BAAABIES

More Cowbell

Confessions of a Recovering Baby Addict

My baby addiction started young.

I was two when my only sibling, Mack, was born. Mom’s instant and clear favoritism for Mack gave me Mommy Issues with a capital M. I craved a closeness with my mom until I was in my fourth decade of life but never got it.

Maybe it was his red hair and freckles that endeared Mack to Mom. They matched complexions and crowns, and we are drawn to what is (in this case, literally) familiar. But my dad thinks that my mother felt more at ease with Mack because he was a boy, and an easygoing person, at that. Mom had grown up with mommy issues of her own — she was the daughter of an alcoholic mother whose idea of regard for her children was throwing up outside of the community pool area before picking them up.

To some extent I was wounded by this family dysfunction. By bringing people into the world, choosing their names, and participating in their lives in a functional, adult way, I hoped to have an antibiotic for the infectious Nikula disregard.

A Rose By Any Other Name

Our dad named both Mack and me, but Mom later told us the runners-up in the big baby-naming race.

Harrison, she’d wanted to call my brother. I would have been Mary, after my grandma, Mary Kathleen. Mom and Dad landed on my first name in part due to its invocation of a beloved character in children’s lit.

I delighted in naming my kids. When my husband and I started having babies, Joe made the final call each time. But I loved everything about baby names and the fine-tuned plucking out of just the right one.

The rhythms, the spellings, the colors, the imagery. The flow of the first, middle, and last name. The literary associations. The people, places, and things. The way the letters themselves looked in print. And, most complexly, the way the sibling names might complement one other as the family grew.

My name obsession flared when I found Nameberry. I started writing for them, too.

In rapid succession we chose names for John, Wes, and Easter—our three little Daves who came on the run. What would we name a second daughter? I wondered. I had my favorites.

Spoilers: We had three more sons: Zeke, Gale, and Andy. And as with our elder three, my husband picked their names (with my approval).

Nowadays, we are done, Done, DONE having babies. If you don’t believe me, read our reproductive odyssey:

Here are the Names That Got Away :

Rose; Anna; Linnea; and especially, Tabitha. Oh, how I longed to have a little Tabitha to call my own! Never mind that Tabitha was a name that my mother had mused about out loud, while I’d been watching reruns of Bewitched. Our fifth child, Gale, even looks like Tabitha with a buzz cut.*

Separated at birth, Perez Hilton-style:

It wasn’t just about names, likenesses, or even my fomenting Mommy Issues.

Doctor, heal thyself

It is hard — smotheringly hard — to gestate, birth, and care for an infant. Let alone care for an infant, a toddler, and a preschooler at once. (Parenting three-year-old boys is the toughest of tough!). I did this while Joe was getting his evening MBA and working full-time. We didn’t have any family or many friends within 1,000 miles.

I often called my dad and cried.

But we tend to romanticize things that are in the past. And it all went too goddamned fast! I tend to conflate “difficult” with “hugely worthwhile.” This is not to say I regret having any of our children. It’s just that “incredibly hard” and “something you definitely want to keep doing for decades” aren’t always the same. And there are other factors, too:

So after we’d had our first three kids in two and a half years, had the “big snip,” and let a few years pass, I was thrilled with my life. But I still wasn’t totally feelin’ it.

I went to therapy to work through my mommy issues, which took several years. One thing became clear.

I had a fever, and the only prescription was more cowbell.

The pulsating groin is the heart of reproduction. Does my husband make me horny? Yes, yes, and yes again. Did I mention that Joe is the Baby Whisperer?

My Medical School Non-Admissions Essay

I wrote something in 2010, a Facebook post-turned-diary entry. Here is the reasoning behind my monumental career decision, which influenced our later decision to have more babies.

Riding in Cars With Kids

I don’t want to be a doctor. Actually, I don’t want to be a PA, either.

Forget Dr. Laura Schlessinger’s judgments; I got only a few pages into her book, In Praise of Stay-at-Home-Moms, and nearly threw it away for its dubious logic.

However, as is the case for all paradigm-shaking discoveries, the evidence leading up to my latest conclusion is simple, elegant, and makes me wonder why I didn’t think of it before.

I hate hearing my kids scream and fight. It makes me want to conk their heads together like the Three Stooges. But. I love reading to my kids and seeing if a roly-poly will eat a baby carrot and inventing silly dances with them. I love admiring caught moths and dead grasshopper legs together. I love explaining to them that, good guess, but the lady singing on the radio is spelling GLAMOROUS, not HIPPOPOTAMUS.

I love listening to their encyclopedic, spiritual discussions on humoral immunity, climate change, the possible locations of Heaven, and whether or not passing gas makes you run a tiny bit faster.

But I’ll take the less breezy talks, too: What’s a ship strike? What’s a miscarriage and why did the blue whale have one?

I want to look my children in the face more than just a few moments a day. And preferably not when they’re sleeping peacefully or intentionally farting at each other. I want to tell them unequivocally how grateful I am that they’re here, or how rude they’re being.

I want to have a few frivolous hobbies. Writing. Walking. Playing in the pool. I need a few minutes each day to watch the sun go down.

More money? Not necessarily, thank God.

I’m blessed and cursed with an appreciation for irony. And there is great irony in leaving one’s children to be cared for by others, for the purposes of being responsible for the care and wellbeing of…other others.

I couldn’t give less of a sh*t about the enantiomers of clavulanic acid (if such things even exist) and other crap I would need to shove back into my brain to be successful in medicine. I love deleting the MCAT Question of the Day from my inbox, and unsubscribing from AMSA/AAPA’s steady stream of info from fall acceptees, who are just beginning to fully contemplate their lives as medical students/professionals/slaves.

‘How do I balance work and loved ones?’ ‘How do you make the most of your time with your significant other?’ ‘How do we avoid having our parental relationships consist of riding in cars with kids?’

I haven’t the foggiest.

To be fair, it wasn’t all bad having parents who worked a lot. My dad spent time with us for nearly every minute he wasn’t working, and when he became a single parent, he had a much more flexible, local job. And one of my fondest memories with my mom was when a drive-thru worker wanted to know which of our otherwise-identical value meals should be without onions: (“The one on the left!” “Oh man, they’re probably spitting in our food right now…”). Homecooked meals aren’t everything. I learned to be independent from a young age, too.

But from what other parents in medicine have told me — I always ask! — nobody has a solution to the work/family balance problem.

My children will not be children forever. I am going ahead with this mom gig as a professional — an imperfect one who swears too often, but one who chooses to be exactly where I am.

I’m just a mom, and that’s plenty.

Epilogue: Like Will Ferrell in a classic SNL sketch, we came back to give that cowbell a serious tapping. We had three more kids.

*This is an excerpt from my blog, Letters to Aunt Kay: Salty Open Letters to my Parenting Muse

Join Lindy Vogel on Medium, get her humor newsletter, and follow Sweary Mommy to hear more about Will Ferrell’s positive effect on her sex life.