The Halloween Baby Arrives

I've given up on that whole "don't call them, they'll call you" idea. The printers said to come by the same time the next day to pick up the magazine. I called them at noon. They were finished.

Emotions don't work the way they're supposed to. This should have been the big day. I had looked forward to the excitement, the triumph, the joy of finally having this baby. That's what it felt like, and I mean no disrespect to anyone's real baby, especially my own. There was that same sense of expectancy in every sense of the word. I'd conceived this idea in love and enthusiasm, spent months feeling nauseated and dizzy and sleepy, and tensely waited to see the beautiful creature itself. And then, once the moment had truly arrived, I was so exhausted and numbed by all the emotion leading up to the great moment that when I was handed my creation, when it was finally a physical entity existing outside myself, I felt almost detached.

When my son was born and the midwife handed him to me, I felt little more than a terror that I would drop him and a desire to feel what I really ought to at a profound time like this. I clutched the wet, naked little creature, who doubtless felt as dazed and bewildered as I did by his cannonball journey into the world. My husband says that when he heard me whisper "My baby, my baby," he almost cried, it was so sweet. But really, I was only trying to explain to myself exactly what was going on here, and muster up some feelings appropriate to the occasion.

I love the fact that the magazine is a Halloween baby; but I also love Halloween; and I have a son who had plans and excitements of his own for the day. And so my attention and my emotions were divided. And of course all the obstacles and little confusions on the way to getting it had taken some of the wind out of my sails. At one point, I remembered reading about some radical political type who hadn't been able to find a printer willing to work with her writing. What if my printer finally figured out whatever was wrong with the PDF file, only to see the contents and recoil with horror? Sure, I'd already paid for the work; but it was on a debit card. They could reverse the transaction easily enough. And then what? It had been hard enough, in the expensive city I live in, to find one printer who didn't demand a minimum print run of a thousand copies. Would I ever be able to find another?

Ridiculous, of course. But we never know what worries are ridiculous until the journey is safely over.

The printer had loaded the boxes of SHM into my trunk. After a moment of standing in a cramped little parking lot, I opened one of the boxes up and took a copy of the magazine out. I'd already looked at one in the shop, just to confirm that I hadn't picked up crates of someone's self-published novel; now I gave one to my son to peruse on the drive home. I didn't actually want to look too closely at it myself just now. The job was done, finally. If there were hideous errors hiding inside, I really didn't want to know.

"Isn't it great?" I asked my son, trying to convince both of us.

"Nice," he agreed politely. He'd been spellbound by his own work, right there in the center of the mag where it belonged. But now he began politely to flip through the rest of the pages.

"Hey, I've seen that," he said.

"What?"

"This place in the picture."

I was driving. He was in the back seat. That was safer for him, physically. It didn't do much for my sanity just now, but that was no one's top priority but my own, apparently.

"The Santa Monica Pier?"

"Yeah, that's the one."

I relaxed a bit and smiled. I'd been childishly pleased myself to recognize that sign when my husband showed me the pictures he'd picked out to illustrate the Santa Monica College article.

"Is this supposed to be here?" my son asked.

My smile vanished. "What?"

"This article. I don't remember this."

My worse fears realized. "And is it supposed to be right here, next to the kids' section? I didn't think -- "

"Honey!" I shrieked. Am I the only one who, when I feel a scream coming on, tries to channel it into a nice word on the theory that shouting isn't so bad if what you're hollering is technically an endearment. "I can't look right now, okay? I'm driving."

"Okay. Sorry."

A moment's silence. I turned the radio away from his annoying kids' station and to my alternative rock one, hoping they would be playing something at least moderately kid friendly.

"Is this supposed to look like -- "

"Oh, for the love of corn!" I howled. "Look, if it's completely wrong and awful and horrifying, there is nothing I can do about it now! Put the magazine down and stop scaring Mommy when she's trying to drive!"

"Sorry."

These special moments are what make trying to combine homeschooling and editing all worthwhile.