The Art of Making Friends (at the Dog Park)

I believe making friends is an art form.  It's certainly not a science and it's definitely not easy. Especially in a new town.

Making friends in elementary and middle school was simple. It was dictated by your class schedule, lunch period, and often your living proximity for after school playtime.  Don't get me wrong, kids are mean, staying friends was hard, but making friends was easy. In high school that out-of-school proximity expanded as we got driver's licenses. I even dated a guy from East Wenatchee way across the river.  Perhaps it was the distance, more likely the fact that the guy was an asshole, either way we didn't last.

In college the game changed. There, you weren't allowed to make friends in class. At UW, an undocumented social contract exists in which each individual must remain anonymous unless a previously authenticated relationship exists. More simply, you would be totally nerdy to talk to the person sitting next to you. Best case; you show up, take notes, don't get called on by the teacher, and leave with no one noticing you, which is great because you were probably hung over and wearing yesterday's clothes to begin with. In college you made friends through friends or at parties, where people's inhibitions were dampened with alcohol.  Enter the beauty of the greek system.

As an adult, I assume you meet friends at work or though your kids' activities. I'm not currently working, so that's out. David works with a group of friendless guys all similarly transplanted from Seattle, so that's out. We don't have kids, so that's out too. What we have left, folks, is the dog park, and I am working this field like I've never worked it before.

How a (Straight) Woman Hits on Other Women:
The dog park is a dirty place filled with mud, excrement, and jumping, excited, barely domesticated beasts. Whatever training a dog has is forgotten in this exciting place of off-leash play and mayhem. In Seattle, I would go to the dog park in one of my "dog outfits", consisting of threadbare jeans, a too-large or too-small college sweatshirt, and rain galoshes. To begin working this field, I've started dressing up for the dog park. If this is my only outing of the day and my only opportunity to make friends then I am damn well going to make the best of it.

Pick up Lines:
I begin by making sure my dog is (relatively) clean. Barkley is super cute and is sporting a mohawk, so he's not only recognizable, but lovable. In fact, he makes people laugh and is often my conversation starter. Other conversation starters include, "hey, cute sweater" (not very successful) or "cool dog toy, did you get that around here?" (slightly more successful) or the very forward "we just moved here, what's your name" (so far the predominant winner).

The Three Day Rule:
I've received a handful of numbers at the dog park. When a woman gives you her number, I have to wonder, how long do you wait before calling? Is there a 3 day rule for women, too? I've enacted a week waiting rule. I'm not sure why I feel a week is appropriate, maybe it just takes that long for me to get up the courage to call, but I feel pretty good with this timeframe. I believe it sends the message that I am interested, but not desperate. Indeed, I am desperate.

Taking it Slow:
The obvious first date is a doggy play date, no question. Assuming this goes well and the dogs like one another (Barkley is an excellent judge of character), what is the next step? Do you go slow and take her to coffee? Go straight to meeting significant others and spouses for a double date?  Drinks? Happy hour? A whole meal of food? Our most successful date was a double date over a casual dinner, proceeded by drinks at our place. The evening was short, gave everyone a chance to get to know one another and go their separate ways to determine their level of interest.  We have been on unsuccessful dates over lunch and to baseball games. I think the missing element in both these situations was alcohol.

Acknowledgements:
I've made three very nice friends in Portland that I owe completely to my dog, Barkley. Thank you, Muppet.

Barkley's mohawk

The Urban Housewife

It's almost July. We've been living in this God awful place for two months. David is never home, I don't have a job, we don't have any friends, and I'm no longer pregnant. I start my job search in earnest.  Immediately, I get an offer with the American Cancer Society to procure auction items for their Gala.  How can this be a full time, year long position? I am sure I would go nuts doing this job, and I'm getting interviews elsewhere for other more exciting and challenging things, so I turn them down. This decision turns out to be a mistake of gargantuan proportions that I regret to this day. Don't get me wrong, the job would be miserable, but it turns out I won't receive another job offer for 3 months.

Soon I will go to Lake Chelan to spend the week with my family. My mom has organized a BBQ for all of our childhood friends, now grown up, and their families to meet my nephew. It seems everyone has babies.  I feel a hole inside me that not even alcohol can fix.

I change our address on our bills and begin to get our life set up in Portland. I am on the phone with the credit card company, reciting our now memorized new address, and he is asking fill-in-the-blank questions about the move. Is this a permanent move? Yes. Do you own or rent? Rent. What is your husband's profession? Construction manager. What is your profession? I tell him that I'm unemployed. He asks, stay at home mom? No, I say, we just moved and I had to quit my job and haven't found a new job yet. I'm uncomfortable, so I'm giving him too much information. Shall I just check 'housewife', he asks? Oh my god. I'm a housewife.

The Doctor's Visit

The day of the doctor's appointment finally arrived.  We were at week 11, only one week from the end of the precarious first trimester.  I had already begun to feel better, the morning sickness and headaches had dramatically subsided in the prior weeks, and I was thrilled to share the reality of pregnancy with David through the witness of our baby's heartbeat.  While he was incredibly supportive, I could tell this pregnancy didn't yet feel real to him.  Understandably, he wasn't experiencing the signs of pregnancy firsthand, and he could not bear witness to my ambiguous complaints of nausea, headaches and breast tenderness.

As the nurse checked us in, she asked if we thought we were having a boy or a girl.  I had absolutely no idea, though I made up a decisive answer for her benefit.  Did other mothers instinctively know the sex of their unborn baby?  And if so, what kind of a mother would she judge me to be if I did not yet have this bond with my little girl or little boy?  I told her I was sure we were having a boy and immediately began to doubt if I was motherhood material.

Soon the doctor came in and I, armed with my notepad full of questions gathered from the internet, other moms and pregnancy books, began quizzing her.  This was not just a check up, it was an interview.  Her OBGYN license didn't qualify her to be my doctor, she needed to pass a gauntlet of prerequisites first.  Will she be present at my baby's birth?  What are the percentage of her patients that write birth plans?  What is her view on epidurals and episiotomies?  How does she feel about genetic screening?  How could I get a hold of her with further questions and later concerns?  She passed!  We loved her, and with the interview portion of our visit over, I permitted her to proceed with the check-up.

She began the intrauterine ultrasound, positioning David next to her where he would have the best view of our little one on the grainy ultrasound screen.  She points out landmarks as she passes them and I can tell David is really uncomfortable.  He's standing next to her as she is basically performing a pap smear, and hearing words such as "uterus" and "yolk sac".  She promises to confirm the gestational age and due date, and suddenly her face changes.  She stops her cheery narration.  I ask if something is wrong and she tells David to move next to me and hold my hand while she takes another look.  She says the baby is smaller than expected, that it might just mean our dates are wrong.  I tell her I'd been keeping meticulous notes on our calendar and that we're sure of the dates.  What else could it mean?  She admits it could mean something is wrong with the baby.  I'm crying as she tells me to get dressed, that she'll be back in a minute.

I get dressed and she comes back with pictures from the ultrasound and sits next to me, holding my sweaty hand.  She tells me the baby measured at 8 weeks, 1 day rather than the expected 11, and that she couldn't find a heartbeat.  I'm still crying, my breath now coming in jagged gasps.  She tells me we have options but I don't hear them.  She hands me the picture of our baby, which I realize is a picture of a dead baby.  We had picked out names for this baby.  We had plans for this baby.  We'd rearranged the furniture for this baby.  I'd dedicated my last 11 weeks to the perfect health and development of this baby.  I'd gone to water aerobics with 70 year old obese women for this baby!  She hands David packets of information and I hear him asking to come back for another ultrasound to double check.  How can he be so composed?

David drives me home and puts me to bed.  He's supposed to go back to work but doesn't.  Later the doctor calls and gives me my options again.  I keep thinking that my body doesn't even know there's a dead baby inside.  What's wrong with me?  I can't carry a baby correctly.  I can't even have a miscarriage correctly.  She says at any minute or within a few weeks I could pass the dead tissue on my own and it would be painful.  I could take a pill to start this process at home.  Sometimes this doesn't successfully pass all the tissue and I might have to come in for a procedure.  I could schedule this operation now, with drugs or no drugs.  All I can think of is that I want to be pregnant.  I ask her which option allows me to get pregnant again the soonest, but I don't want another baby, I want that baby.  It was supposed to be due January 5th.  I wonder what I'll do on January 5th to remember it.  The operation, a D&C, gets us back the fastest, but not for another 3 months.  I schedule the procedure.

David goes with me but says he doesn't want to stay.  He's afraid it'll scar him.  He thinks I'll be high on meds and won't notice he's not there.  We have another ultrasound to make sure nothing has changed.  The doctor brings in one of her colleagues to double check her diagnosis.  David teases me for wearing all black.  I wonder if an 11 week old baby deserves a funeral.  What do they do with the dead tissue?  The procedure is horrendously painful, I think my many years of migraines has built up a tolerance for pain medications.  I notice each and every minute that David is not there holding my hand.  I grab the nurse's hand and at the end she tells me to let go.  I am not pregnant.  I feel very alone and I hate Portland.

Portland Chapter 1: The First Few Months

We moved to Portland the last week of April in 2010, out of a 50's home with wall to wall mildew, and into a brand new high rise condo building in the downtown Pearl District.  Having been able to sell our house within 48 hours in a market where this was unheard of, and after getting pregnant on the first try, we were feeling as if our move to Portland were blessed by the hand of God himself.  Turns out that hand may have been smiting us.

David started his project, a water reclamation facility in Milwaukie, OR, (hereafter referred to as the shit plant), and realized he, along with every other Seattle transplant, had been duped. Turns out while Mortenson was claiming they were sending an ace team down for job development, they had no intention of fully staffing the job with the crew necessary to accomplish the task. Allowing for the slight exaggeration I'm famous for, this was the last time I saw my husband.  In reality, he began working 12-14 hour days in a desperate attempt to stay afloat doing the work of three people, two of those jobs highly technical positions he was unqualified for and uninterested in. The same two of those jobs that were a step down, not up, from what he was promised. Later, Mortenson would send a summer safety intern and an eager, green college grad to do the work of the unstaffed positions.

Meanwhile, I'm at home with our exuberant 80 lb. puppy Barkley and the morning sickness and headaches that would plague me for two months.  The highlight of this time was the joy I felt over the little monster growing inside me, and the excitement that we were embarking on a terrifying journey into parenthood.  I halfheartedly began a job search, knowing that my job criteria had been drastically narrowed by the window of pregnancy, and wholeheartedly jumped into caring for myself as an expectant mother.  I read at least two dozen books on pregnancy and child development within these first few weeks, joined a gym and began attending a water aerobics class with obese 70-something women, and started hitting on moms at the dog park, eager to make friends.  I found a doctor with rave reviews and looked forward to my first doctor's appointment, where we would get to hear the baby's heartbeat.  While the proverbial "they" suggests waiting until week 12 to tell family and friends, we were too excited to keep this news to ourselves.  At week 4 and the first signs of pregnancy, we called our parents to share our blessed news, at week 8 we told our closest friends at an annual camping trip, and at week 10 I sent out emails to our extended family.  After all, what could go wrong?

Getting started

So let's get you caught up.  Going way back... David and I met in high school where I sat behind him in Vocab for the College Bound with Mr. Deveroux.  I would spent the period pulling gel strand by stand from his ghetto fabulous hair (seriously, you'll have to see a picture.)  Later, I learned that he'd had a string of bad hair cuts authorized (encouraged?) by his mother, starting with a rat tail, later a mullet, and more currently the haircut I liked to call "The Wave".  Our first date was to the movie American Beauty (big mistake), and the next day we went to lunch at Mickey O'Reilly's.  It was spring break our junior year of high school, we were 16, and fell madly in love.  Well... after he got comfortable enough to talk to me, which only took 3 months.

David and I both attended UW (I admit it, I followed a boy to college) where he joined Phi Kappa Psi fraternity and I joined Alpha Gamma Delta sorority, right down the street from one another.  I learned two things here.  Lesson 1: the greek system is a dangerous place, focused solely on drinking and debauchery, and I wouldn't have it any other way.  Lesson 2: never take a class with David Lodge.  He's the kind of guy that literally won't crack open his book until the evening before the final, only sporadically having attended class in the first place, and somehow managing to set the curve on every test.  In short, he's the guy you hate.  David fell in love with architecture in college, which he later realized had nothing to do with the physics and geometry of the construction that he really loved, so he changed his major to Construction Management (best decision ever).  I majored in Communications and Political Science, two of the most broad non-degress out there.  Turns out neither of these are careers.

We got married right out of college, had the whole Catholic church wedding with the big white dress, and an awesome party afterward with 300 of our closest friends. (We maybe only knew half of their names, but the party was legendary.) We were living in a rented 70's condo right on the Burke Gilman trail and across the street from Magnuson Park.  David was interning at Conner and finishing up his last year of school, and I was working for the man who would soon become UW's AD.  David later moved to Mortenson and I to UW Marketing, and we bought a tiny starter house in Wedgwood and a goldendoodle puppy.  We loved our puppy and our new home, epic parties ensued, and four years passed.

In March of 2010, we heard a rumor David was to be transferred to Portland for a great opportunity to manage his first project, a shit plant, and in two weeks and the biggest economic downturn since the great depression, we sold our house, got pregnant and moved to Portland.  And now you're up to speed.

UW graduation

Wedding

Barkley the goldendoodle

The day we left our home for Portland