So, I’ve been de-hermiting this afternoon while trying to motivate myself toward making dinner, and looking at the bunches of places that have linked here.
What seems just barely less weird than BJ being dead is the fact that this weird little website is seeing some netty popularity, from places I’ve never heard of. So, I’ve been popping over to their sites, and it seem invariable that at one of the sites, some commentor will say that its a hoax, evidently because I don’t behave like a grieving widower should, and because I’m still writing. Oh, and because I’ve got a paypal donate link.
So, I admit it.
I have totally discovered that one of the channels we have shows Rockford Files followed by Magnum PI.
Now, I think there are cool things, and then there are cool things, but there isn’t much cooler than that. It is totally negating my irritation at the fact that the phone client I use to take calls doesn’t work wirelessly yet (seriously, why not? Thats silly, Avaya. Dumb name, too)
The boys are off at school today, and I’m getting some quality work hours in. Its pretty slow, which is a good thing too, thus giving me time to clean up the kitchen, eat an orange (my new breakfast, aren’t I being healthy) and drink two cups of coffee (*BING*).
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Thanks for all your kind words about Pigpen. I’ve always relied on BJ to tell me if I’m screwing the children up (because, seriously, what parent ISN’T convinced that their kids are going to wind up warped as hell), and I miss that safety net. She didn’t start out the best mother in the world, let me tell you.
Actually, our early parenting years were less than stellar.
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First of all, the birth of our child, what is supposed to be a magical event, was miserable. UT sucked. Seriously. If I’m ever decapatated, and I’m right next to UT, and they have super amazing head reattachment technology, my head will croak out “Noooo UT… seriouslyyy… it suucks”.
The nurses treated us like hell, because we were 18 and on Tenncare. They were rude, they were unhelpful, the acted like they had somewhere else to be. They were all older women. It was just a horrible time, or at least thats how I remember it.
BJ had Gabe at 11:19, as I said, and didn’t hold him until around 8 PM that night, both because of her condition, and because Gabe was a little yellow. She didn’t get a room until 5 PM or so. When they finally brought Gabe in, she tried and tried to nurse him, but he just wouldn’t take it. He cried, and cried and cried.
Around 3 AM, we finally decided that we had to get some sleep, and had the nurses take him to the nursery. We had a night of guilt.
The next day, we had Gabe back, and he cried and cried. He still wouldn’t nurse, so we were feeding him these little glass premixed bottles of formula, which is what the nurses fed him while BJ was asleep after giving birth.
Gabe never nursed. He was a bottle baby, because he just wouldn’t take to the tit.
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After a few days like this, we left the hospital. BJ was still very, very worn out, from the 10 or so hours of serious labor, and then the emergency C-section. She was pale, her eyes were dark and sunken, when she finally got out of bed, 8 days after having Gabe. By then, Gabe was pretty much screaming all the time. We were convinced that we were screwing something up. He would be red-faced and scream. Constantly.
The only way we could get him to sleep was in one of those baby swings. That was it. He’d sleep for the 30 minutes it was wound, and I’d pass out in the chair next to him. When the swing stopped, he’d scream again. I started the swing, he’d sleep for another 30 minutes.
I remember one night, up with him, watching Conan O’Bryan, and he made some sort of joke about talking to all the parents up with crying babies.
I did not find it funny.
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Weeks passed, and Gabe still screamed. From about 3 PM until about midnight, he’d scream. We went to a tenncare clinic in Fort Sanders (we were still living at Huntington Place), and they said it was colic, and they had no idea why. Colic, like the illness that claimed BJ, evidently is one of life’s great mysteries (along with the pyramids).
In fact, the only way, we found, to get him to stop screaming, was to stick him in a baby carrier that went on my chest and walk him around the mall. West Town Mall. To this day, I hate the mall. We went there every day, spent 3 or 4 hours there, with a sleeping tiny bratty screamy baby on my chest. He even had a little angry wrinkle between his eyes, that he has to this day if you see him at the right time.
Finally, at 6 weeks, we got the idea to switch him to soy formula, and thus solved the conundrum that had plagued the scores of doctors (well, the one that would see us) regarding his colic - he was lactose intolerant.
Doctors. Puh.
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We couldn’t do it. Even with him feeling better, BJ hated being in the house alone, so she was having her mom come down and help every day. I wasn’t working much, because BJ hated to be with him alone at night (not that she hated Gabe, and she felt so incredibly guilty for her feelings, but she just wasn’t ready to be a mom yet), so I stayed up at night with him. I got no sleep, and ended up working a lot less. We couldn’t afford our apartment.
Ultimately, we moved into BJ’s folks house again. It was good to have help, and it cemented Gabe’s strong relationship with BJ’s parents. I don’t know how we’d have done those early months without their help.
I worked part time, and BJ still didn’t work. We got along great, still, but the young love was transmuted into an exhausted, knowing love. We still tried to go out occasionally on dates, what with the built in babysitters, but we didn’t have much in the way of money.
Time passed. There are pictures that remember those days and weeks and months, but I don’t have any solid memories of them. Gabe grew constantly. I recall sitting at nights, in BJ’s folks living room, watching a big screen TV (that we ultimately ended up with, and discarded). We’d eat popcorn that BJ’s dad fixed, we’d always break off tiny pieces for little walking Gabe to snatch up. When he had to poop, he’d go hide in the corner to do it. That was a funny quirk.
They were still golden years.
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Still, BJ and I weren’t ready to give up on our youth, that teenage energy and stuff. We were children of the grunge thing, tattoos and piercings (well, one piercing. I didn’t care for them myself, but BJ got her lower under lip pierced, and it was cute for 6 months, until she took it out for 5 minutes, and it healed up. D’oh). We made friends, I met Mojofilter and some other friends that we have to this day (that were at the Barleys thing with us). We were hanging out, partying, having a great time. We came home, and we were parents again.
I don’t know if I feel guilty for that or not. We were good parents, and always had Gabe as our first priority, but when we could get a babysitter, buddy, we were gone. Luckily, BJ’s folks lived there. We were gone maybe once or twice a week, for an evening.
I kinda wish we hadn’t done that, but at the same time, I’m glad we did. BJ and I needed the US time that so many parents couldn’t get. We were young, we were deeply in love, and we had a kind of relationship that isn’t supposed to work out. Luckily, it worked out.
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In March of 1997, I had been working at Pizza Hut as a delivery driver for a few months, and we rented an apartment in Clinton. It was above a law firm. They were shit for landlords.
When we moved in, the guy (I guess he was a paralegal or something) that was showing us the place had a few screws loose. He had a habit of twitching his eye whenever he told a lie, like when he said there were problems with the fridge. When we questioned further, he said maybe we should have our neighbors keep our meat.
Indeed.
The new fridge came a few weeks after we moved in.
Now, this place, landlords aside, was awesome. It was on a rooftop, and had roof access to the kitchen. There was a ladder from the parking garage to the roof, and I loved getting into the place like Batman. It was sweet.
As it was centrally located in Clinton, it rapidly became the party place. Now, we only had one or two real PARTIES, but we had a few good friends over damn near every night. I found delivery driving to be a fairly lucrative business, so we were able to afford the alcohol and party favors, as well as food, and stuff.
We still weren’t the best parents in the world, but we tried pretty hard. We were selfish, tho, and still didn’t want to let the party time over. Gabe spent maybe two nights a week at BJ’s folks house. He was always asleep when friends came over, and we kept him isolated from the noise and smoke. I felt vaguely uncomfortable doing this, but other parents we knew lived that way, and their kids seemed fine.
Maybe it wasn’t as much that, as the whole life situation that I felt uncomfortable towards. BJ still wasn’t totally comfortable being alone with Gabe. She was always afraid that something would go wrong, and she wouldn’t know what to do. She was terrified of that, but wouldn’t let me know.
I had experience with kids, being that when I was 17, my little sister was born. I had seen 3 other little siblings growing up, and my mom is a nurse. I had a pretty good idea how to deal with problems that could pop up with kids, but BJ never had that experience, and she was panicked, silently, constantly, at the thought that something may happen, and she wouldn’t know what to do. That Gabe’s little airway would close, or he’d get sick, or he’d hurt his head, and there’d be nobody there to save him but her.
I recall one memorable day (and this is a story I haven’t told much) that BJ was really, really wanting me to come home. I was working a day shift at the Pizza Hut, and would have gotten off around 5 or so. It was 2, and I swung by the house on a delivery (because it was that close) to say hi and give her a kiss.
When I got there, she asked me to call back in sick. She said she wasn’t feeling good, that she was in a real bad mood, that she didn’t want to be alone. She begged me.
Now, that had been a thing, and I’m more than willing to get out of work. Seriously, I’ve always been one to be talked out of work pretty easily. When I’m there, I work hard, but when I’m not, I sure like not being there. However, at this point in time I was on a “grow up, you bastard” trip, thinking that I had to build a work ethic if our lives were ever going to improve. I told BJ that I’m going to have to go back to work.
She told me she REALLY wanted me to stay home. She got mad. I got mad. We said things to each other that I just don’t remember, and then I told her I’m not going to fight. I walked out the roof door in the kitchen, on my way down the ladder.
A window shattered behind me, with BJ’s fist sticking out of it.
I uh, ended up staying home. Miraculously, she didn’t get cut by the window that she burst. It stayed broken until we moved, along with another window that Mojo broke a few months later while trying to get the damn thing open.
It worked out, because that summer our air conditioning went out, and the lawyers never got it fixed.
Lawyers. Puh.
—
We moved out of there, again, back into BJ’s parents house for the next year, because the bills got on top of us. Our sojourn on the rooftop apartment lasted only about 6 months, but it was a high point for us. Well, hell, they were all high points, but this was really the end of ‘Jake and BJ, party animals’. After this, we slowly headed down into a nice life of hermitdom, which lasted until around the past couple of years.
Those years are when we really started creating what we have today, and what we became, up until now.