Mama needs an easy button

I’m feeling a bit contemplative today, partly because I know I’ll be snowed in this weekend, and partly because it’s Friday and I have nothing better to do. There was an article this morning on Good Morning America’s website about a recent study done on women over the age of 30 in the UK. The study found that after 30, 90 percent of a woman’s eggs are gone. Like, poof. Vanished. Vamoosed.

This disturbs me more than a little. I have written here extensively about the fact that I don’t have children and am not sure that I ever want any. But, as my friends and I discuss often, we don’t want to get beyond childbearing years and regret that we didn’t take the opportunity while we could have. Yes, there is adoption, and yes, we could try all kinds of fertility methods, but the bottom line is that over the age of 30, being pregnant is a whole new ballgame.

So what’s a girl to do? Who knows, I say. Go ahead and slap my hand now, because I haven’t been to see my ob/gyn in 3 years. (Shocking, yes.) A) I’m scared of doctors which stems from my anxiety and I still don’t feel yet that I can go to a doctor’s office and not fall down screaming from a panic attack. B) I am terrified that on such a visit my doctor will find some god-awful disease like endometriosis or diabetes or high blood pressure or heart problems or something related to the fact that I am overweight and lazy.

Phew, there, I said it. Right now today, that is my biggest fear.

In all honesty, I would love for Brian and I to have children and raise them together to be little hoodlums just like us. I would relish hanging out on a Saturday morning watching cartoons and playing with Legos and screaming my head off because I haven’t slept and there’s crusty cereal in my bra. (This is all how I imagine parenting, of course.) What’s holding me back from all of this is my fear. In addition to my overwhelming fear of a doctor’s appointment, I am also terrified that childbirth will kill me. I don’t know, haven’t read the statistics, how it goes for overweight pregnant women. Do they die? Do their babies survive?

The easy answer to this is, of course, to just lose a bunch of weight and then try to get pregnant. Except there’s that whole pesky problem of the fact that I’m about to be 32 and so statistically more than 90 percent of my eggs have hit the road and headed off to greener, more fertile pastures. So in the time it takes for me to lose the weight I need to lose, that just makes me older and more moldy on the inside. What gives, people?

On top of the worry that I carry around on my shoulders is the knowledge that my parents aren’t spring chickens anymore. My father will be 70 in April and he has wanted a grandchild since I got engaged. His snarky comments have lessened in the last year or so – I think because he’s resigned himself to the fact that he may never get one – but the guilt remains with me that he could live his entire life without a grandchild of his own.

I don’t have a simple solution to this, and I doubt you do, too. But pregnancy seems so easy for some people, and so difficult for others. I know in my heart that if it happens for us, it will surely be difficult – that’s the way things usually go in the Baker house. I just wish someone could have a baby for me, design it to look just like BB and hand it over at birth.

Where’s the easy button when you need it?

The one where life goes on and someone forgot to tell us

We are sitting in the middle of the floor, in folding chairs in the middle of a row of people whose faces I never even noticed. It is dark, except for the stage, lit up with single harsh lavender bulbs here and there to show her at the piano. She is singing, her background singer just behind her, and she is hitting every single solitary high note. Not pitchy at all, before we knew what pitchy was. You are holding my hand and I stop occasionally to look down and make sure they are still there, our hands. When the music is especially good, you look at me to see if I’m looking at you, and I am.

It feels good to be on our own this night, out on the town, freedom being a newly-won privilege. I drove, you rode. We knew what to listen to and we loved riding with the sunroof open, driving too fast on the highway between the mountains. They came with us, too – part of the deal – and we don’t mind, for they can entertain themselves without noticing the electricity we have. It is palpable and we can hardly contain ourselves, set to set, during the intermission, during the drive home. Sometimes it is hard not to smile when we say goodnight to each other, because we know it won’t be too long before we say hello again. Minutes, even.

You recall that night years later and you smile a little, as if that place was long ago and far away. It was. No one likes to admit that though, least of all me. For a while we hung in suspension, no safety net, no tethers holding us together. Just two people, drawn together in one time and space by what? Fire? Lust? Hormones? All of the above, we say. We look like shadows of ourselves when we talk about those days. I change, you don’t. You move on quickly, I don’t. A soundtrack of those days plays in our heads over and over, and we don’t even have to conjure up images or sounds – they are just there. The people are gone, moved on, moved forward, left us. Our lives have done the same, but one of us tries mightily to hold on longer than the other. Funny, because it is opposite of all those years ago – one of us pulling away, the other holding on tightly.

Then a game, just like all the other games. The same players, but different in a way this time, because you don’t make a bet. You don’t place a gamble like always – you let the days and weeks slide by, likely hoping that I will forget. But I don’t forget. One of my worst faults, you said, always remembering things that should be forgotten. I have tried, very hard, to forget the things that should be forgotten, and to remember the things that are important, but the mind works in ways we tell it not to. My mind, anyway. I don’t know about yours anymore.

We are both happy, if forgetful. We are both hanging in new suspension now, after years and love past, and while we are burned into each other’s memory, we are somehow not there at all. It is just as well, because our friends tell us that life goes on and that we shouldn’t look back – the road behind us always looks different from this angle.

But tonight, when I hear her singing just as she did that good night, I think of your face, young and unlined and hopeful, and I wonder what happened to the girl I knew then. That girl had dreams and hopes and plans, and now – tonight – I ask that girl if she is what she thought she would be. She is not, she answers, but she is not sorry. The road ahead looks different from this angle, too.

And amongst the cliches and weepy sad stories is one bottom line: we had a good night, we had a few good years, and then life went on. She sang about it; seems like we should have known.

Weekend in 5

5. Brian watched Hitchcock’s Notorious for the first time, and we discovered that Ingrid Bergman’s accent is like Ambien for cats.

4. On the same day I found a new home for a cat, a dog bit me because I came up on its blind side. Also in the same day, I watched the movie Blind Side. It was entirely a coincidence, but the irony was not lost on me.

3. The weather does not change if you don’t leave your house.

2. Carolina basketball is having a bad season so far. Speaking of seasons, I missed the SAG awards and was kind of glad because two award shows in one week is a bit much, even if it is Oscar season.

1. I tried not to cry as Blissdom ’10 sold out. When Brian’s February vacation didn’t work out, I couldn’t find a date to Nashville in time. And no, I wasn’t going alone – it’s just not as fun.

Who dat is? My baby daddy.

An Edwards family portrait

By now it’s made the rounds: the love-child admission heard round the world. John Edwards has admitted to fathering Frances Quinn, the daughter of former campaign worker Rielle Hunter.

SHOCKING.

I mean really. Did we not already know this? Did we not scoff and roll our eyes every single time John Edwards denied a) having an affair, b) showing up in a hotel room in LA holding a baby and c) actually owning up to being that baby’s father. Yeah, we did.

This story interests me for several reasons, the first being that he’s from North Carolina. I live right outside of Raleigh, the state’s capitol. John Edwards is from Raleigh, raised his first set of children there, and had I been attending public instead of private high school, I might have known his child Wade, the son who died in a horrific car accident. Down South, as you probably have already surmised, we don’t talk about this cheating stuff. Sure, it happens. All the damn time. But we don’t go around getting caught (and by we, I mean other people). And we sure as hell don’t go around cheating on our cancer-stricken wives, no matter how reportedly bitchy they were on the campaign trail.

This scandal is bringing undue attention to our fair state. Oprah has been to Chapel Hill to interview Elizabeth Edwards at their “sprawling farm,” which is just a bunch of nouveau riche buildings strung together on a cleared-out tobacco field. The guys from ABC News have been down here several times, first at Southern Village in Chapel Hill where Edwards’ headquarters were based, and then at their old home between Raleigh and Chapel Hill. (It should be noted here that when people refer to this area, it is known as the Triangle. Raleigh, Durham and Chapel Hill are separate cities. No one calls Raleigh “Raleigh-Durham.” That’s the airport. Not the town.)

I will fully admit here that I think John Edwards is a tacky son of a bitch who got too big for his britches and decided that his supposed good looks entitled him to sleeping around. After his wife was diagnosed with cancer. After he lost a child and had two other children. But this is beside my actual point.

How, someone please tell me, did he get saddled with being a baby daddy? This is 2010. That child is two years old. Even in 2008, there was birth control. Hell, birth control has mostly been around since the beginning of  time, whichever way you look at it, and I’m not going into methods here. What I am going into is the fact that IF you’re going to screw around, don’t be stupid. Don’t be so stupid as to bring a child into your scandalous affair for him or her to grow up forever labeled as “That Jackass Politician’s Love Child.” The number of stories in the press right now about celebrities having children out of wedlock is astounding. And I’m not judging that necessarily; if you’re in a committed relationship, have no plans to marry, but decide you want a child, go for it. Your life is your life. But when you already are in a committed relationship, one which exists in the public eye, one which you tout as strong and hold up as a model for your constituents, cheating is unacceptable.

I was having this same discussion with a friend of mine this morning and she said to me, “Yes, Elizabeth. I agree with you. But he’s human. People make mistakes.” Very true. I make mistakes every day. But I’m not running for President. I am not my state’s senator. I do not hold press conferences with my husband by my side to say that I’ve been married 40 years and we are happier than ever. I do not cheat.

There are those of you out there who will read the title of this post and think that I’m flippant and perhaps a little on the tasteless side, and let me point out that those are lyrics from a 90’s song. Just so you know. But those words never rang so true as they did this morning, when that rat fink liar confessed to lying for years, denying his third daughter and undoubtedly lying to his wife and children. He now has a living breathing reminder, living out in California, being photographed by paparazzi, that he cheated. That he went back on his word and stepped out on his family. And that little girl’s face will always remind people of this scandal.

She doesn’t deserve that and neither does his family.

I deserve this, really I do.

So Internet, I’m about to show you my dirty little secret. The horrifying, disgusting thing I hide from everyone. The skeleton in my closet, so to speak. The thing that makes me want to bathe outside with the garden hose.

The bathrooms.

In our defense, let me start out by saying that our house was built in 1967 and still has all the original stuff. Except appliances and carpet, of course. That’s just nasty (to quote Teresa Guidice). What we do have are the original bathrooms, and since I wasn’t around in 1967, I can only assume that people in the olden days were exceptionally thin and bordered on miniature, and also didn’t have any belongings. Particularly of the bathroom variety.

Being the first-time homebuyers that we were in 2004, we didn’t know any better. We thought a nearly 2000 square-foot house was a mansion, and we thought that any bathroom that actually belonged to us was ALL KINDS OF AWESOME. Clearly we were stupid.

Our guest bathroom

Above is pictured our UH-MAZINGLY hideous guest bath. So to counteract all the aqua tile, we did this:

Magically, it still looks like this

We painted aqua straight up to the ceiling! Don’t you wish you were design geniuses like us? Don’t you? DON’T YOU? The “master” bath (I’m sorry, I die laughing every time I say that, because it is SMALLER than the guest bath) was so lovely and…orange.

The, uh, "master" bath

To change it up, we painted it like this:

I don't know what we were thinking, except NEUTRALIZE

And so finally, in 2010, I have made the executive decision to sell everything I own, including myself if I have to, to have a new bathroom. The guest bathroom I don’t care so much about. In fact, we could probably get that tile spray painted or something if we had to. Don’t know, don’t care.

But y’all, this 2×2 bathroom has GOT to go. For one, BB has to come out of it before I can go in, and vice versa. The shower door hits the bathroom counter and cannot be opened all the way. The toilet, oh GOD how I wish I had a picture of the toilet, is orange and has a Navajo themed toilet seat cover. Like literally the top of the toilet is plastic and has a design SEWN IN. I wish I were lying to you. Seriously.

The cabinets are minute and all gross and cardboardy and need to be painted desperately except no one can fit into that tiny space to actually GET to the cabinets and so they remain that way. The tile in the shower…well, I can’t even post that here. The tile on the floor is orange and beige? we think? and the grout is some unidentifiable slop color. There is one towel bar. We play rock paper scissors every week to see who gets to use it. The other one drops towels on the floor because they’re the perfect size for a BATH RUG in this piece.

So I think that after almost 6 years of living in a cave that is so very small we feel the need to duck when we walk in, I deserve a new bathroom. I deserve some decent closet space. I deserve to feel like my bathrooms don’t have it in for me.

Now it’s your job to help me convince BB that this is completely necessary in my life. Because you do, right? I don’t know where y’all went yesterday on List Monday but COME BACK! Come give me good arguments to give BB so he doesn’t divorce me over some tile. 1, 2, 3…GO!