I'm not one for sitting in long meetings and behaving well. One of my best friends, Nance, knows this. Sometimes she feeds the fire, but generally keeps me under control. Last year during a particularly long-winded speech by one of our esteemed colleagues, Nance wrote me a note that said, "STFU," meaning shut the fuck up. We tried not to laugh about it until later when we were safely out of the building. We vowed to tell one another to St. Fu (Saint Foo) whenever necessary from then on. Too bad she's not always by my side.
New mommies are notorious for sharing too much information. Seriously, I would love to recount for you some of the experiences of my pregnancy, labor and delivery. Maybe I will someday soon.
After Corey was born, we spent eight months of his infancy in Oklahoma with my then-husband and his family. It was a very different lifestyle and life philosophy than I was accustomed to, but I'd say the ratio of great, decent and rotten people was about the same there as anywhere else. Still, I didn't really have many women in my life to talk about things with, and I'm pretty sure I hadn't even heard of the Internet yet. It was quiet and fairly isolating. The best I could do was to write and rewrite the story of Corey's birth (man, I'm glad for the backspace key!) and obsessively fill out his baby book and first year calendar.
This time around, my life is about a 180 degree switch from back then. For one thing, Mad's first year calendar pretty much details her social and culinary life, rather than being a day-to-day accounting of her life thus far.
A couple of friends from the childbirth class that Tom and I took together also went to a new mommy group with me, where we got to share our birth stories, struggles and successes of life with our newborns. The three of us still get together regularly, and two more occasionally join in. Even now, six months later, the topics are wide-ranging and deeply personal... not so much when the two stragglers are there, but it's still more than most groups of extremely divergent women share so soon after knowing one another, I think.
With Corey, I stayed home until he was nearly a year old, only returning to work because of my separation and divorce. Although I wish I could be a stay at home mom now, there came a time when I had to return to my job. Luckily for me, Mad was nearly five months old. Still way too soon, but I remember trying to count my blessings when she was six weeks old and my "disability" ended. Even after so much time off... and so much of that spent deep in conversation, the desire to really share the inner workings of my brain is apparently quite strong. Too strong, some might say. My coworkers, for example.
In the past six weeks since returning to work, I have told a principal that she needed to "help a sister out" in regards to a teacher friend of mine and the completely mediocre principal who's in charge of her site. I have pointed out to the program specialist of a neighboring district that the reason one of his schools only had 21 students attend our event was that one of his teachers arbitrarily closed the enrollment. The other day at the office, within a five minute span, I announced that I was glad my nipple rings were out (because I'd just gotten an electric shock from a passing coworker... it was bad, but not as bad as getting one from a car while pierced) and then proceeded to admit that I sometimes forget to close my nursing bra back up after pumping in my car... and even if I do, there's no telling which way my nipples will be pointing.
I'm not Catholic, but perhaps I need to get one of those medals that Catholics wear. Do they make one for Saint Foo?
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