Sins of Father

Who is my father? An adopted man (I began looking up his roots, stopped, I don't have time and I guess I do not care enough) a man with no history, and who does not want one. 

A selfish man who lived his life in pursuit of nothing but his own interests. He hated his job, sure, but he was there first (in order to beat rush hour, it was frustrating for him to have to deal with traffic, so he left the house at six or six-thirty) and came home last, maybe in time for the six o'clock news. Twelve hours out of the house for a job he didn't care about, the job his father did. No imagination. No creativity. Only sitting up late in his underpants, eating cheese and bologna, reading history.

How did I come from this man? Yes, thanks to him (and mother) I have learned how to be wildly out of touch with my emotions, how to be politely passive-aggressive, how to mutter under my breath. How to desire nothing, how to achieve nothing. How have I come as far as I have with parents like these? How did I develop a need to show off, to attract attention, and how did I come to a place where people look to me as a leader?

Has Toni taught me everything? How to cope with being needed? How to make difficult decisions? How to enjoy the air, the animals, other people? How not to suffer fools gladly?

I was feeling dowdy the other day, the weather has been crummy again, we are short on laundry and I never had particularly attractive winter clothes, anyway (like father, like son - we all dress terribly until there is a woman to dress us up) and my hair was longish, it cannot grow too long on my bald head without looking bad. So I trimmed it, but trimmed it closer than normal, and I shaved, trimmed my goatee and I thought, hey, that's an attractive man. An attractive, bald man in his thirties. Not a young man who has grown too old and doesn't know what to do with his life, but a man, a simple man, a man who has a wife and owns a house and is expecting a child and is living a life, and he looks all right.

What if the child isn't healthy? Will I blame myself for not insisting she not have that occasional glass of wine, to not take so much Tylenol, will it be my fault?

What if the child isn't healthy? What will I do? I will cope. I will cope. We will cope. Cope like I was never taught how.

The books say it is normal for a father-to-be to assess their own father in this way. But it is still awful. And he is changing, too. It's not just me. He is becoming like his father in so many way he talks about things without care for whether or not he's being a bore, he foists strong philosophical and religious beliefs on us. He sees the end and he is desperate to make an impact. His father has annoyed him for so long. And now he is annoying me. What a terrible cycle.

It's 11:30.

Nesting

Good morning. Happy Saint Patrick's Day.

Toni's appetite is up, we have been consuming the calories we need (she needs) for the baby. But as of yesterday we were both concerned that the baby isn't moving as much as it used to, it doesn't kick as heard, and only moves occasionally.

She was very upset. She is way behind in school and before spring break her boss let her go with some unfair words of criticism. And she is upset about the baby.

I asked her to call the midwife and she said she would feel stupid, she should have called her days ago and besides, we will see her on Monday and it was last-thing Friday. We went round and round and I began getting upset, the old Father's Rights thing, but I was only getting emotional about it. I froze up for awhile, I was feeling all kinds of terrible things, then it became about me, and it all came spilling out -- well, no, it came in bursts, it was hard. About the first blood test, about the baby disappearing in my head, like we would wake up one morning from a dream, together, and think, weren't we pregnant? Wasn't that a happy dream?

She called. We got advice -- a cold glass of juice and then lie down and wait for kicks. Less than 3 in a half hour. We wait another half hour -- less than four in an hour, call the doctor.

She felt seven faint movements in 25 minutes.

We went out for Chinese -- another good indicator is when you eat, it should move around a lot right after that. She was kicked in the bladder several times after we had begun eating.

Before we called, I wanted to sing to it. I sand the Mockingbird song, and it moved, right then when I started.

We came home. We watched "The West Wing" on tape. We got in bed. We had sex. Toni slept all night long ... for the first time in months.

I am up early to work on the nursery, but I owed myself time to drink coffee, write in my journal, maybe have breakfast. Nothing but work on the house today, and dinner with the Pedacis tonight.

Headache

Every night is awful. It used to be that she would get terrible indigestion just as she got into bed -- and then there was the snoring. 

She is now used to having the indigestion (it is still no picnic, but she is used to it) and I got earplugs -- and just as I was used to those, she now develops terrible head and neck aches in the middle of the night and I rouse myself to rub her head or neck or whatever. She then sleeps in the morning and I feel like shit.

Yesterday (or the day before) she said she never wants to have a baby again and I think she means it. I think I never want her to have a baby again. 

Of course, I was never kidding myself (though I think she was) into believing a pregnancy would be easy. Nothing else is easy, she was always been susceptible to slight alterations in her physical condition. She becomes faint easily, succumbs to heat, she is ill very, very often. I mean, she gets sick all the time and she always has.

After last weekend she missed Monday, half of Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday from work -- and then her boss said some unfair things to her over the phone, about Toni warning them at the beginning of the week about not coming in, and worse, on Friday when she did get into work the boss suggested we threw a holiday dinner party (one which this woman did not even attend) to make up for lost hours last semester.

Toni may have missed a lot of time at work over this pregnancy, but her boss sounds truly fucked-up for some of the things she said to Toni this week and it has made Toni furious.

Would she be getting headaches anyway? I say yes, the books say yes, but this gives her something to really focus on.