While My Boyfriend Was Sleeping

What I write after Joe and Henry go to bed

Finding Joy in the Dog Days (Or Not)

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Editors note: If you’re able to get through this entire post, you deserve a gold star and a Book It! pin.

To my husband, my mother, my sisters, my friends, my neighbors and anyone else I may have barked at, scowled at, sulked away from or cried to during the last … oh, let’s call it a month:

I’ve been a surly bitch.

Unappreciative and crabby.

No scratch that. I’ve been downright beastly. My outward appreciation for life’s little gifts has been snuffed out lately by sadness, strife, underarm sweat, sleeplessness and the care and keeping of a tantrum-prone Henry.

It’s 800 degrees every day in Florida. In the morning, it’s 600 degrees. At night, it’s 700 degrees. During the day? It’s 800 motherf**king degrees.

More than once I’ve exclaimed out loud to anyone within ear shot, that August can suck it. The bugs are at their biggest. (Thank god the 902-page September issue of Vogue arrived so I can annihilate cockroaches three at a time.) The ozone is at its thinnest. The grass is at its brownest. Homeless alcoholics are at their rankest and the general public is at its meanest. (Last week a woman at Target stormed out of my line because I had 11 items on the 10-items-or-less belt. “So much for the EXPRESS LANE!” she snarled. “Lady, you’re shopping at Target not diffusing bombs. Chill the eff out,” I snapped IN MY HEAD. In real life I glared at her while Henry reached for the candy display and tore open a package of peanut M&Ms. “HENRY WANT CANDY MAMA!”)

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A crushed bicycle and the end of a bad habit

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Over the course of my adolescence and adulthood I’ve made many attempts to stop biting my fingernails. They’ve all ended in failure. As a reminder of this weakness I’m left with nubs so useless I’m forced to use paper clips to open pop cans, credit cards to scratch bug bites and tweezers to fasten necklaces.

It’s pitiful. And gross. My hands are ugly. Looking at them as I type this post, I’m reminded of the brief times in my life when I actually had real human nails. I can count these times on two fingers. (Pun intended.) Once: In 2007, when I went Kerouac-ing across the country. Twice: when I left the newspaper and a took a job in a marble yard . (Lesson learned from my marble yard experience: Having visibly filthy hands all day is the best deterrent to nail biting.)

So what does this have to do with a crushed bicycle you ask.

Well, let’s see here…

About a month ago I strapped my bike to the back of my car and drove to Sarasota to do some riding with Oma. (Note: I’m not talking about my sexy Bianchi. I wisely left her at home. I took Joe’s cumbersome, twice-crashed Specialized Crossroads – the one with Henry’s green seat mounted on the front.)

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We set up camp

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… along the water at Fort De Soto Park. It was beautiful and exhausting. I ate a lot of chocolate donuts. Joe built a fire using scrap wood from our unruly Brazilian Pepper tree. Hank ate a lot of dirt; chased dogs, squirrels, trucks and little girls on the playground. We woke up each morning in time to watch the sun rise over the Gulf of Mexico. Spending two nights in a tent with an 18-month-old and a snoring, farting pug will certainly make you appreciate your uncomfortable queen-sized bed and busted box spring.

Ah. Sunday night. Home again.

Domestic Joe

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I love the way Joe folds my laundry.

When I met my husband four years ago his friends and co-workers called him PJ. It stood for Party Joe.

Within six months of our dating they had switched to calling him DJ for Domestic Joe. Apparently it didn’t take me long to tie him down.

I’m sorry darling. I never set out to housebreak you.

Besides. The way you fold laundry makes me think you were ripe for the pickin’.

—

PS. I promise to write more soon. I returned to the paper two weeks ago. The baby/work balancing act is something I’m sure many of you are familiar with.

The one about my sister’s fake toe nails

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lips.

This is a true story, as are all stories on The Lance.

It’s short, unsettling and involves my hapless sister PK and her flawless toe nails.

Over the summer, our favorite Bristol Palin lookalike began adhering fake toe nails to her piggies.

She was covert about her new weird beauty habit, choosing short white nails with french tips, which she refrained from revealing were artificial, until one day I said, “Jesus PK. Those nails looks so perfect they could almost be fake.”

She started giggling.

“That’s because they are fake. I got ’em from the Dollar Store,” she said.

“Well I’ll be damned,” I replied, half-disgusted and half-impressed with her ingenuity.

I’ve not seen her real toe nails since June. It would appear that the regime has (pardon the pun) stuck.

A couple weeks ago, she shared with me this story while we were heading to a chocolate festival in Tampa. (Yes, I said chocolate festival. I’m a pregnant chocoholic. My primal instincts kicked in.)

The story goes:

PK runs to the Dollar Store to pick up a new pack of falsies and a bottle of nail glue.

She returns to her apartment with the goods and begins her routine of replacing the old acrylics with the new acrylics.

She’s in a hurry.

To expedite the process, she decides to bite open the nail glue rather than fetch a pair of scissors.

With a firm grip on the cap, she begins to gnaw. At this point, she’s thinking it would have been easier to retrieve the scissors from the kitchen.

She gnaws too much.

She successfully loosens the plastic tip. In a matter of seconds, nail glue begins to ooze into her mouth. By the time she realizes the severity of the situation, it’s too late. Her lips are glued to the cap. Her tongue is glued to her teeth.

She lives alone so there’s no one around to a.) help her and b.) mock her.

“It tasted disgusting,” she said. “It took me like 30 minutes to pry my lips apart.”

“I hope it doesn’t interfere with the taste of the chocolate,” I said.

“I don’t know,” she muttered. “I’ve still got glue stuck to the back of my teeth.”

—

PS. Photo by Anthony Kelly.

Pregnancy Confession No. 2

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[I can't give up baths.]

This one came as a huge surprise to me:
Pregnant women are not supposed to take hot baths.

Your body temperature rises, which can be harmful for fetuses.
Especially in the early months of development.  

A prolonged spike in your core body temperature could cause birth defects.
 Avoid the bath tub, avoid overheating, avoid birth defects.

But we all know fetal development isn't this simple.
And common sense, as I'm learning, can serve a woman well in pregnancy.

There are a lot of "rules"
A lot of old wives tales.
A lot of fear-rooted dos and donts. 

I love my baths.
Love soaking my bones in a hot tub.
Love sinking my shoulders under the water
and feeling the tension of younameit loosen and release.  

I love to read in the bath.
All of my books are warped from water.

I never would have guessed that this habit,
my most therapeutic habit,
might harm my unborn baby.

So I read some more on the topic
and learned that while HOT baths aren't safe,
WARM baths are just fine.

Which was a relief.

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Newsprint ain’t dead in this office.

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Those of us in the newspaper business have got a dilemma on our hands. And no it’s not the imminent fall of print journalism. That would be too heavy a topic for this grizzled reporter.

My problem lies in the leaning tower of newspapers by my desk; the fact that my livelihood takes up space and I can’t seem to part with it. In no other area of my house is this more apparent than in my office, where I’ve stockpiled years of newspapers, notebooks and other reporter debris.

Debris! All of it!

If you were to throw a lit match into my office the room would go up in flames.

Imagine if I worked for a daily.

Now add the fact that I have a collection of newspapers from various cities and towns I’ve traveled through: The Idaho Statesman. The Oregonian. The Kansas City Star. The Hannibal Courier-Post. The Ozark County Times. The Chicago Tribune. The Logan Herald Journal. The Denver Post. Estes Park Trail Gazette. Mountain Valley News. Colorado Springs Independent. The Buffalo News. The Chattanoogan. The Clarion Ledger. The Arkansas Times. Asheville’s Mountain Xpress. (They’re all stacked in that white chest next to where the pug is sleeping.)

I haven’t even counted the European newspapers I keep in a Rubbermaid bin in my bedroom closet.

Some people buy souvenir shot glasses. I buy newspapers. Newspapers take up more room.

They were beginning to choke me. The dust was making me sneeze. The dust was making the pug sneeze. The leaning tower of newspapers was starting to resemble something from out of A&E’s Hoarders. Jesus, that show makes my skin crawl. I dare you to watch just episode and not purge your life of every inanimate object.

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At least when voice mail piles up it doesn’t collect dust.

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I’m a recovering pack rat, but sometimes I regress. Tonight I transcribed 14 saved voice mail messages dating back to 2007. It was as much a practical exercise as it was a display of my neurotic compulsion to document everything. I have no space left for voice mails and text messages. My mailbox is always full. I was forced to make room.

But before I purged these 14 messages from my voice mail memory, I decided to post them here. I’ve held onto them for very specific reasons, most of which will be completely meaningless to you:

……

1. “Hey cutie pie, baby pie, sweetums, lovey cakes. I hope this means you’re buying oak tag or poster board. It is 6:30 and I just walked into my house. I’ll be on the road about a quarter-to-seven, so call me back if you like, otherwise I’ll see you when I see you.” ♥

– From Joe when we first started dating. The poster board he’s referring to was used to make two giant Chinese takeout containers for a costume party at a bar in downtown Sarasota.

2. “Hey Heidi. I just got my grades back from my first essay and I got an 85, so I didn’t do as bad as I thought I would. The teacher said I ended the story too abruptly and I had a semi-colon in a place where I should have had a colon, but everything else was great, so thank you very much. I miss the heck outta ya.” ♥

– From my friend Chris, who I worked with at a marble yard during my two-year hiatus from journalism. Not long after I left the marble biz, Chris decided to go to college to pursue an engineering degree. He left me this message after I helped him with an English essay.

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Razor yearn

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shaver

About four months ago, maybe longer, Joe ran to CVS for some odds and ends. I didn’t go because I had a headache, which I believe was the primary reason for the late-night CVS run. We were out of Advil. As Joe grabbed his keys and headed for the door, he asked me if I needed anything else from the store.

Tampons?

Chocolate ice cream?

Vogue?

Toothpaste?

“I need a pack of razors,” I said.

Razors? What kind of razors?

“Just a pack of BICs or whatever.”

I never buy expensive razors. Certainly not the kind that come in blister packs and require $18 disposable heads and definitely not the kind Jewel sold her soul to peddle in 2003.

When Joe returned from CVS, not only had he purchased a family-sized bottle of Advil, (the kind one might buy using a Sam’s Club card) he had also purchased a Gillette Venus Breeze 2-in-1 razor with shave gel bars.

Have you guys seen this thing? It looks like an ordinary razor except that the head is cushioned by a sort of slimy gel helmet. Like the razor suffered a concussion and needed head padding.

“What the hell kind of a contraption is this?” I asked.

“You said you needed a razor,” he replied.

“Yeah, not a $20 razor.”

“It’s not a $20 razor. And besides, it came with gel. Now you won’t need to buy it.”

“What, gel? I don’t use gel.”

“Well, now you do.”

—–

PS. Happy 34th birthday, Joe. While I’ve not been very good at buying replacement heads for my Venus Breeze, I love that you’ve made it an option. Thank you, as always, for broadening my horizons.

The unbearable lightness of being (with Joe)

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IMG_0675

I wrote this the day I returned from my honeymoon and never posted it. It’s for you romantics.

…

It was important to Joe that we go on our honeymoon the day after our wedding. One momentous thing followed by another momentous thing. Wedding then honeymoon. No lag time between. He called it “getting shot out of a cannon.” There would be immense build up, followed by drunken well wishes and champagne toasts, culminating in a spark that when lit would launch us into the autumn horizon like a rocket, propelled by a combustible mixture of red wine and roses that no amount of romantic lollygagging through Upstate New York could or would encumber.

So here I am at 3 p.m. on September 25. Back in Florida. Back on my couch with the pug by my side and Joe asleep in the bedroom after insisting he cover most of the 23-hour drive from Buffalo to St. Petersburg himself.

We had built fires in the woods near Montréal, Québec, ferried our car from Plattsburgh, N.Y. to Burlington, V.T., purchased armfuls of produce on the side of the road and then washed it all down with champagne beside a waterfall. When Joe suggested we drive straight through the night, I didn’t protest. What was one more adventure in the month of September? We were in such a bliss bubble on our drive home that even a blown tire in West Virginia seemed cute. Well, to me anyway.

All the clichés about time and how fast it goes are true. I didn’t fully grasp that until now. Sometimes when you step outside of your body and take a second to swallow a moment, you can see the slow-motion passage of time. One fat molecule freeing itself from another fat molecule like liquid taffy. Gelatinous time.

About two months ago, Joe turned to me and asked, “You wont get depressed when the wedding’s over, right?”

“Depressed? No. I’m looking forward to getting my life back.”

I was up to my waist in wedding planning and work. Luggage-sized bags had formed under my eyes and inside these hollow caves I carried a never-ending to-do list of tasks.

“OK,” he said, smiling, knowing full well I was full of shit. “Just checking.”

Three months have passed since that conversation and now I’m doing laundry and unpacking suitcases, giggling to myself as I separate the various memories from the last three weeks into a cardboard box that I will save forever. Wistful already.

Despite getting only two hours of sleep last night, the bags under my eyes are gone and in their place is something new. I can’t really describe it because part of me thinks it’s purely psychological, although Joe, in his usual Joe-way, tried to describe it three nights ago in Cooperstown, N.Y.

“You look wife-like,” he said.

“Wife-like? Oh God. Really?”

“Why are you acting like it’s an insult?”

“I don’t know. Because wife-like sounds so matronly.”

“Well, if matronly is beautiful. You look matronly.”

I think it was then that I blushed, and when I blushed the space under my eyes filled with something warm and dewy. I noticed it this morning when I walked into the bathroom and saw that he had unpacked all the hotel toiletries we collected on our honeymoon and arranged them on the vanity as if we were still on vacation.