Also? I never did get any pudding.

I don’t like saying I’m solo mom because it sounds so…self-serving. Hello self, would you like a cup of tea? Perhaps a foot rub? But from 7 am to 7 pm (or so, depending on the day) it’s just me and the baby. That’s a lot of hours. That’s the number of hours in the Pinball song from old-school Sesame Street. Did I mention that I found an MP3 of that song, and that it’s by the Pointer Sisters? Dude, that song gets stuck in my head all the time. Onetwothree FOUR FIVE sixseven eight NINE ten eleven twelve.

Anyway, so it’s just me, the kid, and the Pointer Sisters for twelve hours every day, so you’d think I’d insist on some Me Time once Not So Cranky Dada gets home. The problem with that is a) I’ve forgotten how to do Me Time, what with all the spending nine months cooped up in the house worrying that something would happen to the impending baby and then the taking care of said baby, and b) I know that Not So spends those hours working hard to support us and I feel like he needs some Him Time, and c) I have the self-esteem of a…person who has very low self-esteem, and right now the only thing that makes me feel worthwhile is taking care of the kid.

All those things together and we get a night like last night. I’ll set the scene: I’m putting away laundry in the baby’s (woefully incomplete) nursery; Not So is downstairs doing dishes. Happy Fun Baby and I are playing this game where I announce each clothing item (“Oh my goodness! Could it be…pants?“) and he grins and bounces and generally is adorable. Suddenly Happy Fun Baby starts to laugh, and it’s the funniest sound I’ve ever heard in my life. He doesn’t usually give us more than the occasional giggle – I think it surprised him. Still, he was cracking right up (and yes, I realize I just changed tenses in the middle of a paragraph. Let’s all take a moment to mourn the loss of my grammar skills and move on), so I called Not So. Of course as soon as he came up the baby merely smiled tolerantly at me and the laughing episode did not repeat. Not So went back down to finish the dishes and I finished putting away the laundry.

I assumed Not So knew we were awake, and upstairs, and adorable. I hung out in the nursery with the baby for another half hour or so, thinking Not So would surely come back up (and feeling increasingly guilty for making him do housework, which is clearly my job because hello, SAHM?). Finally I went down to check on him and found him hanging out on the couch with his laptop. “Don’t you want to come play with the baby?” I asked.

He jumped up right away. “I was just decompressing,” he said. We played with the baby in the nursery for a while, and then the baby got kind of sleepy and cranky. Not So went back downstairs. I brought the baby into the bedroom (one of the incomplete aspects of the nursery: no crib) and snuggled him to sleep, which left me…upstairs, by myself, with a sleeping baby. Not much I could do other than sit there and watch HGTV, and after a day of doing pretty much just that, it wasn’t too appealing. Except, and here’s the thing: during the day there’s no one else here, and at night I could, in theory, at least be sharing space with my husband. I ventured downstairs (after clearing all the pillows off the bed and fretting obsessively about SIDS, as per my usual) and asked Not So about his not-coming-up-ness.

“I’d love to spend time with you!” he said. “I’m just not ready to be down. You guys seemed kind of down.”

“I’m not down!” I said. “I was trying to get the baby to be down. I’m up! I just didn’t say anything because I thought you might be having some You Time.”

“Well, I do like a little Me Time. That’s why I take a bath every night. It’s nice to have an hour when I can just relax, read a book, decompress.”

“Yes,” I said, all internally snark-a-riffic all of a sudden, “that does sound nice.” Then I went back upstairs to make sure the baby hadn’t spontaneously discovered rolling and rolled off the bed – but I did get some kissin’ from Not So, because it doesn’t do to wear our passive-aggression on our sleeve.

That was last night. Today I got a call from a tipsy Not So, wanting to know if it was okay if he hung out with his coworkers at the bar for a while…although he could come right home if I needed him to. I didn’t need him to, did I?

I looked at Happy Fun Baby, all crashed out in his Boppy, and I thought about how much I wish I could take a night off without someone needing me.

“Of course you don’t need to come straight home,” I said. “Have fun.”

Onetwothree FOUR FIVE sixseven eight NINE ten eleven twelve.

Number of rainy days in February: lots.
Number of times I left the house: few.

It’s lovely outside today. You might think we’d be going for a walk, but you’d be wrong. As usual, I’ve assessed the effort vs. possible reward and come to the perfectly reasonable conclusion that it’s much better to stay home and make some pudding. One could argue that I need a walk far, far more than I need anything resembling pudding. To that I say HA! And then I mention the cuteness of my child, because no one can criticize while gazing on a face like this:

And how can I be depressed while looking at a face like that? Yet here I am, parked on the couch, contemplating pudding. Not just a little bit of pudding, either; my plan, if I could be so bold as to label it a plan, is to make an entire box of Cook and Serve and then go back to the couch, where I will eat all four servings. Possibly I will pour all four servings into one very large bowl; this idea fills me with joy.

The main thing standing between me and a tub of pudding-related bliss is, ironically enough, the amount of effort it will take. Less effort than going out, yes, sure. No one needs to get dressed in order to prepare pudding. Getting dressed: a whole planet of unpleasantness all on its own. I used to have a good relationship with my clothes. We were quite friendly, my clothing and me. I’d flirt with cute skirts and chat up sweater sets. Certain brands could inspire torrents of illicit longing (Calvin Klein and Kenneth Cole still hold a special place in my heart). Sometimes I’d pick up an outfit on a whim only to discover in the harsh light of morning that it wasn’t nearly as flattering as it had seemed at the store, but for the most part my separates and I had a mutually supportive existence.

That was before. Before baby? Before pregnancy? Being pregnant at least was a dress-up party in and of itself. Fat and waddling, sure, but fat and waddling in cunning maternity duds! Maternity duds have a special language; they say to the world I am not obese, I am creating life! You must surrender your bus seat to me and claim that I have a “glow”! Ha! There ought to be cunning post-pregnancy duds: special clothes for the time between giving birth and actually resembling the person you were before you had a person in your uterus. There are nursing clothes, sure, but why must nursing clothes be either massive and unflattering or cost the same as a small car? If there’s any time in a woman’s life when she won’t be able to afford designer clothing it’s when she’s on maternity leave (or, in my case, beginning the strange and new career of SAHM). It’s not like the baby; people like buying clothes for the baby. The baby, I’ll hazard to guess, has more clothing than he could possibly need. But mama? Mama is wearing one of the two tops she owns which do not make her look like a turnip, paired with either some floppy sweats or a sad pair of maternity jeans that make her look like she’s working on Baby #2. Mama is not a fashion plate.

At some point I’m sure I’ll once again have a relationship with my clothing which does not involve a futile attempt to cover as much of my misshapen, flab-ridden body as possible, but until then: pudding. Yes. The baby’s asleep right now so the timing could not be better. Then again, there are all sorts of other things I ought to be doing while the baby sleeps. Things like school, or dishes, or cleaning up the cat vomit at the foot of the stairs. All these things are at least as important as the pudding, although far, far less delicious (esp. the cat vomit) and the baby, he wakes often and unpredictably. How can I possibly justify twenty minutes of standing in front of the stove? There are bills to pay, lists to make, calls which must be placed to the advice line at Kaiser in which I am somehow supposed to utter the words “I have Post Partum Depression” and then fling myself at the mercy of the Insurance Gods. (I spent a disproportionate amount of time last night trying to figure out the proper cutting response should the advice line nurse try to argue with me; I’m pretty sure normal people do not do this.)

The baby just decided that sleep is some obscure form of baby torture, so I guess the point is moot for now. Crying baby! Immediate need! No time to dilly-dally! Still: I wish I had some pudding.