Oh, The Commerical IS The Point

Last week I interviewed at a very large and well-known ad agency. They'd said they were looking for someone to do some freelance information architecture work, but once I arrived in their huge and somewhat creepy industrial space it became clear that they'd sort of lied about the freelance position and were really looking for someone full time. This was immediately apparent by the fact that I was forced to meet with the human resources lady. When someone wants to bring on a freelancer they don't make you go through human resources.

So the HR lady sat me down at a big round table and asked me a bunch of silly HR questions that had nothing to do with anything, and then she popped a video tape into a nearby VCR and said, "I'm going to let you watch a short video about [insert big ad agency name here]." Then she left the room.

The video started, and it was pretty standard stuff, about ten minutes or so on the company, and why it was such a fabulous, creative, edgy place, and how they made such great ads, and I sat and stared out the window because information architecture has nothing to do with creating television ads and I could have cared less what kind of work environment their copywriters and art directors subsist in.

And then the commercials started. There was a cute ad involving cows that entertained me for a minute, and then we got on to some boring pain relief ads and hotel ads, and before I knew it I found myself reflexively looking around for the remote so I could fast forward through the commercials. At which point it occured to me that there was no remote and there was in fact no TV show to fast forward to., because of course the only thing on this tape was commercials. Duh.

I've spent a lot of my professional life working in and around ad agencies, and I am always amazed at the fact that people at ad agencies think commercials are art. And I knew then that I was not going to be taking any projects for the big, edgy ad agency. I knew it later, too, when the VP of information architecture came in to meet with me and he was about 15 and acted all uncertain about whether my 10 years of experience would really be enough to qualify me to design a web site for laundry detergent.

I might have been upset and pissed off about the whole experience and how it was such a massive waste of time, except that then I went home and I kissed the baby and I kissed my book and I kissed my husband and I patted the cat, and none of it really mattered that much after all.

The Difference Between People Who Have Had Babies and People Who Have Not

"How old is your baby?" asked the cashier.

"Almost three months," I said.

"And are you feeling good?" she asked.

"Well," I said. "Every week is better than the week before."

A woman standing next to me glanced at me sympathetically. "That sounds about right," she said.

Brooklyn in Da House

If You Can't Say Something Nice, Become A Book Critic

Finally, after some intial nastiness and general confusion, I get some decent reviews. Who knew I would have fans in Green Bay?
Boston Herald
Green Bay Press-Gazette

Boys

"So the other day on The View* they were talking about autism," I said to Steven last night.

"Oh for God's sake, Milo isn't autistic."

"I know. I'm just saying. They said it's now like 1 in 150 or something, but they keep changing the diagnosis and stuff, so who knows."

"Isn't there some kind of mild autism now?"

"Yes, Asperger's Syndrome."

"Ass Burger's Syndrome?"

"No. Asperger."

"Ass Burger?"

"Asperger! With a P!"

"Oh. I thought there was a Dr. Ass Burger out there somewhere."

I rubbed my forehead. "If I have to live in a house full of boys I might shoot myself. And now there are two of you."

"I know," said Steven. "It's going to be so great."

*Note to those who are alarmed by the fact that I am watching The View: They review books. I wrote a book. It is for research purposes only.

Milo Contemplates His Future Profile

One of the first things people say when they meet a baby for the first time is, "He looks like you", or, "He looks like his dad," or, "He looks like the mailman." There is endless discussion over whose eyes he has and what color his hair will be and, particularly in Jewish families, whose nose he has inherited.

Since Milo's birth the majority of the world (i.e. my family and Steven's family) have been in agreement that he looks like my side of the family. Some people say he looks like me, other say he looks like my brother (see above) or my father. (Please God, don't make me raise my father.) But the truth is that he looks totally different every day; every morning when I see him in his crib I'm greeted by a face that looks slightly different from the one I kissed good night the evening before.

I recently sent my father some pictures of Milo and he emailed me back asking, "Does he have red hair?"

"He did that day," I replied.

Part of the problem is that babies look like babies. When I went to my OB's office for my 6 week post partum check up I found myself staring at a picture of a baby on her wall and thinking, that looks exactly like Milo! How did she get a picture of him in here? When it dawned on me that it wasn't a picture of Milo at all, or maybe it was, the fact was that I had absolutely no idea what my baby looked when shown in comparison to a sea of other babies.

And of course, what people usually mean when they say "He looks like X" is one of two things:

1. I want to make a pleasant comment about your baby.

2. I'm wondering what kind of human being your baby is going to turn out to be.

In the mean time, I'm trying to stop thinking about who Milo looks like. He may end up with my eyes or Steven's nose, but ultimately he's just going to look like Milo.

Not Enough Baby to Go Around

Throughout most of my pregnancy, especially the last two god-awful months when I could do nothing but complain and sit around trapped under my own girth, and the first 8 weeks or so of Milo's ex-utero existence, I wondered how on earth people have more than one child. I calculated that I had just spent the bulk of an entire year suffering a nice variety of misery - some physical, some mental, some just hormonal - and couldn't fathom ever going through this process again.

And then the Milo of the last few weeks arrived - a smiley baby who has passionate likes (the mobile above his crib, the book Mirror Me, his new friend the bouncy-seat starfish) and passionate dislikes (being put down for naps, breastfeeding, hats) - and suddenly there simply isn't enough Milo to go around. Which means that quite frequently either Steven or I will be performing some baby-related task like changing his diaper (likes) or bathing him (has to be reminded that he likes) while the other person stands nearby and simply marvels at the fact that we have created something so ridiculously cute. Which of course is a massive waste of time, particularly when non-baby time is so precious. We both know that there are plenty of bother, better things we could be doing as opposed to booping Milo's nose while the other person changes his diaper, but it's almost like Milo has some sort of magnetic pull that keeps both parents firmly rooted to his side.

Unless he's crying. At which point I have to repeat silently to myself "it's not his fault, it's not his fault, he's just a baby, it's not his fault" in order to keep myself from throwing him in the crib and walking out of the apartment.

This weird push/pull whenever one enters Milo's orbit has been going on for quite a while now - "Can't live with him, can't live without him," my mother said the other day - and I'm begining to wonder if it's just what being a parent is about. Here is this entity that is totally your creation, that sometimes seems to be the most marvelous being on earth, except when he's the bane of your existence and you wonder if it would really be all that bad to just hand him off to a passing stranger.

When I was pregnant people were always busy congratulating me and saying things like "oh it's so exciting!!" Now that I have a newborn I find most people approach me slowly, put an arm around my shoulder and whisper, "How are you holding up?" Being a parent is HARD. Being tired is hard. Being under the spell of a twelve-week-old baby is ridiculous. And yet, I can't wait to see what he's going to be like next week.

Old

When I was a kid we had a German cleaning woman who used to put everyone's shoes on the fireplace. Looking back on it, I'm not sure if she was a German immigrant or simply of German descent, but my father used to refer to her as The Nazi, and somehow I linked her alleged Nazi-ism with the fact that she thought shoes belonged on the fireplace. Like, that's where they put their shoes during the war to keep them warm.

As an adult I now have my own cleaning woman, Jadwiga. She's really lovely and adores both Milo and our cat Oscar, but she has some strange idiosyncrasies that I find myself attributing to the fact that she's a Polish immigrant. Which is to say, when she spread out our big yellow chenille throw across the living room couch and tucked it into the pillows I thought to myself, well, maybe that's what couches look like in Poland. When Steven discovered his pajamas folded up neatly under his pillow I thought, maybe that's where people keep their pajamas in Poland.

Of course the reality is that little of this has to do with nationality or being a recent immigrant, a fact that has become glaringly obvious over the past two months, when our apartment has played host to one mother or another for extended periods of time. (A side effect of having a baby is that suddenly your own parents are way more interested in visiting you than they ever have been before.) After my mother spent a week with us I found a stack of neatly folded paper bags in the kitchen. And I knew instantly that she had put them there because in the kitchens of my childhood we always had a stack of neatly folded paper bags somewhere. My mother likes to save paper bags. I have no idea why.

And after Steven's mother spent a week with us I found a little mound of single-serving packets of salt, pepper, Equal, Sweet 'n Low, soy sauce, mustard and ketchup in one of the kitchen drawers. Clearly my mother-in-law believes that when one is given free condiments in take out orders, one should save them. I pointed the little mound of packets out to Steven one morning and he said, oh yes, his childhood home had always contained a drawer full of condiment packets.

These are things that might have upset me at some other point in my life. In my early twenties I might have felt threatened and wondered if one could actually have a household without stacks of paper bags and piles of condiment packets. Maybe these things were required in order to make a house a home? But now I'm old enough to laugh the bags and condiments off as quaint relics from my childhood and Steven's childhood, old enough to scoop up the packets and the bags and throw them out because for God's sake has neither woman lived in a New York apartment where space is at a premium?

All of which is to say that I usually feel pretty comfortable with running my household the way I see fit; I feel old enough to have opinions on what gets saved and what gets thrown out and together enough to have established my own workaday routine around the house. Which is why it's so weird that I feel I need to perform for the nanny. She started this week. She's 23 and she's here, in our house, 4 1/2 hours out of every day. And normally I would just go about my business, as I do when the cleaning woman is here, and do my work and listen to my music and chat on the phone and do whatever else I generally do. But the other day I found myself attempting to select hipper music to work to, in an attempt to look cooler to the nanny.

Maybe it's that being around a 23-year-old makes me feel unbelievably ancient. Because it's easy to pretend you're just out of your twenties and not really all THAT far out of college until you meet someone who really is in their twenties and is JUST out of college, and you realize that that person is a child and you are decidedly an adult. You understand that that person has things like roommates and probably sleeps on a futon and that to her 10pm is the time you go out, not the time you go to sleep. And all of this leads you to the realization that sometime in the past ten years you went from being a child to being an adult. Sometime in the period of time your job became not just a job but a career, you acquired furniture that did not come from the Salvation Army or your grandmother's old apartment, you got married, you became the kind of person who owns a Kitchen Aid stand mixer, you became a parent.

And I think that I am slightly obsessed with the nanny because while I know what it is to be her - to be 23 and just arrived in a new city and excited and scared and who knows what crazy, fabulous thing might happen today? - I know that she has absolutely no idea what it is to be me. At least, when I was her age I had no idea. So I can't help but wonder what she thinks of me. I wonder if I am as boring to her as my 23-year-old self would have found me. I wonder if she finds us old and dull and typical. I wonder if she thinks, God, does that woman own any music that isn't totally VH1? Or maybe she doesn't think about it at all. Maybe she's just thinking about what she's going to do tonight and how she's going to pay her rent and if that job or that boy or this life is really going to work out. After all, that's probably what I would be thinking, were I still 23.

How Does He Put Up With Me?

The other day Steven and I were walking through Prospect Park, pushing a gently sleeping Milo along in his stroller. It was unseasonably warm for January, and we were wearing thin wool coats and gloves.

I looked up at the pale blue winter sky and the bare trees and across the rolling hills of the park, which was mostly empty save for a few scenic dogs out fetching sticks or frisbees or whatever it is dogs fetch, and I turned to Steven and said, "sometimes this park is so beautiful it makes me want to cry."

"Mmhmm," Steven replied.

Pause.

"Wow. That was probably the girliest sentence I've ever said."

"Mmhmm," said Steven.

Rollercoaster Ride, Part 3

New low point of motherhood:
Walking around all day singing the song Milo's stuffed caterpillar makes when you press the red section: red, red, did you hear what I said, red, red. Then walking into the kitchen before bed and hearing Steven singing the same song.

New high point of motherhood:
Walking into Milo's room early this morning and having him not only notice my arrival, but stop crying, smile, and start kicking his feet back and forth with sheer joy.

Shameless Self Promotion

Whatever. I've never been in a national magazine before.
If you want your own more legible copy you'll have to buy the February issue of Glamour.

The Importance of Being Peppy

Let the world rejoice! I am writing about something other than the baby!

Having a book published is a little like being drafted for the J.V. cheerleading squad. For starters, everyone from my agent to my editor to my two publicists is a rail-thin, stylishly dressed woman. But more importantly, everyone is peppy about the book all the time. (Which is why I say they are like the J.V. squad. Were they the varsity squad they would be saying nasty things behind my back that would eventually lead me to develop an eating disorder.)

On the one hand, this general peppiness is totally acceptable since everyone is on the same team and wants the book to be a huge success. On the other hand, yesterday I had an email exchange with one of the publicists that contained no less than six instances of the word "great!" (always with an exclamation point!). The scariest part is that I was responsible for at least half the "great!"s. And I am not a "great!" kind of gal. Words I like to use in my emails generally include "sucks", "ugh", and, when referring to a recent unkind review of my book that both my editor and agent deemed irrelevant, "soul-crushing."

Granted, so far a lot of the things that have happened with the book are "great!". i received some very flattering blurbs from other authors and one Hollywood director. The book has been chosen by Barnes and Noble to be in their Discover Great New Writers series, which everyone involved with the book says is not just "great!" but "huge!". And I am genuinely excited about these things. I really, really am. But somehow I am incapable of expressing my excitement in a way that doesn't sound ridiculous to my own ears, which means I end up just not expressing it at all.

This has been a problem that has plagued me for years, my inability to be peppy. As a camper I was severly reprimanded for not showing enough enthusiasm while singing "Sign out and rotate *clap* *clap*! Our team is really great!" while rotating positions during volleyball games. And in high school my softball coach threatened to pull me from my prized position batting 4th in the lineup unless I starting cheering my teammates on better.

"Infield chatter!" she'd yell from the bench, then glare at me as I mumbled into my softball glove while the rest of the team yelled peppy words of encouragement to the pitcher.

"You can do it Cindy!" they'd squeal. "Strike her out!"

At a complete loss as to what to yell, I'd just repeat whatever had been yelled by the previous girl and pretend that it was a coincidence.

"Strike her out!" I'd whisper to the long grass out in right field.

"You can do it, Cindy!" I'd tell a nearby dandelion.

And now, with the publication of my first book, I find myself in a similar situation, only this time everyone is over thirty and they're cheering me on about something that I honestly care about (as opposed to the outcome of some stupid high school softball game). So to my teammates on the J.V. Book Publication Squad I'd like to say thanks. I really appreciate the pep and the excitement and the "great!"s. I'm excited too. I just tend to use the word "soul-crushing" to describe it.

Yeah, I Guess I'll Keep Him

The Blue Toe

The other day I discovered that if I give my right breast a squeeze in just the right place, milk will shoot out across the room. I quickly padded down the hall to find Steven to show him my new party trick.

"Check this out," I said, then sent a stream of breast milk a few inches into the air.

"Great," said Steven. Then, apropos of nothing, he added, "lots of women hand-express."

"What?" I said. "Where did you hear that?"

"I'm informed," he muttered. "I know things."

Nothing makes words come out of your mouth that you never in a million years thought you might say like having a baby around. When Steven and I were first introduced, 8 years ago, in a dark and drafty TV studio, it never crossed my mind that one day we would be discussing ways of producing breast milk.

I'm not sure whether it's the fact that we now have a joint product and a shared person whom we're utterly invested in, or the knowledge that Steven now owns a pair of jeans that were once splattered with amniotic fluid, but Steven and I are suddenly discussing all kinds of things that we didn't before Milo arrived on the scene. It probably started when I was pregnant and I developed a sort of uncontrolled burping as a result of the heartburn that plagued me night and day. I secretly hoped the burping was endearing, because I'd never burped in front of Steven before. But now, safe with the knowledge that he has watched all sorts of scary things come out of my body, I'm totally free to burp whenever I please. I feel liberated. Of course, this is probably also partially due to the fact that my burps pale in comparison to the endless stream of chunky spit up and bright yellow poop that is our son.

I didn't realize how much things had changed for us until last week, when Milo had his first medical drama (well, second if you count the jaundice episode). He woke up on Friday morning with a blue toe. Upon further inspection, we discovered that he had a hair (one of mine, natch, so I can live with the guilt for the rest of my life) wrapped tightly around the toe and it was cutting off his circulation. After several frantic minutes of trying and failing to get the hair off, we called the pediatrician, who told us to bring Milo in immediately. And so Steven took the baby and ran the fifteen blocks to the pediatrician, who ended up getting the hair of with Nair.

After the episode was over and Milo had returned from a wailing baby in pain to one who was happy as a clam, I looked at Steven and saw that he had not only run out of the house without brushing his teeth, but also without a coat or socks. I saw that as much Milo had been in pain, Steven had been in pain too. The three of us had all suffered together, and I loved both my boys more for it.

If the World Were Babylicious

A friend of mine once wrote that after she'd given birth she stared open-mouthed at other mothers passing her on the street, amazed at the amount of pain and struggle these otherwise ordinary women had endured to bring a child into the world. While I'm amazed at that too, I find that I'm even more fascinated by the fact that everyone, from President Bush to my landlord, Ray, was once a helpless baby.

I sit in meetings staring at the grownups in their business casual and think to myself, your mama once wiped your ass, and burped you, and if you were lucky, she worried about what kind of person you would reveal yourself to be and if you would grow up allright. I am equally amazed at the other people in these meetings who have children. I look at them and think, you know what it is to be spit up on at three in the morning; you too have inspected your child's dirty diapers and wondered if the color and consistency of his poop is okay; you understand what it feels like to be on the receiving end of endless uncontrollable crying.

And I find it amazing that all of us grownups, ex-babies, have learned to supress the baby inside. Because while Milo expresses every tiny little thing he is feeling every minute of the day, most people do not. I like to imagine a world where people in business meetings cry when they need to fart, where their colleagues come over and pat them on the back and whisper soothing words into their ears when their tummies hurt after lunch, where when you feel sleepy you can squish your face into your meal and fall asleep, mouth agape, a tiny trickle of nonfat latte running from the corner of your mouth, pooling under the collar of your golf shirt.

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Milo

So all week Milo has been a dream baby. He has been sleeping five, sometimes even six hour stretches at night, which, from what I understand about the Ways of The North American Infant, is highly unusual and makes up a tiny bit for that irksome 36-hour labor. He's been giggling and cute, eating when he's supposed to eat and sleeping when he's supposed to sleep. That changed yesterday, when we made the massive mistake of inviting people not related to us over to the house.

Milo had been throwing us the highlights from his bag of tricks all morning - smiling, loving the rotating starfish on his bouncy seat, smacking the crap out of the hanging plastic parts on his activity mat - until Sam and Lisa showed up, at which point he decided to scream, fuss, and generally act like he was extremely unsatisfied with the parents that life had dealt him.

Every day is ... not so much an adventure, more like a grueling hike up a mountain that sometimes offers nice views. Which makes it extremely hard to plan or anticipate anything. And for me, this is one of the toughest parts of parenthood. Because I love to plan. I like to plan what I'm doing in three hours; I like to plan what I'm doing in three months or three years. And I like to put it in spreadsheet format. But now planning is next to impossible because we have no idea what Milo will be like on a minute-to-minute basis.

This all came to a head over the past few weeks as I tried to plan a trip for us in May. My brother is getting married in L.A., and we're going to plan our first family vacation around the wedding. Which is impossible, because by then Milo will be six months old and I haven't a clue what a six-month-old, let alone this particular six-month-old, is like. Will he like to zoo? Playing on the beach? Will he adjust to the time change or will he be pissed off and fussy the entire time? I don't even know what he'll be eating and when he'll be sleeping. It would be easier to plan a vacation with a chimpanzee, because at least then I could call the zoo and find out what chimps are generally like.

But tickets need to be purchased and plans need to be made, so after an uncharacteristic three weeks spent debating minutia (will he need his own seat on the plane? do we book a single room or a suite? do we bring the car seat? the pack and play? will we need to buy a steamer trunk to haul all of our crap?) I finally made some executive decisions and booked the trip. At the very least it will be, dare I say it, an adventure.

The Joys of Yiddish

Something about having a baby means that our entire extended family has reverted back to a language we only sort of vaguely know. My father constantly refers to the baby as bubbeshein. My mother has decided she wants Milo to call her Bubby. The week that Steven's mother was here I caught her calling Milo boichick, which to me was the biggest shocker of all because while my parents frequently throw in Yiddish-isms into their daily speech, I didn't know that my mother-in-law had any knowledge of the language.

In fact, when Steven and I were first dating we had a fight over the fact that when we toasted with drinks he liked to say "cheers" and I liked to say "l'chaim". There was of course a lot more drinking and toasting going on back then, so this seemed very important, and we were at an impasse for quite a while because each of us thought the other's toast was stupid and dorky, until we just finally realized that we didn't have to say the same thing when we toasted. So now he says "cheers" and I say "l'chaim" and we get on with our lives. (Unless we're in France - then we both say "salut" because we like to pretend we know French.)

In any event, there is a lot more Yiddish being thrown around these days, usually in reference to Milo. Maybe because as a language it's a sort of cutesy, baby-like one, or maybe because our parents and our parents' parents spoke to us in Yiddish-isms. But either way, we have run into a problem which is this: Steven and I are now four generations removed from anyone actually speaking Yiddish as a first language, and as a result we don't always know the meanings of words. So the other day when I said we should shtupp Milo full of milk in the hopes that he might sleep longer, Steven gave me a horrified look.

"You never say you're going to shtupp your son," he said.

"I didn't say I was going to shtupp him," I countered. "I said I was going to shtupp him full of food."

"That's not what it means," Steven said. I knew he was thinking of the way the word is used in Mel Brooks movies, as slang for something that you certainly don't want to be doing to your son.

"That is what it means," I said. "You can say that."

"You can't say that."

"You can!"

We glared at each other while Milo slurpped happily from his bottle.

"There's the actual meaning and then the slang," I said. "You can say it."

"Maybe," said Steven. "But I don't like it."

Now, I know I'm right on this one, but I probably won't say it again. Because what if I'm wrong. And anyway, what business do I have using a language that I don't really speak.