ever-fixed mark

My parents gave Aitch a little red ride-on Jeep for Christmas — not the motorized kind that costs more than my first car, but a low-tech kiddie-powered toy. It does have some electronic components, though, because that’s the law — the battery lobby apparently has a stranglehold on the toy-industrial complex. There are buttons on the dashboard which, when pushed, make car noises. Some of these are traditional, like an engine starting or a horn blaring. Others are somewhat unexpected — kids’ auditioning-for-Annie voices singing, “Start the engine, oh what a feeling!” and braying, “Coooool Jeep!”

This morning, I was eating my breakfast when the Jeep, apropos of nothing, suddenly emitted in trochaic octameter,

“Hold on tight! It looks rough ahead.”

I know that doesn’t quite scan to eight feet on the page, but it does when recited. I thought Husband must have jostled the Jeep in passing. Then, an hour later, as I was on the phone with a client:

“Hold on tight! It looks rough ahead.”

Shortly thereafter, as I was answering an e-mail:

“Hold on—hold on tight! It looks rough ahead.”

and so on at irregular intervals throughout the afternoon.

Now, what am I to make of this? If my life were a bad off-Broadway play, this utterance would serve as ominous foreshadowing of some third-act tragedy. If my life were a horror movie, the it would be the embodiment of a ghost in my hundred-year-old home, who possessed the Jeep to give voice to a prophetic warning. If my life were completely neurotic, the voice might be a projection of my unconscious fears and desires.

Hmm.

Just to make sure, I asked Husband, “Honey? Have you heard Aitch’s Jeep say anything to you today?”

“The damn thing’s been driving me crazy. It kept going off all through my conference call.”

Good. Not completely neurotic.

When I got home from an all-day meeting on Friday, Husband was wearing one of my t-shirts. Not one of my extra-large unisex t-shirts, but one of my trim-fitting Nike for Women t-shirts. It was playing peek-a-boo with his belly button.

“Why are you wearing that?” I asked.

“Well, I had to give Aitch a bath before I took him to the doctor this afternoon…”

Uh-oh.

“…so I took off the t-shirt I was wearing so it wouldn’t get wet. Then as we were getting ready to leave the house I threw it on, but I must have grabbed the wrong one and didn’t realize it until I was in the car.”

“You mean you wore that to see the pediatrician?”

“Well, I explained to them what happened, and also that we were in a hurry so I forgot Aitch’s shoes.”

“You took him to the pediatrician with no shoes, and you were wearing that?!”

Oh my God. I can just hear the office nurses yukking it up about the clueless dad who could barely dress himself or his son. The funny thing is that Husband is actually perfectly capable of and practiced at caring for Aitch. He’s not a dad who “helps”; he just does. He’s responsible for half of Aitch’s care when I’m around, and all of it when I’m gone, and he doesn’t need to be cajoled or threatened or nagged into doing it either. He is not one of those dads who abandons his wife for the second shift.

He is just the teeniest bit absent-minded, though.

I asked Husband if I could blog about this incident, and he grudgingly assented, but he warned me, “You need some new fodder.”

Happy fodder’s day, honey.

A friend of mine recently e-mailed me to get some information on international adoption, which I supplied. She is single, has been thinking about adoption for some time now, and is seriously considering going forward with it. She did not ask my opinion on her decision to become a single parent, and I wisely refrained from giving her any assvice. (See how much I’ve learned from you people on the internets?) But it made me wonder: Had I never met Husband, or a suitable facsimile, would I have chosen to go the single-parent route?

Husband just returned from a three-day business trip, so I am eminently qualified to comment on single parenthood. News flash: it’s hard.

It’s not just the missing pair of hands — you could, I suppose, rent or borrow the sort of help that an extra parent would provide. And it’s not just the profound craving for adult company that you’re left with after a day spent in lockdown with a small child — I have many single-parent friends who have active social lives and romantic partners. The hardest part, for me, was the constant pressure of working without a net, that I had to plan every last detail of every move far in advance for anything to go smoothly.

On Tuesday, for example, I had to get the baby and dog up and to their respective day cares by 7:15 a.m. so I could be downtown for an important meeting at 9:00. This required the kind of advance planning normally only engaged in by organizations with the words “Special Ops” in their titles. Despite my best efforts to foresee any contingency, I was tripped up by an empty gas tank, an unexpected construction detour, and a misreading of the conference room location, leaving me sitting on the 6th floor while the meeting was starting on 2. But I did make it, and by virtue of getting everyone up, dressed, fed, and delivered, I felt I had pretty much fulfilled my accomplishment quota for the day.

But there’s no resting on laurels for the single parent; when you get home from work there’s the second shift (feeding, bathing, and bedding the baby); the third shift (house work and homework that didn’t get accomplished because you left work “early” to get back to day care at a reasonable hour); and then the midnight shift (night wakings and sick kid). All the shifts are yours. Sure, you can relax, but you have to schedule it, and then you spend half your time going, “Don’t think about anything for an hour goddamn it try to relax STOP THE THOUGHTS!” as your brain tries to plan the week’s meals on autopilot.

At one point this week, I contemplated a strike. “I can stop the motor of the world, you know, Aitch,” I threatened as I changed a soaked pair of pajamas for the third time that day. Aitch was unimpressed. He knew if I slacked, it would hurt me more than it hurt him. The less I plan and do, the more my world tends to entropy, destroying any hope of a free, peaceful moment.

This is how you know that John Galt was not a single parent. Single parents do not have the luxury of work stoppage. And I’ll bet that Dagny got her tubes tied as soon as they got married, or whatever Objectivist partnering equivalent they recognized in their Colorado fort.

This is kind of a long article, so would someone else be able to peruse it more carefully and tell me: Where do you spray it?

Directly on your ovaries? (Tricky.)

Perhaps in your hair? It’s a styling product AND a contraceptive!

Maybe you’re meant to mist it in a great cloud in the air and walk through it, suffusing your entire body with its protective properties.

Or, more likely, under the tongue:

“Hey, can I take a hit of your breath freshener?”

“Wait, that’s not…”

“Gaaaah, I’m infertile!”

“But your breath does smell minty fresh.”

I’m back in Ohio (State Motto: “Future Home of the Brooklyn Bridge, Which We Just Bought Off Some Guy!”). It’s a Groundhog Day repeat of last week’s business trip: same flights, same hotel, same dizzy wallpaper in the bathroom, same meetings. The only real difference is my hotel room number, leaving me standing in the elevator indecisively muttering, “15 or 18? 15 or 18?”

A bulletin from the glamorous world of interstate travel:

This is the maiden voyage of my new four-wheeled suitcase (hey, they spelled “surrey” incorrectly). All my suitcases disintegrated at once, so Husband and I rushed out to the mall on Sunday afternoon to buy one. It’s a 25-mile drive to the closest reliable department store. I swear, when I was in the Peace Corps living in a small town in North Africa, I had more convenient access to consumer goods and chattels than I do here on the North Shore of Boston. But there are 21 gift shops that sell scented candles within one mile of my home. (That said, guess how many candles we have in the house as a backup in the event of power failure? Two or three birthday candles, tops. The chandler’s kids, you know.)

Anyway, the new valise corners like it’s on rails. It eliminates a lot of the lugging that two-wheeled luggage usually requires. [Husband: “Lug…luggage…hey, I never put that together before.” Of course you didn’t, honey.] It makes me wonder why rolling suitcases didn’t always have four wheels. I mean, it’s not like four-wheel technology has only recently emerged. Why did it take us so long to figure it out?

Speaking of luggage…I saw someone wheeling a (two-wheeled, vastly inferior) bag that had one wheel with little LED lights inside of it that lit up as it spun. Cool…I guess…but why? Are we going to start tricking out our luggage with all kinds of after-market custom accessories? Will businessmen start walking around with suitcase spoilers and flashing luggage tags? It’s a trend you saw here first.

Speaking of trends…airports have been automating more and more of their bathroom fixtures. First the sink, then the toilet, then the soap dispenser, then the automatic seat covers (an O’Hare specialty…oh, how I love those seat covers and revere His Highness, Mayor Daley for awarding that nice fat contract to his crony in the tidy-toidy biz), and now the towel dispensers. Walk into any airport loo and you’ll find me waving my arms at the various magic eyes like I’m in the grip of St. Vitus’s Dance. But I have one fewer wave to deliver: the towel dispensers at the Columbus Intergalactic Spaceport now dispense towels automatically as soon as you rip the existing towel off. Hey, ho, way to go, Ohio!

I had the following e-mail exchange with my social worker today. Her portion has been paraphrased, but you’ll get the gist:

SW: Hope all went well with the INS.

Me: Thanks. We went to our fingerprint appointment and got through it with no problem. The people there thought that the approval would come through pretty quickly.

SW: Thanks for the update. I hope it does come quickly. Lately we’ve had some approved quickly but others were slow, with no obvious reason.

Me: Well, we slipped ‘em a twenty…so I’m sure it will go smoothly.

SW: Are you joking?

Jesus. She’s probably dialing the feds this minute.

This morning, Husband and I drove down to Boston to get ‘printed at CIS (formerly INS, then briefly BCIS, but now the much improved, jauntier CIS). We’ve been printed before, of course, so we know the drill, but this being a winning combination of government bureaucracy and downtown Boston, we were expecting the worst. The drive downtown was the typical thrill-ride of confusing exits and unmarked streets (my theory: they took down the signs to confuse any infiltrating Germans in WWII and just haven’t gotten around to replacing them). But in a surprisingly short amount of time we had located on-street parking and were inside. This time, we weren’t forced to wait on line outside the building in freezing weather. The weather was still freezing, of course (it’s only mid-June, after all), but we were able to get on an indoor line.

The hall was filled with perhaps a hundred and fifty petitioners, standing in line or waiting patiently on benches. As I surveyed the multitude that had gotten there ahead of us, I marveled at the fact that neither of us had thought to bring any reading material. I mean, we are the kind of people who read through every meal, cup of coffee, and plane flight. We often bring two or more sections of the newspaper and a back-up book to the dinner table with us. Luckily, I had my computer with me, but Husband doubted that the government would have provided Wi-Fi.

I never got the chance to find out. After going through a brief triage, we were directed away from the huddled masses to a much shorter fingerprintees-only line. The line was so short that it could be accommodated in a row of 10 chairs. Every time the first person in line proceeded to an open fingerprint kiosk, the rest of us would stand up and move down a chair like so many Merv Griffin show guests. The line was moving pretty quickly, so every thirty seconds or so we had to stand, shift, sit. By the time Husband called I was the only person in line, and I felt silly, so I stayed put in the second chair. But one of the INS flunkeys sternly directed me to move over one. Since they are holding the fate of my future daughter in their supple little hands (from all the Cornhusker lotion!), I did so. Compliantly.

It took about fifteen minutes to print me. Prints are taken by pressing one’s oil-doused fingers on a glass plate of a special machine. The computer scans the plate and images your digits. I have wrinkled fingertips that don’t photograph well, hence the lengthy session. Is there a beauty cream for this? I sense a big untapped market: middle-aged adoptive parents, green-card applicants, and repeat offenders. “I used to be ashamed to get printed, but not any more!”

I was hoping to see my scanned prints being compared on-screen to a database of print images, CSI-style, with a flashing “Match! Match!” as they were matched to my existing set of prints in the same system, but apparently functionality was limited. Life is littered with such minor disappointments.

I spoke with our adoption agency yesterday and confirmed that our fingerprints have to be done and our I600A approved before our homestudy will be sent to Korea. So we are not on the waiting list as I posted here earlier. Not even close.

I am disappointed in myself for missing such an important step in the process. I’m paid to teach other people how to be effective project managers. The first step is planning, and the only way to plan is to know the process. Idiot.

I’ve been trying to reconstruct what happened so I can discover how I was so knuckleheaded as to misunderstand this point. I dug up the letter that the agency sent when the homestudy was approved; it did indeed say that our homestudy was “approved on April 13,” but it did NOT say that it was sent to Korea. That information was imparted by our social worker, who left a voice mail saying, “I just wanted to let you know that your homestudy has been approved, and I guess that means it will be on its way to Korea this week–I think they send the cables on Friday.” Or something to that effect–I didn’t save it.

Now, if there’s one thing I know from our first adoption, it’s that social workers are very blinkered when it comes to the part of the adoption process that does not directly involve them. To them, the homestudy is paramount, and what happens between the homestudy and the referral is like a big black box. Homestudy goes in; some function is performed; referral comes out. Since, for some reason, I600-A approval is not considered part of the homestudy approval process, “You’re all done” to the social worker means, “You’re all done with my part. Check with the program coordinator on what else needs to be done–I can’t be expected to keep track of every program requirement.” Parents, of course, don’t see the divisions in the same way–it’s all “adoption agency” to us, not “social worker and program coordinator,” and we therefore tend to believe the social worker when she tells us she is there to “shepherd you through the process.” Or we believe them the first time. Any parent that believes the social worker the second time, and doesn’t double-check every word that comes out of her mouth, is an idiot.

I am not feeling like a very useful engine this week.

This morning, I got up early to do a few miles on the hotel treadmill before an 8:00 a.m. conference call. (I am, regrettably, in Ohio. State motto: “We Buy Old Coins!”) As I was running in the empty gym, a woman entered, positioned herself to the right of my machine, and mouthed, “Excuse me.” It’s annoying to converse when you’re on a treadmill, so I tried to ignore her, pretending that my iPod had rendered me blind as well as deaf. But she persisted. “Excuse me!”

”Yes?”

”I’m going out there for a swim,” pointing to the hotel pool through the big plate windows, “and I don’t have a swim buddy. Could you keep an eye out for me and, if you see me flailing around like I’m drowning, call someone?”

How to process this? It was way too early in the morning for a non-routine conversation. “Do you know how to swim?” I asked, confused by the request.

”Yes,” she said.

I was completely nonplussed at meeting someone who was even more tragically speculative than I am. I mean, I swim in hotel pools solo all the time and it’s never even occurred to me that I might sink without even a bellhop to hear me gurgle. Clearly I’m not watching enough CSI. I was so taken aback, I didn’t even think to say, “The pool is 4 feet 6 inches at its deepest point. If you feel like you’re drowning, stand up!”

Don’t I have enough toddler drowning scenarios to worry about without adding the safety of a total stranger to my burden? Aitch swims a few times a week at his babysitter’s house, and while I trust her completely, there have been an awful lot of sad toddler-on-the-bottom-of-the-pool stories lately. (One set of twins escaped their babysitter’s notice while their mother was giving birth to a sibling in the hospital. One survived, one didn’t.) And don’t even get me started about the dangers of ocean rip tides on the beach (thank you, New York Times Science section).

I took Aitch swimming myself last weekend and realized that he’s not a baby content to float around in my arms anymore. He likes to sit unaided on side of the pool playing with water toys, jump off the edge by himself, and put his head under. I’m also eager to let him have a bit more independence because I want him to learn how to swim. So I’ve decided to buy him this:

Will this alleviate my fears? Not entirely. I worry that an adult (the babysitter or I) supervising Aitch in this getup will be lulled into a false sense of security and be less vigilant than needed. I worry that Aitch will never learn to swim properly if he always wears a life vest and will be at even greater risk when he’s older. I worry that the other kids will laugh at him because of his uncool full-body bathing suit.

And now, I’m worried about dying alone in a hotel pool on a business trip while wearing an ugly and ill-fitting bathing suit from the gift shop. Thanks, paranoid pool lady.

This week, I’m on the consultant’s version of the Grand Tour: four different companies in one week. I thought I could turn this into some cool bit comparing and contrasting company cultures — the hotshot start-up versus the established blue-chip! The midwestern can-do versus the…ahhhh….sorry, I nodded off there. I got nothing. The only pithy observation I’ve made is that, working from a statistically significant sample of four, I’ve determined that the feminine hygiene brand of choice in corporate America is Tampax.

As I was sitting down to a pretty good dinner tonight somewhere in flyover country, I got a call from Husband who has been holding down the fort admirably in my absence. Apparently, our social worker called this evening saying that our fingerprints were holding up our dossier. We got the notification of our fingerprint appointment about a month ago but were on vacation and haven’t been able to find a convenient Wednesday morning to get them done, Wednesdays being the only permitted make-up day.

I would have made a greater effort, though, had I known the fingerprints were holding up the dossier. The last time we went through this, they weren’t on the critical path, and I somehow missed the change in policy this time around. Husband, shaken in his faith in my adoption process knowledge, questioned the social worker closely, and she admitted she wasn’t sure that our dossier was not sent. But a quick canvass of the Internets has provided some intelligence that the process for our agency may have changed.

Shit. I thought we were two months into our year-long wait, and instead we are three weeks away (next Wednesday plus two weeks and change to get the fingerprints approved and send the homestudy to Korea) from even starting to wait. I could swear I’ve received a document that said, “Your homestudy has been approved on 4/13 and will be sent to Korea…” How could I have missed the “…after your fingerprints are approved” codicil?