I've abandoned my daughter to her father's care. Granted, when I left her she was sleeping happily on his chest, and he seems perfectly capable of handling anything she might need. Plus, there’s even a bottle full of milk waiting in the fridge that I squeezed from my own tit (which I find to be a mesmerizing process. I mean, there is MILK coming out of my body. A lot of milk. How weird is that? It’s juice squeezed from a human - from me. Wild.) And, granted I am a whole 10 blocks away at the coffee shop with the cell phone at the ready and the car parked in front so I can make a quick getaway if I need to. Yipee? Nope. I’m totally teary. Fucking hormones.

So, am I weepy because I’m leaving my daughter for the first time for longer than 10 or 15 minutes?

Or am I weepy because as I pulled out of my driveway, I caught my White Trash Neighbor, (hereafter WTN – and while I fully acknowledge the racist and classist dimension of the term, I feel that when you have not one, but 2 non-functioning vehicles rusting in your driveway and not one but 2 major appliances rusting in the yard, and a dog that tries to kill your neighbors through the fence every time they walk into their own yards that one fully lives up to the designation) who is passionately and irrationally persuaded that the foot of space between our house and his driveway belongs to him because in antiquity sometime one of his fucking relatives had a fence on that strip of stupid ass grass despite the multiple surveys and city records that indicate he does not actually own every inch of the land up to the very fucking edge of our house, planting a YEW bush on my property. I fucking hate yews. They look nice for a year or so and then they get all weedy and threadbare. I fucking hate WTN. I’ve been worrying about this for a while now because in the last couple of weeks they tore up all of the grass over there and put in mulch, which to their credit looked a lot better than the weedy-ass grass that nobody every cared for and was a continuation of the mulch I put in on my side of the yard. But I took it as a sign that they’re moving in on the space thinking that we’ve neglected it for a few years. I’ve found myself obsessing about this late at night and trying to hand it over to the Big Universal Wow for he/she/it/they to take care of instead of me. But, planting something implies a firmer degree of ownership in some way, don’t you think? Anyway, I think it made me weepy even though I called Spousal Unit and asked him to take a little walk with the Gadlet (whose presence should be soothing to both SU and WTN – I mean, who can have a knock-down drag-out fight with a neighbor with a baby?) and check the situation out. Anyway, I’m a little bit freaked about it.

Or maybe I’m weepy because I had to ask a woman who was hogging 2 whole tables in this very small space if she could share one of her two tables and she was less than kind about it. Doesn’t she know that I’m leaving my baby for the first time and that my neighbor might possibly be planting a yew tree in my yard and my husband might attempt to kill him over it?

Or MAYBE, just MAYBE I’m weepy and panicked because I’m returning to my dissertation after 2-ish months of being completely away from it and 6-ish months from being mostly away from it. What if it is all crap? What if I can’t do it? What if I’m a better mother than I am dissertator? What if I lose my job? What if I don’t even actually care if I lose my job because I so much prefer being a mother?

But this doesn’t seem very productive or conducive to actually working in the very short time I have to work. So for now, I’m going to swallow the weepies, know that the Gadlet is OK** with Spousal Unit, let the universe (or SU) take care of WTN, and know that I can do this dissertation thing. I mean, hell, if I can not only squeeze a human out of my own body, but also the juice to feed that human, surely I can do anything, right?



(Ha! As I wrote this, a Very Famous Song by a Much Beloved 60s Band whose refrain very prominently features the Gadlet’s first name is being played over the coffee shop stereo. So much for attempting to forget her and do my work!)

[Update: I spent 2 productive hours away at the Coffee Shop. (Well, one productive hour and one emotionally charged hour, anyway.) I revised the introductory section to the chapter I’d been working on when last I was in dissertation land. Not a huge chunk of pages (only 6) and I was really only working with prose, not with major ideas – but I did accomplish a major stylistic shift from a really passive depiction of what was going on to a more active one that centers the historical figures in the sentences. And, I only looked at photos of the Gadlet on my iPod once and didn’t worry about WTN at all. So, good for me, huh?

I'm about to leave, but called home first -- Spousal Unit did not answer. I'm fighting visions of him neck-deep in Gadlet shit attempting to clean her up, or of her screaming so hysterically that he can't hear the phone. Or, worse yet, of her cuddled in his dead arms as he's splayed on the stupid fucking foot of land that WTN thinks he owns as WTN stands over him with a shotgun and as their evil dog nibbles on his toes and makes hungry eyes at the Gadlet. Oh shit, I must leave this instant!! Panic!!!!

Update #2: Nobody died. Phew. Spousal Unit didn't answer the phone because he was feeding the Gadlet the bottle I left. I got all weepy AGAIN when I came home. Fucking hormones.

Update #3: WTN DID plant a shrub on our property. Fuck fuck fuck. Spousal Unit says he'll handle it. So, I'm going to keep my sticky little worried paws off of that one. Fucking hormones.