lame superpowers

i have recently discovered that pregnancy, childbirth and childrearing might imbue you with a new set of superpowers....or at least superhuman abilities. instead of a radioactive spider you have the pain of labor and birth and the ever present fear that something will happen to your baby. the effect is not nearly as stunning as spiderman's magic production of webs from his fingertips but hey...it is cooler than what i had before the baby!

a. supersonic hearing- i swear i can hear her sigh at the other end of the house. i am so attuned and in tune with her bodily functions that i really do not understand the need for a baby monitor (unless you live in a 2 story house...)

b. lightening fast cleaning abilities- ok, i am going to brag here because i seriously cannot believe how much i can accomplish in one nap time, let alone one full day. let me preface with this fact: i have never been a good housekeeper. benson used to find dirty dishes under my bed in college. and before sibby was born i probably washed our dog-nose-smeared windows once a year. since her arrival i have felt a very keen need to have the house clean at all times. example. in the past 2 days i have vacuumed, mopped the tile and hardwood floors, washed the windows in the house, dusted throughout, oiled the wood furniture, removed that hard to reach dust atop the tall bookcases, planted flowers, hung up pictures in sibby's room, wrote many thank you notes (and actually mailed them, another bad habit of mine), cleaned every crevice of the kitchen cabinets with bleach spray, cooked two "real" dinners, swept the carport, cleaned the molding and baseboards, attended a mommy and me class, visited a sick friend, went shopping and to walmart at 7 am to buy benson jean shorts (dont ask) and have actually stayed on track with my new work out routine. seriously even though i didnt work when i was pregnant i would not have accomplished that much in a week!

c. super human love- ok, i know this is lame, but i just realized i have to hurry and wrap this post up! i have the opposite problem of the grinch and my heart is ten sizes too big. what is interesting in sibby is not the only recipient of this growing heart. who knew that after loving my benson for 10 years that i could feel soooo much more in love with him after seeing him be a father? i now love my mom much more fully and deeply after realizing what she went through with me and how much she loves me after feeling it myself for my daughter. i also now love every child i meet, hear about, or who exists somewhere on this planet. now i understand why people cant listen to the news. i fall to pieces thinking that a child is suffering somewhere. while it used to make me sad or angry in a theoretical sense about the wars, fighting, abuses, etc. i now have a very painful heartache considering the hurt of one child anywhere. it is so much more real to me now, because everyone is someone's baby, someones whole world.

in an aside, while thinking about superpowers i remembered captain planet. seriously, could there be a bigger loser of a superhero? dont get me wrong, i love the planet. i read national geographic, recycle and use cloth diapers! but his goal as a superhero is to "take pollution down to zero"? this opinion is coming from someone who read the comic concrete, where the superhero is just made of concrete! and swamp thing, where the superhero is made of mud and lives in a bog! even those lowly heroes seems rad compared to captain planet and his awful theme song.

kenneth speaks the truth...?

so i dont know how i existed the past few years without 30 rock. someone loaned us season 1 when sibby was 8 weeks old and we have loved every second of this show....we just started season 4. anyways, all of the characters are fantastic but of course kenneth is special. kenneth, supposedly from a pig farm in stone mountain (guess the writers had not actually been anywhere near stone mountain when they pulled that name out of a hat...that accent is much more rabun county and stone mountain was possibly a small town 60 years ago, before it was swallowed into atlanta-sprawl...anyways!)

so last night's episode gave kenneth the line "i feel as useless as a mom's college degree". benson and i both burst out laughing, har har, but in a way, i have been questioning the usefulness of my college degrees for the past few years. what am i going to do with them? was there a point to it...especially the last masters which required a student loan? my degrees were useless before i became a stay at home mom (ba in african history, swahili and sociology, masters in public health, masters in social studies education). i got into high school history at the wrong time and only ended up finding a job for one semester. the underwater basket weaving joke got old in undergrad...but i guess there was a ring of truth to it.

there is no answer here....just pontificating. of course, i would not have met benson, i would not be even a tenth of as interesting, i would not have acquired the research skills i really honed writing 3 different theses, i would not have made certain friends, traveled to tanzania, become as interested in world affairs, etc. if i could do it all over again, i would not change my path...but is that vanity? i have found my calling in being a mom and hope to have many more children before i return the working world. right now speaking swahili, or understanding public health research or knowing how to manage a high school classroom might be about as useless as a mom's college degree for me.