Anyway, I'm seriously sick of talking about myself and my FEELINGS ... so here's two funny things I wanted to share with you. The first is a hilarious post Timmy sent me because he knows I love slapstick (or essentially anything involving anyone getting hurt, including myself) so here's the link:
This Is How The Human Face Reacts To Getting Hit By A 90-MPH Fastball (PHOTOS)
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/
The second is a really cool Mother's Day post my friend Sheri sent me (see below). Even though my little man is 14 (almost 15 years old -- gasp!), I still remember every single thing this author talks about. Hope you enjoy it too. Much love to you all. Angel.
What I Would Actually Like for Mother's Day
I
have something I would like for Mother’s Day. Most holidays my husband
doesn’t buy me gifts because there is nothing I particularly want or
need, but he has always said if there’s
something I really want, to let him know. He is wonderful. I would like
to say up front that he is one of the best human beings I have ever
met.
And
I feel bad even asking for this for Mother’s Day because it’s going to
be really difficult—maybe impossible to pull off. It is not flowers and
it is in no way a stuffed animal holding
a mylar balloon (if someone wants to send me a quick e-mail explaining
why those even exist, please go ahead) and it is not some sort of
quasi-expensive chocolate. It is not a gift certificate for a spa
treatment and it is not breakfast in bed. I am trying
to get out of the habit of eating in bed.
What
I want for Mother’s Day is going to hurt my husband, who I love and
care about a lot, so it hurts me that it will hurt him, but I want it
regardless.
1. I
would like for my husband to become pregnant.
Dude. You're glowing.
And let me clarify: not for a long period of time.
Absolutely not for nine months because that is the stupidest thing I’ve
ever heard—nobody should have to be pregnant for nine
months. That should be written into the Geneva Convention. But for a
week or so I would love for him to have an abbreviated, montage-version
of a pregnancy—a mash-up of the first and third trimesters in which he
is constantly nauseous and exhausted and WHAT
IS GOING ON WITH THESE MOOD SWINGS, no, never mind, everything’s fine,
false alarm, NO SERIOUSLY, THERE THEY ARE AGAIN, WHY
IS THIS HAPPENING??
I would like his back to hurt to the point where there is not a single
position in which he is comfortable and for him to get to the point
where the idea of
walking two blocks is more exhausting than, under normal circumstances, the reality of running ten miles.
2. I
would like him to experience labor.
The agony.
FOR
ABSOLUTELY NO LONGER THAN TEN MINUTES. I’m not a mustachioed
totalitarian dictator, I just want him to understand it. Within a ten
minute period I’d like him to experience three
or four one-minute-long contractions, but I want them to be the ones at
the end of the labor—the ones that are two minutes apart, where you are
either sobbing or screaming because there is nothing that could have
prepared you for that amount of pain. The ones
that are so horrible and all-encompassing that when people ask later,
“What was it like?” you stand there with your jaw hanging open because
unless the person has been systematically tortured while also undergoing
an un-anesthetized root canal, they are not
going to have a workable frame of reference.
3. I
would like him to experience 10 seconds of physically pushing a child out of your body when you have not had an epidural.
PUSH.
Honestly, maybe not even ten seconds. I just want him to get the gist of it.
4. I
would like him to experience a very brief
time period sampling the first few weeks (months?) of what your body feels like right after you have given birth.
“Here you go. Good luck figuring this out.”
I
want him to understand how it feels when you are emerging from the
hospital after what feels like a horrible, debilitating train accident.
And you are in both pain and a mild state
of shock and also the doctors are going, “Hey, hope you’re feeling
better after that horrific train accident and also here’s an extremely
delicate yet demanding human being for whom you are now responsible,
regardless of the fact that you’re in so much pain
that looking at a bicycle seat gives you a panic attack.”
I
want him to breastfeed the baby and deal with the ridiculous insanity
of pumping and leaking and horrific soreness or I want him to be not
that great at it and wonder what’s wrong
with him that he’s not enjoying it the way all the books told him he
would. OR I want him to choose to not breastfeed the baby and have total
strangers come up to him, telling him that he is a terrible father for
not breastfeeding the baby.
I want him to have at least one instance where he urinates on himself while sneezing.
5. I want him to stay at home with the baby full-time for one full month.
Like a version of solitary confinement where the prison guards force you
to continually read “The Cat in the Hat” at gunpoint.
This
is a polite way of saying I want him to be COMPLETELY OVERCOME BY
UNIMAGINABLE BOREDOM AND LONELINESS. I want him to be overwhelmed by a
loneliness so intense that he regularly
wishes he were an Iroquois indian because after four weeks alone in an
apartment with an eight month-old, living in a communal longhouse with a
bunch of other adults sounds more appealing than an invite to the Vanity
Fair party.
* * *
And
what will I be doing during as he endures the pain of this incredibly
elaborate mother’s day gift? Will I be sitting in a leather recliner
eating beef jerky and corn chips, going,
“Ok, so now do you get it?? Do you finally understand?”
No, of course I will not be doing that.
I will be beside him the whole time.
If during his pregnancy he wakes up at 3AM
and says that he is so so sorry to ask but he really wants Taco Bell, I
will go out and get him Taco bell. I will hold his hand during labor,
grimacing, because it will be hard to see someone I love in that much
pain. I will try, when I can, to get the baby when he cries at night so
that my husband can get a few extra hours of sleep. When I get home from
work and see that he is frustrated and exhausted
and has had a really rough day, I will take the baby off his hands. I
will do whatever I can to make it a little easier for him.
Hang in there.
I will do for him all the things that he has done for me.
Which is why, for the record, I conjured up this extremely complicated, probably-impossible-to- implement mother’s day request in the first place.
Partially
because there is a part of me that wishes that he could fully,
completely understand what I went through. It is hard (maybe
impossible?) to fully understand something you
have not experienced.
But
partially because being married to someone who, despite his lack of
understanding, did everything he could to make my life a little bit
easier, I can’t come up with anything else
I could possibly want.
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