tigers

Leave it to Baby to have his first birthday on a week in which I had to travel, am forced to clean the apartment for hours on end, and have to complete a time-depleting, soul-sucking, brain-melting project at work (suffice it to say that involves acronyms, numbers, and acronyms with numbers).

My son is just a talented fellow, what can I say?

In addition to lacking any time to reflect upon this momentous occasion, I’ve been about as visible in the blogosphere as Hillary Clinton at a Barack Obama rally.

In a way, this past fortnight, in which my life resembled the intersection of a Figure-8 race, has been emblematic of the last 12 months. It’s more apropos of life itself that Baby’s first birthday happened to fall at a time when his father was more ectoplasm than human.

The biggest lesson I’ve learned in Baby’s first year is that…um…uh…I’m just too tired to remember it.

Oh, yes. It’s entirely true that you will take a bullet for the kid. It’s also true that, at least once, you will seriously consider killing him.

Also, as a writer, you have a wealth of new experiences, all of which can be turned into writing material of the highest order.

For instance, the other night, at about 1:30 in the morning, Baby was crying, and crying, and crying. We had put him to bed at about 7, and after he had awoken at 10, he had gone immediately back to sleep. But for the third night in a row, he woke up after midnight and was wailing. And kept wailing. In a test of immature wills — I was not going to fucking get up and indulge the brat! — he was winning.

Finally, more frustrated than angry, I got up, and stomped out to his room. Any anger I had disappated immediately when I turned on the light and saw him standing in his crib, terrified (because while Baby is now quite adept and pulling himself up in his crib, he hasn’t yet mastered the art of letting himself down). I went from anger to shame to nearly crying, all in the space of about 30 seconds. 

stax
Parenthood is an emotional experience

Having a child exposes one to love, terror, fear, exhilaration, and panic in depths likely to overwhelm most humans, and it is only because, as a parent, you feel a protection of your newborn too strong to properly express, one doesn’t drown. It is like a pallet of the richest, deepest emotional colorings, and as a writer, I’m fortunate to have access to them.

Unfortunately, I’m too exhausted to actually write.

As in "write fiction." The usual inspirational tricks — reading great fiction to inspire me, reading awful fiction to inspire me, burning a couple of Harold Robbins paperbacks — have left me cold. 

The screen is fallow before my eyes. The longer I stare, the blanker it stays. It becomes a endless tunnel, and the harder I try to escape, the longer the end appears. Then, when I’m done not writing, I’ll tend to Baby, scrub the floor (a necessary evil because of the nasty pesticides, because of the bed bugs, damn them), or I’ll simply fall asleep.

chinatown
She’s my sister. She’s my daughter. She’s my sister. She’s my…oh, I’m just so damn tired that I’m babbling like an idiot at this point

It’s enough to make you feel 90 years old and living in a nursing home, where the biggest challenges of the day are taking that afternoon nap and getting an extra fruit cup on Taco Tuesdays. 

I had something else semi-interesting to say on this subject, but it’s been lost in the miasma once known as my memory. I’ll remember it soon, I’m sure.

Let me sleep on it, and I’ll get back to you.