Dalai Mama Dishes

by Catherine Newman

Catherine Newman cooks for the family

Dalai Mama Dishes

Catherine Newman cooks for the family

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Marathon

Posted April 22, 2008
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Ever wonder what Catherine sounds like? Listen to her read this blog entry.

When Ben was two months old, Michael walked out on us. To attend a philosophy conference. For three days. But still. I prepared meticulously for this abandonment, stewing up an enormous pot of meat and vegetables, stocking up on diapers and beer and Good N Plenty, laundering nursing pads and swaddling blankets, washing my own straggly, falling-out excuse for hair. It was like taking a huge breath before swimming a length of the pool underwater. And I ran out of oxygen almost immediately. I mean, there was plenty of stew. But Ben was one of those babies who smiled a lot - provided you were holding his giant smiling self in a sling all day long while also bouncing up and down on the exercise ball, which he preferred you to also be rolling slowly around the house while bouncing up and down and rocking him in your arms. He would tolerate being walked around the neighborhood folded up into the front pack, but only if you performed a kind of high-stepping bouncy walk that simulated the experience of the exercise ball crossed with your audition for A Chorus Line. You were free to stop bouncing or walking, of course, provided you felt fine about the morphing of his smile into a deafening cavern of grief, tiny boats ferrying ear-plugged tourists through the saliva stalactites of his gaping misery.

My cohort of new mamas complained about their own babies that needed to be held all day long - but they complained about this from the carpet, where they were reclining with glasses of merlot while pink-cheeked cherubs drifted peaceably in their laps; I, on the other hand, had to shout my complaints from across the house, where I was rolling bouncingly along on the exercise ball with the baby in a sling, trying not to spill my beer.

Each day of Michael's goneness, after I'd nursed the baby infinity or so times, gobbled down three or five bowls of stew, changed diapers over and over like I was stuck on a looped videotape, walked around the whole neighborhood to get coffee, walked around the whole neighborhood to get chai, and washed various repeating assortments of damp, yellow blankets and damp, yellow onesies, I'd look at my watch, and it would be 9:30 a.m. When Michael finally returned to us, wrung out from travel and job interviews and relentless power schmoozing, I treated him precisely as though he'd spent the past three days getting a pedicure on the beach while someone fanned him with a Playboy magazine. And if you're a full-time single parent, right about now you're saying, "Tell me about it!" and man - I can only imagine.

But I mention this today because Michael just left us for three days. To travel to St. Louis. To run a marathon. And the kids and I missed his company, and I became stabbingly, prune-fingeredly aware of just how many dishes he must normally wash over the course of three days. But we spent the weekend in lovely uneventfulness - dining with friends, hosting wall-to-wall play dates, and mooning around in the big bed for long, lazy stretches of the morning, the peace of our sun-drenched bedroom interrupted only occasionally by Birdy's impersonation of her newly invented Bum-Bum Cuckoo Clock that involves a little girl sticking her booty in your face and crying, "Bum bum! Bum bum! Bum-bum time! It's Bum-bum o'clock!" and then falling over in a paroxysm of hilarity. It wasn't hard to figure out how to get everybody's teeth brushed, like it was when Michael used to be at massage school every night and Birdy would disintegrate into sobbing chunks of toddler strewn across the upstairs. It wasn't hard to get everyone fed, like it was when Ben was a newborn and I could eat only whatever was in the top of the fridge because my c-section prevented me from bending to investigate the lower shelves.

But you aren't even paying attention, because you're still thinking, "Michael ran a marathon?" And all I can say is: Tell me about it. When I say, "Honey, I'm going to go for a little run," what I mean - and I'm just working from memory here, since I haven't actually said this particular thing in months - is that I will be back in 15 minutes, sweaty and complaining. For the past few months, on the other hand, when Michael says he's going for a little run, what he means is, "After I leave, you'll get the children ready to go out and you'll drive them to Northampton to the bulb show and grab a bite to eat at the café and then you'll shop for groceries on the way home, make a cake with the kids, put it in the oven and take it out when it's finished baking, and around the time you're inverting it onto a cooling rack, I should be getting back from my run." His runs are always "Great," except for the time he "had to circle back seven miles to get a dropped glove." He never complains. The only problem, of course, is that Michael experiences himself as having accomplished an arduous task, while I experience him as having had a four-hour interlude on the beach, with the toenails and the fanning magazine. But honestly? I'm happy that he's been training so hard, and it makes me feel good about myself to be the kind of partner who makes it easy for him. I'm proud of us both. But mostly of him. Marathon-running jerk.

I suppose I'm just a little self-conscious that his mid-life crisis involves getting into the best shape of his life, while mine involves figuring out if I can take one of those stretchy clips you use to tighten a jacket and fasten it onto the back of my neck skin to make my chins look a bit tauter. I'll let you know.

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About Catherine Newman

Catherine Newman is the author of the memoir, Waiting for Birdy: A Year of Frantic Tedium, Neurotic Angst, and the Wild Magic of Growing a Family, available online and in bookstores nationwide.

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