it turns out i like the playground. i like kissing my wife where the baby -- toddler! -- can see. i like his sticky apple slice hands. i like bath time and the way his soft skin goes slippery in the soap. i like, well, not accidents, but knowing i am the one who can put things right, who can change the sheets and put the pajamas in the wash. i like daycare drop off and even more i like daycare pick up, his face through the window when a woman hoists him in her arms and points at me for him to look and see and grin. i like being an emergency contact. i like spelling his last name, which is also mine and a little bit lauren's, over the phone. all this time i thought i would lose the things i loved and i have, a little bit, some of them, but i'll get them back. in the meantime it's like i've been let through the velvet ropes into a party i didn't know existed. if life is a series of choices then this one was no more or less right than any other but boy am i glad we made it.
i have to run nine miles tomorrow and i've kind of psyched myself out about it: i got sunburned today, my legs still hurt from pt on friday, maybe i need new shoes. but my sister in law -- well legally she's not my sister in law, legally she's just a woman i know and spend time with, but she's my sister in law's sister in law's partner so it's easier just to group the whole bunch together -- is doing an IRONMAN tomorrow, so i figure if she can do that, i can leave my house and not stop until i put my tired feet into the ocean.
ok it's like. having kids is not the most important thing in the world. they're just people. but also life is about the sound my tiny baby made the first time he had a window seat on an above-ground q train. and every second i spend at my midtown desk instead of showing him the manhattan bridge is wasted. that's kind of where i'm at in year three of the pandemic.
this morning i woke up before the baby and took the train up to columbus circle, while at the same time lily was coming down from the upper west side. had you told me, years ago, that i would gleefully forego any extra sleep to run — run! — six miles without the benefit of any coffee, i would have been hesitant to believe it, but this morning, a lovely sunny saturday in the most beautiful park in this city we both love so much, i thought about the women we were years ago, who laughed and yelled in bars up and down brooklyn, and you know what? it isn’t that different at all.
the baby has started to reach toward images in which parents hold their sleeping children. he is old enough that his gestures seem intentional, but too young to tell me what he's thinking about when he rests the tip of one soft, round finger against a drawing of a bigger cartoon dog carrying a much smaller cartoon dog in their arms. he has no context for the world in which he exists. he doesn't realize that we keep offering him sunglasses because the light is hurting his eyes, so he takes them off and then cries. he can't possibly understand that the feeling he is experiencing is exhaustion, and that it will end if he goes to sleep. every single thing he sees, including things that could kill him, instantly go into his nearly toothless mouth.
seven years ago -- and i have told you this before, but bear with me -- i watched lauren address an entire campaign staff on the day that obergefell v. hodges came down. someone found a step stool so that she could be seen, and someone else handed her a microphone, and while she spoke i felt desire root itself within me. here was a person who was so entirely herself that she could say exactly what it was that she was thinking without running the lines over in her head first. how astonishing, how alien. we all drank champagne, and someone played chapel of love aloud in the office. the world was an open door and i would have hesitated to go through it, but lauren has never hesitated in her entire life, thank god, and that is the only reason that i now find myself hunched beside a crib, reading a sandra boynton board book to a person who certainly does not know that it is becoming harder for his mother and i to pretend that there aren't people in power who want to strip us of the right to exist just as we are: a family, just the three of us, with all of the entitlements that that term confers for so many others.
yes, i say -- i say yes whenever he points at anything, as though i am agreeing with something interesting and smart, because i am a sucker and he is the best person i have ever made -- that baby is safe.
so far i have celebrated this pride month by describing the high risk doctor who came into the triage room to tell us we were going to have a baby the day that remy was born to many, many straight women — including my own mother in law — as “powerful” in a way that i think makes clear i mean “erotic”
yesterday, my feet aching from running a little too much, i walked up and down the new terminal in laguardia with the baby asleep in a carrier on my chest. the golf men in first class boarded, and then the young people in airpods, lauren with her violin and pump bag, the tired-looking wearers of comfortable shoes, and finally the students. i am not a person who waits; i get out of cabs to walk the rest of the way, i take the stairs when the elevator is paused for a second too long. but we were the last people on this plane, he and i, a thin string of drool stretching from his lower lip to my t-shirt. this is the part of parenting that i like best: when he has a need, and i can meet it.
the baby has said exactly two words that we are considering to be intentional: hi -- which, yes, made me cry -- and mumma, lovingly whispered to his true mother, the handheld audio monitor that we let him gum on when his teeth hurt
covid has moved through my home slowly, knocking us down one by one like very tired bowling pins. now that the baby can breathe normally, it's not the fear that's getting to me, but the loneliness: we have been inside for half of may, and we will be inside for half of june. lauren naps only under duress, so antithetical is it to her nature to relax for even a second, while i take long walks with the stroller, loaded up with supplies not for him but for me -- after all, i can't push my covid-positive infant into any places of business to use the water fountain or acquire a bagel. our friends and parents check in on us almost daily, and it is a visceral relief to be able to tell them about the baby's first word (a gentle hi whispered into my forehead on lauren's humid birthday afternoon), his latest snack (slices of apple, gnawed upon deliberately), his newest trick (his hands rotate at the end of his arms! who knew!). i miss the world badly, but here's the secret: i am so grateful not to be missing these days with him.
he is fine now, i should tell you he's fine, but for one horrible hour this weekend my baby's throat was so swollen that he sounded like an angry dog when he cried, and i couldn't get my pediatrician to call me back because every other baby in new york also has covid, so all i could do was hold him in the bathroom with the shower running while lauren frantically called urgent care in the other room, and rub his back and weep into the top of his head, hoping that nothing worse would happen to him than seeing his mother afraid.
ok i've been alone in my bedroom for four consecutive days so it's possible i'm losing it but i do kind of think the universe conspired to give me covid so that i couldn't ignore the nyc parks department's desperate pleas to wait until the lifeguards come on duty next weekend and instead throw myself into the atlantic ocean on the first hot new york saturday
sorry i know i'm preaching to the choir here but becoming a parent when i chose to become a parent allowed my life to be full and lush and wonderful. i moved to new york and grew into community and did work that contributes to that community. i learned what i am like and what i need, i developed a network of people who know me and are known by me, i married someone that i trust, and only then did i add the joy and, yes, the burden of parenthood to my life. this was a gift but also a basic entitlement: i am a person. to think of this having gone any other way makes my chest hurt.
i had an hour free in prospect heights without the baby or the dog and so i went for my first park loop run of spring, my arms pumping and my strong legs moving without fail, and i felt very lucky both for this body and for brooklyn. every spring, without fail, they are there, blooming.
when i first moved to new york, the subway was -- and i'm sorry to use this word that has been so worn down over the last few years -- a liminal space. below ground i could disappear and reappear at will, and when i climbed the stairs at the end of the line no one would be waiting for me other than the man who swept the fallen fruit from the stand on the corner of canal and essex. now i am kept track of. lauren can watch my dot bob along the map on her phone, if she so chooses; i am always moving toward or away from my family. still, when i slip into the car, i am giving myself to this city that i love so much, trusting that i will get where i need to go and back again, safe and whole.
is marriage “sexy”? well after seven years together lauren and i recently began making arnold palmers in the afternoon, which we refer to as “a nice cold arnie p.” so you tell me.
i know she was well-intentioned but i cannot stop thinking about my podiatrist yesterday telling me that i need to "make time for myself" as though i did not rush out of my house early on a tuesday without having fulfilled any of my morning household obligations (dog walked, coffee made) to get to chelsea by 9 am, which in turn would make me a full hour late to work. jasmine this is the time for myself. you holding my ankles in your beautiful genius hands and yelling "INCREDIBLE!" is basically a trip to the spa. what more do you want from me.
one day you are a normal person surviving in the world and the next you cannot stop thinking about shauna shipman