So, some people were wondering how I closed the milk bar over here at Casa Asshole. The first time, Franny was eight months old and I was frantically trying to finish my bachelor’s degree. It was summer quarter and I had a morning class and an evening class. Normally I came home in the space in between, to have lunch and nurse her and do my studying at home, before having an early dinner and then heading back to school. One day, I told her father, Seattle Federline, that I was not coming home during my long break. That was cold turkey. I brought a flannel shirt with me that morning, because I knew it would be a chilly summer evening. I studied and noodled around during my ten-hour break, and by the time my evening class started, I was feeling feverish and light-headed, but I was a real Tracy Flick in those days, so it didn’t even occur to me to go home. I sat in the back as usual and watched the pretty colors on the slides and pretended to take notes.

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And she’s so proud of herself.

Today I used the very active and popular Seattle-flavor craigslist to unload some baby furniture that has been responsible for a displeasing amount of shin-barkage and dust-collection. I posted the pieces at 2:30, and the furniture was claimed by 5:30. That’s great service, man.

My companion carried the jumparoo down to the car of the lady who wanted it. Strudel can no longer be contained in it–she prefers to do her jumping on the couch or in her crib now, and she crawls fast enough to follow me all over the house. If the jumparoo’s so useless, why was I so sad to see him carrying it out the door? GODDAM hormones making me weepy over stupid piece of plastic crap.

When you have to start selling their little baby jails, you know it means they’re getting big enough to run away from you. At least I have my companion hobbled…by lust delicious home cooking.

…Because I couldn’t decide, that’s why.

Ah, The Baby. You are so twee, so confectionary. I get lost in the aroma of your stinky stinky baby feet, a fragance more intoxicating than one thousand baking cakes.

Look how ickle you are.

But what is this, The Baby? What new development is this? Yes, you are at that awkward early-toddler hair stage. I will not cut that little goldie-brown swirl, just because you’re starting to look like Hall AND Oates.

But what does it remind me of? Think think think.

Oh yes.

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We got the baby to sleep through the night. It’s been a week now. How did we achieve this stunning victory after eight months of me feeding her 2-3 times a night, and then picking her up and putting HRH back in the crib because OH NO, she didn’t want to SLEEP with us…she only wanted to suck on me and then be deposited back in her bed, where she would wake up again three hours later. That sentence did not actually end up being a question like I thought it was going to, but ANYWAY, it was tiny tyranny over here!

So one night, as we were trying to ignore her piteous howling because she didn’t need anything, it was the middle of the night, and she had already been fed, I snapped. I picked up my pillow and escaped to the living room. My companion was wide-awake-but-playing-dead next to me, so he immediately got hip and followed me with his pillow and our blanket. She cried for a loooong time, but eventually we slept.

And now we have been sleeping for a few nights, and we feel much better. Our light-sleeping Strudel is no longer disturbed by us rolling over, breathing, or GOD FORBID attempting to fight crime in our own bed. There’s nothing like that little head appearing over the side of the crib to make you knock that shit off real quick. I can see the furious look in her angry little eyes: “Mother. You weren’t attempting to provide me with COMPETITION, were you, MOTHER?” (Answer: HELL NAW.)

The trade-off for having her sleep eleven hours (THANK YOU, Giant Opinionated Head of Kanye West) is that we are now fully stuck on my companion’s futon from Ye Olde Wild Bachelor Bill days. I think you could probably guess, without me telling you, that it is not long enough for our legs, and that I can feel every slat under the “mattress”. On the other hand, the living room faces the East, so we wake up to the sun now, which is nice. So this is something to do now, until we get a bigger place in a couple of months, and it’s fine.

HOWEVER, what is NOT fine is the fact that my period has come back now that I’ve had a hormone decrease due to nursing less. So, still nursing, and more frequently during the day since there’s less nursing at night. Today I had to dust off the old menstrual cup and saddle up.

Which reminds me of when I was a checker at a grocery store during college…. Sometimes I would end up having really intimate conversations with women while checking their groceries. I would never initiate these conversations, but sometimes women, usually young ones like me, wanted to ask my opinions on certain products. Tampons or pads would roll down the belt–“Have you used these? What do you think?”–and it would come out that I used neither, because I only used a non-disposable rubber cup. They would think about this information for a few seconds.

“Is there an applicator?” I remember one asking.

“No, you just fold it up, and put it in. It’s easy.”

I could see she was having trouble controlling the look of disgust on her face. “But…you must get blood on your hands.”

“Yeah, sometimes. It’s not a big deal. I’m not really afraid of what comes out of my own body.” I smiled as I handed her the receipt.

She took her bags and stalked off, looking troubled.

This was in Phoenix, where a lot of young people wear tiny-ass clothes, because it’s fucking hot as hell, and everyone’s pretty tan anyway. A higher level of skin exposure than someplace cooler, like Seattle, is pretty much the norm. I sized her up as she walked out of the store. She looked like your standard issue Phoenix chick–short shorts, tan as hell, glossy dagger nails, and a tank top. She looked like she was at least in her late teens and if I had to guess I would say she was probably sexually active.

Okay, I know this is a little apples-to-oranges here, but stick with me. More than once I have revealed what I do about my period and have encountered that “EW EW blood” attitude from women who had boyfriends (and in one case, a husband). So it’s okay to let your fella repeatedly jam his penis into you, but you can’t reach in and fish out a little rubber cup? WHAT? Dude, don’t even talk to me about unsanitary, you penis-jammer.

I’m not at home nights, you know, all smearing my glorious female essence on my chakras or anything, but it’s your body. Get comfortable in it to the point where, if you had to, you could reach up there and find that missing Barbie head or button or whatever. I’m just saying.

Where was I? I think I was in labor at the Chinese restaurant on Friday, March 11th, telling my lawyer to fuck himself. So my water broke in my kitchen on Thursday night, and I slept okay that night. I was excited, because I knew the trial of carrying my donkey-kicking potential-anti-Christ was about to come to an end.

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Where was I? Oh, yes, I was telling you about my alien-invasion-stylee pregnancy. I think I had left off at the ultrasound, in which we discovered that I would not have to name my child “Demonicus” or “Linda Blair”* on account of the fact that the baby did not have horns or a tail (visible).

The rest of the pregnancy was uneventful, as they say, inside my body. Strudel grew her funny little pointy eyebrows like her dad’s and her widow’s peak like her dad’s and her ability to completely lose her shit when presented with any new way of doing things and become as obstinate as a donkey up a minaret, why…just like her dad does. To be fair, after pitching a fit, she has also has his ability to change her mind and accept new things with open arms a very short time afterwards. My modus operandi around here is to introduce one of my new and crazy ideas, jump into the nearest foxhole, and then wait five minutes.

Sometimes I feel like we didn’t so much make a baby, as I acted as a host for his clone, if you know what I mean.

Outside my body, life was eventful as hell. I told you recently that Seattle Federline, my first babydaddy, was trying to pry money out of me last December. At this point I had really run out of money to litigate, and had been told I would need another $15,000 to finish the investigations and take it to trial. I approached him about settling and he agreed to it. He knew I was pregnant again / still because I had told Frannie, and we decided to keep my pregnancy a secret. For me, my initial decision to lie on the court paperwork was because of the fact that in Washington State, a woman has to declare if she is pregnant on the divorce papers, and if the husband is the father. At the time, Sea-Fed had an unreversed vasectomy, and I had gotten pregnant after I had moved out of the house we lived in. I saw no need to bring it up. This is no justification, but it certainly made me angry that I was supposed to declare a pregnancy, even if it was physically impossible in more ways than one that it was the husband’s, while the husband does not have to declare if he has impregnated other women. Don’t tell me that’s not important, either, because supporting another child will affect his income and ability to support other children.

While I was pregnant there was quite a flapdoodle in Washington about Shawnna Hughes, who was denied a divorce even though she was pregnant with a child who was not her husband’s. When Hughes got pregnant her husband was in prison for beating her. As my lawyer told me, in this state it is presumed that the child is the husband’s despite such things as vasectomies and not wanting to touch somebody’s groadie ass for 1 million gold doubloons. So this was a hot-button topic at the time. As an aside, I am not the first woman who considered lying on the court paperwork.

Anyway, Sea-Fed was trying to shake me down for some money, and if I don’t trust him with my kid you know I don’t trust him with the secret of my new pregnancy. So I made one of the biggest mistakes of my divorce: I told my lawyer that I was pregnant. He immediately said that it was going to have to come out in court. Papers would have to be signed. My companion was going to have to declare paternity and Sea-Fed was going to have to deny it. “Fine,” I said. “They will. Just get me divorced already.” “It’s not that simple,” he replied. “It’s illegal to get divorced in Washington State if you’re pregnant.” Illegal? Crap. That meant I would have to wait three more months, until Strudel would be born in March, to finalize.

I went away then, and I got angry. I talked to everyone I knew about it, some of whom thought what my lawyer said was fishy. I emailed the reporter from our local weekly who was on the Shawnna Hughes story and told her what happened to me. The reporter is a law student and told me that what my lawyer said wasn’t true. She met with me and interviewed me for another angle to the story, but it did not go to press. If I was angry before, I was livid after this.

I called my lawyer and confronted him. He backtracked and attempted to talk circles around me. “I need this to be over,” I told him. When I told him I wanted to settle and finish before I went bankrupt I remember him saying something stupid like, “But is this justice? Is justice being served here?” I snapped, “No, but he’s not drinking himself to death fast enough, so I have to end this.” My lawyer sent me a letter that said it was reiterating what we had discussed on the phone, but not once did he commit what he said about “divorce being illegal in Washington state while pregnant” to print.

So my lawyer and Sea-Fed’s lawyer played pattycake with each other via a volley of incorrect and misfiled paperwork. When I would call him up to ask him what was going on, and tell him to finish already, and that I didn’t believe what he was telling me, he would take pains to remind me that he’d been “a family law lawyer for over twenty years,” so who was the expert here? He would vacillate between being a condescending expert or total fuckwit depending on what resulted in more billable hours. My bill, which I had paid down to a reasonable amount because I did temp work until I was 35 weeks along, trebled in February due to intentional lollygagging.

As far as I was concerned, the jig was motherfucking up. I wasn’t going to get my divorce before I had Strudel, so I had pretty much stopped caring. I just wanted to throw the brakes on before my bill got any higher. In late February I sent my lawyer a letter firing him. He came after me two or three times after that, basically saying, “Are you sure? Are you out of your mind?” I admit that being married to a sociopath for eight years can make you feel like you’re a little barmy at times, but firing my lawyer actually brought on an excellent amount of clarity.

I remember the last phone conversation I had with him. It was a Friday night and I was out to dinner at Chinese food, the awesome “American” kind with the florescent orange sauces, when my cel rang with a blocked call. “It’s my lawyer,” I said to my family. “Sorry.” I answered it.

“Yeah,” I said.

“SJ. Shifty McLamepants here. I just wanted to make a final confirmation that you no longer need my services,” he said.

“No, I’m done.”

“We can finish really quickly once you have the baby.”

“I don’t think you understood me. I wanted to get divorced before I had the baby,” I said. “Now I don’t care.”

“This just doesn’t make any sense.” He said this repeatedly throughout our conversation. Doesn’t make sense that I am tired of paying you $150 an hour to drag your feet? That’s a tough concept, I know. He was badgering me and I was having trouble getting off the phone with him. “If you’re concerned about the money, I can finish this for free.”

“It’s too late for this,” I said. “I’m at dinner with my family and I’m labor NOW, so please, I’m done.”

“You’re in labor now?”

“Yes.”

“And you’re out to dinner?”

“Yes.”

“Huh. Call me if you change your mind.” He hung up.

What can I say? I had to have honey walnut prawns one more time before I got housebound for a while.

And what can I say about lawyers and this mess? Your best bet, unless you have multiple thousands of dollars, is to avoid this mess. I was thisclose to leaving my husband when I found out I was pregnant. One crappy millennial New Year’s Eve party and I get stupid, drink champagne and sleep with my husband. A total ugh. I knew something was wrong with him back then, but I didn’t know what…I didn’t have the word for it.

My very illegal advice is this: if you are pregnant by a robot monkey, and you know something is very wrong, you know you have a narrow window of time where you can get out before your pregnancy is discovered. Go, and file for divorce remotely. Don’t feel bad about taking your kid away from their father, because this person is incapable of having feelings for your child anyway. Tell your kid that her father died saving a box of kittens from a burning battleship. Because that will be easier than putting your kid in the possession of a monkey robot with cold, dead eyes a couple of times a month until the kid is eighteen or makes another choice. You can give your kid a more loving environment as a single parent than by sharing her with something that has the emotional life of a rubber plant.

This is the lesson I took away from my divorce. My ex took away a different one, after I brought up his thieving, drug dealing, and child neglect in court his conclusion to me was, “Well, I’m never telling anyone my secrets like that again.”

Sociopaths Walk Among Us, and unfortunately they don’t respond to the sign of the cross or normal human emotions. Most of us assume that other people have normal emotions and a conscience. And sociopaths are good at faking being normal to the outside world. Protect yourself by learning the signs.

And if anyone who wants the name of an awesome lawyer who will lie to you about the law and run up your bill like mad in the Seattle area, email me.

* That’s right, “Linda Blair.” Not the name of the character from “The Exorcist,” but just “Linda Blair.” I can hear myself now: “LINDA Blair! You get yor butt back into this trailer TOOT SWEET!”