the joys of motherhood

Growing up, I was adamant that I would never have children. So many factors were too up to chance to risk it: behavioral issues in the offspring, irreparable damage to my body (little did I know then I would do this all by myself via cheeseburgers, pizza, and alcohol), and the most dreaded - ugliness. Why would I have a child when supporting myself was a harrowing enough task? Plus, there was my selfishness to contend with.

But as I get older, I'm thinking it might not be so bad to have a little me running around, so long as it's a girl and doesn't talk back. In lieu of launching directly into motherhood, however, two years ago I decided to get a dog. If I can handle this, I reasoned, then surely a child can't be much worse? I know there are some subtle differences between raising a baby to adulthood and looking after a dog for 8-15 years, and although I have discovered that some parents can get pretty uppity about the distinction between pet and progeny, I still feel that basically the idea is the same. Your life as you know it is over either way; the only difference is that when you go on vacation you can stick your dog in a kennel, but this is generally frowned upon for babies.

Dog ownership, like child rearing, isn't all roses and glory. Yes, Sheba is soft and cute and she gives me that warm, needed feeling when she wakes up to discover I'm home and goes apeshit all over the house, but she also rubs her ass across my floor, doesn't listen to me when I call her (being deaf is no excuse), pisses in the corner, and keeps me up at night with her incessant scratching. That's something I had no idea existed before owning a dog myself: dog allergies. And just my luck, Sheba has them in spades. She's allergic to grass, which is great if you're a dog, because a nice alternative to going out on the grass to pee is just squatting wherever you feel like it and relieving yourself on the carpet. But this is not so great for the human who walks on that carpet, and so to counteract the extreme allergic reaction Sheba has when I take her out 5-6 times a day to pee on our front lawn, I am forced to give her Children's Benadryl daily so that she bites her feet 5% less than she otherwise would. The summer is the worst, and it's an ordinary evening where I'm sitting between Hector, eyes red and nose running and doped up on a powerful Zyrtec/Sudafed combo, and Sheba, feet almost bloodied due to a constant manic biting alternating with frequent scratchings.

This weekend, my Mom was visiting, and since she's allergic to Sheba, I let her sleep with me in my room and promised that Sheba wouldn't be allowed in. Apparently I should have checked with Sheba on that though, because the first night, she spent an entire half hour after we went to bed scratching on the bedroom door demanding to be let in. My mom and I are both light sleepers, so while Hector (who I had asked to please keep Sheba in bed with him in the living room) was able to conveniently ignore her desperate clawings on the door and drift off to sleep, the etchings she was drawing on my door were making it pretty impossible on our end to ignore. I know there are schools of thought that say when babies cry at night, you should ignore them so they learn that crybabies won't be rewarded in THIS house, but obviously I will be in the camp of "tough love is great, but sleep is better". I let her in and she immediately settled in to scratching under the blankets. She was in rare form and woke us up every hour on the hour with a medley of scratching, choking, and getting up to retch in the corner or stare expectantly at the door til I took her outside to use the bathroom. I basically didn't get any sleep all weekend, and if this is what having a baby is going to be like, then no thank you. My mom left this morning, so I'll see if Sheba behaves herself tonight now that she's back to being Queen of the Bed, but even this short-lived sleep deprivation has been enough to make me question my future life choices.

Until you can stow your babies in cages filled with blankets and food and water while you go to work, I'll take dog ownership over baby ownership any day.

that's an hour of my life I'll never get back

There's one part of my job that I dread doing more than anything else, and thankfully I don't have to do it too often: making calls to customer service departments. Honestly, I don't know how some of them get off still calling it "customer service" since the only service they provide is that of pissing me off to the point of screaming into the telephone and imagining the person on the other line being mauled to death by a pack of hungry chihuahuas. But as bad as customer service can be, it gets so much worse when the call center has been off-shored to India. No one who has gotten to the point where they've submitted to defeat and decided to make the dreaded call in the first place is in the right frame of mind to then be put through the task of hunting down the actual phone number on the "user-friendly" website (past pop up offers to live-chat with "Terry" or "Lisa" when you know it's more like "Ambuja" or "Preeti")and tempting suggestions that you wade through the user forums where other saps like yourself may have had their issue resolved by others with nothing better to do than surf said forums. Once you do find the phone number, you have to enter a series of other numbers and information about yourself which for some reason they are incapable of keeping for the use of each successive operator they end up shuttling you through. If by some miracle you get a live human on the other end, you have to explain using symbols and grunts what the problem seems to be, and what should take two minutes to explain ends up taking 20. Then you either get disconnected or told that you're calling the wrong department and to please call the other service line, where you start the process anew.

Today I spent over an hour on the phone with Dell who, through several frustrating and resolution-free conversations over the past couple of months, have led me to the conclusion that not only will I never be purchasing another Dell product again, but I may also light my current one on fire and send it still smoldering FedEx Overnight to Delhi. I had to explain what I was trying to accomplish THREE times to THREE different people, each explanation taking over ten minutes to complete, and none getting me closer to a resolution. In the end, I wound up in the Software Support department, a place where they waste your time listening to you describe the issue for 15 minutes, only to transfer you to a manager who will ask you to describe the issue and will then try to sell you a "guaranteed resolution" for $89. When you finally buckle and agree to a now lowered price (because you flat out refused the higher one), they take your credit card information and then leave you for five full minutes, only to come back and say that resolution they guaranteed is unfortunately impossible. Commence beating phone on table. I went through all this, and even stayed on the line while the latest person I was talking to transferred me to another technician who would be able to confirm they couldn't help me. Once he did that, I held once more so I could be transferred yet again to someone who would assure me that my credit card wouldn't be charged since they couldn't resolve my issue. Except, instead of ending up with someone familiar to my case, I wound up in the Sales Department, while someone asked how he could help me with my purchase. After an hour and ten minutes, for some reason this was my breaking point, and I hung up. And two minutes later got a call back from the Dell Call Back Department, expressing their regrets that we were accidentally disconnected.

I am really dreading the call I will have to make when the next credit card statement comes in.

don't believe everything you read at Planned Parenthood

If you are male, you may want to skip this post.

Getting an IUD was an idea I've been toying with for some time now, so the last time I was at the clinic for my yearly checkup, I asked the nurse practitioner or whatever they are there whether she recommended it, and got some information on the benefits and dangers of getting one. There are two kinds, one with hormones and one without, and the little pamphlet makes it a pretty easy decision (contract with Mirena, perhaps?) since it claims they both do basically the same thing, except one gives you worse cramps and heavier periods and the other gives you fewer cramps and a lighter to no period. For 5 years. Um, yes please. I left the clinic with instructions on when the best time to make an appointment would be and a prescription for a drug to take 8-12 hours before the insertion to prime the cervix (I hope that's the last time I ever write that). Long term birth control step one - done.

A couple of weeks later, I called the clinic again to make my appointment to get the show on the road. Except they had no record of me getting the information on pros and cons, which apparently is a must before you can come in for the procedure. I tried to rationalize with the 20 year old lab tech that how could I have a prescription without having been prepped on IUD 101, but she wasn't having it and insisted I come back for that consultation before I could even make an appointment for the insertion. Have you ever been to Planned Parenthood? Even with an appointment, your total visit time is never less than an hour and a half, and I can't be taking off all kinds of time at work just to thwart accidental impregnation. The only reason I still go there is because everything's free. I called back another day and got a more reasonable person on the phone, who understood that in order to have a prescription, I must have spoken to someone authorized to give one out, and she scheduled for me to come in the next week. I took the medicine as close to 8-12 hours before my appointment as possible, but because I wasn't about to stay up til 2AM to do it, I may have taken it a bit more than 12 hours before. Was this a huge mistake? Maybe.

I went in for my appointment with my papers in hand and re-read all the possible side effects (cramping, expulsion of the IUD, infection, puncturing of the uterus - yikes!) and was still confident in my decision. The paper said the procedure could cause "mild to moderate" discomfort, but I wasn't too worried because I have a fairly high tolerance for pain. I have several tattoos and once went two weeks without a bowel movement, I'm practically immune to pain! The technician showed me the IUD (a little bigger than I would have thought) and we began the procedure. It's very disconcerting to be on that table so completely exposed; you have to put all your trust in someone you've never met and let it all hang out there. It's funny when the doctor tries to make small talk like there's nothing out of the ordinary happening...I once had a doctor comment on how much she liked my socks. I guess that's all she COULD like, since it's all I was wearing. Anyway, I expected the insertion to feel something like getting a Pap Smear, uncomfortable, annoying, but not too bad.

I was wrong. Very, very, horribly and insanely painfully, wrong. When she told me to take a deep breath for the first step in insertion, I almost stopped breathing when she did whatever she did down there. I screamed. And then I held my breath, realizing I had made a huge mistake. It felt like someone had stabbed me where I didn't know I could be stabbed, and the pain radiated through my entire lower body. Once I knew what to expect, the next 5-6 pain waves were even worse, and somehow, different. Mild to moderate my ass. When she was finally finished, she brought me a wet towel to cool my by now copiously sweating body. I kept apologizing to her because I NEVER get like that, but then again, I had never experienced what I just experienced. She wanted me to stay and recover for at least 15 minutes, but I just wanted to get out of there and never come back. The whole drive home I couldn't feel my legs or hands, and I was shaking. I felt like such a wuss, but I cannot stress enough that I had never felt this kind of pain before. I just kept comforting myself with the fact that I would now be baby-free for 5 years or however long I wanted in that time frame. And bonus, no more periods! I could handle a day of intense cramping for that.

This week, however, Planned Parenthood got their final dig, when not only did I not have a lighter, cramp free period, but instead had a worse-than-normal one that lasted longer than I would have liked. It just goes to show, you can't believe everything you read in those eye-catching pamphlets.

So it's come to this: a tale of baby voyeurism and dog-scented jalopies

I haven't posted anything since September and am not promising that I will start posting regularly as of now, but I do enjoy writing even if it's only to read back later and marvel at my cleverness. To bring you up to speed with the exciting changes in my life in the past 9 months (that would have been enough time to gestate!)...Janessa has moved out to live once again with Brian (they grow up so fast) and not much else of consequence has happened. I went on a couple small vacations to Seattle and Vegas (perhaps more on Vegas later) but otherwise I've been working and gymming and sleeping according to my regular habits. Moving on!

This weekend was the yearly Dog Walk that the animal rescue organization I volunteer for puts on. We've been working on it since before Christmas and it takes a huge amount of effort and coordination on everyone's part to carry it off. The day before the walk, I was supposed to go to Costco with some of the group to shop for the barbecue, but since I had also promised Janelle I would see "The Babies" with her (side note: not as bad as I would have thought), I wasn't able to make it and instead offered to drive another volunteer's truck stocked with supplies to the event. The movie was at Santana Row, so we decided to go to dinner afterward and then go pick up the truck in San Jose and take it wherever we decided to go out after. Ok. Let me back up a bit to when we first got to the theater, rounded the corner, and saw a line stretching into the parking lot for the ticket counter. Not what we were expecting at 4PM on a Saturday at the theater which shows mainly indie films. We first noticed something amiss when we started checking out our linemates...mostly 30-something/40-something women dressed even more over-the-top than typical Santana Row wannabes. Anxiously whispering that hopefully all of these women weren't there to see the Babies, Janelle and I tried to overhear what the group at the front were going to see. Turns out, the CineArts was also showing Sex & the City 2 at almost the exact same time we were to see the Babies. Aha! Now the drunken gaggles of women desperately trying to recapture their youth and band together through the common themes of love, fashion, and horse-faces made sense. I only hoped passersby wouldn't confuse me and Janelle with these pathetic moviegoers; we were going to spend OUR afternoon watching four babies from birth to age one! I stand by my choices.

So after the movie and after dinner, we headed over to my friend Jennifer's house where the truck was parked - the owner had rented a U-haul to drive to the walk so I would take her truck filled with buns, water, soda, and charcoal. I should mention that the owner fosters dogs with the organization, a fact which I didn't really think about until the three of us, dressed in semi-fancy attire, were squeezed into the cab of the Ford Ranger, literally covered in dog hair and reeking of unbathed canine. Janessa has three dogs in a 700sf apartment, and even she was offended. At first it was funny, but after a couple of minutes of driving 50mph down the freeway (the fastest it would go), unable to see out of the back window because of the grime and getting my hair blown off because of the necessity of having the windows rolled down just to breathe, blasting Usher's "OMG" (featuring Will.i.am) and looking like we were on our way to Club Miami...yeah, it was still funny. We decided not to go back to Santana Row in our new ride, but instead, and more appropriately, to the liquor store around the corner to pick up some $6 wine and drink at home. Good times! Makes me appreciate the little cube car I drive that allows me to reach speeds of 80mph and beyond with the slightest depression of my toes. It may be ugly but at least the dog hair is limited.