Dear Dad: I love you. Do not read this post. ‘kay, thanks.
Oooh, I got new workout clothes! For the first time since before I was pregnant with Caleb. This is exciting in my sad little world.
So exciting that last night I carefully laid out my new workout clothes before bed. So exciting that this morning I popped right out of bed in anticipation of putting on the new workout clothes.
So exciting that I checked myself out in the mirror before I left. And from the front, I looked pretty good. From the side, I noticed my trunk looked a bit, um, lumpy. From the back, it was tragic.
I had four butt cheeks. Like this:
Turns out yoga pants are entirely incompatible with my undies of choice:
Plain ol’ hiphugger bikinis. Totally comfy, no creeping, minimal panty lines. Perfect under my jeans (which are not mom jeans, I swear). But it turns out yoga pants do not camouflage how the elastic in the undies dissects my aging, post-three-babies derriere in half perfectly. Horizontally. Like my ass has an equator or something.
Four butt cheeks on one person is not good.
This led to an emergency phone call to my sister. What should I do?!
Try a thong! she said.
Oh, okay. Seriously, I’m not even going to give you much of a visual on this one. Remember: three babies. If you’ve birthed babies, you know why I don’t wear a thong. If you haven’t had them, you don’t want to know. Trust me.
I’m not at all opposed to some sexy lingerie. But, um, these would kill me. I would die from wearing ill-advised undies to the gym. Not the way I want to go out.
This makes me laugh out loud. I don’t know if I’ve ever, in my life, worn anything less flattering than boy short undies. These are not only incompatible with yoga pants, they are incompatible with the human body. Nobody looks like this photo. I could put them on in a pitch-black closet with no mirror in sight and still know that I look like a complete jack-ass. Nope.
They come up to your navel, people. And then all the jiggly parts just squeeze out over and under the Spanx.
Dear WalMart,
I quit you.
You suck my soul dry.
On an average trip: I have to park in the very back of the parking lot because everybody always wants to go to your stupid store. I have to dodge two or three cars in your parking lot driven by people who don’t feel they need to actually obey the stop sign and wait for a woman and her three children. The greeter accosts my children and slaps stickers all over them– even the baby, even when I say, “No, thank you” because he just eats them, and even my almost eight-year-old, even when he shies away and shakes his head suspiciously. You are always sold out of at least one basic staple on my list and I can never find anyone to help me when I have a question. I can never find green onions. I have to wait multiple times for people who think it is their God-given right to block an entire aisle while they take 15 minutes to select hair dye in the perfect shade of “cheap” or adult diapers or processed cheese food or just the right monster-truck-emblazoned t-shirt. I then wait another 15 minutes in line to check out. (You have 32 check-out aisles. At any given time, four are open. At the most.) I wait for this long in an aisle lined with candy and soda and disposable lighters and disgusting fruit-flavored chewing gum and celebrity gossip magazines and beef jerky and car “fresheners” which my children know they can’t have but after waiting that long they get just a bit restless. And when I am finally able to check out, the checker is invariably sullen and wears enormous amounts of black eyeliner and says nothing to me except the dollar amount that I owe (which is always too high, because somewhere along the line I lose all focus and just start throwing random things in the cart that aren’t on my list and which I later regret purchasing but it seems like a major hassle to return them). By the time we actually get to leave your God-forsaken store my children are starving and beg for Subway which is conveniently placed by the front door, just before the 10,000 slot machines with candy and toys in them. When we actually make it through that pediatric and economic minefield, it’s back out to brave the terrifying parking lot again.
Also: your shopping carts are repulsive (although Caleb really likes to suck on the cart handles). You try to sell cheap worthless plastic crap to my children who are futile against your least-common-denominator marketing. (”Live better! Buy more sh*t you don’t need!”) You sell ammunition and cold, cheap beer and 17 flavors of PopTarts but no decent fresh produce. The fluorescent lights make my kids look like they’re in liver failure.
By the time I’m done, it is difficult to think about anything but escape.
And then, yesterday. As usual, I was stressed out and zoned out and crabby as I left. The kids were tired and bored and whiney. We all just wanted to go home. In the parking lot I realized I forgot to buy diapers. Somebody was waiting for my parking place.
And then. Then I slammed Evan’s hand in the van door. His entire hand. The door latched. His hand bruised and swelled immediately and he had a big ugly red line across it.
It was sickening.
This is not your fault, WalMart. I know that you did not make me do this. But it made me realize how miserable you make me. When I leave you I am defensive and irritable and distracted and hating. Every time.
We’ve all heard the arguments about whether WalMart is a good corporate citizen, about what WalMart does to local economies, about what WalMart has done to the face of America (and now the world). I don’t know about these things. I don’t know whether the anti-WalMart rhetoric is holding true, or whether it’s just theory. What I do know is that it’s tempting, the thought that I can buy toilet paper and bananas and diapers and socks and pregnancy tests and Christmas decor under one roof. Especially when you are the closest store to me. Especially when it’s all less expensive at your store. What else I know is how ugly I feel every single time I visit you.
It isn’t worth it, on a personal scale or from a more global perspective.
So I am declaring here and now that I will be taking my business elsewhere. Somewhere slightly less ugly, somewhere that makes the world slightly less ugly, somewhere that makes me feel slightly less ugly. This isn’t a naive call to action (I don’t have that in me). Me versus the WalMart Industrial Complex? Hardly. I’m just telling you what I’m doing.
You can take your dietary supplements and Rubbermaid bins and ugly baby clothes and store-brand white bread and 823 brands of frozen pizza and “Proud to Be An American” cd’s and particle board furniture and everything that contains high-fructose corn syrup and all the other stuff I might actually buy there, and you can shove it, WalMart.
Ciao.
(PS– Evan’s hand is fine. It only took a two-hour field trip to the doctor’s office to determine this, but he is fine.)
There is a name for this.
My sister called yesterday. She sounded tiny and tired and defeated. Before too many words were said, she was crying.
She had lost her wallet, and didn’t even know it for three days. She was angry at herself and embarrassed and didn’t understand how this could happen. She’s a new mom, and this was her first time her Type A personality had crumbled.
Me? I’m used to this. After eight years I just assume that I will embarrass myself on a daily basis. I never know what form my absent-mindedness will take, but I know it will happen.
Like the time my husband was gone on business and not only did I leave the front door unlocked, I left it wide open all night long. In January, in Iowa. And yes, it was below zero that night.
Or the time I just forgot to go to work.
Or the time I remembered to go to work but couldn’t because I could not find my keys anywhere. Couldn’t find the spare keys, either.
Or the time I left the keys in the car and left the car running (unintentionally) while I grocery shopped, then proceeded to leave my purchased groceries inside the store when I left.
Or the time I forgot to renew my thyroid medication prescription. For an entire month.
Or the time I neglected to renew my driver’s license for so long I had to take the written test and the driving test. Oh, and there’s the other time I did that, too.
Or the time I sent Jensen for a week-long vacation at his grandparents’ without his suitcase, which I had lovingly packed and placed carefully by the front door so I wouldn’t forget it.
Or the time I permanently lost my glasses. The ones I didn’t replace because I decided it’s just easier to be slightly visually-impaired than to try to keep track of yet one more thing.
Or…. I have to stop now, before somebody comes and removes my children from my custody.
Smartest parenting move we ever made was deciding that the birth control pill should probably not be our contraceptive method of choice. Seriously: we’d have seven kids by now. At least.
You know the story: I’m relatively intelligent, relatively high-functioning, relatively organized. (Don’t we all think these things about ourselves?) But on any given day there may well be no milk in the refrigerator because I keep forgetting to buy it. Or there may be four gallons of milk in the refrigerator because I keep forgetting that I remembered to buy it.
So, yes, there’s a name for this phenomenon, but I don’t like it: “mommy brain.” I find it troublesome anytime an adult refers to another adult (or herself) as “mommy.” But, more importantly, the term implies that there’s something inherently wrong with a mother’s intelligence. It’s condescending.
Nevertheless. There is something that happens when we find ourselves permanently and irrevocably in charge of another human being. Something that leaves us mentally disconnected, grasping at cognitive straws far too often. No matter how well we plan, how many lists we make, how many times we check and double-check… sometimes we forget.
We are tired, chronically, from waking with babies and sleeping with one ear cocked and never really allowing ourselves to rest. We are responsible for something so big that we cannot wrap our exhausted brains around it, and we are distracted by being needed incessantly. And, maybe most importantly, our brains and our hearts are no longer our own. We are taken over by these little people who move into our homes and into our souls and make everything else– wallets and glasses and keys– entirely secondary.
Call it mommy brain if you must. I don’t like it but I probably won’t argue with you. Because it’s true that something in me is just not quite capable of addressing life’s pettiest tasks sometimes. I like to think it’s gotten better, but I’m not sure the evidence supports that assertion. I’ve learned to live with it, Jeff has learned to live with it, and (aside from my occasionally-bruised ego) we are none the worse for it.
So, Ali, I can’t promise you that it will get better, but I can tell you that you’ll learn to accomodate your sometimes-slippery mental state. And if you can’t take it anymore and need to talk to someone who understands, call me. If you can find the phone.
I shouldn’t want this.
But I do. I want it. I want to freeze this moment, this beautiful moment that defies adjectives. I want my baby to be a baby forever. I want him to nuzzle his face into the crook of my neck. I want his angel curls to smell of sweet baby shampoo. I want to share his whispered baby conversations. I want him to suck his fingers and stroke my hair when he is tired. I want his buttery skin to stay this soft, I want his legs to stay chubby and his pot-belly cute, and I want him to remain the happiest person I’ve ever known.
I want him to need me. To love me without question. I want his world to remain safe and bright and warm.
I want. Forever.
Most days I resist this. Most days I am more than happy to let time pass. I am content to let our future itself be testament to our past. Knowing that there is no sense in wishing for the impossible. Knowing that there are unforeseen and better moments to come. Knowing that even as I forget the details, this magical and challenging year that we have lived together will shape the people both of us will grow into. Most days I have faith.
But today I cannot resist. Today I remember that I’ve forgotten so much already. Today I remember that there will be no more babies to remind me. I struggle to impress this moment on my mind and soul indelibly. I do not want to forget a single heartbreaking detail. How can I remember? How can I make sure this moment never fades? I hold him closer, I close my eyes, I grasp. And I fail.
Today I want to hold him here forever.
Here’s a fun! and easy! way to start the holiday season: a do-it-yourself Christmas card photo shoot! After all, nothing says “festive” like crying children and swearing parents. Want awesome holiday pics like ours? Here’s a foolproof step-by-step guide:
1) Do not plan ahead. This is crucial. Pictures better reflect your kids’ personalities when they’re spontaneous. So spring it on them (and your photographer/husband) with no advanced warning. (Added bonus: your husband will love you for this!)
2) Get the kids completely wound up. This always makes for successful pictures.
5) Bribe kids with leftover Halloween candy that no one wants. Example: “I’ll give you Milk Duds if you stop crying.” It kind of works.
7) “Smile!”
“No, kids, your real smiles.”
10) {sigh} Put away the camera. Tell your husband to stop dropping f-bombs in front of the kids. Open a beer. Consider studying up on Photoshop; after all, with the 54 pictures he just took, there’s gotta be something salvageable. Right?
This conversation really happened yesterday in my kitchen.
It’s a little, um, sensitive. I’ll handle it with as much tact as possible.
So. Let’s just jump right in, then. Jensen rarely has questions about the proverbial facts of life– he is 96% un-curious about such matters. But questions do surface now and then. Like yesterday.
The gist of the whole thing was that he was unclear about what “sex” meant. Okay. I can handle this. I think I answered pretty age-appropriately and he seemed okay with the information.
Then he said: “Wow, I wouldn’t want to do that with a box of Wheat Thins.”
Me: “…”
Me again: “Hmmmm. What made you think of that?” At least that’s what I think I said. I’m a little unclear, actually, because something in my brain exploded thinking about my 7-year old and snack crackers and intimacy in one sentence.
Him: “Well. I really love Wheat Thins. But I wouldn’t want to do that with them.”
Me: “No…. No, I suppose not.”
And then he was off chattering about the relative merits of different kinds of crackers and that was basically the end of the discussion.
I will never, ever be able to look a box of Wheat Thins in the eye again.
