I'm writing in public, at a Starbucks, no less, on my little MacBook, the very picture of pretentious writerly-ness, and I am tactically surrounded by some kind of extended family. There are at least four toddlers in the mix and two infants, and the family has commandeered the three tables immediately around me and all available chairs. Various diaper bags and standing men block my egress, and the apparent paterfamilias, Grampy, is now wielding a camera and whistling and shouting at his grandchildren to get them to look at him. It is clear that he is over the moon to have such a large family, and he keeps saying, "They haven't seen ALL MY KIDS!" as he snaps away. Grandma repeats the suggestion to heard all the adult couples-- I can't even tell how many there are-- into standing together, so the mysterious They can discern who is married to whom. A fight breaks out between two of the toddlers over a plastic horse and the chorus of adult voices rises to meet it with various well-researched but conflicting strategies. The conversation proper, fragmented, cyclical and shouted, attempts to elevate itself another acoustic level to compensate.
This is my future.
My little man, 30 weeks along, sits stubbornly in breech position, his head pressing into my ribs, still for now. He still has no name, though I've seen a creepy sepia rendering of one side of his face in the curiously named 4D ultrasound and decided that, in utero, he is already a heartbreaker.
I was going to elaborate further on some line of thought, but now one of the dads is carrying on at high volume about the schedule of juices his children will drink and at what times. I wonder if this is what's in store for my attempts at writing-- I'll start a sentence that may or may not be brilliant, may or may not point promisingly, like a shaded path to somewhere deeper and unexplored, and then instead I will have to observe and weigh in on my child's capricious beverage preferences and lecture at length on his nap schedule.
The family is eyeing me, as I'm clearly taking up a table that could be better used for diaper bag storage and to allow the one remaining adult to have a seated shouting venue. Imminent domain. Now they're shouting about the church service they've just attended and the fit one child threw which had no solution, and no end game, evidently, and a sense of panic is climbing my chest like a small, frantic monkey.
I'm pulling the eject handle.
No comments:
Post a Comment