Your Future Overlord

I want YOU to be my Mommy.

You're going to hate me right off the bat when I tell you that all of my pregnancies were planned. The first one ended in a miscarriage at seven weeks. It was really a nothing thing to me. A mild disappointment and nothing more. They told me the "remains" were going to be buried in a group plot on the hospital grounds, and I could visit any time I wanted, but I was a little weirded out by the concept that it was anything more than unfinished cells. I moved on without any grief period whatsoever.

My second pregnancy went full term, though. We conceived right away, just like we did the first time. I said to my husband, "Let's make a baby." We did what needing doing, this one stuck, and a baby was born from it nine months later. A baby I was referring to as Your Future Overlord long before she came into this world.

The joke is that I didn't want to be the mother of a future President. Why be President of the United States when you can be Master of the Entire World? I wanted my child to aspire to greater things, to be a conqueror of nations! Mostly I was just influenced by video games and giggled at the idea of any child of mine bossing around a bunch of hapless minions.

My friends in the freeform role-playing community took it to mean that I intended on training my spawn to duel, and they hoped to see him or her in a decade or so on the Rings of Honor site doing a better job of gaining rank than I ever have. I do not discount this possibility.

I'm sure all of that goes right over the heads of more than half of you, which is why I provided some links. You're welcome.

So anyway!

With our first child, my husband and I agreed not to learn the gender until it was born. This was in part due to the fact that if it should turn out to be a girl I did not want to be overwhelmed with an onslaught of pink. I hate(d) pink with the passion of a thousand fiery suns. I wanted to keep it out of my house for as long as humanly possible. Mostly we just wanted to experience the surprise of being told "It's a boy!" or "It's a girl!" at the hospital.

Though we've already established I'm not a religious person, I am not entirely averse to the idea that the supernatural exists. (I do believe in fairies! I do! I do!) I've always felt there was something more out there, and frankly the idea that humanity is the superior species is too arrogant for my blood. But I believe in the power of belief, because I'm pretty sure everybody (my mother-in-law especially) cursed me by insisting it was going to be a girl.

Nobody bought me girl things, though. I insisted on gender neutral everything. Even if I did know ahead of time it was a girl, I wasn't going to buy pink butterfly bedding and pink polka-dot high chairs and car seats and.... No. Just no. I didn't want to drown in the pink and frilly that is much to my dismay automatically associated with my gender. I avoided all of that for at least the first three months of my firstborn's existence. 

But I may be getting ahead of myself.

My first full term pregnancy was not perfect. I weighed merely 93 pounds when it all began. I was still recovering from years of assault on my body from bad teeth filling me with poisons. The skinny thing with the baby bump in the picture above is not a woman I was really proud to be. I was even a smoker, and didn't manage to give it up until I was 5 months along. Sorry, kiddo.

There were three concerns with my pregnancy. The first was, of course, that I needed to quit smoking. The second was that I needed to put on more weight. No lie. My midwife put me on a milkshake-a-day diet, which I found impossible to keep up on. The third concern was that my baby had a single artery umbilical cord. None of these were actually very life-threatening to me or the baby, but there loomed the possibility that birth defects could occur. None did. And I don't think any of these factored into what really happened.

So my due date was set to October 27th, 2010. I kept joking that I hoped the baby camped in there a little longer so I could have a Halloween baby, because that would be cool. Come that final month, however, I was just ready to be done with it all, because I had ballooned out to add half my original body weight, my feet were swollen, I wasn't sleeping comfortably at all, and my ribs felt bruised constantly up under the left side. Turns out her head was wedged up there all that time, because...

On October 4th, 2010, we had another ultrasound done. Due to the condition of the single artery umbilical cord, and my size, and this being my first pregnancy, the doctors ordered me to have a lot of ultrasounds to keep up on the baby and make sure it was developing all right. On that day, the ultrasound tech made a concerning discovery. She said, "I can't see anything. There's no amnio in there to cushion anything." All we saw on the screen was a mass of gray, which was odd. So she sent the results to the doctor and had us wait in the lobby.

We waited . . . and waited . . . and waited.

Patients were called back. Those same patients left. Hours and hours of playing solitaire on my smartphone. Waiting. Until we realized that we were the last people in the waiting room, the sky was getting dark outside, they were turning down the lights, and it occurred to us that we had been waiting there until closing time. Finally, someone fetched us and took us back to talk to a doctor.

The doctor explained the situation to me, but I don't remember much besides him saying, "So. How would you feel about having that baby today?"

The baby wasn't due for another three weeks! It had never even occurred to me that babies could be born early! I had been hoping for a natural birth! I wasn't ready! We didn't even have a mattress for the crib! Or a car seat! Our baby shower had only been a few weeks ago! I didn't have a hospital bag packed! I was starting to hyperventilate! Not really, but it was a near thing.

I said to the doctor, "Well if you think it's best." He said he did and then got on the phone to call the hospital to set up a cesarean for me. They wanted to get the baby out of me, because my mysteriously vanishing amniotic fluid was not good. It was weird. I hadn't been leaking anything. You'd think I would've noticed something like that.

So the doctor called the hospital, and I remember that conversation rather clearly. Maybe not the precise words, but the gist I recall well. He bargained with the surgeon for a few minutes. Apparently there had been thirteen c-sections scheduled for the following day! 13! The day after wasn't good enough, he said. I needed this done tonight or tomorrow. Since she was so full up tomorrow, the surgeon agreed to do my surgery that night.

My husband and I went home to pack our overnight bag in a panic. I'm sure I didn't have half as much in it as the books and websites suggest. But I also know I put in twice as much of the things I didn't actually need, like a baby naming book.

We already had names picked out. I don't know why I took the book, other than a panicked moment of, "What if I change my mind at the last minute!?" That didn't happen, though. The truth is I was dead set on the name for a boy. Still am, if we ever have one. The girl name I wasn't too sure about, though, until they put her in my arms for the first time. I smiled, looked at her teeny little face, and the first thing I said to her was, "Hello, Lilah."

Her first name came to me in a dream. I think I was only six months along at the time. All through the pregnancy I had been scouring the Internet and books in search of the perfect name. I had my heart set on an R name for a while, but couldn't find the right one. Nothing went well with the middle name we had already decided upon: Jayne. Yes, she is named after Jayne Cobb from Firefly. My favorite character from my favorite (unfortunately cancelled) television series of all time. 

Middle name, check. First name? Um.

So I had this dream that took place in my step-mother's house. The baby was born. For some reason Jamie and I were staying there. That's odd when you understand that I haven't spoken to my step-mother for several years, since my father died. She wasn't even invited to our wedding. But I guess my pregnant dreams wanted me to feel like I was home, somewhere, and built this dreamscape around her house. 

My eldest brother Mike was in this dream, and I left him in the living room with the baby while I stepped out to talk to my husband, who was smoking on the front porch. I said, in my dream, "What do you think of the name Lilah?" He said, "I like it."

This same scene played itself out the following day on the back patio of our loft bedroom apartment. Except it was day time and my brother Mike was not present. Oh. And the baby was not born yet. In my dream, apparently I'd had the baby and still hadn't decided on her name. I had some pretty wicked pregnancy dreams before she came into this world. Like the one in which I gave birth to quadruplets, and they were all girls!

Thank goodness I only had the one for real!

Your Future Overlord was born October 4, 2010 at 9:06 PM. She weighed 5 pounds, 13 ounces, and measured only 17 1/2 inches in length. She was born three weeks early, and was so tiny that her head literally fit in the palm of her daddy's hand.

We were given the biggest room in the maternity room. It came fully equipped with a chair and a sofa, with enough room for a dance party to take place in. The maternity room was so quiet that first night. The following morning, all the spare rooms filled up fast! Thirteen scheduled c-sections! Ricky Lake really wasn't joking when she made that movie.

They Find My Lack of Faith Disturbing

About that wedding...

There is one very important fact about me that you must know before committing fully to reading my blog regularly. This truth may make or break our online relationship, dear reader. I hope that you are capable of overlooking this "flaw" of mine. The truth is...

I am an agnostic.

A dirty heathen.

A non-believer.

A doubter.

A free-thinker.

One of the many things my husband and I agreed upon that sealed the deal of our marriage from the beginning is that there would be no god between us. Any children we created together would be raised as free-thinkers, free of religion. Our wedding would have absolutely zero church involvement whatsoever.

Let me tell you something. That last part wasn't easy to accomplish.

I owe most of the success of my wedding to my Aunt Carol, who was more than delighted to step up to the task of being my free-of-charge wedding planner. I don't know what we would have done without her. She bought pretty much all of the decorations for our reception and ceremony. She found us the park and reserved the time for us. She rented the chairs; I think from her own church. She found us our reception hall and put in a tremendous amount of time into giving me exactly what I wanted. She and her sister (my other aunt, duh) both paid for our honeymoon by giving us a gift pass on their timeshare. I can't thank them enough.

A lot of other people pitched in, too, though. The father of my childhood best friend came in all the way from Pittsburgh to be our pianist for the ceremony, playing an eclectic selection of music instead of the traditional march. Everybody in the wedding party helped decorate the reception hall before the ceremony, bright and early the morning of the big event. My maid-of-honor's friend filmed everything, though I don't think I've ever seen the video and nobody knows where it went. My brother Keith got a photographer on discount, and unfortunately we never received our wedding pictures. But through the generosity of gifts given to us from all of our guests, we have photos aplenty to share.

Mawwiage. Keepin' it classy.

The trick was finding someone to marry us! The disturbing truth of the matter, in 2003, is that there were only two types of people willing to perform a marriage ceremony. The number one and most commonly used method that my husband and I avoided at all costs was through a church official. The other method was to make a date with a judge. The word from the courthouse was that they only performed marriage ceremonies at the courthouse. Nobody was willing to come to our park of choice. Except one lady I found in the phone book.

I found only one ordained minister, official Justice of the Peace, in the entire phone book for Northeastern Ohio who was willing to come to Canton to do our ceremony outside of the confines of a chapel or courtroom. Only one person who was willing to do it without any mention of any god whatsoever. I wish I could remember her name. She found for us a lovely Cherokee love blessing, and tossed in a moment of silence to honor my long-departed mother and father, neither of which were alive to see me on my wedding day.

Everything went swimmingly, completely faith free . . . until my uncle sneaked in the before meal prayer at our reception without first consulting me about it.

Appropriate reaction is appropriate.

~     *     ~     *     ~

Apart from our love of nerdy things -- such as books, video games, and chess -- my husband and I share a conviction that religion is not without flaw. On his part, he was raised in a household in which religion was not an issue. Though his mother is a woman of faith, it was never pushed on him. They never went to church as a family. It was the one thing his father was thankfully adamant on, that his children not be subjected to religious indoctrination.

I, on the other hand, am a victim of just the opposite.

When I was a child, we went to church every Sunday. I do not at all remember the name of the church, or which denomination it was specifically (maybe Lutheran or Methodist), but my involvement in the church scene is impossible to forget. My very first impression of religion was that it was vitally important we dress to impress.

"So help  me you will smile for this picture
or I will--!" - November 1984

My mother would wrestle me into a starched, scratchy, moth-ball stinking white frilly dress, with stockings and black patent leather shoes. I hated the thing. I hated wearing dresses in general (still do). I was a notorious tomboy at the time. Skirts and dresses just got in the way of climbing on things and being rambunctious, and made me feel partly naked. My daughters feel the same way. They hate it when I put them in dresses, and are always pulling at the skirts to try to get them out of the way.

To make matters worse, my mother also forced me to put curlers in my hair the night before. So I could look pretty. I didn't want to look pretty, but apparently it was very important to her that I did.

This is what the result of subjugation looks like.

I couldn't tell you what I learned in Sunday school, other than basements are cold, dusty, and the snacks are gross. I remember being given a pocket Bible, that I put stickers in. Stupid fruit stickers that may have been scratch 'n' sniff. I guess we earned them for doing something right. Probably reciting what we'd been spoon-fed to believe. Coloring Jesus riding a velociraptor. I don't know. All I know is that these experiences of my early childhood began the downward spiral to my future as a nonreligious adult.

My mother died when I was 8, and we stopped going to church. My father never brought it up, but the looming shadow of religion's oppressive power still hung over us when we attended family gatherings. Before meal prayers always happened. They still do. I suffer silently while I'm told to hold hands and get in a circle, bow my head and stand and listen while someone leads us in a prayer. I never bow my head. I never close my eyes. I tune out whatever is being said and spend my time reflecting on other things. I consider it a minor inconvenience to endure until I'm permitted to get some food to eat.

(Just ignore my daughter as she runs around giggling maniacally. She's three. She doesn't care, and I'm not putting in the effort to brainwash her.)

Though nobody ever says anything to me outright about my lack of faith, I can feel their disapproval. I know it's there. It's not like I keep it a secret. I'm friends with my aunt on Facebook. I have a tendency to post anti-religious propaganda now and then. Chances are she's reading this right now (hi). But I digress.

I began seriously researching religions of the world when I was a teenager. I wrote many essays on the topics of various faiths. I think my studies really began when I stumbled upon The Book Your Church Doesn't Want You to Read at the library. After suffering the same superficial stereotypes of expectation from the super religious mother of my first boyfriend (that's another story). After so many of my friends seemed determined to save me by asking me to attend church services with them. (I did go to church with them, but I never converted.) After the Bible/Myth class I took when one of my fellow classmates gaped at me and asked, "You don't believe in Gawd???" As if she had never, ever encountered such a phenomenon in her entire life.

Too many people tried to "save" me. It was annoying.

Even after my father died nearly 10 years to the day of the anniversary of my mother's death, I still did not find God.

I found out a lot about how similar all the world's religions are, however. I dabbled a little in the occult. I thought Wicca sounded more my style. I even hung out with a coven for a bit. But deep down inside I found believing in multiple deities that did what I wanted them to do by simply praying to them seemed just as ridiculous as putting all my faith in one.

I tend to see myself as sitting on the line between belief and disbelief. Neither side can prove to me one way or another that a higher power does or does not exist, and I think it's a waste of time to bicker about it. There is plenty of proof, however, of how violent and horrible religion can be as a whole: The Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition, the Salem Witch Trials, 911. Disregarding the debate about whether or not he even existed, just look at what happened to Jesus! The things people have done in the name of their faith are nothing short of atrocities, and I want nothing to do with any group of peoples with such a horrific history marring its name. Even the pagan religions have their fair share of historical evils to account for.

Back to my issue with needing to dress to impress...

"But, Stacey! My church isn't like that! You can dress however you want! Heck. I wear sweat pants most of the time myself!"

I've heard that before. My experience begs to differ. If I show up wearing my usual comfortable ensemble of jeans and a tee-shirt, I get so many disapproving looks. Maybe I just haven't found the right church, people say. I don't really want to find the right church, though. I'm not comfortable in churches. My husband and I are in agreement that church is no place for introverts like us. My biggest discomfort comes from that moment when -- and it always happens -- the pastor or priest or whatever tells the congregation to turn and introduce themselves to the people around them. Shake hands. Make friends!

Listen. I don't like that. Whatever happened to just going to church to hear the "Word of God" and leaving? Why does there have to be this push for fellowship? Why do I have to flee the premises before a sermon is even finished just to avoid being hunted down by the super friendly sharks who can smell my visitor blood from a mile away?

PLEASE JUST LEAVE ME ALONE.

I don't want to get to know you. I don't want to have to talk to you. Let me observe quietly, comfortably in the back row, as far away from everybody else as humanly possible.

Please stop pushing your preconceived notions of human behavior on me.

Please stop pushing your religion on me.

Just let me be.

I wish people could just let it be, but unfortunately how one self-identifies in regards to faith has become a status symbol. If you confess to being a Christian, 80% of the time you're going to be warmly welcomed by your fell man (or woman). Tell anyone that you self-identify as atheist, agnostic, Hindu, Jew, or ('Murica forfend!) Muslim and the war begins. The war to try to convert you. The war to thump you so hard with Bible verses that you're left dizzy and bleeding and beaten down so sore that you just don't want to fight anymore.

That's where I stand, really. I don't want to fight anymore. There are instances in which I feel compelled to do so, however. Particularly regarding "the sanctity of marriage" that always comes into play these days with the fight to legalize gay marriage.

There shouldn't even be a fight. Religion does not own marriage. If it did, I never would have done this:

By all rights I shouldn't have even been
 wearing white.

Chess. Or, How I Met Their Father

That's me sitting cross-legged, front and center, in the smiley face shirt. This picture was taken circa 1997 for my Junior class yearbook. It's a picture of the Chess Club, and yes I was a member. In fact, I was third chair on a five person competition team. We weren't the best of the best, but we gave most other schools a run for their money. I wish I could remember what we placed at that year.

I have loved chess for as long as I can remember. My mother used to be into making ceramics, and once upon a time created a giant set of foot tall pieces that every now and then we would bust out and play on a big checkered rug. One of my brother's still has that set. I keep meaning to steal it from him to set up in my living room and share with my girls.

I have fond memories of playing chess with my father. He would set up the board on the living room floor. I'd lay on my belly intensely studying the pieces. I vaguely recall him explaining to me which piece does what. I mostly just remember playing with him, and there being a rule for the longest time that nobody was allowed to take my queen no matter what, because it made me cry. Not to worry. I got over that eventually.

The only other people aside from my family I had ever met who had an active interest in chess were the assembled fellow nerds pictured above.

And then I met my husband.

That's him right there hiding behind a co-worker.

I met my husband at Target, and we are one of the rare, mythical success stories of work-place relationships. I started working there at the very end of 2001, one whole week before my 22nd birthday. At the time, I was already involved in a complicated relationship with someone else. A depressing, complicated, bleak relationship that had no future for me whatsoever. I was on my second trial run with yet another anti-marriage, anti-children, rebel. At the time I was pretty firmly convinced that all men were like this and that I was destined to live with a mate that would never give me offspring for the rest of my life.

Then, on my second day of work, a woman named Jen stopped me on my way back to the fixture room (I worked on the planogram team) and said to me, "Stacey. You really need to flirt with Jamie."

A dozen score memories came flooding in at that moment. My first thought was, "Do I really look like a lesbian?" because to the best of my experience the only people I had ever met named Jamie, my cousin included, were female. I remembered moments of jocks stopping me at the water fountain in grade school to ask me, "Are you a boy or a girl?" simply because I was a tomboy and did not like wearing girly things. I had a flash recall of the exchange student who saw me coming out of a stall in the girls' restroom, screaming, and running out to tell a teacher there was a boy in there.

This isn't so terribly difficult to believe when you realize that in grade school I looked like this:

I'm not sure which year this is: 1990 maybe?

So it was with great trepidation I slowly indulged my well-meaning coworker by oozing through time and asking, "Whooooo?"

Jen stepped out to the end of the aisle she was stocking and pointed down the main thoroughfare toward electronics, where all I saw were two young men shelving CDs. She said, "That guy right there on the end." Whew! So she wasn't trying to hook me up with a girl after all! What a relief! "He thinks you rock his world," she added with giddy delight. "Okaaaay," I said warily, and then wandered away. Remember, at the time I already had a boyfriend. It was only my second day on the job. Hooking up with someone was the furthest thing from my mind.

That same day, at break time, I joined the crowd that gathered outside to get our nicotine on (I was a smoker once), and found myself the victim of a 20 Questions barrage from yet another coworker I had just met. Her name was Heather. She drilled me with such inquiries as: "What's your name?", "Where do you live?", and "Do you have a boyfriend?" The answer to that last was a hesitant and uncertain yes, because frankly I was a little weirded out by a woman asking me all these personal questions. Again I was questioning my apparent sexuality.

Long story short, eventually the overnight crowd at Target got me to go to breakfast with them, as was apparently a common ritual among the group. I joined them at Denny's one bright, sunshiny morning, and got to know them a little better. Particularly Jamie. It took him a week or two to convince me to join just him for breakfast after work, at a place called Perkins in North Canton, Ohio.

I couldn't tell you what we ordered to eat, but he had coffee and I had cocoa. We dabbled in awkward small talk, trying to find some common interests. I was extremely uncomfortable, because, as I kept insisting, I had a boyfriend, and eating breakfast alone with this guy who was super interested in me felt like cheating. Fortunately there was a distraction going on in a booth behind us. A pair of teenage boys were playing chess on a regulation board with regulation pieces. I kept sneaking nervous glances back at them, trying to muster up the nerve to ask to play the winner.

Jamie finally asked me, "What're you looking at?"

I said, "Those two guys playing chess back there. I'm thinking about asking to play the winner."

Jamie's immediate response was a bold, honest, "I'm going to marry you."

SAY WHAT?

The only person in my entire life history who had ever uttered such words to me was my dear friend Benji, but he did so clearly in jest. This was dead serious! I was shocked! I was stunned! I was--

Suffice it to say, a year later this happened:

September 7, 2003

Introductions

Let's start with the basics.

Hi! My name is Stacey. I am a 34-year-old non-single white female. I live in the United States of America. I am exactly 5 feet tall, and on average weigh in around 140 pounds. My hair is brown. My eyes are gray. All of this you can determine by taking a glance at my personal ID card, or by meeting me on the street. Of course, there's more to me than that.

As is true with all life stories, however, mine is very, very long. I'm sure over the course of our time together you'll learn more about me. One chapter at a time, though.

The important thing is this blog. I never pictured myself as the "mom blog" type. Most of the millions of ones out there on the great wide Intrawebz today seem to fit into very narrow categories of Everything Is Perfect, I Am Perfect, My Life Is Wonderful, Welcome to Stepford Wives-ville!

I am not that person.

Those blogs bore me.

I am a nerd, and I was a nerd before nerds were cool. No seriously. This is my 5th grade picture:

If that one doesn't sell it for you, check out my 8th grade picture:

Back in the '80s and '90s, such a thing as Geek Chic didn't exist. Those big round glasses I was wearing served no purpose of style, but were very functional. I could see with them on. Without them on, not so much. Though I still require glasses to see, my style has much improved since then, but I'm still a nerd.

As was true then is still true now. I enjoy video games immensely. I was playing them since the bygone days of the Atari 2600. My mother used to keep a binder next to our box full of cartridges, in which she would log her high scores. If any of us beat her high score on any game, it was war. She would play nonstop until she conquered us. I probably got my love of video games from her. We were one of the first families to have a home computer, VCR, cable television, and the Nintendo entertainment system.

Among my other interests are reading, writing, Science Fiction, fantasy, classic literature, fiction, movies, television, knitting, crocheting, amigurumi, board games, role-playing, tabletop games, MMOs, anime, manga, breastfeeding, and of course parenting. The thing is, though...

No other mom blog covers these topics. Except maybe the last two. So that's where I come in.

My name is Stacey Miner. I am a nerd. I have been married to my husband nerd for 10 wonderful years. Together we spawned two nerdlings in training. Join me while I talk about their indoctrination into nerd culture. It is my hope that I can instill in them the same love for all things nerdy that my husband and I share, and above all to help them become strong, young women armed with the high self esteem vorpal sword and a devil-may-care attitude that will allow them to defeat the gender stereotype beasts that plague our world, as I have, without so much as breaking a nail.

Welcome to Nerdling Academy.