I picked up a book my sister-in-law Bethany lent me last summer. It's called, Waiting for Birdy: A year of frantic tedium, neurotic angst, and the wild magic of growing a family by Catherine Newman. Last summer, I was a little too green in the parenthood department to see the forest-for-the-trees, not to mention craving sleep far too much to even try to read. This spring, though, I pick the book up each night and find myself laughing outloud before bed. I GET it and it's so funny. The curious thing, too, is that I keep hearing Bethany's voice as the narration. :0)
Here are a few samples. Newman opens by citing a section from Anne Lamott's Operating Instructions: "It feels like I'm babysitting in the Twilight Zone. I keep waiting for the parents to show up because we are out of chips and diet Cokes." Here's another: "Until it happened to us, I didn't understand that having a baby would feel like falling in love, but like falling in love on a bad acid trip. With an alarm clock--a pooping alarm clock. I wasn't prepared to lie awake by the sleeping babe, my heart pounding audibly and so swollen with passion that I could barely breathe. I hadn't realized that my mind would scan constantly for disaster, like a metal detector casting around for the big stuff and turning up endless bottle caps. What is that? Pneumonia? A brain aneurism? Woops, okay, no, just a little cold." (3)
No comments:
Post a Comment