets and things ending in "ASAP".  My job is the best because we are in the business of spending other people's money, and lots of it.  There is something very cool about riding the subway and seeing an advertisement that you placed.  Eh, it doesn't sound so cool, but I'm all about the cheap thrills.


I am not depressed, but I'm anxious.  I have anxiety about everything and everyone.  You would think that once you've gotten the scary phone call that something terrible has happened, and you've dealt with it, or overcome it, or whatever, it would make you stronger.  Sadly, this is not the case.  Instead, there is this underlying feeling of panic that when it happens again, it will be worse, and there won't be anything you can do about it because you're too far away.  If it didn't completely destroy you, it didn't count.


But I'm trying not to think about that.


Carly has just started smiling, and Hope is learning to swim.  I've lost count of how many people are coming to my house on Sunday for Carly's christening.  It's probably going to rain, but I don't care.  I'm too busy being anxious about the unknown.  I have very ugly daydreams, and I don't know how to stop them.


Why can't I just be happy that I have this great job?  It's not like I'm leaving my babies with a stranger.  They're with their father, for crying out loud!  And what's more, he knows what to do if they're drowning or bleeding or choking, all things that would reduce me to a puddle on the floor, so what's the problem?  The problem, perhaps, is that aside from carrying them for nine months, I've become completely unnecessary.


Starting tomorrow.


So when you see an ad for the "Underdog" movie, you can say to yourself "Hey, American Girl put that there." and think of me with my stack of Altoids and my Caffeine Free Diet Coke in my office with the dirty window, desperately missing my babies.

posted by: AmericanGirl at 14:49 | link | comments (12) |

Guess who had a few drinks tonight?

posted by: AmericanGirl at 01:11 | link | comments (9) |

Happy Birthday America.  And Howard!  Both belated.

I'm having a hard time mustering up that "America - Yay!" feeling lately.  It's just...they make it so hard, you know?  It's like loving the music of a certain band, but the band says "We're gonna take all this money you send us, and spend it on hair weaves and boots, for us.  But the good news is that we'll have a world tour soon, only you won't be able to go.  Our PR person will say we're coming to your town soon, AND there's a new CD coming out, but he'll be lying, because the lead singer is really a crackhead, and the band manager will cover it all up.  But we'll send all kinds of free tickets and CD's to people living in other countries who love other bands better than us!  And then we'll have no energy left to make any music for you, but you'll still love us, because it's the right thing to do."  Sigh.  It's disturbing, because I'm normally pretty much the biggest "America-Yay!" person out there.  Or, I was.  Rather than becoming one of those angry bitter fist shakers, I'm just feeling defeated, and more than a little embarrassed by the actions of my leaders.  I know I'll come back around, I just really really really hope we get someone non-crooked to run in the next election.  It doesn't seem like anyone wants to be president for the right reasons.  Honestly, I wouldn't want the job of cleaning up this mess either.  I suppose this is where someone will jump in and suggest I move to Kabul, or something.

It's possible that I'm projecting my depression because we've all been sick all week, Ryan needs surgery, I have one week left on my maternity leave, and I have accomplished absolutely nothing.  Except for the giving birth part, of course.  I hate the thought of going back to work with the fire of a thousand suns.  It's entirely too soon.  So much so that I wish I'd had a c-section so I could get the extra two weeks.

When I was a kid, we spent every summer evening catching fireflies and shooting watermelon seeds.  The ice cream man stopped right around the corner every single night, and if you bought the baseball gumballs for 5 cents, and you got one that said "Homerun", you could pick any other candy for free.  I lived for those nights!  And the chocolate coated ice cream bars with chocolate bars in the middle - what the heck were they called?  We used to jump the curbs on our bicycles and play Ringelevio and not come inside until the O'Hare mom rang her bell to call her own kids in.  And all this stuff, rolled into a ball, had a certain smell that evoked a feeling of pure bliss. 

I have been distraught because I've been trying with all my might to recreate that whole package for my kids.  (And by "my", I mean the kids in my family, because I realize mine aren't quite old enough yet)  No matter how much fun I try to create, there has been no blissful smell of summer evening around here. 

Last night I was complaining to my brother that the magic seems lost, and doesn't he remember?  He laughed and told me that I can't do it.  Like Neverland, once you grow up, you can't feel it anymore, but it's there.  It's just that I'm on the other side, just like my mom was on the front porch; cleaning up watermelon rinds, handing out money for the ice cream man, holding her breath when our bikes went flying, and calling Mrs. O'Hare to remind her that it was time to ring the bell.

So I looked around, and three of the girls are huddled and giggling and braiding eachother's hair, the boys are racing a car around the street, one is playing with a Gameboy, two teens are comparing their cell phones, and few are playing a Mermaid/Shark game, while Hope runs through them all with her firefly catching net.  Maybe he's right, and the "fun" has just been modernized, and once you cross over to the other side, you just can't feel it the same anymore.  I just wish that one of them could desribe the smell to me.

posted by: AmericanGirl at 19:17 | link | comments (9) |

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