Sandi Kahn Shelton

Do you remember when you first found out you were going to be a parent, and how suddenly the whole world seemed to have advice to throw at you? Did you have people saying, “Get ready for your life to suck” and warning you that you would never sleep again?

And did it seem to you that people were almost gleeful as they described the myriad ways in which your life was now going to be in ruins?  

You’re not alone.

In fact, that kind of unsolicited, ”helpful” advice provides the framework for a hilarious and touching new musical just written by Bill Squier and Jeffrey Lodin, two award-winning writers from Stamford. The two have taken Dana Bedford Hilmer’s book, “Blindsided by a Diaper”, which was  published last June by Three Rivers Press, and turned it into a stage show that captures the almost universal experience of panic, fear, excitement, love and confusion that comes into play when the little pink line appears on the pregnancy test stick.

The book is a collection of 30 essays written by men and women who give an unflinching portrait of how having a baby changed their relationship. Some of the essays are hilarious, some are sad, but all have a breathtaking honesty to them, as they tackle some aspect of parenthood.

And I got to see a read-through of the show on Monday night.

The show is a wonderful, amazing compilation of the essays, all framed around a young couple discovering they’re expecting a baby…and realizing through the pregnancy exactly what they’re in for. Bill and Jeff have taken many of the book’s essays and turned them into stories that other people tell to the couple, warning them about what to expect.

The result is both funny and powerful–and so universal. There’s not a single cliche in the mix, probably because the essays come from so many different people, all writing about their own powerful experience.

And, oh yeah, full disclosure here: an essay that I wrote for the book (”Dating the Hubs” about how my husband and I finally got to go on a date and had to learn all over again how to talk to each other) got turned into a skit, and even had a song written about it.

Oh my! 

May I just say that I was unprepared for what it was going to be like to sit in an audience and see somebody who was playing ME, saying my words and singing a funny song that illuminated them perfectly? I felt as though my nerve-endings were electrified. 

And although I’d been warned by my friend Beth (who is Bill’s wife) to bring along Kleenex, I wasn’t prepared for what it was going to be like when the woman playing me looked out at the audience and read the part about how going out on that date was just the first bit of learning to say goodbye to our child…and now that she was going off to college, she was the one saying goodbye to US.

I could barely breathe.

And when at the end of the skit, the cast stood up and sang in a low voice, “Go, speed racer…” which is the song my husband used to sing to our daughter during those  middle of the night walks around the dining room table…well, thank goodness for Kleenex. And waterproof mascara.

Now the show just needs a million dollars so it can turn into a real stage play and go to Broadway. That’s all. I’m saving up my quarters.

On Friday, I came home to find my cell phone bill in the mailbox…and it was double the amount it usually is.

And just when we had decided to stop our wild, spendthrifty ways, too. We have had three months now of trying to be soooo careful–radical things like eating at home ALL THE TIME, canceling subscriptions we can read on-line, cooking all the food we buy instead of throwing half of it out, not driving places unless we absolutely have to, and clipping coupons. I’m even learning to turn off lights when I leave the room.

And then, wouldn’t you know, the cell phone bill goes completely haywire.

It’s not like a regular human can actually READ a cell phone bill to try and figure out what happened, so I called up customer service and said, “Would somebody there please walk me through this 14-page document and explain how it is that my cell phone is always $114 but now is $229? Did I somehow walk in my sleep and sign myself up for a new deluxe, charge-me-for-everything plan or something when I had to replace my old phone last month?”

The woman who had answered my call said, “Oh, didn’t you just want to faint when you looked at that bill? I know just how this is!”

I was silent for a moment. ”As a matter of fact, I did consider fainting,” I told her, “except that I knew I would probably just bonk my head on something on my way down to the floor and then I’d have an additional medical bill to pay.”

“Well, let’s just see what’s going on here,” she said. “Sit down and take a few deep breaths, and I’ll see what I can do.”

She kept typing things–I could hear the clicking of the keys–and after a moment she said, “Oh! I see exactly what this is! One of the people on your family plan made lots and lots of calls last month!”

“Yes. That’s my daughter,” I said. “She’s at college and she doesn’t have a land line. She uses her cell phone for everything.”

“Ohhh. She must have had a tough month. Usually we see this when kids are stressed out at school. That’s when they need to talk to their friends.”

“Yes,” I said. “They do.”

(March had been a tough month: lots of sickness, a couple of friend crises, some heavy decisions about next year’s courses and housing situations.)

“Well,” said the woman. “Let’s just make all that go away. You’re back to where you usually are. Just tell your daughter to use the phone nights and weekends unless her friends are on the same network, and then they can talk anytime. This was just a one-time deal, though, I bet. She’ll be more careful from now on.”

I sat there stunned. “You took the extra calls away?”

“Yes. You’re back to where you usually are. Your bill is $114.”

“Are you kidding me?”

“No! Have a good day.”

“YOU TOOK THE CALLS AWAY?”

“Yes. It wasn’t your usual bill.”

“Um, can I send you some chocolate chip cookies?” I said.

“Oh, no,” she said. “You know how much trouble I’d get into for that?”

Has anybody else ever had anything like this happen? Are there LOTS of companies just waiting for us to call them and say we need our bills explained?

Maybe I should call up the heating oil compan. Would they say, ”Ohhh, I see what happened! George Bush really messed up the economy with that war in the Middle East. You shouldn’t have to pay $3.80 a gallon for heating oil. Let me just put that back where it used to be….”

My novel misbehaves in the middle of the night. Last night it woke me up with a start at 2:14 a.m., insisting that I get up out of bed and FIND MY NOTEBOOK and a pen QUICKQUICKQUICK, which are not easy things to locate in the dark at somebody else’s house. (I have been visiting Boston for the past two days, where Ben and Amy live.)

Now it’s daytime, and I’m sitting in Panera with my laptop, and even though it’s waayy past lunchtime–already 2:45–the place is just teeming with humanity! Much of this humanity consists of people under the age of one, all of them munching on pacifiers and flirting, or occasionally flinging bottles of formula to the floor just for the pleasure of seeing perfect strangers react with surprise and then jump up to retrieve those bottles. Again and again and again. 

I have not had much sleep. With a novel waking me at 2:14, and real live adorable children coming in to see me at 6:30, there wasn’t a lot of truly good rest time in the middle.

I awoke this morning to find Charlie (a deep thinker of four years of age) sitting cross-legged next to me on my bed. “Oh, you’re awake,” he said when I opened my eyes. “I was wondering what you think about the light fixtures in here. Are they interesting?”

I looked at them. They were nice, but on the whole, as I told him, I’d rather think about them after 7 a.m.  So then I persuaded him to get under the covers with me and go back to sleep. We got exactly twenty more seconds of shut-eye, and then Josh (ten months old) woke up, and the day had officially begun. We all went upstairs (their two bedrooms and the playroom are on the third floor) where we played drum-like instruments and read stories and changed one person’s diapers and found Mickey Mouse underwear for another person, and got dressed–(”comfy clothes, no pants with snaps today!” said Charlie), and then Ben came and we all went on the Breakfast Train to the first floor, where we cooked eggs and ate pears and waffles and Cheerios. And then Ben took Charlie to preschool, and I put Josh down for a nap, which was THE most luscious time of all. Just sitting in the glider with a fat, cuddly baby drinking from a bottle with his eyes closed, is a divine experience, even when you’re tired. Maybe especially when you’re tired. Just looking upon those plump, pink arms and hearing those wonderful sucking, sighing noises he makes. The lashes on the cheek. And the way he just tucks himself right in, snuggling as close as can be. He drank and drank and drank and then, in his sleep, pushed himself away from the bottle, with milk running down his chin like a drunken sailor…and I reluctantly put him in his crib and went to take a bath.

And now I’m in Panera, and just a moment ago, I dived for my notepad to see what I’d been so driven to write in the middle of the night, since I have absolutely no memory of what was so vital, and here’s what it says, in nearly indecipherable handwriting:

“And you know what? My mother became my real mother again, just a bad year, not w/father but w/__________.

Also, in telling of past, goes on and on. Then talk about Mentor. Way he was at fault somehow. THEN we see Jeremiah. Surprise?”

This, I don’t have to tell you, is Novel Misbehavior of the highest order. The first rule I have for novels (in the middle of the night, or any time) is that they try to make some sense. And if they have to wake a person up for some all-important news flash, they need to phrase it in something approaching coherence. Something one can find the way back to, eventually.

The sun is shining on me here in my armchair here in Panera, and I see the way this could so easily go…Maybe this is the kind of message from the subconscious that will make more sense to me if I just go back to sleep for a moment or two more before I head back home to my Real Life, where there are no babies with fat arms and children who want to discuss the interestingness of the light fixtures with me, or any other deep subjects.

Yesterday when I picked up Charlie from preschool, he stared off into space in the car, clearly lost in thought.

“What are you thinking about?” I asked him.

“Well, I’m thinking about blame,” he said. “I’ve been thinking about that for a long time.”

Yeah, me too.

He may end up writing novels, himself. I just hope his novels let him sleep through the night.

Have you met Google Talk?

I have to admit: I’m on it all the time, whether I want to be or not. It’s the main way I write my novel AND talk to my kids all at the same time. Sort of like major multi-tasking.

I’m getting used to having the little screen pop up in the corner of my novel, and I can dash over to it and type a few lines, and then go right back to my book without ever having to click out of anything.

But the other day I was there, typing away to Allie, when suddenly my computer started to sound like a phone ringing.

I jumped back.

And then there was Allie’s voice, COMING OUT OF MY COMPUTER. She was saying, “Hello?” and she sounded as baffled as I was.

“How is it that we’re talking to each other instead of typing?” I said.

She didn’t know. Except that it turned out that her baby, Miles, was sitting on her lap, and then he leaned over and pressed a button on the computer, and suddenly we understood what that little “Call” box was referring to.

YOU CAN ACTUALLY CALL THE PERSON YOU’RE TYPING TO.

We felt a little ridiculous when we realized that this had been available to us all along–times when we foolishly used the telephone to communicate, for instance.

“The BABY figured this out?” she said.

“Yes,” I said. “Get used to it. Children always know more about modern technology than their parents do.”

“But, Mom,” she said, “he’s not even eleven months old.”

They learn fast these days.

P.S. I tried to tell my friend Alice about this amazing happening.

“Allie’s voice came out of your computer?” she said.

“Yes, after the sound of a ringing phone. Allie’s computer had called my computer, don’t you see, and then we could talk to each other.”

“How did the computer CALL another computer?”

“Well, who knows? There’s a button you click on.”

“No,” she said. “No. That didn’t happen, and it’s not true, and I can’t hear about it anymore.”

“Well…” I said.

She took a sip of her wine. “But I’ll tell you another amazing thing,” she said. “My son was visiting over the weekend, and he used his CELL PHONE to check his email! Did you know people could do that??”

Yes, I said. I’ve heard of that.

My daughter Allie is a member of a book group consisting of moms with babies. They call themselves the Dead Tired Society and they meet whenever several conditions can be met: (1) they have all read the same book, or nearly all of them, at least; (2) they can agree on a day when a majority of them don’t have anything else they MUST DO; and (3) their babies are in relatively decent health, or at least good enough so that they won’t be the one blamed when two days later, the entire group is throwing up.

I think they’ve been together nearly a year, and they’re up to three books. My hat is off to them. It’s been a bad year for babies and flu.

Last week they invited me to come and talk to them about my book, What Comes After Crazy, which was the novel that took me 17 years to write. (I wrote it while I, too, was raising kids, and thus had to wait for conditions to be perfect). I told them I LOVE going and talking to book groups.

“Wellll…” said the hostess, whose name is Sam. She’s the mother of Esme, who has just turned 1. “There may be more crying at this group than you’re used to at most book groups you talk to…”

I said I was familiar with crying at book groups. Usually somebody has to go and get tissues.

But then there wasn’t any after all. We all sat in Sam’s wonderful Brooklyn apartment, while babies climbed over us, poked fingers in our eyes, played with rattles and balls, tried to climb over partitions so they could get to Sam’s valuable computer system (how is it that all babies can sense immediately where computers are located and just what button to push to dismantle them?) A very energetic toddler named Zane–admired by the others for his ability to actually WALK–went down the hall to the nursery and managed, with great difficulty, to come out with the entire floor covering for the nursery, a rubber puzzle mat consisting of the ABC’s, I believe. This was a very time-consuming project for him, but he was definite that it had to be done, and all the other babies were impressed.

It was lots of fun sitting on the floor, passing babies around. Young moms have such an incredible ability to do such things as breastfeed, wipe noses, change diapers, search out hidden pacifiers, tie shoes, soothe tears, and save a baby from leaping off a couch–all at the same time and ALL WHILE CARRYING ON AN ADULT CONVERSATION.  They don’t even break a sweat doing it. It’s always a pleasure to watch them. I think women in their twenties and thirties could run the world without any trouble at all, even on the limited sleep most of them get.

Because the book is about a woman raised by a mostly crazy, fortune-telling, narcissistic mom, book groups always love (and I love) to talk about our own moms, for good and for ill, and what they forced us to cope with and how we managed to grow up. Everybody always wants to know whether the book was really about my mother.

“Sort of,” I say. My mother wasn’t a fortune-teller, and we never lived in a trailer, and she didn’t get married seven times…but let’s just say there are certain qualities that she shared with Madame Lucille. When my publisher asked me if Madame Lucille was essentially my mother but just “exaggerated a bit,” I had to admit that she was partially my mother but actually TONED DOWN some.

That made the group laugh, and then they started telling stories about their moms–all except for poor Allie, of course, who had to sit there, smiling and insisting that she had a perfectly normal, sane childhood with a loving mother and no problems whatsoever.

I think I owe her, big time.

If you are a reader of the fabulous blog Boing Boing, you know that every now and then things get so gross that they have to run a unicorn chaser, which means they run pictures of happy unicorns, hearts and flowers just to clear everybody’s mind of the horrifying images they’ve put there.

My friend Nancy says I’ve reached that point. Since I wrote about my colonoscopy, she says I absolutely must not tell any more gross stories without offering a unicorn chaser of my own. 

Okay, here you go–beautiful purple water lilies. Feel better?

No? Okay, then. How about a dramatic sunset?

Okay, and here’s a sweet baby to look at–little Miles, six months old.

Tra la la.

And now–unicorn chaser over!–I have a gross story to tell you.

Last Friday I hung out for most of the day with little Miles, who, as you can see by the picture, is running for president in 2052. He’s quite serious about his campaign, too, intent on smiling and cooing and kissing everyone he sees, just to ensure that he has their vote.

At one point, we were in a restaurant together, he and I and his mother Allie, and he worked the room like any good politician would, making faces and grinning at everyone–at one point even banging his cup HARD on the table when some people at another table seemed interested in going back to their own conversations rather than continuing to admire him.

Don’t worry: a little table-banging brought them right back to attention. I tell you, we were all riveted by his platform.

And, as a way of thanking me for my support and my promise to vote for him, he grabbed onto my face at one point and sucked on my nose as hard as he possibly could. I was sure I was going to pull back to find my own face unrecognizable, possibly minus its nose altogether.

But, hey, who needs a nose when you have the love of a baby? I was so flattered–and yes, laughing so hysterically–at the intensity of his attention that I was willing to ignore the fact that Miles had had quite a runny nose himself–and now, of course, I am struck down with all manner of upper respiratory symptoms.

I am sad to report that I have a cough, a sore throat, chills, a killer sinus headache, laryngitis, and a runny nose, all at once.

Go back and look at the water lilies and the sunset again if you need to, Nancy. I’m going to take some more Sudafed and drink more Earl Grey tea. It’s freezing in here.  

We are in the midst of a veritable population explosion in our family! It’s spring, and the little boys just keep popping out everywhere.

This newest member is Joshua, who was born on May 5, and who is in this picture just three hours old and has already discovered the magic deliciousness of his mother’s index finger. He’s being greeted by his parents, Ben and Amy, and his big brother, Charlie, who is three and a half, and who explained to anyone who would listen just exactly where this baby came from.

He kept saying to his mother, “So you’re not pregnant anymore?” and she would say, “That’s right.” And he kept shaking his head in wonder. It is a mysterious thing.

Also mysterious is all the technological equipment in Ben and Amy’s house, which luckily Charlie was adept at operating. I got to spend four days hanging out with him, and he helped me learn to work the GPS (”You turn right and you turn left and you turn right again, and then you reach your destination!”) and the TV remote, the car radio, the filtered water in the fridge, the night light, the living room lamp, and the key to the front door. In his spare time, he found time to educate me about big rigs, dump trucks, and how certain candies can resemble BMW hubcaps he’s seen go by on highways. 

I am getting so many new babies to rock and cuddle–it’s really a wonderful springtime. On Josh’s birthday, all the leaves burst forth on the trees, and the yellow tulip in the front yard suddenly opened…and we were finally able to take off our sweaters.

Charlie wore his BIG BROTHER t-shirt to the hospital.

Stephanie came home from college for 24 hours because she was sick. This is one of the advantages of living only a trainride from home–you can get a sore throat, a sinus headache, a stomach ache and a bump on your tongue, and you can come home for a good night’s sleep and a fried egg sandwich.

It was lovely. We sat out on the screened porch working side by side on our computers. I was doing–what else?–my novel, and she was working on a final paper for one of her classes.

We were enjoying the companionly silence of staring into space, trying to think of the next thing to type when I heard her say, “Hmm, I should check out how the bump on my tongue is doing.”

And then, to my astonishment, she stuck out her tongue at her computer, clicked a button–and voila! There was a close-up photograph of her tongue filling the entire screen.

“Oh,” she said. “It looks like it’s healing up nicely,” and went right back to work.

A lot of people have to get up and go look in the mirror to get that kind of information.

How long since you’ve seen somebody who is fifteen whole minutes old?

This is Miles, who is kicking back as he celebrates his first-quarter hour of life in the world–and Allie, his mother, who is just amazed by him. If you’ve ever had a baby, you know just what she is thinking: So this is who has been kicking my ribs for the past few months! It’s YOU!

You can see that they’ve already pretty much committed to each other and are in love…and I, who got to be present during the labor and birth, helping Mike, her husband, as we both held her elbows and said things like, “You can do it! You’re almost there!” have finally been able to stop sniffling every time I think of that moment when he came out into the world, looking around in surprise at everyone there to meet him: his mom, his father, the midwife, the nurse, and me.

He is the first person, besides my own children, that I got to see actually being born. Words are so inadequate to describe what it was like. Just so stunning and humbling and unbelievable…see? I should stop with the words. There aren’t words. 

Let’s just say that I cried. Later I got to sit in the rocking chair there in the birthing center and rock him for a while, and he stared up at me with those hazy big navy blue eyes, and he was calm and serene. He seemed to bring with him his own sense of peace and quiet. 

Already he’s showing signs of being a wise person. For one thing, he came one week early, just so he could avoid what in our family is the April Birthday Logjam taking place next week, when four of us have our birthdays all piled on top of each other. (People always have teased us for being very clever in managing to all be born right at the same time, but in fact who needs a whole week in which you have to make–and eat–at least four birthday cakes! I know, I know…some people will complain about anything, won’t they?) 

But little Miles picked April 14th, which was a sunny spring day in New York City. Tulips and magnolia trees and forsythia were blooming everywhere. Then, the next day, once he’d gotten safely home, a huge nor’easter raged outside. We hardly noticed.  

So life is good, and I am home again, back to work on my book–wasn’t I writing a book before all this happened? I think so!

I think I’m going to give all my characters new babies.

We forget, sometimes, that they haven’t always been around–those people who take up so much space in the world and for whom most television commercials make sense.

We forget that we have lived through things of which they have no idea.

And that’s why it’s useful when somebody at Beloit College takes the time every year to remind us of just what it is that WE know that young people don’t know, so that we don’t take offense when they give us those blank looks when we’re talking to them.

Yep, once again it’s time for Beloit College’s Mindset List for the Class of 2010, just in case you are like us and have an 18-year old to communicate with.

These, then, are a sampling of things that are true for those who are 18:

The Soviet Union has never existed and therefore is about as scary as the student union.

They have known only two presidents.

They have never heard anyone actually “ring it up” on a cash register.

A stained blue dress is as famous to their generation as a third-rate burglary was to their parents’.

There has always been only one Germany.

Thanks to pervasive headphones in the back seat, parents have always been able to speak freely in the front.

A coffee has always taken longer to make than a milkshake.

Carbon copies are oddities found in their grandparents’ attics.

“So” as in “Sooooo New York,” has always been a drawn-out adjective modifying a proper noun, which in turn modifies something else,

“Outing” has always been a threat.

They grew up with virtual pets to feed, water, and play games with, lest they die.

Disposable contact lenses have always been available.