Learning #10 : you don't need a p

It's been aaaaaages since I wrote anything non-work-related that's more complicated than an emailed diaper order cancellation. When I went on maternity leave in September of 2010, I rather confidently announced to myself, in an internal monologue accompanied by a John-Williams-esque-overly-orchestrated-trumpeting-to-crescendo tune, that I would now have time to write! Write all day long, uninterrupted by the soon-to-be squealing bundle of potential that would almost certainly ensure that I would no longer have time to do even the most basic of self-grooming tasks, let alone ever have a spare second to sit down, collect my thoughts (the best I ever do, which is to say strung together with too many commas and dashes and apostrophes and parenthetical digressions), and write... something.

What I was going to write was unclear to me, but it had better be fantastic. I mean, if I was going to sit down and write, it had better be good because this was time I was spending, after all, and I we were about to get into a dwindling resource situation as far as time was concerned. So maybe I'd write a children's book, or a collection of essays, or just a kick-ass novel about... something. No, that might take too long to write. But the time I would have! I could at least write something.

It probably took a week of maternity leave before I was feeling reeeeeally pregnant and overwhelmed with choices like "Will a baby in flannel pajamas stick to flannel sheets, thus creating a velcro-like effect that may harm her due to some sort of limb dislocation, or will they create any sort of sparking effect that might cause a crib fire that we won't catch despite the fancypants 'I will sound a blood-curdling alarm if the child stops moving for 20 seconds or more' (which might, you will find, mean that the child has pinned herself sideways up against her crib bars despite being swaddled, as though an Oreo cookie standing up on its side. And not because she's in distress, but because you've spawned a creature who for whatever reason just likes to sleep that way, thus intermittently setting off the monitor alarm and scaring everyone half to death), or will she be hot in flannel sheets, or is bamboo better - wait, do they even make bamboo sheets for newborns, and - crap, do they have them in any gender-neutral colors so as not to convince our child that girl = pink even though, secretly, I think little girls in pink are hugely adorable, but somebody's got to take a stand, and anyway she'll probably get my regrettable lack of melanin, and I look like utter shit in pink, and... wait, what was I about to do?"

And, feeling justly overwhelmed, I reasoned that my baby would obviously come out well-behaved and docile enough to allow me the time to write.

To be fair, she actually was a really easy baby (I like to think this is because I called her "Lil' Sleepy" in utero, in order to suggest a basic behavior pattern), but she was, after all, a baby. A really new and wobbly baby who slept like 22 hours a day, but not exactly right in a row. Well, um, OK, she actually slept like 8-10 hours a night starting at about 2 weeks old, but ... I was busy. There were the diapers to change, and one day I clocked the number of hours spent in my nursing chair in a 24-hour period, and it was 8 hours. Eight! And that didn't even count dancing around to Hall 'n Oates because rocking around while seated was not producing the all-important newborn fhbreeeeeeeeeeeeeerphhh (which is what a newborn burp sounds like). I mean, feeding this bundle of wonderful was amazingly awesome, truly. Which was a pretty darn good thing, too, because I was doing it 40 hours a week.

And, feeling, justly time-challenged, I decided I'd wait until she was about 6 months old, or eating via something that wasn't inexorably attached to me, and then I'd write. Something. Seriously, like maybe a children's book, but maybe a children's book for adults or something. Wait, that sounds kind of hard, actually, so maybe I'm being overly ambitious about this children's book... (And why is my computer underlining "children's" in red? Is this a mistake? Childrens' doesn't seem right, unless childrens' is the new extra plural or something... does that even make sense? What is an extra plural and what in the hell am I talking about?)

Anyway: 6 months passed. I was, medically speaking, recovered from the rather unexpected C-section that had dramatically announced our daughter to the world. But now I'd gone and done it: we were in escrow.

Moving the contents of a house you've lived in for 5 years is bad. Doing a sprint of a remodel in your new house - one that you're actually doing hands-on, which is to say that your handy partner is doing all the physical work while you do the very hard work of choosing paint colors and asking when it might be done and whether you'll be on time to move in and otherwise worrywarting around, which has to be someone's job, after all - anyway, having all of that DIY drama while simultaneously getting ready to dislocate the contents of a house you've lived in for 5 years with someone else that also contains all the stuff you got at 2 baby showers for your first baby and everything you need to manage 4 dogs plus there's a basement full of forgotten stuff... argh. Now I see why people stay in the same house for 20 years. Moving stinks!

And then there was the packing, the unpacking, the 6 and then 7 and then almost 8 month old... I'd definitely have time to write when we unpacked, though. (Which, incidentally, seems as though it may be sometime next spring, and that - given the weather lately - would seem to indicate that it will be sometime next... June? July? What is this climate change of which you speak?)

With all of these challenges, it seemed almost cosmic that the computer was, tragically and arguably forebodingly, missing its p key. Which is to say that the computer is now a comuter or a com[find a p somewhere on the screen, ctrl+c and ctrl+v]uter or a comhttp://www.google.com/#sclient=psy&hl=en&source=hp&q=wearing+sweatants+in+ublic&aq=f&aqi=g-l1&aql=&oq=&pbx=1&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.&fp=951dc7972bfd90fb&biw=1280&bih=553uter*, that last since I use that ctrl+c / ctrl+v a lot in general.

Surely, I can't write a serious work of ... something ... with a missing p key, people. Which is to say: surely, I can't write a serious work of ... something ... with a missing (925) 376-4040 key, oele.

But the thing is, I can. I mean, I can at least sit down at the desk between feedings (just had one) and between baby-staring and marveling over how well she can roll over and laughing at her wanting to feed herself almost immediately after trying solid foods and using the camera semi-obsessively to document as many fleeting moments as I can so that I can always remember her wee progression through babyhood. And I can do this because not only am I the one in charge of making the time (I'm the Mom, after all), and not only am I tired of my own excuses to dilly-dally and whatnot (which is to say procrastinate, which really doesn't have very many quality p-free synonyms), but I can definitely do this because it turns out that I can actually often avoid the letter p due to a mild childhood obsession with a thesaurus, and so I'm somewhat out of excuses.

And so I did. Because it doesn't have to be erfect, it just has to be.

The child is still alive and everything. Um... and chewing on a Thank-You note.

*(I would here like to that Google for allowing me to enter most my search terms containing the missing letter without bothering to include it and still give me the correct result as well as"did you mean?" header, thus allowing me the chance to [ctrl+c] + [ctrl+v] and get that p back.)