The Gnome Gnotebook

In October of 2006, my mom came to visit as she usually does around my birthday every year. This particular visit was special because Sean and I had just moved into our very first home (the same one we're in now) and of course, we needed my mom's curtain rod hanging expertise and designer's advice (are you sensing a pattern here? I promise she's not ill-used). Come to think of it, my mom's birthday visits are always timely--the year before was pretty special too, as it was the weekend just after Sean and I had gotten engaged and we were able to go to Suky Rosan to pick out my wedding dress. Good timing, mom! Anyway...

She always brings a bag of beautifully wrapped birthday presents--usually handmade scarves and jewelry from her friend Carol's store, Badawang, or candles or a bound journal or a really great book or two. This time she also brought The Gnome Gnotebook. In the living room of the house on Briarwood where we lived from the time my brother was born until I went to college, I often saw this book sitting on one of the built-in shelves that flanked our fireplace. But I never really knew what it was, I don't think. It didn't have pictures, and therefore, it didn't interest me. And besides, we had another book of gnomes that was far more captivating.

In any event, I suppose she thought that the buying of our first home together signified that Sean and I were ready to start a family, and what better way to acknowledge that than to hand off the record of that very same time in her life? Er, actually, she definitely thought that, as I just realized that the inscription from October 2006 reads "...and now that you and Sean are getting closer to starting your own family, I thought this would be the right time to finally give it to you." (I'm very insightful.) There were no blogs in 1978, after all, and so she had to hand write everything in pen in this little hardbound journal. The pages are ruled in blue with pink margin lines and a little drawing of a reading gnome sits in the lower outer corner of each page. There are 100 pages all together. The first page lists the vitals of my birth--time and date, weight, length, location, a description of my hair and eyes, and this: "with all 10 fingers, 10 toes, and lungs in very good working order!" At the bottom of the page is a tiny lock of hair.

The first entry is dated April 30, 1979, when I would have been six and a half months old. It's a recounting of the day before (my aunt and uncle's wedding), the day of, and the day after my birth. Clearly, enough time had passed that her memory of events had been veiled in the haze of euphoria that is new motherhood (read: exhaustion or denial, or both). She writes, "...the doctor told me to "push." Then, at 12:06, POP! You showed yourself to us for the first time." She also describes my Grandma and Dad, red-faced and perspiring, and says, "as hard as we worked, they worked even harder!" Woah, mom. The truly amazing thing is that I bet she really believed that, too. She was probably even apologizing at the time for the terrible inconvenience.

My family's pediatrician, Dr. Sundaresh, told my mom a poem when he came to examine me. The poem goes a little something like this:

A son's a son
Till he finds a wife,
But a daughter's a daughter
The rest of your life!

Huh? Sweet, I suppose, for 1978.

There are so many revealing entries in this journal--I can't wait to explore more in future posts. And I guess it stands to reason that a lot of what's written is about my mom being proud of me as her daughter and about our relationship as mother and daughter. It would have been a completely different story if I'd been a son. Revisiting the Gnome Gnotebook and seeing it from this perspective has made me think really hard about the sex of our baby. There was a slim possibility that the tech could have determined the sex from yesterday's ultrasound, but it wouldn't have been conclusive until later anyway. I think about whether I have a feeling, one way or the other--whether I have the slightest inkling or instinct about what the sex will be, or whether I have a preference. Part of me, a very large part, hopes for a girl because I am girl--a first born to a first born--and that has so shaped my relationship with my mom, which has in turn been so central to who I am as a person. I think in so many ways and for so many reasons that I'd be a better mom to a little girl because I KNOW it, I lived it. On the other hand, every person is different. Even if my first born is a girl, there's no telling what my relationship with her will be like since her personality will be different than mine, and mine as a mother is different than my mom's was. We're also in such completely different places in our lives, my mom having me at 20 and me having my first at 30, and with completely different family situations, my mom being surrounded by her family in her hometown and me not having any family nearby at all. Too many variables to guarantee that anything would be the same.

Then there's the part of me that's always imagined having a son that I could raise to be tough and sweet, smart and wise, and who would teach me to let go a little more. I've often thought about what it would be like to have had an older brother to stand up for me and protect me and to look up to. I also think it would be an amazing insight into the secret life of my husband--the part of him that I don't know because I didn't know him when he was little. He is an oldest son, and to watch him parent an oldest son would be like having a window into his life that he couldn't possibly know how to open otherwise. Talk about a two-for. That would be a really amazing gift.

I guess the point is that it doesn't matter, which is probably the conclusion that most expectant parents come to nowadays (since hopefully there aren't too many people espousing the sentiments of my pediatrician's poem anymore). Still, it doesn't make me any less curious!

My Little Greek Olive

Or, more accurately, my little Greek-Russian-Irish-Welsh-Hungarian-Scottish olive. The "bean" has graduated to "olive" this week, but somehow that just doesn't sound as cute. And plus, it makes me think of martinis, dammit. Grape, maybe? Now I'm thinking of dessert wine, which strangely, I've been craving. Anyway, at somewhere between an inch and an inch-and-a-half, it's really hard to believe s/he can be taking up so much space in there, but my non-existent waistline is proof. I swear it's not that bag of Cheetos or the double order of tiramisu...

Not only has the little bugger been growing up a storm over the last week and a half, but there's been a lot going on around the house too. My mom was in town from Thursday to Monday. The visit was a birthday present to her from me and Sean, and what a thoughtful present it was! If it wasn't enough that she's working at Bray Whaler while maintaining her own business, she's also moving this Saturday. And it's not as though this trip was even a relaxing respite from her daily, crazy life. We did the marathon shopping thing, flipping though hundreds of rugs at ABC Carpet & Home, spending hours planning the interior of the PAX storage wall in the office/baby's room (well, she did, while I crashed on the MALM floor sample), and hitting every bedding and bath store in a 25 mile radius of Hoboken searching for THE curtain rods. We perfected the art of "honing," (driving in increasingly smaller concentric circles around the target while cursing out Emily, whose maps are shamefully out-of-date), and she did an amazing job not punching my lights out when I got cranky. All in all, I think it was a great birthday present.

Even though it took two tries to put it together (thank GOD for Sean on Saturday night), the Great Wall of Storage tripled our closet space and made room for baby and anything else we might acquire in the coming months. There's no way I'd have been able to plan it the way she did. She's also really good at installing hardware like curtain rods, which requires the confidence to make permanent holes in walls that I just don't have. And before her visit, I might have been content with a several hundred dollar "hand tufted" rug from Home Decorator's Collection, whereas now I know better and will be satisfied with nothing less than a hand-knotted Tabriz in the rarest of colors with 110 knots per square inch. Dammit again.

So, her visit really tied up a lot of loose ends around here and got us extremely organized. But there is one dilemma that it raised: what will the baby call her? It's not too early to think about this either, because if we knew, I'd already be referring to her as "_______" in this blog. We went over several options but none of them seemed right. We ruled out "Grandma" and "Nana." Beyond that, we're stumped. Any ideas?