Category: parenting

Learning to have an opinion

I’m not trying to sound pathetic when I say this, but when you are the mother of small children it is so much easier if you have no needs or desires.

Babies can be very sweet, and they can also be ridiculously helpless and demanding.  Any ideas you might have about the purpose of evenings or weekends–or NIGHTS, for that matter–are best left repressed.  Just go with the flow.  If baby is hungry, baby gets fed.  If baby needs a fresh diaper, by gum she gets it.

If you are at the playground and the bathrooms are locked you simply do not need to go to the bathroom.

If you are at the zoo and everyone is happy, then it does not matter that you forgot to eat breakfast.  And lunch.  Or that the only snacks you brought are teething biscuits and boobs.  You just wait until you can pry your child away from the lemurs.  It’s not like you’re going to die.

On the weekend, you dump the baby with the spouse and race to lay in groceries and supplies for the week.  Who knows when you might next escape unchaperoned.  It is so much more bearable to drop a small fortune on pre-landfill when no one is screaming or battling diarrhea in your orbit.

If your infant does not nap or tolerate being set down, any serious business just has to wait for the spouse to return.  And if he happens to be in Japan like mine often was, you’re just fucked.

Around this time, a friend asked me if I had seen the movie Kill Bill.  I laughed maniacally in her face.

“I’m on house arrest,” I explained.

She looked at me quizzically.  “It’s out on dvd now,” she countered.

“I know,” I sighed.  “It’s just that–”  I cut myself short.  How could I explain that even if I did manage to get the kid to sleep without dozing off myself, I was still going to have to get up two or three or five times during the night.  I wasn’t about to squander the opportunity to restore my sanity on 111 minutes of choreographed violence.  Chances are, if something was published, released, sung, built, or exploded between 2003 and 2008 I’ve never heard of it.  You can ask, though, and I’ll do my best not to get huffy.

Now that the girls are six and eight, I am realizing that I have completely forgotten how to figure out what I would actually like to be doing.  Not only is my spouse willing and able to step in, the girls can amuse themselves for an hour or so, yet I can’t decide how to spend my precious sixty minutes.  Occasionally I figure it out at the end of the day, when it’s too late.  Oh, yeah.  It would have felt great to write and exercise, but I spent the whole day playing with the dollhouse and schlepping the kids around town.  If I set clear goals, I could squeeze in dolls and exercise, right?

Lookout world.  I’m thinking about formulating an opinion.

Novel excerpt: Bad Parenting 101

I cannot account for the drive to swap ‘most embarrassing moments.’ Perhaps it is just a “misery loves company” sort of phenomenon, or a chance to release old baggage and laugh at ourselves in the process.  I do know that it is more enjoyable if you follow certain rules.  You have to pick the right sort of person with whom to share, and then make sure to speak last—just in case. Gauge the level of trust based on how heinous your friend’s story is.  Personally, I have such an accumulation of humiliating moments that I like to select one that is only very slightly less mortifying than my companion’s.  I was about to share a truly devastating, ego-crushing debacle with an acquaintance, but LUCKILY I made her share first.  Since when does accidentally running a load of laundry twice through the wash count as embarrassing?  I immediately reneged on my promised reciprocation.  After that lame-ass, milquetoast non-revelation, there was no way was I going to talk about what happened to me in a port-a-potty once at a rock concert.  NO WAY.

Swapping bad parenting stories follows the same principles, and it feels even more liberating to get that shit off your chest and begin to forgive yourself–especially if your friend did something even worse.  That feels great.

I was once in a terribly uncomfortable situation…trapped in a station wagon with a gallery-owner I had never met, despite the fact that I had been interning at his place for months.  He was driving around downtown like a maniac.  My job was to run into places and pick up ridiculously valuable objects here and there, and toss them into the trunk while he double-parked and stared at me vaguely.  “WHO are you, again?” he asked for the third time.  I realized he would never get the hang of my name, so I changed my tactic:  “I’m the fool who found out I was pregnant 3 weeks into art school and has been trying to finish ever since.”  Suddenly, his vision cleared and he started talking with me like a real person, to my great relief.

We talked about everything:  art, philosophy, truth, but mostly parenting. When I told him my two year old threw down her crayon and yelled “fuck it,” when she got frustrated, he just laughed and said, “That’s nothing.  On his first day of kindergarten, my son turned to his neighbor at the lunch table and said—in front of the teacher and half a dozen other parents–‘Wanna toke of my cookie?’”

He won that round, but lately I’ve been working on some seriously competitive material.

Novel Excerpt: Dangers of Parenting

Parenting is dangerous work.  Kids will do, throw, and say things that make it impossible to watch where you are going, by foot or by car.  Thanks to legions of alert drivers ahead and behind, we have avoided countless close calls.  Small people seem strangely intent on committing suicide.  They throw themselves off of slides and into the street on a regular basis.  They eat rocks and shiny metal objects.  They put small round things up their nose.  They choke on all manner of harmless-looking food items.  Meanwhile, schlepping their tiny bodies and their disproportionate mounds of accompanying crap screws up your back and shoulders.  Even playing with them can be treacherous.  I once threw out my neck playing Oogie Boogie.  I got physically stuck in a maze of tunnels ten feet off the ground while pregnant with #2.  No one had explained that being pregnant while raising a toddler is a Herculean task.  Instead of resting when you get sick or tired, you take a whiney child to the zoo, and carry them around when they refuse to walk or sit in the stroller.  The needs of a pregnant woman and her eighteen month old are diametrically opposed.   As they get older, they start to walk reliably, but it’s still dicey.  That last round of spanky tag got so heated I twisted my ankle and had some discomfort sitting down to ice it for the next hour or so.

Yet long-term sleep deprivation is by far the most hazardous aspect of parenting.  It endangers life, limb, sanity, and all personal relationships. You snap at your spouse.  You can’t tell your friends from your frenemies.  You become bitter and stupid.  You can’t finish a thought, let alone a sentence.  You drop things, spill things, break things, and lose things, especially your shit.  I once got out of the car while it was running to wander around and rummage in the trunk.  It took a moment before I realized that the car was still in reverse and careening backwards down Potrero Hill with my babbling child inside.  As I stared dumbly at the unfolding debacle, I knocked myself over with the door I had left open.  Though secretly impressed by my wonder woman leap to the rescue of surrounding people and property, I never told anyone about the incident until now.  I’m pretty sure it is more indicative of my stupidity than any sort of heroism, but it does illustrate nicely why sleep deprivation is used as a torture technique.  You become completely unglued and irrational.

Day two: another excerpt

But baby was born and she was just perfectly beautiful. She latched on and started nursing eagerly, and I thought, “when she’s done, we’ll just sleep and sleep and sleep.” She didn’t finish, though. She was insatiable. And, it turns out you have to do stacks of paperwork before they let you go to the room. It took hours to fill it all out, administer exams, tests, shots, eye drops, the whole nine yards. When we finally headed to the room around 4 am for some sleep, guess what? Baby did not want to sleep. Baby wanted to scream. She wanted to nurse. She would not be put down. This frustrated me to no end. I had made a rational and informed decision that the baby would sleep in her own crib from day one so I wouldn’t ruin sleep patterns for the whole family as well as end my sex life. It had never occurred to me that the baby might have her own opinion on the matter. She wanted to be held. At all times. She nursed relentlessly, and when the colostrom was gone and my milk had not yet come in, she bit at me until my nipples bled. “See?” I thought to myself. “It’s because you weren’t well-centered enough throughout the pregnancy. You didn’t do enough yoga. You harbored bad thoughts about your hippie birthing coach. You didn’t sing stupid twinkle songs to the fetus. Now you’re fucked.”

Ooh! Today’s novel excerpt!

“My main concern about art school was a vision of quirky painter types, holing up in their studios and spewing arty masturbations about their tiny inner lives onto giant canvases.  What if I got sucked into their self-indulgent little cult?  Ugh.  But I was studying photography!  I would journey out into reality, recording lives legions away from my inner world.

Sadly, when I found out I was pregnant, I felt tremendous pressure to turn the lens on myself.  “If not now, when?” my teachers queried.  Here was this tremendous opportunity for self-exploration, they persisted, a once in a lifetime chance!  And so my work devolved into self-indulgent arty masturbations about my tiny inner life.  As I transformed into my own worst nightmare, at least I was too broke to make the ginormous prints that would have reified the accompanying self-loathing.”