House of Healing

I could call this entry House of Pain, but I’m trying to be positive here.

Suffice it to say the Thursday before last was not a healthy day in the McClusky household. A headache I’d had the day before turned into my totally weird and unique optic nerve problem by morning. Which is to say that, for the fifth time now, my right eye is Temporarily Out of Service. Essentially there’s some bad wiring somewhere in my brain that results in my optic nerve getting pinched somehow and stopping working. So, my eye lolls over to the side of my head and the eye lid closes over it so I don’t see in double vision.

Yes, it is extremely weird. Yes, it is extremely rare.

And I would really rather that this isn’t the thing that differentiates me in life.

Thankfully it has always gotten better. Though it requires time and patience. Last time it took about 7 weeks to right itself. And by right itself, I mean that quite literally since there is nothing that the doctors can do, no magic pill to take, to make it all better.

In the modern world of pharmaceutical-mania, it’s distressing when your doctor informs you that there ain’t no pill for what ails you.

So, I’m out of work since I can’t drive, shouldn’t really be straining my “good eye” on the computer, and need to rest up ‘n get better.

In the meantime, when Mark and I returned from my doctor’s appointment on Day One of my eye blitz, Kate was lying on the couch with an ice pack on her ankle. She twisted her ankle coming down the slide at the park with the nanny. Now two doctor’s visits and two x-rays later, we are trying to get in to see an orthopedist. After 9 days she was finally able to walk again, but is limping like Quasimoto. They think there could be some kind of hairline fracture that isn’t showing up in the x-ray.

Aside from a toenail related injury which seems to be on the mend, Mark has maintained the function of all his eyes and limbs. Thank God since Cyclops and Hop Along have needed all the help we can get.

Karma is a Bitch

So Thursday night I come back from a dinner out with the mother’s group. And as I start to get ready for bed I walk from the bathroom where I’m brushing my teeth and washing my face to the living room where Mark is sitting to give him the download.

“Some of the babies are still not sleeping through the night!” I reported.

“Some can’t fall asleep on their own in their cribs!” I say between spitting toothpaste.

Not very charitable of me, as my mother would put it. I guess what I was trying to say to Mark was that we are pretty lucky with Miss Kate. She is doing a good job, and some of the things that we’ve now kinda taken for granted, are things that we should be grateful for.

But I didn’t really say that. I was gloating a bit. But I got my pay-back.

At about 10:30 while I was still awake, I heard Kate call out from her bed, “Mama!” as I was walking past. And it didn’t really phase me. If anything I smiled and thought, I’ll go in for a minute, arrange her blankies and she’ll doze back off. She almost never does this, so going in when she calls won’t start a bad habit.

In the middle of the night–God knows what time it was–Kate calls out, “Mama, uppy!” This is the annoying way she asks to be picked up, which dates back to our Easter trip to RI when Aunt Mary taught Kate a little game that had the phrase, “Uppity uppity to the wee house” in it. (The “wee house” of course being the armpit. Long story.) Somehow after that Kate started asking for “uppy” instead of “up” when she wanted to be picked up.

Sooo, back to the middle of the night. Here she is calling out, “Mama, uppy!” clear as a bell in the middle of the night. I was hoping she would doze back off, but she said it about 5 more times.

This was weird. Up twice in one night. But again, since she never does this I figured it wouldn’t hurt for Mark to just go in and quickly tell her to go back to sleep. But that didn’t work so well. First off, Mark didn’t think that was a good idea. So we had a delightful exhausted and grumpy exchange of varying parenting approaches. Then I won and Mark stormed off to Kate’s room.

She was not interested in Daddy, uppy, as it turns out. He tried to calm her down. He picked her up. He even went to the kitchen and got her milk (something we haven’t done in months and months in the middle of the night). When that all failed, he tried putting her back in bed and she was wailing.

But then she stopped. For 15 minutes. And as we are dozing off another, “Mama, uppy!” rang out. This time followed by crying. At this point it’s clear she is getting back at me for the not one but three other children I was gloating that she was sleeping better than.

Mark and I tried to tough it out. Since I won the last argument to go into her room, but that didn’t help, it was Mark’s turn to prevail, and he insisted that ignoring her was the solution.

20 minutes of hysterical screaming of “Mama, uppy!” was essentially Iraq prison torture to me. At one point Mark said he was confident she wasn’t losing steam, and could quite possibly continue bellowing “Mama, uppy” for a good hour at least.

So I went in. And all it took was me saying, “It’s time to sleep. Mama and Dada are sleeping [or should be, damn it]. It’s time for Kate to sleep.” And she didn’t even need to be picked up. Just wanted to know I was there, I guess. So I re-arranged her blankets and gave her a kiss and she was quiet as a mouse.

And I crawled back into bed exhausted and convinced that karma had dealt me an immediate and undeniable blow. Next time the mamas meet, my download to Mark will be all sympathy and no glory. I just can’t risk losing the sleep.

Diary of a Pack Rat

Whenever I throw something away I have to announce it to Mark. I’ll just scream out to him wherever he is from my position near the garbage can. “I’m throwing out these holey socks I’ve had since 7th grade!” Or, “I’m throwing out these flip flops with the paper-thin soles!”

I throw things out so infrequently I require positive reinforcement when I do so. It’s not like Mark is someone who has facility with tossing things himself. If anything, he understands how hard it is to part with crap, so he empathizes and cheers me on.

I’d say it’s a genetic trait since my mom was utterly incapable of parting with things. But it didn’t get passed down to all of us. My oldest sister Marie is living proof of the backlash of being the child of a hoarder. She throws things out with clinical ease, utter emotional detachment. In fact, at one point she told me she heard that things don’t last in the freezer for more than two weeks, so whatever she was keeping in there wasn’t around for long either. I don’t think that, aside from the humans, she’s got anything in her house that’s more than a few years old.

As the youngest, I represent the opposite side of the spectrum–though Ellen and Judy do their fair share of packratting. In fact, Judy has a storage unit with the contents of an entire apartment that she hasn’t lived in for years, so that counts for something.

At least everything that I hoard–with some exceptions–has some redeeming value. When my mother was selling the house we grew up in, which she’d lived in for over 40 years, my sisters and I slogged through three floors full of stuff. There were doll-sized afghans knitted by church bazaar ladies. Patterns for outdated outfits for pre-teens. Twin bed frames long unassembled, woven palm frond fans, mismatched shirt boxes from Macy’s and Lord & Taylor, circa God knows when (definitely pre-80s). And endless amounts of books and magazines. The woman had every Woman’s Day, Gourmet, and National Geographic ever printed (though not in any sort of order that might make them collectible), not to mention a pristine vintage set of The World Book Encyclopedia. (The Wold Book was the Internet back when I was in grade school.)

Much of this crap filled the eves of the attic, but much of it was in the living space. It wasn’t like she was a crazy-lady in a cat-filled house, but anywhere where there might be a couple magazines in a “tossers” house, there would be a treasure trove in which one could perform a sociological study of fashion and food trends through the decades in my mother’s house.

And her old magazines weren’t enough. You know when you go to a yard sale and someone is selling a carton of Bon Appetit magazines from 1974-1976, and you think to yourself, “Ha. Good luck selling those, buddy. Who the hell would buy those?”

Well, if the sale was east of the Mississippi, my mother would, that’s who. My cousin Nancy who is for all intents and purposes a sister, and certainly my mother’s fifth daughter, used to find ways to lug armloads of magazines out of my mother’s house after a visit, so she could recycle them. We would laugh until we cried talking about Nancy’s attempts to sneak out with a bag of yellowing National Enquirers (the dirty papers, as my grandmother called them), which my Aunt Mary would distribute to my mother after she and her sister, Mimi, had read them. Sometimes Nancy would almost get caught and oooh you didn’t want to cross my mother when you were trying to get rid of something she thought she needed. That was never an easy conversation, and always ended with you setting down the bag and Just. Walking. Away.

When we were getting ready to move her to her smaller house we’d argue with my mom over the smallest items. Up in the attic in a shoe box full of other random crap like pin cushions and crochet hooks I’d found a handle to a coffee mug–truly a white handle to a random mug, not even a china cup–and I remember my mother blew her stack when I tossed it in the garbage. “I’m holding onto that,” she scolded me. “That mug is somewhere and I’m going to glue it back on.” It would have been funny it was so absurd, if it weren’t for the fact that you’d been shoveling through stuff all day and wanted to just sit down and cry with exhaustion and frustration.

After my sisters and I had five of these arguments each with her, all over various worthless items, my mother grew incredibly defensive and upset over the whole enterprise. She was trying to hold onto all these pieces of her life, and we were thoughtlessly plowing through it all and willing to just throw it all away. I can see how the panic of something she really cherished getting discarded could be unnerving, but my sisters and I held staunchly to our side of the situation. We were blinded with drive to get more than 40 years of accumulation moved, organized, and/or somehow staged in a way that made it look appealing to a potential buyer.

Eventually we somehow managed to corral the save-able stuff, toss some of the crap on the sly, sell the better stuff we all agreed we didn’t want but someone else might, and get her into the sweet smaller house that she loved, without ever coming to blows or needing family mediation. Net net we must have somehow grown from the experience.

Part of the thing with my mother no doubt had to do with her having grown up in the Depression. She never used tea bags twice, but man did she scrape every last drop of batter from a mixing bowl. And in the way that you buy whatever laundry detergent you had growing up because that’s just what people use, I definitely picked up some of my mother’s Depression-inspired habits without realizing they were anything other than the way things are done.

When Shelley and I were first roommates I went into the fridge one night after dinner and saw that Shelley, whose mother was a bit older than my mom, had wrapped up the small heel of a tomato in Saran Wrap. I laughed when I saw it, thinking that even I would never have saved that, but Shelley would probably not hold onto flannel nightgowns for as long as I do, so it all evens out. Besides, how can you make fun of someone who is suffering from a version of an illness that you have?

At any rate, tonight I threw out a perfectly good shirt of Kate’s. Well, it used to be perfectly good, but it must have been in the laundry pile downstairs with some food on it because it got blue speckles of mold on it–even after going through the wash. The shirt was actually pretty new, but I knew it wasn’t ever going to come clean. So, after rejecting the thought of saving it as a rag, I just tossed it in the garbage can.

Maybe some day when Kate is helping us clean out the house so we can move to a smaller place, she’ll thank me for having let go of some things along the way.

The Ultimate Pairing of Good and Evil

Dunkin’ Donuts [good] is now using Rachel Ray [evil] in their advertising.

What is this world coming to?

Sleepless in Oakland

Somewhere between drinking too many glasses of zin at dinner with the Politos and waking up at 7AM to attend a work event I lied awake in bed and fretted about Kate. Well, more about me really. And this whole work thing.

It’s super unusual for it to happen, but this weekend there is a big work thing going on that means I have to work Saturday and Sunday all day. Sure I’ll get to take two comp days some other time, but last night as I was in bed it seemed like being away from Kate for the weekend was almost unbearable.

Of course, the more I realized how desperately I needed to sleep off the wine and stow away some energy for two long days on my feet–the more wide awake I was. And sure my brain grazed several neurotic topics (and some of a practical nature), but it seemed to cling most fervently to this idea of Kate and my need to be with her.

Somewhere into my second hour of awakedness my thoughts of Kate made me miss her so much I wanted nothing more than to go into her room and be with her. And then, the baby who always sleeps (knock wood) from 7PM to 7AM with nary a peep, woke up and said, “Mama! Mama!”

I swear there is some crazy bond thing between us.

I’d never been so happy to get out of bed in the middle of the night. I’m sure Mark wondered why I was heading towards her room after the first seconds of her peeping. In general if this had happened she’d doze off again in a matter of seconds.

Anyway, I got her out of her crib and she clearly was bewildered by the suddent burst of attention she didn’t realize she was able to so easily summon. The moment I was holding her she pointed down to the mattress and said, “Night night!” So I put her down and satisfied myself with our brief visit.

Not long after that when I crawled back into bed I seemed to finally doze off. But today my thoughts of my work/Mama balancing act linger. Perhaps they’ll pass once this work weekend is over and we’re back to our normal routine. But if not I don’t want to sweep them under the carpet. If 4 days a week is too much, is 3 days perfect? Or is this a grass is always greener thing?

At any rate, secure in knowing I’m not going to let go of these middle-of-the-night thoughts, I’ll hopefully sleep better tonight. And in the light of day at some point I can spend some time thinking about what–if anything–I want to do to address them.

10 Things I Learned in Belize

1. Blue Morpho butterflies copulate for 5 hours straight.

2. Flying in 12-seater planes is both terrifying and exhilarating.

3. It takes about 5 seconds for safety-conscious parents to be convinced by an island cab driver that, “You don’t need to use a car seat–everyone drives slow here.” (Hey, what’s good enough for Britney Spears’ baby, is good enough for Kate.)

4. Apparently a fair number of Americans vacation in places like Belize and decide on the fly to move there and never go home. This concept has always concerned me. Do they truly not return home and “just stay” as they claim to have? In that case, what do they do with the contents of their homes? Do their mothers or friends clean up after them and put all their stuff on storage, or have a big yard sale? Aside from being way too much of a planner to take this approach to moving, it just seems plain selfish to me. Besides, paradise seems great until Week 6 of your job renting snorkel equipment to tourists. Sure it’s pretty there and all, but after a while those jobs have to wear on you as much as your cubicle gig did.

5. After days of constant togetherness, one day Kate was sweetly muttering, “Mama, Dada, Kate” to herself. I explained to her that Mama, Dada and Kate are what is called a family. She looked at me all excited and said, “Heiny!” Ah yes, the McClusky heiny. This is not something I learned while in Belize, but it was funny.

6. Bandits can be so meddlesome. Just when you want to check out some Mayan ruins, a group of gun- and machete-totin’ bandits hold up a group of tourists, and they end up closing down the place for the day before you can get in.

7. Spending a lot of money on an impractical white bathing suit is totally worth it if it makes you feel like you still got it on your 40th birthday.

8. The worst kind of American tourists are drunk Baby Boomers.

9. When not being toted around in a Gucci bag by Paris Hilton, Kinajous crawl around in trees in the jungle. Night-time jungle treks allow you to see these kinds of things, along with tarantulas, mega “witch” moths, and other creepy crawly things.

10. Having your husband spontaneously serenade you on the morning of your 40th birthday with a medley of Lionel Richie songs is both hilarious and sweet (and validates your choice in him as a life mate). Hearing a LR song on the cab ride back from dinner that night and bursting into song–along with the cabbie–is the perfect end to an evening (and validates that even at 40, one can still act immature).

Bad Bikini Planning

A few weeks ago I was listening to NPR and they were saying that 30 years ago the mini-series Roots had aired. And I was thinking to myself, wow that is really weird that I remember having watched that when I was just six!

Later that day I realized I wasn’t six when Roots aired. I was nine. But in my mind I’m apparently still 36, despite the reality of my 40th birthday approaching just next week.

It’s funny to think of the things that you thought you would be doing at this age when you were younger. I remember being not even that young–just new to SF and about 25. And I was thinking of the situation that I’d be in when the new millennium came–like what I’d be doing for that New Year’s Eve. And even then–just 15 years ago–I was totally off base. Since I’d be 33 I figured I’d be married and have not one, but somehow I envisioned possibly even being pregnant with a second child–for that big New Year. I thought that my concept of NYE (though I’ve never been a huge fan) would be totally altered by my probable state of soccer-momness.

It turned out I spent that New Year’s Eve at a party at Mike and Lorin’s loft in Brooklyn. I was unmarried and single, wearing a blonde wig and had “tattooed” 2000 on my bicep in black Sharpie. And I spent the evening discoing into the new millennium in a sea of gay men, many who were also similarly clad in wigs. Let’s just say if a soccer mom was there she woulda called the cops (and definitely not sat directly on the toilet seat).

I guess it’s somewhat comforting knowing that time marches on and I’m still my same self. I guess at the age of 40 I am somehow different, in that I am married and I’m a mom. And those concepts that were so unfamiliar to me at one point even when I was living them, don’t seem so weird now. So I guess change does happen.

My Aunt Mary, whose not really an Aunt, is a remarkable woman. She is turning 88 the day before my birthday and the woman is a pistol. She takes care of her 93-year-old sister, she goes out to breakfast and lunch every day with her posse the self-named Morning Glories. She cooks like a homestyle Italian gourmet and is funny and charming and energetic and wonderful with babies and children. She knows dozens of kids songs and little games the words of which I try to remember for even a day after seeing her and I never seem to.

At any rate, I’d called her once for a recipe a few years ago from the car. Mark was driving and I remember thinking that I shouldn’t really get into a long conversation with her, but she started talking to me and I got reeled in. She said she’d been somewhere that day–a restaurant or store–and the guy who worked there must have taken one look at “this little old lady” and starting talking to her like she was deaf and/or retarded. I mean, the woman is sharp as a tack, and her hearing is perfect. She said it was so sad to her, because in her mind she is nowhere near as old as her age belies. She feels the same as she did decades ago–but she’s in this old lady body now–and it’s frustrating making people understand when they get her all wrong.

I’m hopeful that once I’m 40 people at the movie theater won’t be offering me senior citizen discounts. And nothing I’ve felt has come close to the story she told me that day which was so honest and heartfelt. But on some levels I’ve already surprised myself by thinking, “Wow. This is what 40 is like? Who knew?”

When I was working at an agency back in the Internet boom, I was out at a celebratory dinner with a team after launching a website. We were at Buca di Beppo drinking cheap wine and acting like we owned the place. At one point in the revelry some junior HTML developer type asked me how old I was, and when I said 32 he looked at me all boozy and amazed and said, “Wow. What’s that like?” It cracked me up because I knew when he got there he’d realize it wasn’t much different from being 26, or whatever he was. You just live with less roommates and hopefully own a car and can spend money more freely at Target.

On Sunday Mark went for a bike ride and I took Kate to Macy’s so I could find a bathing suit for our upcoming trip to Belize. Upcoming as in, we leave Saturday.

When I was in the dressing room I realized that I haven’t exercised at all in preparation for this trip–as in, in preparation for taking my body out of winter hibernation and into a small piece of nylon. And let’s just say the wrap-around mirrors made it plan to me that that was a tactical error.

There was a time when I didn’t have to think twice about putting on a bathing suit, but it seems I’m at a point where that luxury has passed me by. Ah well. I guess it’s one way to mark the years that have passed. Anyway, back when I didn’t have to worry about these things I wouldn’t be going on a fabulous South American adventure with my incredible husband and child. For what these years have given me, I’m willing to put up with some saddle bags.

Welcome to the Lab

Tonight when I gave Kate a bath I held out the mesh bag o’ bath toys for her to pick a few, and then was overcome by some force of kookiness beyond my control and decided to dump all the bath toys in there at once.

This is probably 15 times the number of toys Kate usually bathes with. I decided to conduct a small experiment. Would this many more toys make the bath that much more fun?

I’m sure you’re at the edge of your seat. It turns out that it was somewhat more fun than our usual bath time, but not because Kate was creating some uber-complex pretend scenario in the tub that involved the integration of all 71 toys. (I counted them while putting them away.) Instead the fun factor seemed upped simply by the fact that Kate reconnected with some toys that apparently were wedged at the bottom of the toy sack and weren’t getting a lot of play. Why knew those plastic turltes held such allure for her? Why, I wondered, had I been denying her them and only selecting the toys each night that I deemed play-with-able.

The bath did seem a good deal more fun for me. Just was kinda funny seeing her sitting amidst a bobbing mass of plastic crap.

But as we all know, an experiment is hardly statistically valid if it’s just conducted once on such a small population as one (even if she is of world-class cuteness and brilliance caliber). Perhaps I can start a trend where parents everywhere throw caution to the wind and dump all the bath toys into the tub at once, then feverishly record their findings and report back to me. I’m not sure what the ultimate result would be, but I’ve no doubt it would be quite powerful.

Please Claim Your Bra

A few weeks ago I was in my car and reached across the seat for something and realized that I’d made a dent in my shirt. In my bra in particular. Further investigation revealed that the bra was clearly huge on me. It was one of those padded-type ones that holds its shape even with no boobies in it, so it was kind of resting there, but you could poke at it and leave an impression. (And people attribute car accidents to cell phones. How many women are out there driving distractedly due to surprisingly large undergarments they discover they’re wearing?)

I knew that my breastfeeding buxomness wasn’t going to last forever—especially since it’s been four months now since I’ve weaned Kate—but this was ridiculous. Had I recently experienced a sudden, dramatic shrinkage that made a bra that fit me perfectly yesterday seem immense today? At this rate I’d be convex by summer.

Later that night while getting ready for bed I looked at the size on the bra and realized why it was so big, or rather, why I seemed so small in it. It wasn’t anywhere near my size. This bra was an imposter! This was not my bra!

So whose was it?

Although I was (thankfully) confident there was no foul play, I couldn’t resist teasing Mark about it. “Your girlfriend is clearly irresponsible—leaving her bra here. What a tramp!”

Mark played along with the concept of an imaginary girlfriend. “Oh yeah,” he said casually. “She’s always leaving that thing everywhere.”

Then I did a mental checklist of the many houseguests we recently had. My father. No, this black lace bra clearly wasn’t his style. My mother-in-law. Didn’t seem likely it was hers, and I don’t even thing she did laundry when she was here. My friend—or frienda, as I like to say—Brenda. “Aha!” I thought, utilizing all my Nancy Drew sleuthiness. Brenda had to be the rightful owner. She fit the bill in terms of bra size, and she’d done laundry while visiting.

I called her. “I’ve got your bra, I think. But if it’s not yours, don’t tell me. I’d rather not have to figure out how it got into my house.”

Of course, the bra sat on my bureau for a couple weeks. The mailroom at my office is in the building across the street and I never seem to muster the energy to make the trek there. And on my days off, jaunts to the post office didn’t seem like a good use of my free time. So one day as Mark was heading out to the office I handed him the bra. “Could you please mail this to Brenda? I’ll email you her address.” I could trust Mark to not be the kind of guy who would wear it on his head through his office.

A few days later I got a voicemail from Brenda who had gotten Mark’s package. “It’s a very pretty bra, but I’m sorry to say it’s not mine. Too small.” (Show off.)

I called her back. “I told you to lie if it wasn’t yours, remember?”

“Maybe it was yours from before you had Kate?” she offered. “You know, before you moved onto nursing bras.”

Huh, I thought. She’s got a point there. Maybe that was the bra that I was so proud to have bought in such a large size towards the end of my pregnancy. Walking home from the store I left about four voicemail messages for friends showing off my new cup size.

Brenda promises to bring the bra back the next time we see each other. In the meantime, a woman’s brown and black reversible jacket has now appeared on our coat rack. Mark’s Mom says it’s not hers, so I’ll have to call Bren again to check in on whether it’s hers. If it’s not, I hope she remembers to lie this time.

Baby Borat

Mark and I had a sort of marital standoff about seeing the Borat movie. He’s a huge fan of Sacha Baron Cohen’s show, and–call me crazy–but it makes me uncomfortable watching someone interview a Bishop and asking them questions about sex with animals and such. To me it’s not funny, it’s painful. But Mark–and evidently millions of other Americans–find it uproarious.

So when we were in North Carolina for Thanksgiving, and were thankful for having Mark’s mother not only offer to but want to hang out with Kate solo for a few hours to allow us to skip out to a movie, the issue came to a head about the Borat movie.

Ultimately Mark caved. As much as he wanted to see it, he didn’t want to see it sitting next to me if I was going to squirm and sigh and make quiet disapproving noises while chomping on my popcorn. It’s a sad kind of victory when your mate gives into you based on the knowledge that when you don’t get your way you can be so unbearable that it’s better to just give you your way.

But be that as it may, I won.

Sadly, the movie pickin’s were slim. It’s the typical scenario like those rare times when your parents were feeling generous when you were mall-shopping as a kid. When every other shopping adventure left you desperate to own something that would change your life it was so great but you couldn’t get it, when you had the green light to shop you never found anything you really liked. But you bought something anyway, because you could. And like that, Mark and I still went to a movie. I mean, how often do we get to do this without spending a small fortune on a babysitter? Like all my friends with kids before me said, it really does make a good case for waiting for movies to come out on DVD.

It’s shameful what we settled on, and worse, how the whole afternoon panned out. I am, or rather was, a huge Jack Black fan. (Wither the days of High Fidelity?) So we went to see some abominable movie that he was in with his Tenacious D band mate. The movie was clearly for 15-year-old stoners. I mean, the opening credits were an animation of people farting, propelled around the screen like wayward balloons by the amount of gas they were expelling.

But we had hope. We had a babysitter and we were free!

Alas, the movie droned on. Painfully. So painfully in fact that our bad decision to see it in the first place was made more glaringly evident as each minute passed. Somehow through whispers in the dark we managed to come to the joint conclusion that cutting our losses and leaving mid-way would be the best tactic. We returned to a house full of Mark’s relatives, our heads hung low with shame. “How was the movie?” they all chimed in excitedly, knowing what a treat it was for us to get to one. I almost felt tempted to lie.

Well, shameful for us, but as an actor, you’ve got to be embarrassed about being in a movie that the parents of a baby–people who adore movies and never get out to them–are compelled to walk out of.

God, Jack Black. Fire your agent, dude.

Of course, this whole scenario just provided Mark with more Borat ammo. Every time any friend relayed some scene from the movie to us, and when we were quiet and they’d ask us if we’d seen it, Mark would just sigh and look at me with big cow eyes. “No, no, we didn’t,” he’d say, his voice heavy with regret. Sometimes he’d mention the other movie we saw instead. And sometimes he didn’t even need to say anything.

So once the Borat movie came out on DVD I was, of course, backed into a marital corner. What option had I other than to consent to bringing the awful DVD into our home? At least it would save Mark from the social stigma of not being able to chat with friends and coworkers about the movie if it ever were to come up in conversation years from now–it being so terribly past the point when all other humans had already seen it.

And I have to admit. It wasn’t that bad. It certainly wasn’t half as bad as that other movie, the name of which I’ve committed to deep repression.

At any rate, just when I thought we’d buried the whole Borat plot line from the McClusky family existence, Kate picked up a small verbal affectation. When she’s bidding her adieus to people, or inanimate objects as is sometimes the case, Kate lets lose a Bah-Biiiyeee that is a remarkably uncanny imitation of Borat. I mean, she did it at Macy’s yesterday to the saleswoman in the Faconnable area. And as I stooped down to pick up the hat that Kate’d dropped I muttered something under my breath about Mama’s little Borat, which the saleswoman heard and squealed, “Oh my God! She does sound like him! How funny!”

Adorable, I think as we trudge off, as Kate, excited that the woman is laughing and smiling at her, smiles back a huge grin and calls out another, “Ba-Biiiiyeee!” over her shoulder. The woman chuckles and shakes her head as she reaches to ring up the clothes of the next person in line saying, “Did you hear that little girl? She sounds just like Borat!”

Wonderful. Just the sort of thing I’d hoped for my daughter. This sort of karmic backlash will teach me to give into Mark’s preferences a little more often. When the next Lord of the Rings movie comes out, I will feign enthusiasm and put aside whatever “good” movie it is that I’d rather seen. Better that then risking Kate taking on some dwarfish Hobbit-like qualities that I’ll never live down.