Kara Baskin

Great news! I’m now writing a weekly parenting column for Boston.com’s Community Voices titled “The 24-Hour Workday.” It’s all about balancing career and motherhood — while eating well and having fun and sucking in my stomach and making plenty of time for my life’s true passions, which include “Murder, She Wrote” and the melodic tunes of Steely Dan. Please follow my blog there; I’ll also link to it here. Links to my other work will continue to live here, too. As ever, thank you for reading!

A young rebel.

Well, hello there. So I swore I’d never be one of those people who started a blog, posted a few entries, and then proceeded to neglect it like a lonesome Friendster profile. Yet here I am. Last you saw me, Andy and I had just recovered from his massive birthday party, and things have changed since then. For one thing, as you can see, he now has a tattoo. Kids grow up so fast, don’t they? (Thanks, Island Creek Oyster Festival!)

However: I can assure you that there’s going to be plenty more blog excitement in the near future–more on that later–and that everyone here is just dandy. I’ve been incredibly busy with work, I’m putting the final touches on my book proposal at last, and I’m nursing a head cold that makes me sound like Kathy Bates. Andy, meanwhile, is practicing saying “hiiiiii” like an ancient Gypsy psychic. It’s cute ‘n creepy, especially when he pairs his crackly “hiiiiiii” with a curly wave of his beefy lil’ paw. Also, my house is so dirty that I could probably make a souffle with the contents of my kitchen floor…So, basically, it’s business as usual around here.

Stay tuned for more. And…um…when do infant tattoos wash off?

Mom made me wear this hat.

Andy’s spending the weekend sunning himself in Kennebunkport with his Nana and Zeyde, Uncle Matt, and of course Brian and me. He’s had his first dip in the ocean, his first dip in a pool, and he’s behaved with aplomb in plenty of restaurants. Cuisine of choice: Sand. Happy Fourth of July!

Andy was mesmerized as pie by his first baseball game. Brian got the whole family season tickets from a coworker for the Lowell Spinners — which afforded everyone a primo view of the game and also meant that we were sitting on top of mascots like the Canaligator (Lowell was built on a canal) and Bob the Toothbrush (also, residents suffer from gingivitis!). My parents bought Andy special Red Sox overalls for the occasion–humbly pictured here.

He was captivated throughout–with a few gentlemanly pauses for purees and Puffs. He made fast friends with a preschooler named Conor and bucked each time a new mascot trotted onto the field. Behind me, a harried mother bemoaned the lines at Market Basket. A scrubbed older gent named Bob, decked out in a yellow collared shirt and pressed khakis, whipped the crowd into a frenzy with “Who Let the Dogs Out”and joked with little kids. He could’ve been D.

My grandfather, D to everyone (but to me first), was christened Paul. He’s the reason my son is named Paul Andrew. He played baseball in Lowell in the 1930s, when he lived with six brothers and one sister in a house on West London Street, not knowing then — but probably knowing then — that they’d never move more than a few blocks from home.

He had albums upon meticulous albums, now mine, with Lowell Sun clippings chronicling his exploits. “Little Paulie Durkin”‘s special talent was pitching. If not for World War Two, he could’ve probably played out here, too.

LeLacheur Park isn’t Fenway. It’s next to the Aiken Bridge, which connects nowhere to a slightly more hilly nowhere. There are burned-out factories, refurbished lofts, and a downtown that’s been “gentrifying” for 20 years. Tickets cost $15 a pop. Whatever crap I was trying to digest from a heart-attack-inducing dinner in Cambridge the night before could never measure up to whatever was for dinner down the street at the Owl Diner … and it was probably twice as good and half as expensive, sucker that I am.

This was never my home. But it is home.

My parents grew up in Lowell. My mother has approximately 3980o958 cousins, all of whom are from here, and most of ‘em still live here. At LeLacheur Park--named after one of my grandfather’s good friends and baseball teammates–an advertisement for our cousin’s car dealership hangs on a banner; meanwhile my ex-boyfriend, whose dad grew up next to my dad, announces the game. The field was dedicated by the city manager, Brian Martin, another of D’s close friends from a block down Andrews Street. D said they used to shoot hoops in his paved backyard, overlooking the Prince Spaghetti Factory.

We parked in the Notini’s parking Lot. Notini’s is where my grandfather worked as a wholesale tobacco salesman for more than 40 years, before retiring to help my mom take care of my brother and me. D was such a graceful athlete and a gifted baseball player.  He loved Spinners games, following them as excitedly as any Red Sox game.  These fields were the same ones where D played, with different names and in different times, decades ago. His friend and teammate Ed LeLacheur died last year. My grandfather died in 2008. But Notini’s is still here. The pink sun that illuminated the Aiken Bridge is the same pink sun that saw my grandfather home after so many baseball practices so many years ago.

As I flip-flopped to my seat, sweaty beer in one hand, Andy’s diaper bag slapping against my ribs, nachos in a free paw–I smiled because I knew that I hadn’t inherited any of his grace.

But I hope he saw us.

Seeing my sixty-two-year-old parents waiting for us in the seats that their son-in-law procured, blocks from the high school where they met as 16-year-olds, looking for their grandson Paul Andrew…I knew he saw us. D was there.

Sorry, not sold by Enfamil or Similac.

Yes, there are times I wish I could put a fifth of vodka into Andy’s bottle. But I’m talking about my drinking here. How much is too much?

Remember Stefanie Wilder-Taylor, the mom-blogger who wrote naughty-mommy! books like Sippy Cups Are Not for Chardonnay? She wrote the books trying to encourage other moms to remain “edgy” and retain some of their pre-baby, pre-7 p.m. freedom. Being a mom doesn’t mean wearing frump pants and going to bed at 8 p.m., was the gist. Which is a true, well-taken point. Having a baby shouldn’t, in theory, morph you into a school marm and confine you to a life of Ovaltine. You’re not a nun because you procreated.

But then she outed herself as an alcoholic after confessing to getting drunk every night after her kids went to bed.

It raises an interesting issue: How much fun should moms have? I’m not an alcoholic by any stretch–maybe because I’m a Capricorn, or Type A, or ultra-organized and hyperactive and it’s just not in my genes. Or maybe it’s just practicality: From a logical standpoint, I simply can’t get drunk every night. Can’t. It’s not even about wanting to be buzzed. It’s about not wanting to wake up in the morning feeling dry-mouthed, groggy, and unproductive. I have too much to do. I don’t have time for wine.

But every now and again, I enjoy a few glasses of wine. Probably a couple times a week. And when I do–damn if I’m not going to enjoy it. Yet: The other night, I did happen to have some wine, left over from a dinner party. In fact, I had a couple of glasses. And then I gave Andy a bath. And I felt a little bit buzzed, sudsing him up and toweling him off. Don’t call DSS: I was completely steady and fine and sober; I’d had no more than if I’d gone out to dinner with Brian. I felt guilty, though. Deviant.

Why? Because I felt a little bit better, a little bit bubblier, a teensy bit lighter. And I wondered–at which point does this feeling stop being a treat and start being a compulsion? And is it odd that I’m toweling off my son with a vague buzz? It’s such a fraught topic, I think, because there’s still a certain underlying sense that Moms can’t have too much fun — because we’re in charge, after all. It’s the very same sentiment that generates reactive, in-your-face books like Sippy Cups Aren’t for Chardonnay. See, Moms can be “bad” too –  it’s naughty and deviant and funny … and, in Wilder-Taylor’s case, ultimately destructive.

What’s the tipping point? Is there a happy medium? I definitely think so. But lotioning Andy with Aquaphor and feeling a couple glasses of white wine course though my veins, well … it gave me some pause. I felt bad for feeling good.

Expect startling Murder, She Wrote episode recaps, lamentations about the lack of decent Chinese food in Arlington, and in-depth analysis of Andrew’s diaper output.