Her Bad Mother

Friday, March 20, 2009

Good Housekeeping: Totally Slobtastic Slackermom Edition

If you were ever to visit my neighborhood, I would love for you to drop by. I'd be thrilled to see you, and I would totally invite you onto my verandah, and I would fix us up a nice pot of coffee and we would sit outside and eat cupcakes - fresh from the bakery down the street - and drink our coffee and chat. Or maybe it would be, like, late afternoon or evening and I would bust out the wine and the cheese and we would sit outside and enjoy the sunset and it would be lovely, really, just perfectly lovely. But I'd really hope that you wouldn't ask to use the bathroom. Because I'd really kind of rather you not come in my house.

It's not that I have anything against you, or that I have weird bathroom issues. It's just that, you know, if you'd just dropped by? And I hadn't had enough notice to do a total sweep of the house in advance of your visit? I just would totally not want you to come inside. Because, really, it usually looks something like this:


That's what it looks like, all the time. Worse even. That room at the back? That's supposed to be the dining room. Needless to say, we don't do a lot of dining there. We actually moved the table out so that there'd be more room for things like, say, easels and chalkboards and paints. Also, giant stuffed cows and little plastic grocery carts. The piano is there, just off to the right, and it does get played, but it also functions as a toy shelf and Dora puzzle storage unit.

Oh, we try to keep it tidy. Two or three times a day I shove toys and books and miscellaneous child crap into the various baskets that you see strewn about. Then I vacuum. And then the room looks clean for about fifteen minutes before Jasper and/or Emilia begin upturning baskets and flinging toys everywhere again.

And then it looks something like this:



And this isn't even the worst room. If I, in a fit of transparency, let you in the front door, I still wouldn't let you up the stairs. That's where I hide the real mess: the piles of laundry, the unpacked suitcases (seriously), the random pieces of barely used baby equipment, the children. The bathroom is also upstairs, which is why, if you mentioned a need to use the facilities, I might suddenly suggest that we head to the cafe around the corner. For cookies! They make the best cookies! Also, their restroom doesn't have childrens' toothpaste smeared across the vanity mirror, and they probably actually put the toilet paper on the roll.

It's a losing battle for me, keeping house. I just can't do it. I have a ten-month old baby who is just starting to walk and using his newfound mobility to seek out things to scatter and destroy, and a three-year old who loves nothing more than to mark her territory by spreading toys and books as far as she can see. And I have a husband who has trouble figuring out the relationship between socks and sock drawers and two cats who have an enthusiastic affection for dragging miscellaneous crap underneath sofas and leaving it there to collect dust. It is Sisyphean, I tell you, the work of managing a household while tending to two very small children and a tidiness-challenged husband. It is impossible, and unavoidable, and necessary, and it causes me no end of stress.

Derrida and Bukowski get tossed and stomped. Not shown: destruction of the lesser post-modernists and later dirty realists.

I can look at pictures, in magazines, of skinny mom-celebs - the Gwyneths, the Angelinas - and it doesn't bother me, because, please. I know the work of a trainer and a private chef when I see it. But I see images of tidy homes - homes that are ostensibly occupied by families, by people with children - and it makes me a little bit crazy. Because even though I know that images in magazines are set-decorated and fluffed and faked, it still worries me, the idea that somewhere out there, other parents are keeping their homes tidy. I do not, and cannot, keep my own home in a state that even approximates something that even resembles a simulation of 'tidy.' And I have no idea how to change that. If I really wanted to lose my muffin-top, I would join a gym or do that shred thing and I would have some reasonable expectation of having some success. But getting my house organized? And keeping it that way? Figuring out the alchemical formula for turning cat turds into gold seem seems a more attainable goal for me.

So I'm trying to come to terms with it, in the same way that I have been trying to come to terms with the muffin-top. Embrace my outer slob, as it were. And it would really, really help if somebody - anybody - out there would stand up and to admit to some slobbiness, too. You don't have to post photographic evidence (although if you wanted to do that, I'd be really impressed. And grateful.) (Here's a Flickr group to post to, if you're so inclined.) Even just a show of hands? Anyone else out there losing the battle of the mess? Anybody else pretty much just ready to surrender?

If not, that's fine. You're still welcome to come visit me. Just make sure that you pee before you get here.

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Wednesday, March 18, 2009

10 Things To Do Before You Become A Parent

I heard a song once - one of those songs that you hear on the radio in someone else's car, or over the soundsystem at the grocery store - that had a refrain about some woman regretting the fact, in her middle age, that she'd never driven a sports car around Paris, or something to that effect. I can't remember exactly; what stuck with me, mostly, was the thought that well, I'd been to Paris. So - I thought - I probably wouldn't have that regret. Which, as it turned out, was quite right: I'm not yet in my middle age, but I can see it on the horizon, and I'm happy to report that there seem to be no travel-related regrets forthcoming.

That said, I do have some regrets, of a sort; they're just not of the bucket-list variety. My regrets - such as they are, now that I'm a parent, with responsibilities and accountabilities and very limited ability to do as I please - are more of the man, I wish I'd appreciated that when kind of regret. (Regret is a bit strong. Let's call these retrospective yearnings.) I was thinking about this yesterday, as I lay on the couch with a cranium-rattling headache, trying to amuse the baby by weakly nudging a rattle toward him with my foot. In that moment, the idea that I might ever regret something like not being able to take off to Paris for the weekend struck me as absurd. Paris, schmaris. What I regretted most in that moment was the fact that in my pre-motherhood life I did not appreciate the luxury of being able to take to my bed when I was sick. Which got me thinking: if I knew then what I know now, what would I have done more often or appreciated more before I became a parent?

1. Get sick, and like it: I know, being sick is supposed to be a miserable thing. But is it, really? Assuming that your symptoms are not too brutal, and/or that you're able to medicate yourself into a happy stupor, there is much to enjoy about being sick. You stay in bed all day, drinking hot steamy drinks and slurping chicken soup and watching bad game shows and soap operas and Dr. Phil and maybe thumbing through some tabloids and napping and just generally enjoying the Vicks VapoRub-scented experience of convalescence. If you live with someone - and especially if that someone is a spouse or romantically beholden to you in anyway - you can bitch and whine at them and they will bring you more soup.

You cannot do this when you have small children. There are no sick days when you have small children. When you have small children, you cannot take to your bed and watch television and huff VapoRub. You have to parent. So what it you're dripping snot on the head of your wailing baby? That baby isn't going to feed/soothe/change himself. You're on duty, bitch. Deal with it.

2. Take naps. Take lots of naps. The kind where you doze off on the couch before dinner, the kind where you nod off at your desk at work, the kind where you just say screw Monday and go back to bed for an hour. Because what I said above about being on duty? That applies 24-7. Which means, no, you can't just take twenty minutes to "rest your eyes." Unless the baby is having his own nap, in which case you're welcome to try to nap, but I'm guessing that you might want to shower/bathe/eat, too, and you've probably only got forty minutes, so.

3. Shower/bathe. Enjoy your showers. Take lots of them, and make them long and hot. Also, baths, if you're a bath person. Long hot baths at all hours of the day. Twice a day, even! With bubbles and oils and magazines.

Oh, sure, it's not like you're forced to stop bathing and showering when the kids come along, but you will find that your bathing/shower regimen is seriously curtailed. You'll skip days - those days when eating and sleeping seem more pressing than cleanliness - and when you finally do get around to performing some ablutions? You'll be scrambling through that shower in less than three minutes because the baby is in his crib, shrieking, or you'll be splashing briefly in a lukewarm tub because the hot water tank got drained when the toddler's tub needed to be refilled, twice, after she a) brought a roll of toilet paper into the tub, because b) her 'poo-poo was coming.'

You will miss long, hot, leisurely baths and showers, I promise you. Enjoy them now.

4. Have a drink or two at lunch. You know how, sometimes, you go out for lunch on a Saturday and someone says, why don't we order a bottle of wine/get margaritas/have a beer? and you spend the afternoon eating and talking and drinking and working up a delicious buzz? And it's, like, totally fine, because you know that you can go home and have a nap and a bath before thinking about what your evening looks like? Yeah, you can't do that when you have small children, because a) you're probably not having lunch anywhere that sells a decent bottle of wine, and b) naps? baths? Ha. See above.

5. Cultivate and appreciate a hangover. Hangovers suck, right? Wrong. Hangovers only suck if you can't take a day off to recover from them. Hangovers, properly tended to, are similar to being sick, only with a little added frisson of shame to make things interesting. When you don't have small children, you can spend your hangover day in bed, watching television and eating potato chips and warding off that buzz of guilt with Oreos and chocolate milk. When you do have small children, you can't do this, for reasons that I've already stated. But you're probably not drinking all that much, either, so it's kind of a moot point.

6. Stay up late/sleep in. See above re: hangovers/being sick. You just really don't get to spend a lot of time in bed when you have small children.

7. Have sex whenever you want. Ditto.

8. Spend a rainy day watching an entire season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. There's a theme emerging here, I know: things that you do while curled up in blankets on the sofa or in bed while eating junk food. I can't recommend these activities highly enough. I miss them desperately. If you asked me, would you like to take the family on a Caribbean vacation, or would you like to spend a week, by yourself, just laying around watching DVDs and reading books and eating cookie dough? I would really have to think about that.

Because, seriously: Paris, Barcelona, Tulum, whatever. Whenever I do get around to going back to those places, I'll probably want to take the kids anyway, because I want to see it all through their eyes and I want them to see what I've seen, blah blah blah. But a day off, where I do nothing but lounge and nap and snack and just generally indulge in some lazy-assed laziness? That place, I want to go to there. ALONE.

9. Eat chocolate chip cookie dough (or guilty pleasure food of choice) without any regard for who might be watching. I love cookie dough. I think that cookie dough is better than cookies. But I would strongly prefer that my three-year old eat, say, apple slices and cheese, rather than cookie dough, and so I conceal my cookie dough habit from her as best I can, with varying degrees of success. Just yesterday I was trying to nibble a hunk of chocolate chip cookie dough, torn from the end of a Pillsbury cookie dough package, when I was confronted by my daughter, who demanded to know what I was eating. It's cheese, I told her. Spicy cheese. The kind you don't like.

Those look like chocolate, she said, pointing at the chocolate chips.

They're raisins, I said. Spicy cheese raisins. Then I shoved the rest of it in my mouth and swallowed before she could get a closer look. It kind of ruined my enjoyment of the experience, quite frankly.

10. Take more naps. Seriously. I adore my children, and wouldn't trade them for anything in the world, but really: most days, I would pay serious cash money for a nap.

Or a long hot bath. Or some uninterrupted cookie dough indulgence. Or a day off. I wish that I'd known that back in the days when I could have them all for free.

But now you know. You're welcome.

(Parents: what would you add to this list? Would you take Paris or the Caribbean over Lounge Week? Am I the only lazy-assed layabout out here in momosphere-land? Or would you one-up me and demand two weeks? You know, enough time to watch all back-seasons of Lost and maybe also Battlestar Galactica?)

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Monday, March 16, 2009

Monday, Monday

I have typed six paragraphs this afternoon. I have deleted them all. I have deleted them all because they all said the same thing, and the thing that they said was boring and stupid and self-obsessed and whiny and I couldn't decide whether or not I was willing to indulge in any more self-obsessed whining in this space and so I kept retyping the same blah-blah-blah-tired-malaise-blah crap onto the screen and then erasing that same blah-blah-blah-tired-malaise-blah crap because, really, who wants to read about that? Who wants to write about that?

Bah.

So I decided to spare you my melancholy. Instead, I'll just direct you to some better reading, and go take a B-complex multivitamin:

1) When grandmothers get mad: my mother, frustrated and angry with the New York Times, lets loose on her own blog. (Yeah, you heard me. She has her own blog now. She needs encouragement, so please visit.)

2) You think you're stressed out? Marital discord and sexual abuse and frustrations about babies having babies are being discussed over at the Basement. (Remember the rules over there, people: comment nicely. You're free to disagree with opinions, and tough-love is welcome, but it all needs to be dealt nicely. Civilly. Respectfully.)

3) What do Jim Carrey, Pam Anderson and I have in common, other than a troubling propensity for oversharing? We're all Canadian. So are all these bloggers. Check out our new project (it's still, like, totally in beta, but you should still visit, and cheer us on!)

4) Or, just shut your computer and take a nap. That's what all the cool kids are doing.

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