For anyone interested, I just posted a bunch of photos of Jolie over at the blog we maintain for her. I also captioned all of them, saying things like this:
These following two pictures are of Jolie in her cute new (hand-me-down) Hannah Anderson outfit. And while we’re on the topic of baby clothing labels, you may be interested to know that a legend has developed amongst Jess’s Austin mom friends that I have a superpower that allows me to instantly know the brand of clothing that a kid is wearing. The truth is that I know the brand of clothing that my daughter is wearing at a given time, which apparently is enough to make a lot of the other dads out there look bad by comparison. It’s also the case, though, that certain brands have a distinctive look, and sometimes I can spot a Zutano or a Hannah Anderson (which is big on the vertical stripes and bold colors) from a distance.
Captioning the photos we post of her is something that I’ve thought about doing before but haven’t done because the dangers of seeming cutesy or self-satisfied when captioning your baby’s life has just seemed too great. I don’t know why I took the gamble this time, but it probably has something to do with my attempts, of late, to push past some of the inhibitions I have that are, um, inhibiting my life as a father, husband, man, etc.
I just made my first playdate, for instance, with a mom, which is to say that I opened myself up to sharing the experience of parenthood with that half of the population that does about 90 percent of the childcare–and likes doing and talking about the kinds of things I like doing and talking about– rather than continuing to fantasize about happening upon the nonexistent community of men who’d love to go to the mall with Jolie and me and their kid, where we could gab about books and parenting philosophies and the curiously homoerotic advertising paradigm of Abercrombie & Fitch.
Another example: I took Jolie to Goodwill today and I bought a $3 clock that was originally from Pottery Barn (a good deal, in other words — Pottery Barn is very classy, in a middle upper middle class kind of way), which is significant only because it’s exactly the kind of purposeless but pleasant kind of thing that my mother used to do with me, although with her it was TJ Maxx and Marshalls’ (she has too much class anxiety to ever go into Goodwill). So there was a certain moment when I was nearing the cash register when I realized how much I was being my mother’s son, and then decided to go ahead with it anyway.
Final example: I found myself, in therapy yesterday, very haltingly trying to get in touch with the fact that I’d been feeling really down over the previous few days in large part because I missed my wife, who’s been working almost non-stop on her dissertation in order to finish it by the end of the semester and just hasn’t given me the attention that I’m used to getting.
It is, I guess I’m saying, a pretty heavy, heady, exciting, frightening time in my life right now.
