Tuesday, May 29, 2007

Flight or Flight Response

We moved a lot when I was growing up because my father was in the Mil…Library. My dad was a Research Librarian and for some reason that meant his upward professional mobility was tied to moving from university to university. Moving a lot had opposite effects on me and my brother. He has lived in Boston since he graduated college, and I can’t keep still. I even transferred during college. And there is no psychotherapy couch or PhD needed to diagnose this behavior as a flight response to stress or fear. After college I moved because I didn’t know what I wanted to do. Then I moved because where I moved was not what I wanted to do. Then I moved to get a job. Then I moved to go back to school, which led to moving after I was done with school to a city I had no reason to move to. So I moved again. Then, last year, my flight response was triggered when I found out I was pregnant. But after going out to look at a bunch of town homes in Durham, my gag response to pregnancy kicked in and I went back to bed for six months. Anyway, now that I am a mother I realize that moving in response to stress is not the healthiest game plan in the world. In fact, I have used my new level of maturity and greater sense of perspective on life to develop an alternative behavior modification that I think is completely reasonable in response to stress. I buy lottery tickets.

Friday, May 25, 2007

Desperately Seeking Social

B and I are so trying to get out there and find our parent soul-mates. We found one couple that we like so much we are almost afraid to call them too often because we might scare them away. I want to ask them to go steady, but B thinks we should take it slow. So in an effort to play the field a little bit before we get down on one knee in front of this couple, we are basically setting up blind parent dates. To make these events more productive, I thought about taking out the following personal ad:

Married with First Kid Seeking Couple with Kid who don’t have a clue what a moby wrap is, who are comfortable with giving their kids the maximum dosage of Tylenol and gas medicine, who think pudgy mushy babies are healthy and adorable, who do not dress their kids up in higher fashion than they wear themselves, who do not think that Dr. Ferber is the devil, who like to start at 4pm and end at 9pm at the latest, and who don’t mind that we like to hang out at the house, drink beer, play cards and watch sports.

I know. I’m going to have to beat them off with a stick.