Melissesages

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.

My second great news of the week: Chapter one of my novel, Identity Crisis, is now available for viewing on my website, www.melissaolson.net.

Okay, granted, it’s not as exciting as finding out the day your child will be born, but it’s still pretty darn awesome. I’ve been wanting to get this up for ages, and am so psyched to finally present it. Plus, you know, it’s nice to think about something that in no way involves my uterus. I’m especially excited because it went up before a) the baby is born and my life gets insane, and b) Madison Writer’s Institute conference at the end of March.

If you haven’t heard of it, the Madison Writer’s Institute is this very cool three-day event for writers that’s sponsored by the UW School of Continuing Studies. I do a number of events with the school throughout the year, but the Writer’s Institute is the big Show. It’s three days of classes, seminars, workshops, contests, etc, and they usually get great teachers involved. And, best of all, if you participate in Writers’ Institute you can schedule a sit-down pitch session with an honest-to-goodness literary agent.

The process goes like this: you have eight minutes to pitch your completed novel to an agent. If the agent isn’t into it at all, they’ll smile and thank you, and you walk away with at least the experience of talking to an actual industry person (this is more valuable than you’d think: these people are really difficult to get to). If the agent is interested, they’ll ask you to send them an email with an introduction letter (this is like a cover letter for job applications, and there are just as many rules about how it should be written) and a one-page summary of your novel’s events. If the agent likes THAT, he or she will ask you to send them the first three chapters, and if they like those, they’ll ask you for the whole novel.

You can’t imagine how difficult it is to get an agent to read your work, which is why it’s so great to be able to pitch the book in person and really try to get someone’s interest. The catch is, of course, they really only want you to pitch a completed book. My first year at Writers’ Institute I pitched the novel I was working on anyway, and got to the point where I was asked for my first three chapters. Thankfully I had THAT much done. The agent in question read them and sent me a (rather nice) rejection letter explaining what she didn’t like about the book, and it was actually incredibly helpful. Last year I pitched “Identity Crisis,” but the book was still in very early stages - I didn’t have a title, and I wasn’t at all sure that my first three chapters were anything more than first drafts. I was upfront about it with the agent, who listened to my pitch anyway and asked me to send my summary whenever the book was finished. I thought it would be done, well, awhile ago, but I kind of got married and pregnant this year, which tends to derail things.

So where does that leave me? Well, I have a writing schedule worked out, and if I can stick to it, I could theoretically complete the novel before March 27th, the first day of the conference. Most likely, I’ll still need to do some revising after that, but as long as my first three chapters are solid as a rock, I’ll have a little bit of time to get that done. Right now, it’s just a matter of discipline, which I admit is not my best quality. On top of that, I have a baby coming in, oh, four days. This will definitely be a challenge, but I’m excited about it. And having my first chapter available online just fuels the fire. I really, really want to finish this book.

No matter what, though, Writers’ Institute is one of my favorite weekends of the year, because it’s the one time when my primary job is to just be a writer. Not a TV producer, or a wife, or (now) a mother. For three days, all day, I am a Writer. There’s something incredibly satisfying about getting to experience that.

So please, head to my homepage and click “The Book” on the top toolbar. Behold, Chapter 1. And please, let me know what you think, good and bad.

The end is near.

At my doctor’s appointment today, I made a plan: they’re going to induce labor on Tuesday. I’ll call the hospital at 6:00 AM, and they’ll check and make sure the birthing center isn’t too overpopulated. If there’s room for me, I’ll go in at 7:00 AM and the doctors will break my water. My mom will come down from Chippewa to be with me, and hopefully Mattie will be born with no complications.

I am, obviously, super relieved about getting a date on the calendar. Tyler, on the other hand, is a little freaked out. I reminded him that this is exactly what we wanted, and he compared it to the moment when you get to the top of the roller coaster: yeah, you’ve been waiting in line for three hours and you knew exactly how high up the thing was, but damn. Once you’re finally up there, it’s terrifying, no matter how much you’ve been expecting it. I suppose that’s fair. For me, though, I just want the birth stuff over with, so I can move on to the next part of my life.

Throughout this pregnancy, I’ve also been giving a lot of thought to a concept I by all accounts shouldn’t be thinking about for years: the next kid. I know that there’s not rush and we don’t necessarily have to even discuss this for years, but when you’re so involved with having a baby, it’s awfully hard not to consider whether or not you could go through it again - especially when you’re, say, stuck in the hospital Thanksgiving weekend or out of commission for weeks due to morning sickness. Many, many times in the last nine months I’ve caught myself thinking, “Could I ever do this again?” The whole experience has been so miserable, and lasted so long. It’s also completely turned my life upside down. Is there any way I’m tough enough to stand it all again, knowing what I know now?

On the one hand, Tyler and I both had siblings growing up, and it’s an experience I don’t want Mattie to miss out on. (Plus, it’s my understanding that only children have a much, much greater chance of turning out to be assholes than kids who weren’t the sole center of their parents’ universe. And I don’t want my kid to be an asshole.) Having a brother and sister means someone always has your back. And, okay, I recognize that this is basically the worst thought in the entire world, but what happens if something terrible happens to your child, and you lose him or her? Isn’t it better to have another kid as kind of a safety? This sentiment is probably the result of watching way too many crime shows, but I can’t imagine having Mattie being the center of our world for the next two decades and then suddenly lose her and be left with nothing, too old to have any more kids. That would be devastating.

On the other hand, though, there’s the misery of pregnancy (and don’t underestimate this, people: nine months is a really, really long time. I should know), not to mention there’s a part of me that thinks having a kid in this day and age is kind of selfish. Mattie aside for a moment, is it really responsible to bring another child to a planet that’s already overpopulated and dying? We can’t come close to feeding everyone in the country, much less the world, and our natural resources are getting lower every day. And that’s without even getting into things like the economy, rising crime rates, or wars and genocide. Is it fair to a kid to be brought into that?

I have, on and off, been toying with the idea of adoption someday. I would love for Tyler to have a son. But we probably wouldn’t adopt an infant, but a child, since infants are in high demand and lots of kids go unadopted and unwanted. (Plus, you hear so many terrible horror stories about abusive or neglectful foster parents; without even trying hard we could be the best foster parents EVER). I think that would be very cool, but i do worry that the kid would feel like an outsider, since we will already have a biological daughter. Not to mention my big, crazy, hugely populated extended family, which has not a single adopted child among them (we Olsons are from fertile peasant stock.).

I don’t know - it’s a tough decision that I just can’t help thinking about, since the idea of having a kid is so fresh in my mind at all times right now. Tyler isn’t much help, either: every time I bring it up, he just says that Mattie will always have dog brothers and sisters. (Eye roll.) I want to smack him, but I try to remind myself that Tyler has the luxury of not thinking about having children every second of every day, unlike me. I literally can’t escape it, since it’s, you know, a 30-pound weight that’s attached to my body. Talk about trying not to think about the elephant in the room; I’m trying not to think about the THING THAT’S ATTACHED TO MY STOMACH.

Someday I’ll have an answer to the ‘more kids’ questions, but I doubt it’ll be anytime soon. In the meantime, I’m just excited about finally meeting the first one. Tuesday can’t come soon enough.

It seems like every few years, a celebrity goes insane. Or, I should say - we find out a celebrity is insane. Actors are shrouded by layers of publicists, agents, and managers, to the point where most of what they say “candidly” has been written down and rehearsed somewhere along the line ("I loved working with {insert other actor’s name}. He was such a professional, and we had a great time on set.") But every once in awhile, an actor just has so much crazy that it busts through the dam, and suddenly everyone knows. Remember when John Travolta did “Battlefield Earth” and we all found out about Scientology? Or when Mel Gibson lost it after “Passion of the Christ,” or Tom Cruise jumped on a couch, bitched about antidepressants, and married Katie Holmes? How about that memorable day when Britney Spears shaved her head and had to be committed? This isn’t just Stars Gone Wild, people. This is Stars Gone Nuts.

It’s funny, every once in awhile I’ll catch “Lethal Weapon” on television, and think, “Man, what happened? Mel Gibson used to be so awesome, and now we all pretty much agree that he’s a tool. Was he a tool all along and I didn’t know it? Have I been betrayed somehow here? Or did the pressures of Hollywood just cause his mental faculties to slowly leak out of his 80’s mullet?” I don’t have an answer to that, but at this point I think we’ve all just accepted that every once in awhile, somebody goes nuts. I did not, however, expect Joaquin Phoenix to be the next domino to fall. The extremely talented “Walk the Line” actor announced a few months ago that he’s retiring from his successful career in order to be some kind of musician. Then last week he turns up in a club in Las Vegas, ‘performs’ a terrible, unintelligible rap for 12 minutes, and wanders offstage. Great career choice, Joaquin. It makes me sad, and I am once again faced with the question: was he crazy all along, or did something make this happen? Or, alternatively, is there something about acting that really, really attracts crazy people?

In other national news, did you hear about the woman who gave birth to eight babies yesterday? True story. She was 30 weeks along, and delivered by C-section (obviously- no vagina is built for that). They were actually only expecting 7 babies, based on ultrasounds, and the doctors were surprised to discover an 8th baby that had just not been visible. I suppose, after a certain number, it’s like “one more? Why not!” But I can’t believe an additional baby just appeared in there. I can’t imagine if I went in to deliver Mattie and someone said, “Oops! We missed one!”

To be fair, though, I can’t imagine having that many babies, period. This is the country’s second set of octuplets, and if they all make it they will be the first surviving set. The odds of successfully delivering that many babies are much worse than delivering one or two, not to mention the practical difficulties of raising EIGHT FRICKING KIDS that are all the same age. (Although they almost have their own baseball team, which is cool). There’s a TV show I’ve seen a few times on TLC called “Jon and Kate Plus Eight” and it’s about these parents who have one set of twins and one set of sextuplets, and their lives are insane. Because they have a TV show (not exactly an option for everyone), they’re able to afford things like food and diapers, but the parents’ whole lives seem to just be getting everyone in the house up, dressed, fed, sent to the bathroom, and put to bed every day. Just watching the show is exhausting.

It’s really got me thinking about the ethics of fertility treatments. I fully support women who want to have children but whose bodies need artificial help in order to do so. Everyone has the right to be a parent if he or she wants, as long as they meet the requirements of being a decent parent. On the other hand, I’m not ordinarily a big believer in abortion: I think it should be legal, because it’s a religious and not a civic issue, but it’s not something I would ever choose (no pun intended) for myself.

But I have to wonder: if I were pregnant from a fertility treatment and discovered that I had six or seven babies in me, would I be willing to carry all of them to term, or would I choose to “reduce” the pregnancy? In the face of having SEVEN infants inside me, would I stick to my “abortion is not a choice for me” guns, or would I cave and reduce the number of babies to three or four? Statistically, reducing the pregnancy would give all of us survivors a better chance at…well, surviving, but it would also mean aborting three babies. And let’s be honest - health reasons are all well and good, but I would be aborting for mostly selfish purposes, not wanting to have to raise that many babies at once. Could I do that? Would I do that?

The question nags at me, and coward that I am, I’m glad I won’t ever have to truly answer: if Mattie is any indication, fertility treatments will never be a part of my future. But the next time you find yourself in a debate about abortion, ask yourself what you’d do in that situation. You have to admit, it kind of changes the playing field.