Wednesday, February 18, 2009

Freud's field day

First, for those who haven't heard: I'm going to be the proud father of a bouncy baby girl this July!

This process, though, has resulted in some very bizarre dreams for me. The first notable one was your typical adequacy anxiety dream: I was at work, looked at a clock, and realized I had forgotten to go to the hospital for the delivery. Nobody could drive me there, either. Apparently buses and taxis didn't exist, so I was panicking.

A few weeks later, a dream finds me and Tamara at the hospital for a checkup. Upon leaving, a nurse comes out with a three year-old girl and two year-old boy and happily pronounces, "Congratulations! Here are your kids!" I try to explain that my wife is still pregnant, that these could not possibly be my kids given that they're nowhere close to being newborns, that we'd be willing to go through tests to prove this, but to no avail. She condescendingly tries to reassure me: "A lot of new fathers have problems at first and are in denial, but these are most definitely your kids. Off you go!"

Last night, my girl was just born and the doctors tell me, "She's unusually advanced, mentally, for a newborn." This turns out to be a bad thing. Mentally advanced means she's already acting like a teenager. A day later, she's wearing eye shadow, has a nose ring, and is trying to get into all kinds of things that teenagers do, but in an infant's body. She finds this incredibly frustrating, as do I, but for different reasons.

Freud could retire early and comfortably if he had me as a patient.