AN: This madness does not end. Um, there are some inherent problems with the POV I've chosen to write this in (I do stupid shit like write myself into a corner) so you're just going to have to pretend that the Nameless Narrator (Jenny --- she doesn't have a name yet, but I have a good idea of which mathematician she's going to be named after) knows all of this because God told her. Dude, seriously, this is babyfic, I think that itself is more screwed up than my narrative devices. Honestly, why the hell are you reading this?
As always, for Artemis Rain, my beloved IR, my awesome beta-woman, the silly fool who opened up this can of worms and then offered me crack so that I'd continue.
To my parents, getting married was no big deal. For others, it might have been a life-altering affair, a watershed event that separated Before from After. Of course, for others it probably involved a lot more than my aunt Joan's spur-of-the-moment suggestion.
My parents had been together forever by the time they finally got married, so if you think about it, not much had changed. They exchanged vows, got a piece of paper certifying their marriage (written in both English and French), took the dead-of-night flight back home, and hauled themselves out of bed the next morning to continue their indentured servitude to their post-graduate institutions of choice. Before and After were, in essence, the same, and the only difference was my grandmother Helen's sudden insistence that they buy proper silverware.
According to legend, Grandma Helen had been miffed that my parents wouldn't throw a real wedding, one that family and friends could actually attend, where pictures were taken by professional photographers and not Joan. When she finally got over it, she decided nevertheless to offer her youngest child and rebel daughter-in-law an elaborate wedding gift, perhaps to remind them of what they had denied her.
For this reason, one afternoon my father came home to find my mother on the verge of ripping the phone from the wall and hurling it out the window. When Dad asked her what was the source of all this agitation, Mom said irritably, "Your mother is imposing kitchenware on us."
Despite that most people registered for gifts before the wedding, my grandmother thought my parents could break convention and do it now, weeks after the fact, so that family and friends could buy them necessary household appliances.
"That sounds like absolute torture," my mother said.
"It's not that bad," assured my aunt Joan. "Just go to Pottery Barn and talk to the lady at the registry office. Think about it. You can force people to buy you stuff. How awesome is that?"
"Yeah, that's just great. Pottery Barn, the ninth circle of yuppie hell. I can't wait."
"I find it interesting that these are the same people who wouldn't help us with our student loans," my father observed, "but the minute we get married, they're more than happy to buy us a breadmaker."
To appease my grandparents, my parents eventually got around to making the trip to the registry office. They were in need of proper dinnerware anyway, seeing as that their apartment was overstuffed with books and computer parts, but not much else. They ate take-out on a milk crate, and no two pieces of their cutlery matched.
The woman in charge, a deadringer for Gertrude Stein, handed my father the barcode scanner and told my parents to register for whatever they wanted. "Remember," she said, "for better or for worse, these things are going to be with you for the rest of your lives," which did not register confidence in my parents at all.
"Don't worry, we have a great selection of everything," Gertrude continued. "Bedding and linens are over there. We have these wonderful 300-thread count sheets, made from 100 Egyptian cotton ---"
"By nine-year-olds working for two cents an hour in the Philippines," my mother muttered.
"What's that?" Gertrude asked. "To your left is the dinnerware section. We have a lovely collection of flatware. Would you like to look at the Limoges?"
My father was aghast. Earlier that morning he had eaten scrambled eggs off a plastic plate that had Spongebob stenciled in the middle. Owning formal china made him feel as though he were suddenly old enough to draw social security.
"And here, look at this set of salad bowls. They're made from teak, which is the hardest wood in the world. Very hard to come by these days, you know."
"That's because you people are destroying rainforests and chopping down trees to make these stupid bowls!" Mom was a couple dinner forks away from jamming salad tongs down the woman's throat.
Gertrude Stein left my parents alone to wander around and mostly be abhorred by the number of things they didn't need.
"Grace, do you think we need lobster tail forks to eat Kung Pow chicken straight out of the container?" my dad mused aloud.
"As much as we need a silver platter to serve Doritos. Seriously, I swear this is the same one they put John the Baptist's head on."
My father, like most males, was itching to use the barcode scanner, which Gertrude had called "the gun." He said, "Come on, let's find something we can both live with. I want to try this thing out."
"Maybe we should register for that."
Four hours later, my parents left the store, having registered for exactly one set of refrigerator magnets and a bagel slicer. Later, my mother told Joan to convey the message that the best gift of all is for everybody to leave them alone. Committing to each other for the rest of their lives was quick and painless for my parents, but getting the dinnerware sure was a bitch.
You'd think my relatives would learn from that experience. You'd really think they would.
Unfortunately, this is my family we're talking about.
By the time both sets of my grandparents discovered my existence, they had already missed my birthday. So they decided to make up for lost time when December rolled around and commenced what my mother called "the month-long celebration of self-indulgent materialism and exploitation of organized religion."
My grandparents were under the misguided belief that, as a grandchild, I would change everything and make it all better. I would erase history; I would allow, if not compel, my father to overlook all those forgotten birthdays, my mother to forgive the innumerable times she'd woken up to her mother enjoying early-morning screwdrivers. My grandparents thought that once my parents had a child themselves, they would keep in touch with a little more than semi-annual emails and hurried phone calls that revolved around the discussion of weather. This meant they routinely looted Gymboree and Toys R Us, hoping to buy mine and my parents' love with satin dresses and Lego sets. (The clothes my mom didn't like, possibly because they weren't black, but the toys my dad and I had fun with.)
My grandparents also made certain that I was being properly introduced to my different religious backgrounds. My grandma sent us an Advent calendar, the instructions of which we completely ignored. We finished all the chocolate in three days, and when Helen pestered us about a Christmas tree, my mother told her that she wasn't about to hack down another tree just to decorate it with glitter balls, because isn't there enough global warming already? ("I think we should still have a tree. It doesn't have to be a real tree." My dad, being Italian, liked festivity and my mom conceded after he presented her with a persuasive argument, complete with legal precedents.)
The Rabbi called each of the eight nights of Hanukkah to make sure we were lighting the menorah and saying the right prayers, ignoring Mom when she pointed out that Hanukkah is nothing but an overblown commercialist construct created by North Americans that Jews don't even really celebrate in Israel.
"Are you spinning the dreidel?" my grandfather asked, when he overheard my dad calling out, "Grace, it's your turn!"
"Sure," answered my mother, when in fact we were playing Duck Hunt. My uncle Kevin had sent the best gift of all; to my parents, he had given the original Nintendo system that he and Dad and Aunt Joan had owned as children, along with a whole box of game cartridges.
(Just in case you were wondering, my parents didn't completely overlook my religious education. They told me a politically-correct and uncensored version of the stories behind the holidays, complete with persecution and Herod killing babies and Saint Nicholas looking more like the Pope than the jolly, robust man decked out in red at the mall.)
Around the second week of December, the UPS guy, who by then was on a first-name basis with my parents, brought forth a large, heavy package, a gift from my parents' childhood friend, Adam Rove. It was a plastic easel, with some assembly required, and the minute I saw it among the disgusting pile of all my other gifts, I knew I wanted it. To my mother's dismay, I had been sucked into the soulless void of consumerism --- I liked my toys big, bright and expensive. Ergo, to me, it was the best present in the world; to my parents, it was the biggest pain in the ass.
"What is wrong with Rove?" my mother hissed. "He has a kid. He knows it's a bitch to put these things together."
A word of advice to all: do not send toys that require assembly to new parents, unless you are also sending them a person who can do the required assembly.
My parents put off building the stupid easel until the very last minute. I spent Christmas Eve ricocheting off the walls from sugar-induced hypomania before finally passing out on the couch from a combination of exhaustion and gluttony.
With me out of the way, my parents seized the opportunity for what I will heretofore call "Grownup Time". (Use your imagination, but spare me the imagery.) My father had planned everything out beforehand, having written out a structured timetable after calculating time, duration, and the probability of my waking up or the cat getting in the way.
However, things veered off course when Grownup Time was extended by two hours, and around one in the morning, my parents discovered that, for all they understood, the instructions that came with the easel might as well have been written in German.
My father tried to decipher the strange code by looking at the diagrams, but quickly lost patience and began hammering with vicious fervor. "I once built a fully-functioning rail gun," he fumed. "I've helped construct a gamma ray telescope that won several national awards. I refuse to believe that I cannot figure out this stupid Fisher-Price piece of crap."
"I'm going to kill Rove," my mother said repeatedly. "Good intentions, sure, but what the hell was he thinking?"
(My mother exacted her revenge several months later, when Adam's daughter, Elizabeth, had her birthday. Mom bought her an electronic drum set that made a million annoying noises, ranging from ambulance sirens to something that sounded like a lunatic pounding on a keyboard. It was bound to lead to the destruction of Western civilization. My mother had never been happier than when she shipped it off, and for four months, until the batteries wore out, Adam never had a moment's peace.)
After a few beers and a sack of stale chocolate coins, my parents gave up altogether and began to find the situation mildly hilarious. I would get over it, they decided. I always did. As did all three-year-olds, I possessed the capacity to adore my parents in spite of their constant idiocy and, moreover, the attention span equivalent to that of a fruitfly. Whether or not I would complain about this incident twenty years down the road to my therapist, well, that was another question.
They carried on to talk about whatever parents talk about when their children are asleep, except in my parents' case, it probably involved a lot of Euclidian geometry and criticism of France's foreign policy. Somewhere along the line, both of them dozed off on the living room floor, and that was how I found them when I woke up on Christmas morning: my darling fools, two silly, snoring toys fast asleep at my feet.