Author Archives: Eden M. Kennedy

I guess I gave up poetry for confession at some point, but here’s an interesting little site that caught my eye this morning: The Poem Tag Project.

I put up a few new photos in the Yahoo! albums I’ve been using, but will soon be forced to find another way to display them as Yahoo is changing their rules and taking the fun out of everything. So enjoy them while you can because it may take me a while to come up with an alternative.

Let me tell you, hellzapoppin’ around here now that the Nut’s almost nine months old. He wants to eat everything with his hands, for one thing, which creates an ungodly mess. Cheerios everywhere. Then the third tooth starts cutting through. Then last night at 5:00 a.m.: Waaahhh! I climb over Jack and start to put on my robe. Then silence. I sit back on the edge of the bed and wait. Nothing. I take off the robe and climb back in and curl up around Jack. Mmm. Then, Waaahhh! I get up, put on the robe, and go into the Nut’s room, and he’s just sitting there in his crib, looking at me like, Hey, look! I figured out how to sit up in the dark!

Then, of course, this morning, near the end of the aforementioned raccoon mating ritual: Waaahhh! (You’ve never seen a woman concentrate until she’s forced to choose between an orgasm and a crying baby.) So he’s really pissed off after we’ve let him cry for several minutes, and then we rush in to see what’s going on and he’s standing there at the side of his crib ready to rip his John Lennon “Imagine” mobile to shreds, but he sees us and he stops cold, and there we are all sticky and disheveled, and he looks at us like, What the hell is so important that — Mommy, what’s that stuff all over your hand?

The Management would like to apologize for the lewd and unsophisticated content of this post. Or click on the Comment link if you’d like more of this type of thing in the future.

I realized it was time to come out of mourning. I’ve literally been sitting around grieving — for the way the baby has changed my relationship with Jack, for the stupid lost job, for being stuck in this inanely gorgeous little town, for whatever. So I got good and mad last night, and I kept Jack up until 11:30 making him mad at me, and we cursed each other and went to sleep mad and we woke up feeling like two raccoons in heat.

So fuck all that maudlin shit — ordinary is fine by me. Let’s change our socks! Let’s sharpen some pencils! Let’s go fill up the car with premium for a change! Woo hoo!

Monkey? Cockroach? Second wife? Play the reincarnation game. (link from bfts)

I bought a roll of 100 stamps, instead of two little books, and I paid the bills.

I got the laundry done and took the garbage out.

Your new jacket is hanging in your closet.

The answering machine works again.

The baby can stand up by himself, if he’s holding onto something, but won’t crawl more than a few inches. He got a new tooth today.

I will pick up the photos at the drugstore, and use that coupon for a nice bottle of wine.

The cat shit on the floor by your desk again, I don’t know why.

I dreamed that I had a little girl and I left her in the car while I ran into the grocery store. But then I ran into my old boss and he said, Come in here, we need you, and everyone I used to work with was in a room having a meeting, and they had a list of things they wanted to see if I would do. Then we all had a glass of wine. When we were done I went back to my car, and I found my little girl suffocating inside with all the windows rolled up. I got her out and tried to rush her into the air-conditioned store, but a group of fat hippie witches in a VW bus took her away from me until I learned my lesson.

If the dream is about the dreamer, then the little girl was me, and I’ve let her suffocate.

And I won’t get her back until I learn what lesson?

1. No pit bulls — female yellow or chocolate labs, but not black

2. It is now acceptably manly to wear a helmet while cycling

3. A t-shirt is okay while napping, but not pants

4. Pizza only from Giovanni’s

5. Fender basses

6. It is appropriate to greet white half-Irish baby son with the phrase, “What’s up, Ne-gro?”

7. Don’t come crying to me

8. Fresh herbs — always

9. Wife must be dissuaded from wanting a black car because she will not wash it more than twice a year and it will look like shit

10. Yankees, Lakers, Raiders, in that order

Back when I was pregnant I found it impossible to imagine what having a baby around all the time would really be like. I hadn’t planned on becoming pregnant — indeed, I’d never imagined myself to be mother material at all — so I didn’t have a lifetime of preparation that some women seem to get, starting with diapering their baby brothers/sisters and moving on through babysitting, baby showers, Pottery Barn catalogs, etc. And having strangers come up to me, pat my belly, and say, “Get your sleep now, while you can!” was irritating, not instructional.

Nobody can really tell you what it’s like, but for every child-free person who has ever wondered what’s the big deal? I have developed this simple visualization exercise. Find a comfortable seated position, close your eyes, take a deep breath, and we’ll begin.

Imagine you have a roommate

A roommate who communicates in cries, grunts, laughter, and blank stares

A roommate who needs you to carry him everywhere

Who grabs the remote out of your hand when you’re watching television and then starts randomly selecting channels and volume levels

Who needs to be dressed, sometimes three or four times a day because he pukes on himself

Who swats the cup of hot coffee out of your hand

Who bangs on the keyboard while you’re typing

Who pulls your hair

Who falls asleep on your shoulder while you’re vacuuming his room

Who cries when you leave him, and ignores you when you come back

Who is so magnetic that relatives will travel thousands of miles of just to ogle him, and then plead for new photographs weekly, saying “It only takes a second, just pop some in the mail!”

Who wakes you up at 3:30 a.m. crying/wanting to play

Who wakes you up at 5:30 a.m. wanting to suck on your nipples

Who would rather be naked than clothed

Who stuffs fistfuls of Cheerios into his mouth, and then coughs until he turns bright red

Who cries when his grandma tries to pick him up, and stops crying when you pick him up, thereby insulting grandma in the most personal way possible

Whom you both love sometimes, secretly, more than each other

Is it a neurosis of modern life or is it my reading list? — you just don’t find truly cruel characters in novels any more. But go back into the nineteenth century and whew. People are torturing kittens and beating horses to death and living lives totally devoted to spite. It’s so refreshingly unevolved! If you were feeling as though God had turned his face away from you, you were free to shamelessly follow the path of darkness.

But these days, everyone’s trying to be so nice.

Except the guy who used to have my phone number. Jack got me a cell phone so that I can be tracked down to the farthest corners of Babies R Us, but the number I’ve been assigned used to belong to some guy named Chris who, it seems, is in the process of burning some bridges. I am constantly taking calls from bill collectors, angry men with whiskey voices, tattoo parlors, and video stores trying to reclaim overdue rentals. It’s a real hoot.

THANKS 1,000,000 to Chris for the quick, cheerful, and unselfish help with my template problem.

Doesn’t everything look better now?

Can you remember what Fussy used to look like? That big ugly striped useless cell on the far right?

It’s gone now.

Well, I’m excited about it.