R.I.P Sheldon

Remember the fish your dad bought me for Valentine’s Day, Dr. Sheldon Cooper? The one he bought with the hopes of quelling my baby hunger for the time being? Well, I accidentally killed him this weekend.

As luck would have it, when they say you can’t put a Betta fish in untreated tap water, they are actually being serious. I realized we were out of water cleaning solution when I went to clean his bowl on Saturday, but figured that it was probably all just a big scam anyway and filled the bowl up with our faucet water. Within six hours we discovered Sheldon lying on his side at the bottom of the bowl, as dead as dead could be.

Aside from the troubling implications that the tap water I drink on a daily basis apparently contains enough chemicals to instantly kill a relatively complex organism, my ability to care for a real life baby also came under scrutiny this weekend.

As your mother I am charged with the duty of, among other things, keeping you alive. In fact, keeping you alive is pretty much the most important thing I have to do to stay out trouble with the law. If I am not even capable of keeping a fish alive for longer than six months though, how am I supposed to keep an entire child alive for the rest of my life? Your father wants this question answered in its entirety and to his satisfaction before he proceeds any further down this baby-making road.

And frankly I don’t know how to reassure him that I’ll be a good steward over you. That might all be up to him. The truth is I am prone to lapses in judgment (please mark Sheldon as Exhibit A). I tend to forget things. I struggle with monotony and thus sometimes overlook important details. I have poor eyesight. Sometimes I impulsively decide not to do any of the things I set out to do that day. I like to lay down a lot.

None of these attributes will bode well for you as a child of mine. Fortunately your dad tends to make up for a lot of these shortcomings, but in the end he can’t be around 100% of the time to make sure I don’t inadvertently do something drastic. Like look how easy it was for me to kill Sheldon—and your father was just in the next room!   

My point is that while you won’t be as fragile as a fish, you’ll still be vulnerable and entirely dependent upon me to protect you. That probably makes you as nervous as it makes me. I guess in the end what I’ll tell myself is that you’ll be okay, especially considering kids in Africa bathe with goats and they seem to be just fine. I promise to do my best to be viligent over you at all times, without being unnecessarily overprotective. I’ll try and find that balance between you being free to explore your life within clearly established boundaries and outright negligence. It may take some practice though, on both of our parts.  

A TTC Poem For You From Your Future Father

This is a poem your father sent me today while at work:

Thou sun doth shine within my heart
The glimmering crux of my tenderness, in time
Becomes at one with where thou start

The rhythm of sunrise, the sea above
The rising cycle defining my love
Within the turn of nature's path
The striking calmness sets to wrath
A setting light contains the sky
With forceful strength, all falls, all dies

Whomever vows to seek thou out
Finds thy soothing senses forever
But this I say with love and passion
TTC never...TTC never.

Hopefully you will inherit some of his genius.

An Introduction

This blog is a secret for now. I’m the only one who knows about it. I’ll probably tell your dad about it tonight at dinner, but mostly just so I can see him get all uncomfortable and try to change the subject. He probably won’t read it much though, and he certainly won’t tell anybody about it, because he’s not convinced you are really going to happen. You see, your dad is in denial that we’re getting older, we’ve been married nearly a decade, and that each year we go without having a baby equals one more year that we grow increasingly self-absorbed. He’ll come around though, and even if he doesn’t—don’t worry because your mom controls this process entirely.

But I’m not telling anyone else about this blog until you are well underway in the gestation process. At that point I imagine I’ll be shouting from the roof-tops that I’m pregnant, and will likely post about every ache, pain and bloat I feel for the entire 9 months you reside within me, and there’s really no better forum than the internet for that kind of over-sharing. Then at that point I suppose any interested readers—which will likely consist of grandparents, aunts and uncles, and a distant relative or two—can choose to go back to these earlier posts I wrote when you were literally a twinkle in my eye (not your father’s eye, again, because he’s in denial about your pre-existence). But they probably won’t read back this far, considering that by the time this blog goes public, this post might already be two years old.

Anyway, a few preliminaries before we begin this chronicle. First, when I refer to “you,” I know it seems like I’m referring only to my future first child, since I don’t have any kids, and it’s inevitable that my path to motherhood will begin with the oldest child. I really don’t want to be the instigator of any sibling rivalry before there are even any siblings however, so let’s be clear that by “you” I actually mean all of my future children. I hope that one day this blog will be full of stories and pictures of all of you—however many there will be—so that you can all know how important each one of you are to me. And the earliest parts of this blog are here so you can know just how important you were to me even before you were born.

Second, the earliest posts on this blog will likely discuss your father’s resistance to creating you, and how the very notion of your existence sends him into an Ulcerative Colitis tail-spin (I’m sure that by the time you can read this, you are more than familiar with your father’s unfortunate intestinal condition, which makes that last visual all the more entertaining). But you should know that from the very beginning of our relationship—all the way back to our senior year of high school—both of us have spent so much time dreaming and fantasizing about you. Your dad has always wanted to be a dad, and I don’t know anybody else who is as well equipped as him to be one. It’s just that now that you are getting closer, he’s getting cold feet and doesn’t think he’s ready to be all that you need him to be. Even though your dad is usually right about most things, he’s really wrong about that. He’s never been more ready to be your dad.

Finally, I don’t even know for sure when we’ll start trying for your arrival. Right now it is February 2012. I hope to start trying to conceive sometime this November, but any number of things could happen that might move that start date back a little further (like your dad not getting a job-offer in Idaho, for one). But despite any number of things that could go wrong, I anticipate that you will be conceived sometime in 2013. But I say that with cautious optimism because one of my fears is that I’ve spent so much time wishing and planning for your arrival, that in the end I won’t be able to have you at all…which is part of why this blog is private and just for me (and your dad) in the beginning. I just don’t want to jinx anything because I am so, so excited for you.