Melissesages

A few years ago, I stayed with some relatives who had a two year old kid. We were watching television one night, and the mom had to stop watching Grey’s Anatomy because the patient that week was a three-year-old kid. Apparently, it was a little too close to home.

At the time, I thought it was a bit of an overreaction – after all, TV and movies are full of people getting hurt and killed, and nobody freaks out when the good guy’s sister or mother is killed, just because they have a sister or mother. What was the big deal? Then, a while later, I saw “Apocalypse Now,” and I understood, to an extent, how that mother felt. A jillion people die horrible deaths in “Apocalypse Now,” and after awhile it becomes almost boring – you just can only care for so long, when everybody onscreen promptly gets killed. But that’s when they bring out the puppy – a tiny, adorable Golden Retriever (or yellow lab, I can never tell the difference in puppies) that’s practically little enough to fit on Martin Sheen’s hand. When the puppy came onscreen, I almost had to leave the theater.

We see a million deaths on TV, it’s true, but they’re mostly adults, and they mostly have it coming. For better or for worse, we’re used to those deaths. But you never see a dog killed, so we’re not desensitized to it the way we are to, say, someone’s head blowing off, or the millionth person in a movie getting shot. I love dogs. Max, obnoxious as he is, is my baby, and every time a dog gets killed onscreen I still connect it to my own love for dogs, and it upsets me. That’s why my relative was feeling – you rarely see little, little kids die, and for her, it connected to her own fears that something bad could happen to her little girl.

When I was pregnant, I wondered if having a kid would affect how I watched TV and movies. Would it become insufferable to see a child die onscreen? Would I have to leave the room every time a little kid was abducted, or hurt, on a police show? Or when House treated a baby, or someone miscarried on “Private Practice?” When I saw a “House” rerun with a pregnant woman in danger, and then the baby died, I felt oddly proud that it didn’t affect me.

But since we brought Mattie home, a funny thing has happened: my head keeps playing scenarios. It’s not that I can’t watch certain shows now, it’s that the shows I’ve already watched, with kids or babies in danger, keep playing in my head. When I give Mattie a bath, I remember the episode of “Supernatural” where a mother let her baby drown. When I put her in her carseat in the car, I think of the “Bones” where the woman with the baby wrapped her car around a tree.

Really, this breaks down to a matter of odds. In my life, I’ve probably watched seven or eight babies grow from infants to healthy, happy kids (which is 100% of the babies I’ve known, by the way). That’s more than a lot of people my age. On the other hand, in twenty-plus years of watching movies and television, how many kids and babies have I seen hurt, kidnapped, or killed? A lot more than eight, that’s for sure. And desensitization is a funny thing – sure, it can make you immune to getting upset every time a child is injured, but it also severely adjusts your expectations. The morning after Mattie’s first night here, I was honestly amazed that she was still alive. I’d just seen, over the years, so many scenarios (plus the SIDS-related panic that they instill in every new parent at the hospital). A millions scenes in which she got sick and died were available in my head. The other scenario almost didn’t occur to me, the one where she was just fine.

It’s a strange way to live, with so many ways in which something terrible happens available in your head at all times. Over time, I’ve gotten used to things being okay, but the bad stuff still pops in my head sometimes. And what’s the lesson here? That people who intend to have kids someday shouldn’t watch TV? That I would be better off with a worse memory and less imagination? I don’t know. I just hope that I continue to be wrong.

Eight years ago, when I applied to film school, I had no earthly clue about whether or not I’d get in. I knew that I was smart about movies, or at least smarter than most of the people around me, but it was a small town in Wisconsin. In the land of the blind…Anyway, for all I knew, I could have been a film genius, or just this side of a complete idiot.

It’s never easy waiting for results for something like college applications, but it’s especially difficult when you have absolutely no objective concept of your own value in a given field. Eight years ago, I waited on pins and needles for months, afraid that I’d made the biggest mistake of my life by gambling on film school (I only applied to schools in New York and LA). And, as it turned out, I was smart, or at least smart enough.

The past few months have been almost an identical experience for me. I know now that I’m smart about movies, and I have the education to back that up, but at the end of the day I really have no idea whether or not I can write. I’ve been to conferences, I’ve had my worked looked at a little, I’ve read some books…but I don’t really know.

But, in order to be a writer at all, even a crappy one, you have to have at least some sort of ego, some sense of “yeah, I can do this.” Otherwise you just have to fold immediately under the weight of all the odds against you. It took me a long time to develop a baby ego, and that’s what I used to apply to grad school in Creative Writing at the University of Milwaukee. And on Saturday, I got in. That’s right – I can write, or at least I can write well enough for someone to want to teach me how to write better. Hooray!

Saturday was a strange day for me all-around: my parents had driven to Madison late Friday night with the idea of flying to the Bahamas for vacation in the morning. They’d gotten their tickets to fly out of Madison so they could spend a little more time with the baby. But late Friday night, my mom knocked on my bedroom door to explain that she’d just checked the tickets, and their plane was actually leaving Sunday morning, not Saturday morning. So I had a full day in Madison with my parents, for the first time ever. My mom and I got our nails done and saw a movie, and on the way home Tyler called and told me about the letter waiting for me from the University of Milwaukee. I tried really hard not to drive extra fast on the way home.

In movies, it seems like people with important letters are always too nervous to open them right away, or have to make someone else do it for them. I always thought that was stupid. When I have an important letter, nothing on earth could get me to set it on a shelf for two weeks while I worked up the courage to read it. So I ripped my envelope open, saw the “we are pleased to announce,” and was absolutely elated.

So it appears that I’ll be going to grad school in the fall. I have to confess, when I read the letter and realized I was good enough to get into the writing program, a big part of me wondered whether or not I should have applied to a better school. After all, Northwestern is only 2.5 hours away, and the best writing program in the country is in the Midwest, at the University of Iowa. If I waited another year, I could at least apply to the program here in Madison, which is prestigious and only offered every other year.

But here’s the thing: even if I could get in somewhere else, none of that is possible for me, in my current life situation. Being married and a mom and owning a house means that I am, for all intents and purposes, tied down here in Madison, at least for the near future. And when I made the decisions to do those things, I knew what I was getting into. The program at Milwaukee may not be the best in the world, or even the best I can do, but it’s the best I can do right now (and I am not about to put off school for another year just to apply to a program I have no idea I can get into). And it’s not like it’s a bad program – I’ve heard some really good things. So, while I can’t suppress a twinge of curiosity about where else I could have gotten in (that’s the high school overachiever in me), I feel really good about going to school. Right now Tyler and I are trying to figure out whether I’ll go full-time or part-time, and I’ll subsequently be looking for a job as well. Things are finally starting to move with my life, and I’m incredibly grateful. That “sitting around waiting to have a baby” thing was so not me.

Lest I sound all hateful, I should mention that Mattie is wonderful. She’s gorgeous and perfect, aside from having a little trouble pooing this week. (Is it wrong that I think her little constipated face is hilarious? And if so, just how wrong?) Sometimes I just look at her for ages, and I’ll stare at her ear or long hair or eyes and think, “I made that. I created it inside me. How cool is that?”

Greetings, blog devotees. My internet has been down all week (thanks a ton, AT&T), which has kept me from writing lately- well, that and the fact that I have a newborn. Husband has been working 10-hour days since he went back to work on Tuesday, so my life has pretty much been all baby, all the time.

Mattie is now 19 days old, and I’m getting to know her. I always figured newborns don’t have much personality, and it’s true, but there are some things that she does or doesn’t do regularly. In other words, I’m getting experienced with Mattie the Baby, as opposed to Mattie the Person, who hasn’t developed yet. I can say that baby Mattie is pretty good overall – she cries some, when she’s uncomfortable or hungry, but she never seems to cry for no reason, which is good. She’s not a fan of baths, but tolerates them because they don’t bother her enough to scream about it. After about day 4, she is so over swaddling, preferring to sleep with her arms and legs out, like she just jumped out of a plane. She gets in moods where she insists her food come from a bottle, rather than directly from me.

She also makes the best faces. Mattie isn’t old enough yet to smile as a reaction to the world around her, but she does smile in her sleep a lot, which is pretty adorable. Baby dreams, man – they’ve gotta be interesting. I’ve also identified four key expressions that Mattie likes to go through:

1. The “Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man” smile
Mattie has no teeth, so when she smiles a big, open-mouthed grin, she looks exactly like the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man at the end of Ghostbusters – before they started firing proton packs at him. It’s actually pretty creepy.
2. The “Stop F#@&ing With Me” scowl
I do have a picture of this one, here. This is a look that plainly says “I am just barely tolerating this, but you better knock it the f off but quick.” It comes out a lot during bath time, or when she has to get into the car seat. I’d like to think she gets this one from me.
3. The “Mel Gibson”
The TV show “South Park” did a hilarious parody of Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ,” in which Mel Gibson runs amok. Like most South Park impressions, they use a photo of Mel Gibson’s actual head on a cartoon body to represents Gibson. Anyway, there’s this one moment during the show, when Gibson is terrorizing Kyle and Stan, when he stops and does this ridiculous pose with his lips stuck out. I know that’s a lengthy explanation, but Mattie does the EXACT look. Again, a little creepy.
4. The “Han Solo in Carbonite”
Have you ever noticed just how big Harrison Ford’s lips are? They’re huge. And when he gets frozen in carbonite at the end of “Empire Strikes Back,” he’s frozen with his giant lips pursed, like he’s about to make out with Princess Leia…or having a bowel movement. Mattie can do the frozen in carbonite face.

Now, if you’re thinking to yourself, “Gee, Self, Melissa sure seems to have spent a lot of time thinking about her baby’s expressions,” you are exactly correct. Because frankly, I’ve had almost nothing else to do. Let me back up for a moment to explain that the most annoying thing about having a baby is not the baby itself, or anything it does, but the adults around you who already have children. I cannot say how many times I’ve been given some sort of all-in-good-fun warning along the lines of “you’ll never sleep again,” “you have no idea how hard this will be,” “the next few years are going to suck” and so on. Basically, many, many smug ways of saying that Tyler and I clearly have no idea what we’re getting into, and everything will be so much worse than we can imagine.

Like I said, completely annoying. And pointless. There is no good-hearted motive for giving these ‘warnings.’ They’re not meant, in any way, to actually advise or prepare us, but simply to brag in the manner of “I’ve already survived this, woo hoo!” I can’t really blame people for being reminded of their own difficult parenting days and wanting to express their relief that those days are over…but because I am impatient, stubborn, and independent-minded, it still annoys the crap out of me.

Especially, of course, when the stupid warnings are correct. I was prepared for sleep deprivation (which hasn’t actually been that bad, thanks to Tyler and I’s genius system), but I didn’t really fathom how much I wouldn’t be able to get done on any given day. Mattie sleeps for at least 5 or 6 hours between 8 AM and 6 PM – that should be plenty of time for me to load the dishwasher, vacuum, fold clothes, and even write a little, right? Wrong. While Mattie is sleeping, she usually wants to be held (in fact, she’s lying on my chest as I type this). If she does sleep in the Pack N Play, she wakes up pretty frequently, so I’m constantly shifting her in and out of it. If she’s sleeping in my arms, I will invariably a) need to go to the bathroom, b) get really hungry, or c) become bored. When that happens I have to move, and Mattie wakes up, and getting her to sleep starts all over again.

I also lose a lot of time with feeding – Mattie, like most babies, likes to eat until she falls asleep. If she wakes up, she wants to be fed again before falling back to sleep. That means she’s basically eating for the entire day. And it takes forever – Mattie will often down a bottle like a champ, but if I’m nursing her she putzes around, eating a little, then dozing, then eating, etc. Boring.

I’m beginning to see why new moms often seem incapable of talking about anything other than the baby – it’s because we can’t DO anything besides take care of the baby. I’d love to discuss the new movie Tyler and I just went to, or going to see a band or reading the newspaper or whatever, but none of that is happening anytime soon. In fact, since I started writing this post I’ve had to stop three times: once to give Mattie a bath and get her dressed, once to change her diaper and her clothes again after she peed herself with her diaper off, and once to feed her. You can see how this kind of schedule is not very conducive towards anything that requires attention for more than a few minutes…like, say, writing a novel.

So, to summarize, I hate when the stupid adults around me are right about things, especially since I will always go out and find these things out for myself anyway. (I am, in most matters, unwilling to take your word for it. Nobody’s perfect.)

But, I should also mention something else the stupid adults were right about: it’s different when it’s yours. Before she was born I was a little nervous that I would get bored and sick of Mattie – after all, when I’ve babysat for infants before, it’s only fun for about an hour and a half before it’s tedious. Even my nephew, who I adore, used to make me irritable and impatient to leave after a few hours of changing diapers and trying to entertain him. The truth is, babies are pretty dull, yet very time consuming. Who wouldn’t get sick of that?

I’m not saying I don’t get tired of infant care, but it really is different when it’s your own baby. I was not prepared for just how much I have fallen in love with my daughter. It’s amazing how long I can simply marvel at her, at what I created in my body (Now that my body is somewhat back to normal, minus the weight gain, this is even more incredible). I have never been a gushy or overly affectionate person, but I cannot stop kissing the baby. When she cries or fusses, I want to make her happy, rather than just trying to get her to quiet down. I do still get bored after a long, full day with her (she was particularly fussy on Friday, and I was delighted to pawn her off on my mother-in-law), but it’s just different. I can’t properly explain it. It’s like making sure she’s safe and happy is not just my job, but my duty, an imperative. And when I’m taking care of her everything else just fades a bit.

This post contains some references to breastfeeding and labor. Stop here if you’re easily grossed out.

Mattie is a week old now, and we’re all kind of settling in to having a baby in the house. When we took our baby classes, they talked a lot about expectations - mostly in regards to labor, but also just what the first few weeks would be like. Some things are pretty much as I thought they’d be: Tyler is fantastic with the baby (as long as I can get him to wake up in the night for his turn). The house has gotten messy, but mostly just in an easy-to-pick-up-clutter kind of way. We spend most of our time in the living room on the couch.

But there are a lot of things I did not expect. First, how easy it’s been. Now, before you get upset, kid-havers, I should clarify: it’s really kind of easy to take care of a newborn when you have two full-time parents who have nothing else they need to be doing (the husband is taking two weeks off work). Tyler and I have been having a multi-day Veronica Mars marathon, and that’s our only real activity besides the baby. When there are two people, it’s not bad at all to handle the feeding and changing. It helps that Mattie sleeps a LOT: we’ve even got the night shift worked out pretty well. Mattie sleeps about four hours at a time at night, and I wake up after the first four hours to feed and change her. Tyler takes the second feeding. This works out great because Tyler gets a full eight hours of sleep, and I get to sleep in a little bit to make up for the time I’m awake at night. We’ll probably keep this up when Tyler goes back to work. I know the easiness (is that a word?) is only temporary, and I’m already worried about when I have to be doing all of this by myself, but in the meantime I’m really enjoying having the husband around. We’re both a little tired most of the time, but i wouldn’t call us truly sleep-deprived at this time.

I also didn’t expect for breastfeeding to be the complicated trial that it’s been. Well, feeding the baby, period. I want to be nursing her (breastfeeding is the best thing blah blah blah), but her first day or two she was biting me, and it took time to heal from that. Now I don’t know if I’m making enough to fill her up, and how much formula I should be supplementing at the same time, and whether I should be pumping or trying to feed her myself. It’s surprisingly complex, especially when you compare it to, say, feeding the dogs. Why can’t I just leave a bottle of milk around with an automatic refill mechanism? Think how much easier that would be.

Pain-wise, it’s both more and less than I’d expected. The overall soreness is pretty much on par, and I get to take lots of ibprofen for that. However (and this is where it gets a little gross) there was some…uh…tearing. So there’s stitches. Which are incredibly painful, at times excruciating. But hey, that’s what happens when you have a baby that’s almost 10 pounds. I get to take Vicadin for that, which is awesome, but I’d prefer to just not have to have the stitches at all.

For her part, though, Mattie is doing fantastic. I was expecting jaundice or something, but she’s just…perfect. She’s already started to reject swaddling, preferring to sleep in loose blankets, often with both arms straight up in the air like she’s on a roller coaster. I know she’s just a baby and it doesn’t mean anything, but I LOVE that. She doesn’t cry too much, except when she’s hungry and we’re not quick enough with the food. And she’s completely gorgeous - I know I’m biased as her mom, but you can check out the pictures for yourself on my site. She’s beautiful.

In other news, today I signed up for the Madison Writers Institute. It was strange thinking about something OTHER than Mattie, but kind of nice, too. I gave myself a week off after her birthday to recover, but now I gotta get writing again. I think it’ll be good for me to have something else in my head besides breastfeeding and diaper changes.

Warning: this post contains references to breasts. But not in a dirty way; in a breastfeeding way.

Yesterday around noon we brought Mattie home from the hospital. The discharge went really well, and she passed all her medical tests - as I said, she’s basically perfect. We got home and spent the rest of the day settling in.

While I was pregnant, a lot of people asked me how I thought the dogs would react to the baby. Tyler and I pretty much figured out Tucker’s reaction from the get-go: we knew he’d find her slightly interesting but basically ignore her until she was old enough to provide him with food or attention. We nailed it. Max, on the other hand, was a bit more unpredictable. We both hoped he’d start feeling a little protective of her, the way he is of me, but I afraid that he’d see Mattie as a challenge to his affection. Not in a “I’m gonna eat that baby” kind of way, I just kind of pictured him, you know, nosing my hand away from the baby all the time so I’d pay attention to him, getting underfoot, dropping his ball on Mattie’s lap so we’d be sure to see it to throw for him. I also figured his initial reaction would be to just jump all over the poor kid. He’s seen babies before, and his usual reaction is to lick their faces until someone drags him away. I thought we’d have to hold Mattie up pretty high while he jumped up trying to bathe her face, and after awhile, he’d settle down.

I was totally right about the entrance. To provide some advance damage control, Tyler went in first and let the dogs outside. I snuck in with the baby and put her safely in the Pack ‘N Play crib. The dogs came in and got a chance to be all over me, the way they do when we’ve been away for a few days (or, you know, when one of us returns from the grocery store). And then, when I thought the moment was right, I picked the baby up. Tucker ignored her completely, and Max did the “oh-no, I have to lick” dance, and went nuts trying to sniff her and get to her face, tail wagging like crazy. After awhile, he calmed down.

I was not prepared, though, for the next part: Max immediately appointed himself as Mattie’s personal bodyguard. Immediately. Instead of being jealous of her all the time (though he’s probably a little of that, too), Max decided his new, and only, mission in life was to watch the baby. He wants to lick her all the time. If we keep her in a room other than the one he’s in, he cries and scratches and panics (this made for a VERY long night). He barks and growls at Tucker if he comes within six feet of the baby. If we do let him in the same room as Mattie, he’s pretty much perfect: he just curls up as close to her as possible, and tries to get in a lick every now and then.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m relieved that Max isn’t being all jealous about her, but the bodyguard act is getting a little old. And…a little hilarious. Tonight, after we put Mattie to bed, I was washing bottles in the kitchen sink, and Tyler went to change a lightbulb in the baby’s room. And we found this. Clearly some new training is in order.

Other than the dogs, though, the experience of bringing Mattie home and getting her settled in the house has been challenging, emotional, difficult… I’m having hormonal experiences that I never came close to during pregnancy. For example, I want to be holding her, like, all the time. I wake up in the night convinced that she’s died of SIDS in her sleep, and keep running out to check her. (I was amazed when I woke up this morning and she was fine.) I had my first brush with post-partum depression in the middle of the night when I couldn’t get Tyler to wake up and help me, and I was freaking out about not being able to feed her.

Ah, and now we come to it: the biggest difficulty I’ve had since giving birth: breastfeeding. Something has gone deeply off the rails with my breastfeeding capabilities. I seem to be doing my part (mainly, producing the milk), and Mattie seems to be doing her part (latching on in a certain way), but for whatever reason every time I feed her I’m in excruciating pain. Seriously, probably the worst pain of my life. Last night at four, I sobbed the entire time I was feeding her, because it hurt so much but I couldn’t stop or she wouldn’t eat. (We had tried giving her formula, but she threw up the whole bottle.) That was one of the toughest moments of my life.

Happily, the next time she woke up to be fed, Tyler tried a different brand of formula, and this one stayed down. The breastfeeding drama continued, though, because my breasts were by then so painful that I could barely stand to have cloth over them. And, just like cows, they needed to be emptied. At 2:00 today, though, we saw the pediatrician, and she took a look at me. She saw the bruises and swelling I have, and recommended we go buy an electric breast pump right away. One trip to Target later, I was sitting at the kitchen table vacuuming milk out of both breasts at the same time, to give to my daughter. (FYI: breast pumps are CRAZY expensive. We had to tap into Tyler’s retirement money.) I take back everything I said about breastfeeding not being as complicated as everyone says.

I’m supposed to alternate between pumped milk (as much as I can stand) and formula for the next week or so, to give myself a chance to heal. Then maybe Mattie and I can work something out. And hopefully soon I’ll be comfortable with, you know, having a shirt on. Meanwhile, I’m just glad the first night and day are behind us.

Today is February 4th, and I am a mother.

Matilda Zoey Olson was born yesterday at 6:37 PM. She weighed in at 9 pounds, 11 oz, and 20 1/2 inches long…meaning my concerned predictions about having an enormous child were not far off (especially when you consider that she was a week early).

If you’re interested in the whole story, here’s how the day broke down: Tyler and I went into the hospital at 7 AM, after a crappy night’s sleep for both of us. We spent the next 2 1/2 hours doing paperwork, waiting for the right doctors, going over procedures, and so on. At 9:30 AM, a resident finally broke my water (PS: this hurts a lot. And she had to do it twice). This was disgusting. Extremely disgusting. I spent the next few hours walking the halls and rolling around on a balance ball, trying to get contractions going. After awhile, I started having contractions - the really, really bad kind, but they weren’t, as Tyler phrased it, “organized,” which means the medical personnel did not take them seriously. I, on the other hand, took them very seriously. About 2:30 I asked about pain meds, and received the happy news that I was dilated enough to have an epidural whenever I wanted. Hooray!

The nurses got an IV started immediately, but the epidural people weren’t immediately available, so they gave me morphine instead. Morphine made me really, really loopy. Seriously, I had to explain to my family and Tyler that I was essentially wasted. (Yep, I used that word. Wasted. Because I was.) After an hour or so, the epidural people came in and set it up for me. This wasn’t as scary or painful as I had feared, partly because the anesthesiologists were very good, and partly because I was, as mentioned, wasted. I was also very tired, and fell asleep shortly after.

Here’s the thing about epidurals: they’re awesome. Morphine is awesome, too, in the way that large quantities of tequila are awesome, but epidurals now have a warm and sparkly place in my heart forever. I went number from about the belly button down, which meant I could no longer feel my contractions. I couldn’t feel my legs, either, or the catheter they put in (only practical), but I could not have cared less. I got to have a nice nap through the contractions, and didn’t wake up until around 5:30. That’s when the contraction pain started to break through the epidural, just a little. At that point, I kind of wanted to get checked for progress, but my nurse Lana explained that two other babies had just been born at the same time, and all the medical personnel were running around like crazy people. She told me to just hang in there, and let her know if I was starting to feel “the urge to push.”

I was pretty skeptical about this “urge to push” thing…right up until I felt it. It wasn’t exactly the URGE to push, so much as the idea that maybe I could. I called Lana, explained, and she said she’d just check me herself, to see how dilated I was (at my last check I’d been around 4 centimeters, but I needed to make it to 10 in order to start pushing). Most women are convinced that they’re ready to go when they still need three or four more centimeters, so neither of us were particularly hopeful. She went to examine me, and immediately gasped and said, “uh…would you like to know if your baby has hair?”

I was ready.

I won’t go too far into the rest of pushing, except to say, once again, yay for epidurals. And for my ace in the hole, the Olson Hips. For my entire life, I have been banking on these giant, oversized hips helping me out when it finally came time for childbirth someday. Every time I’ve gone into a dressing room, every time I’ve stepped on a scale, I’ve thought, “someday, this will pay off big time, and it’ll be worth all of this. And it was. My pushing stage took about twenty-five minutes (Average for first time mothers: an hour and a half to two hours), after which this giant kid popped out. As pre-arranged with Lana, they took Mattie to be cleaned off before handing her to me, which gave me time to …um…finish delivering. Tyler held the baby first, and then brought her over to me. Then my mom got a turn, and called in my dad and my sister to meet the baby as well.

I also won’t go into further details about my health, because it gets icky, and because I’ve been told more than once that these blogs have frightened some of my friends off having kids, which isn’t my intention. Instead, I want to talk about Mattie, who was born perfect and beautiful. She didn’t cry once last night, not even for shots, or when they cleaned her off with what had to seem like cold cloths. She was happy and calm and tough, even sleeping through the night (some babies don’t want to eat right away, so they don’t wake up every two hours at first) so I got a chance for some rest - or would have, if the nurses hadn’t woken me up frequently to check my vital signs. My point is, I had been prepared for my baby to have some minor problems: be incredibly ugly, or tomato red, or covered in infant acne, or have a dis-proportionately large head. But she was just…perfect.

Anyway, through the whole rest of the night, and this morning, I kept looking at Mattie and thinking two thoughts: first, that she was perfect, and second, that I just couldn’t believe she was mine. And I honestly mean that: I’ve been around babies my whole life. I’ve been to the hospital with problems. I’ve even been stoned at the hospital. And my brain just couldn’t connect these dots: that I’d given birth to a BABY, and she was MINE. I liked the baby and all, but seriously, despite nine months of annoying, but very prevalent pregnancy, last night it wouldn’t have surprised me at all if some random woman had walked in and introduced herself as Mattie’s mother, and taken her away. That feeling lasted all last night and into this morning. Tyler and I played with Mattie, changed her diaper, watched her sleep, kissed her head, stroked her thick hair, and so on, but I just never could quite wrap my head around the whole “mine” thing.

And then something funny happened: we started getting visitors. One of my friends came, and both Tyler’s parents, and everyone wanted to hold the baby. And every time they did, after a few minutes, I started to itch. In fact, if she just laid in her bed for too long, I started to itch. I considered the feeling, and realized that if I went too long without holding Mattie, I missed her. It made me all uncomfortable, and I just needed to get her back. And that, folks, is when I figured out that she was mine.

It also helped when I started breast-feeding. (This paragraph will contain some further references to breast-feeding, so quit now if you’re squeamish.) If you’d asked me six months ago, or hey, two days ago, how I felt about breast-feeding, I would have said I thought it was kind of icky. I mean, every girl knows intellectually that breasts have a biological purpose, but in this day and age, that purpose isn’t exactly the first thing you use them for. I was always kind of weirded out by the concept, and it was one of those things about pregnancy that I’d just kind of pushed to the back of my mind as something to be dealt with later. Then later happened. And I had to just…do it. And you know, it wasn’t so bad. In fact - and as I write this I know how lame and hemp mommy-like it sounds - it made me feel close to the baby. I mean, she needs me. And I can do something for her that no one else can do, not even Tyler. That’s pretty amazing.

So that’s where I’m at. My having a baby experience wasn’t perfectly awesome, it was real. Drugs, weirded-out feelings, uncomfortable new knowledge about the human body, and all. It was not the kind of experience that TV show moms have (except maybe on Sex and the City), but it was real and it was mine. And even though I may not have had an immediate mother-daughter bond with my baby, I got to it, all by myself. Now I just have to get through the next part: taking her home.

(If you’re interested, see pictures in the Gallery section of melissaolson.net)

Chuckie Cheese and I are having issues.

For Tyler’s birthday this year, another couple and I took him to Chuckie Cheese’s, where a kid can be a kid. It probably sounds pretty strange, but when you a) can’t drink, b) want to spend time talking to each other (as opposed to seeing a movie) and c) are basically a big kid anyway, it makes perfect sense. Last night, we wanted to celebrate our friend Jess’s birthday, so the four of us returned to the Cheese.

Here’s the thing about the Madison Chuckie Cheese’s: The people who frequent Chuckie Cheese’s are not the same ones you’d run into, say, at a Mommy and Me class, or the nice bars on State Street. They’re normal people who maybe don’t have the money to go anywhere else. The place itself is dingy, and old, and the food isn’t that great, and the waitstaff is always harried and right on the edge of a nervous breakdown. But despite that, there’s a certain charm and nostalgia to the seedy Chuckie’s. And at the arcade, every single ride or game costs exactly one token, which is 25 cents. If you’ve been to an arcade lately (I’m thinking of Action City in Eau Claire here, but really anywhere), you’ll know that games can cost up to, say, $1.75, if not more. I wouldn’t say Chuckie Cheese’s has the best games in the world, obviously, but they have the basics: skeeball, hoops, that thing where you try to push a button when a light is in a certain spot. And, the best game of all: arcade MarioKart.

I adore MarioKart. We have the Wii version, which is good, but I grew up on the old-school Super Nintendo version, and that’s what you can play at the Cheese, only with a big steering wheel and pedals and new levels and everything. It’s awesome, one of the coolest games I’ve seen in an arcade, in terms of nostalgia and enjoyment, and the only place I’ve ever found it is the Madison Chuckie’s. The only problem is that I’m 25 years old.

On a Saturday night (what were we thinking?!) Chuckie Cheese’s is a little kid-sized madhouse. And the same two little kids, around 8 or 9, sat on the MarioKart machine for HOURS. That seems to happen every time we go, and I can’t swear they’re the same two little kids each time, but I seriously suspect. Tyler and I must have stood around for 45 minutes waiting to play, sweating in the little kid-fueled heat, feeling a little bit like assholes. When we finally, FINALLY got to play, all the mommies at Chuckie Cheese’s started giving us dirty looks, and the kids kept asking if they could play now.

Is this not America? Do my husband and I not have the right to throw away our hard-earned (by him) money on a “children’s” game that happens to be completely awesome? Do we not follow the same social rules of waiting as everyone else, and should our patience not be rewarded with a few rounds of MarioKart?

The answer, it seems, is not really. Mr. Cheese himself seemed to welcome us and our money to his fine establishment, but the other patrons were not amused by our desire to kick some Mario ass. And suddenly I felt like the 16-year-old who goes trick-or-treating. (Do they not have the same rights to free candy as any other minor in America?) As much as I love arcade games, even I can’t really make a very good case for us monopolizing the MarioKart game, even for only a little while, even after we waited patiently. (Though those two monopolizing little kids still piss me off: where are their parents? Have they not taught their children that it’s nice to share? Or did they just drop the boys off with a 20 and hit the bar scene?)

When you’re a little kid, the excitement of Chuckie Cheese’s is that it’s a kid world, built for you. You don’t see the dinginess, the shabby booths and lukewarm pizza, or how old that giant mouse costume has gotten. You just see a world where anything’s possible. I can’t argue with that, and even though Tyler and I enjoy kid things as much as…well, most children, I have to concede the territory of Chuckie Cheese’s to the little ones. The good news, though, is that I’m currently constructing a kid of my own, who in a couple years can provide the perfect cover story for playing MarioKart. And in the meantime, if I need to scratch my Chuckie Cheese itch, I’ll go on a Wednesday.