Friday, January 13, 2006

Mooshy stuff

First off, I love all my kids. Even the ones whose names I can’t recall right now. All nineteen of them are precious to me. Even when I’m reclining innocently on the floor and one of them (Ellis) jumps in my lap and plants her heel, RIGHT THERE in my crotch. I couldn’t get up from the floor for ten minutes, bless her pointy little head. Still love her, though perhaps not quite as much as before she squished “parts of me that don’t want to be squished.”

Anyway, as I have said somewhere here, I am an only child. And not only that, but I’m the son of an only child. Who was also the son of an only child. Yep, me, Pappa-san, and grand-pere were all only children.

You may commence with your “Holy Crap, that dude must be seriously f’ed up.” Let’s just say this, I ended up playing a lot of solitary sports as a kid. Tennis for the High School (singles only please) and golf. Later in life I skied and I now snowboard and jog. You can do all those things without company, including tennis. All you need is a wall. And man, is HE hard to beat! I also played soccer and baseball, but I wasn’t all that great at it either. No basketball (I have stereotypical White Man’s Disease: can’t run, can’t jump) and I’m pretty sure that my mother would have NEVER let me play football, so I didn’t even ask. You know that term, “Doesn’t play well with others” I was the test subject. I’m a team player at work, but that’s only because they pay me to be. :-]

So yeah, having kids for me was a revelation. It was incredibly difficult to get used to. Hell, even being married was a huge struggle for me, something to which my overly patient spouse can surely attest. We got married young and through a small birth control disaster, we got pregnant about 15 seconds after we got married. Specifically, we calculate that we’d been married for 17 days (or 18 depending on which of us you ask) when sperm met egg and then nine months later we got to meet Carrie. We celebrated our nine month anniversary as marking the legitimacy of our unborn child.

And let’s just talk about the level of denial I exhibited right after we figured out what had happened. For a few MONTHS I was convinced that it was possible that Re just had something wrong with her ovaries and that was why she’d stopped having periods. Ovarian cancer, for example. And her growing belly? That was the tumor of course. Der. You may think I’m kidding about that, but I’m going to tell you true that on occasion I call Carrie, “The Tumor” and I mean it in the most affectionate way possible. I’m not sure she’s old enough to appreciate that yet, but teenagers are dumb, you know?

So my quiet world which consisted of reading books and reading some more books and then seeing a movie (most likely adapted from a book I’d read and then be subsequently disappointed in the movie adaptation) was pretty much gone, and let’s just go ahead and say that world view was shattered. Just totally GONE once I got married and we began to single handedly populate the planet. And I’ll admit right here that there was a part of me that wasn’t even sure about the whole family thing to begin with. Why couldn’t we just have a nice quiet childless life filled with the lazy Sundays reading the Times and having a moment to think without someone sitting on me, insisting that I pay attention to them or demanding to be fed at regular intervals. We knew a couple who had a devil of a time conceiving and while everyone else felt sorry for them and wished them well, I secretly wished for their lives. Damn my potent spermatozoa! I specifically remember shortly after Carrie was born— holding her and looking into a full length mirror that was on the back of a door in our little apartment in Provo, UT and quietly saying to myself, “What the H-E-Double Hockey-Sticks have you gotten yourself into, Jon?” I got over it. Eventually. But I’m more than chagrined to admit that I considered running away on at least one occasion. I just wasn’t mature in any way at that point. I was also a twit. Even more of a twit than I am now.

But fear not, Intarweb, I really did get over it. Remember what I said a the beginning of all this? I love all my kidlets.

So whether we were going to have any more kids was always up to me. Reha was always game for them. She loves her the babies! We developed a nice system. After the youngest was 1.5 years old, Reha would begin to strike up a conversation about babies with me every quarter. She called it something like “taking your temperature.” I called it a proctology exam of the soul, because Reha is an attorney and she can question someone until they feel like they’ve been through a Senate Supreme Court nomination hearing. (And I mean that in the best way, babe!) I’d then tell her whether I felt ready or not. Though given my verbal communication skills vis a vis my feelings that conversation would take about four days. Eventually, it turned out that each of our kids is almost EXACTLY four years apart. (Our birthday season is from mid-March to very early June). They’d all be exactly four years apart, but for one miscarriage, now that I think about it. Funky weird.

But miracles do happen of course, and eventually I became accustomed to the thunder and the racket and the din and the sheer WALL OF NOISE my seventeen children can make. And I realized is that parenthood isn’t about controlling all the chaos that swirls around, really. It’s about the semblance of control. And herding cats. Parenting is a lot like herding cats.

And control ends up being a big fat hairy deal to me. That’s the one thing that I had the hardest time adjusting to as I grew into parenthood. Being an only child pretty much means that you are the sovereign of just about everything in your life (unless you have a stereotypically overbearing mother, which thankfully, I did not not. Overprotective, oh my heavenly stars, yes, but not overbearing). All the toys are yours and you don’t have to share unless you choose to. Now, I’m not a control freak by any means, I don’t exert dominance over others, but I’m generally very protective about losing control over myself and my surroundings. And it was hard for me to give of myself and be present as well, because somehow that felt like losing a part of me, which is quite neurotic. Think typical male intimacy issues multiplied by pi. And if I’ve learned one thing about parenthood it’s this: You dedicate ALL of yourself to those little pipsqueaks. And sometimes that’s really hard to do, because it requires sacrifice and dedication and not getting your way all the time. That’s my only-child legacy that I have to overcome right there, not being a selfish prick; unless I can get away with it when no one is looking, which is hard when there are twenty-two people at the Deal Family Compound. Or unless it’s 2:15 A.M. on a school night like it is right now.

As a parent, you aren’t supposed to play favorites, you know. And in general we don’t. We loathe LOVE them all equally. What I find is that I keep falling in love with each of my children one by one, over and over again. That’s how it feels to me anyway. It’s like I keep meeting them as a new person and realizing how amazing they are and how lucky I am to have them in my life and that I wouldn’t trade that for anything in the world and would do most anything to be able to hang out with forever. For example, right now I’m falling in love with what’s his name… the one with the darker hair… kinda short… boy… come on, give me a hint, what’s his name? Ah hell, I give up, I have no idea which one he is. But I like that one quite a bit right now. He’s OK.

Jon scribbled this mess on 01/13/06 at 02:58 AM, best we can tell it fits in the category of Regular Post Favorite Entries. This many folks had something to say about that, The permanent home of this entry is here: Link

Twitter

    Favorite Entries

    If you are new around here, the following entries have been reasonably well received. You might want to peruse these.

     

    Holy Crap! Look at all this STUFF down here. It's awesome!

     

    Really, I'm glad you made it down here. Almost no one ever comes down here. I'm like in a freaking dungeon down here. I get lonely. But not you. YOU made it all the way to the end of the page. For this I think I've a little crush on you. I don't know, is "love" to strong a word to use in this situation? Well, if it's not "love," then it's very strong "like." I'm totally in like with you for coming down here. You are awesome. Please love me back! I know, I know, I shouldn't be all needy, it's not attractive at all, but you don't know how it is to be stuck down here. Who scrolls all the way to the end of a page anymore these days? Anyway, thanks for shedding some light down here in the depths. I appreciate it. Shoot me an email and I'll send you a dollar, OK?


    ©2005-2009 Jon B. Deal All Rights Reserved. I'm not kidding around here, I know people who know other people who would be willing to beat you up or similarly infringe on your rights, should you happen to infringe on my rights.