I haven’t written in a long time. This isn’t because I haven’t had anything interesting to say. In my opinion I’ve had TONS of fantastic stories to tell you. However I’ve been in self-imposed exile because I swore I wouldn’t become one of those parents who can’t talk about ANYthing except the latest adorable thing their offspring did. And frankly there is nothing in my life remotely as interesting as the consistency and regularity of my daughter’s bowel movements. I am just barely cognizant enough to understand you may not agree with this.
So, to amend my earlier statement, I could have written TONS of stories you would have found interesting - unless you happen to not be me.
I’ve managed to extrapolate, however, a few random thoughts that, while mostly still linked in some way to my daughter, are not actual “this one time, my daughter, she did the most ADORABLE thing,” stories so I don’t think they count. However if you’re not a parent or me, I warn you the following column (and probably all subsequent columns for the next 16 years or so) may not be of particular interest.
“B-E-D-T-I-M-E!”
Every night at 8pm, my father would call these letters out with undisguised glee. As a kid, I was completely baffled by this. I recognized the emotion - joy akin to what I felt the night before we were going to Disneyland - but I absolutely could not marry it to the reality of “bedtime,” which was, in a kid’s mind, the WORST word in the world. “Bedtime” is ritualistically followed by begging, pleading, resorting to simple tricks of bathroom and drink requests, ANYthing to prolong the inevitable necessity of lying flat in our beds with no books, no TV, no stimulus and the order to fall asleep.
How could anyone be so happy about the most miserable part of the day (assuming no doctor visits)? I just didn’t get it.
But now? Oh, do I get it.
Every morning brings with it the joy of seeing my daughter again after a long night of separation. As the day wears on, the joy wears off, in equal relation to the crankiness that grows as bedtime approaches. By the end of the day the entire family is worn down to a nub, and my husband and I watch the clock’s slow countdown to our daughter’s bedtime with a desperate eye. At a quarter to eight we turn to our daughter and announce, “Bedtime!” with very little ability (or attempts) to cover up our eagerness to get her into bed. I don’t spell it out, but I am known to sing, “It’s the most won-der-ful tiiiime of the daaaaaay,” as I carry her to bed.
When she’s older I’ll probably just hum it.
VIVA LAS VEGAS - SERIOUSLY
I have never been a huge fan of Las Vegas. I thought it was titillating when I was 21 and went with my boyfriend and another couple during college. We were so poor it was pronounced “poh.” We shared a hotel room that cost about $45 a night, and when they tried to charge us $55 we staged a massive retaliation campaign consisting of us all whispering angrily in the lobby and then shoving forward the largest and most well-spoken of us to argue the bill. I think what impressed us most about the entire weekend was the free drinks on the casino floor, and they were shitty drinks at a shitty casino.
When I was in my early 30’s and married and childless Vegas held even less appeal. Having finally paid off all my debt, I had developed a medically-confirmed allergy to gambling, and I generally preferred to get drunk somewhere a little less seizure-inducing. I much prefer a vacation that introduces me to new cultures, new ways of looking at the world, potentially the opportunity to get mud in my underwear. My feeling is that I have a very limited number of vacations in my lifetime, and certainly a limited budget to spend on them. I want to make sure I experience as much of the world as possible given those two limitations. So Vegas, a place I’ve already been and didn’t really “get,” was pretty much off the list.
But then my best friend Katy, for reasons I cannot mention in this column because she still reads it occasionally and owns a gun, managed to secure a free room, dinner and show in Las Vegas for Fourth of July weekend. For this sort of bargain I might consider vacationing in one of the states whose name begins with a K. Probably not, but maybe. Plus, it was my turn for a baby-free vacation. Tom got one when I went to New York for a week, and another when he went to a business conference in California, which I still totally think counts because most geek-related conferences have beer running from the water fountains. If you’re drunk, it’s not work.
I boarded the plane to Vegas with a feeling of “Oh, well, if nothing else I’ll get some extra sleep.” Yeah, who goes to Vegas hoping for sleep? Me. But on this trip, my eyes were opened wide to the benefits of Las Vegas. Because this was the first time I was experiencing it since becoming a parent.
When you have kids you have an extremely limited amount of time to cut loose, and even when you do cut loose, you are still half-listening for a 2-foot-person’s unrelenting attempts to commit suicide. You cannot let your guard down for a second, even when they are sleeping or at someone else’s house. You are always responsible, always alert, and always guilty if you so much as have half a glass of wine, definitely if you accidentally polish off the whole bottle which seems to happen fairly often these days.
In Vegas, time has no meaning, drinks are free-flowing, nobody knows you and everybody is there to have a good time. It is the absolute best way to cram as many sins into a finite amount of time. It is, really, the most efficient vacation one can take, and when it comes to a full-time working mother, efficiency is not THE word, it is the ONLY word. I crammed a year and a half of irresponsibility (stopping short of anything illegal… mostly) into 3 days. It was wonderful. It was liberating. It was just a little bit nauseating but not nearly as bad as being pregnant.
Fuck culture. I’m going back to Vegas, baby.
I have a Super Power. It’s not anything fancy, nothing that will save the world from Alien destruction or help us achieve our quest for World Peace, but it definitely has its advantages. Keeping it a secret is unnecessary so I will tell you: I have a really super keen sense of smell.
My step-dad used to say if someone farted in Mexico I would complain about it. This is a bit of an embellishment but it illustrates how much envy (irritation?) my super sense has garnered over the years. And luckily my sense of smell has not diminished as I have aged since it comes in handy multiple times a day. Take today for example. I microwaved some popcorn at work. As everybody knows, microwaving popcorn is a real delicate operation. Three seconds too long and a huge section of the middle is burnt. But stop it 2 seconds too soon and half the bag is unpopped kernels. Okay so maybe this isn’t a big deal to SOME people but it is to me. Luckily, my nose will tell me the precise moment a single kernel starts to blacken and I can hurl myself at the stop button and come away with a perfectly popped snack. I mean, that’s pretty handy, don’t you think?
I can also walk into the house and know from the front door if the baby has a dirty diaper. Tom will have spent the entire afternoon with her completely unaware and within a nanosecond I’m yelling “baby pooped!” Or “Something in the fridge is rotten!” or “Our neighbor didn’t shower today.” Okay not that last one.
If you lived with me you’d probably start to find this a bit annoying. But believe me, sometimes this super sense can be a real curse. Like when Tom eats this God-awful turkey chili from a can, which smells like a bowl of salted barf, I can’t be in the same room with him or stand to kiss him for, like, a week. And I can’t walk by the Starbucks storefront downtown that, for some reason, the entire homeless population likes to use as their outdoor urinal because the stench literally assaults me. I have to go all the way to the next Starbucks, around the corner.
Also, to make absolutely sure I don’t get a big head about my sniffer, fate has bestowed upon me atrocious eyesight. That way things are evened out. Luckily I was born in the latter half of the previous century in which contact lenses were invented. (Can I just point out how creepy it is to say I was born in the previous century?) If I had been born a couple hundred years ago my parents would have had to leave me out on a hillside to get eaten by wolves, because I wouldn’t have been able to FIND the field that needed to be tended, let alone tend it. Actually, no, by the time they discovered how bad my eyesight was I would have wandered under the wheels of a carriage and saved them the trouble. Even the first half of the twentieth century wouldn’t have been any good. Sure, I would have had a better chance of basic survival but it wouldn’t have been much of a life, since I would have been that chick sitting in a corner with glasses the thickness of a phone book, my eyes magnified twenty times, making me look perpetually half-witted. Certainly nobody would have been inclined to procreate with me, not even on a bet.
Speaking of which, all of this leads me to wonder what I have or have not bestowed upon my 13 month old daughter. Evidence thus far would seem to indicate she has no sense of smell, since she is perfectly content to cart around a load of odoriferous nastiness for however long it takes one of us grownups to notice it and do something about it. Which, for now, is definitely on the “blessing” side of things because with both of us constantly bitching about the stench Tom would go out of his mind. But hopefully as she grows older her sense of smell will improve, because burnt popcorn can ruin your whole day.
I feel awful that I haven’t written anything in so long. I know all my fans (both of you - hi, mom) have been really disappointed in me. When I tried to log on this morning I actually had forgotten my username for this site, which has never happened before. I feel horribly guilty for neglecting my writing.
In fact, I feel horribly guilty in general. Everybody warns you that having a child means feeling guilty pretty much all the time. If you’re at home you feel guilty that you aren’t at work, and if you are at work you feel guilty that you aren’t home with your child. The once a month you go out without your child you feel guilty for dashing out the door, whooping with glee.
You feel guilty for forgetting her hat when it’s 30 degrees outside.
You feel guilty for skipping the park one day because you know one of the mothers you can’t stand will be there.
You feel guilty for letting her nails get so long she shreds the furniture like a cat, and for having bought a house with wood floors so that she gets bruises on her little shins from crawling around on them.
And you definitely feel guilty about stuffing her with food to the point that she covers everything within a ten foot radius with projectile vomit.
Those few devoted readers I have will recall my extreme fear when it comes to vomiting. And while I don’t really concern myself with other people’s vomit, the smell is another story, because that can make me wretch. (Aside: what was Chef Boyardee thinking, making spaghettios smell EXACTLY like puke? Am I missing something here?)
However this is where I found guilt to actually come in handy: I was so busy feeling incredibly horribly guilty about force-feeding my child that I was able to get through the whole ordeal without one thought of adding my dinner to hers on the dining room floor.
“You FORCE FED YOUR CHILD?” I hear you asking, your mouth twisted in disgust and abhorrence. As well it should be; your mouth is absolutely right. But let me explain.
Lately, my beautiful adorable brilliant wonderful baby girl, aged 13 months, has decided to make every bedtime and every mealtime into an ordeal. She doesn’t want to eat, she doesn’t want to go to sleep. She has reduced us to performing any number of trained-seal-like tricks to get her to do one or the other. When it comes to eating, we are forced to perform “Staying Alive” ad nauseam (ha. literally). My daughter LOVES this song. She sings the “ah, ah, ah, ah,” part. And when she opens her mouth to join in the chorus, we take the opportunity to shove a spoonful of food into her yaw.
The trick of feeding her leads directly to the trick of getting her to sleep - and stay asleep - which, in turn, leads to ME getting sleep, which is heinously selfish of me to even think about and I feel very guilty about that. But if she doesn’t eat enough then she’ll wake up a couple hours later - after having spent an hour or two trying to get her to sleep in the first place - because she’s hungry. And then she’ll figure as long as she’s up we may as well read a book or twelve. And next thing you know, the night has gone by and she has slept maybe a total of 7 hours which is about 4 short of what she needs, thus leading to an excruciatingly long and cranky day during which she is too pissy to eat anything, thus contributing to the cycle.
So we’ve made it our mission to stuff her as full as we possibly can.
In our defense, this has been going on for a couple weeks now, and we didn’t really get it when she started to cry and squirm in her highchair that she really MEANT it this time, she didn’t want to eat. We kept bellowing Staying Alive and she kept opening her mouth and we kept shoveling it in. And then all of a sudden our gorgeous little girl spewed a torrent of orange and green vomit that would rival the output of the Colorado River should the Hoover Dam ever crack. Except way smellier.
I was horrified. This was the first time she’d ever really vomited. This was not sweet-smelling and gently dribbling spit-up. This was a torrential downpour of foulness and it was EVERYwhere. It was all over her and me and the high chair and puddling on the floor. I had to reach into those puddles in order to scoop up my sopping daughter. But I didn’t cringe because of the vomit, even though I could see out of my peripheral vision that there was some in my hair, likely a bit of carrot if one was to judge by the color. I cringed because I felt AWFUL. I still feel awful. My eyes fill at the thought of my abusive awfulness to my innocent daughter who has no way to protest other than crying, and I didn’t listen, and I shoved her so full she literally burst. It was that awfulness that dominated every fiber of my being as I hugged her tight and hurried to get her undressed and comfortable.
The thing is, as soon as I got her out of the chair and cleaned up and into the tub, she was happy as a clam. She sang and babbled to herself as usual, totally fine and happy, while I sat on the edge of the tub and pulled out chunks of my own hair as a form of self flagellation.
It’s true, she’s fine. She’s over it and has moved on. Chances are good she won’t need therapy as a result of this but me? I’m going to need intensive therapy probably for the rest of my life.
I feel really guilty about that.
