How to Be a Crappy Mother Part II

Afternoon

As you pull into the driveway, notice that the baby is out cold. Feel a twinge in your back as you bend over to scrutinize your sleeping baby’s face. Lift one of his lids to see if his eyes are rolled back – a sure sign that he is sleeping deeply. They are nearly back. Straighten up to get out of the back seat and hook the hood of your parka on the ‘clean shirt hook’ Saab has thoughtfully provided on the hand grip above the door. Hang there like a buffoon because you cannot reach the hook. Ask the five-year-old to help you off of the hook. Take the two older children inside, intending to leave the baby asleep for the four more minutes it will take for him to be gone enough for you to carry him inside without waking him.

  In the house, near the window overlooking the driveway, read stories to your other children until your eyes start involuntarily tearing and closing. Suggest that they play “Doctor Heals,” with you as the comatose patient. Drift in and out of sleep for perhaps six minutes while your children drop feathers, to which you are allergic, onto your face. Feel a nice, tickling sensation on your fingers. Wake up to discover that they have colored most of your knuckle joints with the indelible black magic marker you told them never to touch. Find both girls sitting on top of the kitchen counter eating the plate of Christmas cookies. Spy a spilled bottle of antibiotics next to the three-year-old and panic. Ask her if she opened them. When she says no, grab her shoulders and shake her, asking this time through clenched teeth if she ate any of them. When she says no again, use your parental lie detection sense to assess possible truth in the statement. Multiply the number of pills you take per day (three) by the number of days you have been taking the pills (three) and subtract the total from the total number of pills that should be in the container (ten days’ worth). Thanking the God you just went to visit, find twenty-one pills on the counter. When your child asks to eat one, shout, “NO!” then hug her hard. Wonder how many milligrams of amoxocillin it would take to kill a thirty- four pound person. Remember that if you had gone to medical school you would know this. Lose yourself in fantasy, forgetting the now-closed bottle of pretty pink and blue drugs next to the candy whore that is your child. Suddenly jump up from the table and rush outside. Find the baby shrieking in the car seat inside the nearly soundproof Saab. Bring him out. Pretend not to notice your neighbor across the street looking meanly at you. Go inside and nurse the baby, ignoring your other children for as long as you can, which is less than a minute, since one of them is jumping up and down on your feet and legs and the other is trying to ride the dog. 

When the baby wakes up enough to put him down without him bucking and screaming and flailing, watch as the three-year old and the five-year old, miraculously, play together. Leave the room to answer the phone. Hear shrieking from the girls. Tell the person on the phone that you will call her back, knowing you will not remember to do it. Rush back into the living room in time to witness your three-year-old being completely dominated -- on the floor on her back, with the baby on top of her in a wrestling hold, gouging out the eyes of his big sister. Tell the five-year-old, who is climbing up the back of the armchair to stop it and “stand up and just sit there.” Separate the fighting children and smack the dog who has jumped into what must have looked like a fun foray, for nosing your groin so hard that it lifts your knees off the floor. Yell at the dog, causing it to cower, even though it is your children you really feel like yelling at.

 Calm down. Suggest to the three-year-old that the dog might like to play. Watch her wrestle with the dog while you change the baby’s diaper on the couch. Wrestle with the baby as the three-year-old jumps down onto the dog’s extended leg, self-performing the Heimlich maneuver. When she vomits three slices of cranberry bread and five bites of cookie onto the carpet and starts crying, jump up, and with one foot on the baby to keep him from rolling off the couch, pick up the three-year-old. Ask the five-year-old to hold the baby, and when she says, “No, because you wouldn’t carry me before,” holler at her, making her cry. Don’t care when the dog immediately begins eating the vomit from the floor, as it is doing you a favor and you now do not have to clean up the vomit. Cradle all three of your children on the couch. When the undiapered baby pees into your cupped hand, decide that you must all get out of the house as fast as possible. Tell them you are taking them to the mall and watch as the girls fling themselves about with ecstatic delight and the baby, not knowing why, bobbles up and down too. Realize that they are all completely nude. Feed them lunch that way because you know the clean-up will be easier. While they snort and make “stick out my weiner” jokes with the hot dogs, find their clothes scattered around every part of the house. Get them dressed while wondering how they got naked, especially the baby who cannot undress himself, because you certainly did not witness it. 

 Drive a few extra minutes around the mall parking lot until all three children are so deeply asleep that they could be hung from their heels and not awaken. Envy them. Park the car and decide to rest your eyes for a few minutes. Tilt back your seat,   hoping that you will not fall asleep with your jaw gaping open to the point where you and your family resemble a Mafia hit to passers-by. Fall deeply asleep. Wake up to utter darkness with dried spittle crusted on your chin. Freak out, shouting, “Crimisy!” until you realize it is the middle of winter and only four thirty p.m., thirty minutes after you fell asleep. Stare at two worried mall security guys slowly circling your minivan with flashlights. As you get your drowsy children out of their car seats, wave confidently at the men and say in a perky voice, “It’s O.K. We were just tired, that’s all.”

 Drag the children into the mall and walk around. Thank whatever God you hope might exist for their public behavior, which for a change is charming. They are beautiful, causing fellow mall-goers to point and nod at their rosy cheeks and disheveled, yet cute look. Stop in the food court to buy them a muffin.

 When your three-year-old suddenly hops up and down holding her crotch, yelling, “Pee!Pee!” quickly wrap up the muffin and stuff it into the diaper bag, then herd the children to the bathroom. Beg the three-year-old not to touch anything except the toilet paper and her own pants. Put the baby down and help the three- year-old onto the toilet, then go back out and unzip the five-year-old’s sticky zipper, and guide her into a stall. Stand near them so they won’t be abducted, until you notice the baby toddling out of another stall with festoons of toilet paper streaming from his mouth. Grab the baby and remove from his mouth a gray mass of wet paper molded into the shape of his hard palate. Hope that it came from the roll in the dispenser and not from the toilet. Holding the baby, rush back to the three-year-old who is now screaming,” Mommy, close the door. Strangers can see my ganina!” Hold the three-year-old’s door shut while the baby bucks and kicks and flails in your arms, displaying a florid tantrum at too young an age, and the five-year-old corrects the three-year-old by saying, “It’s not ju-nina, stupid, it’s bu-gina. Don’t dare put the baby down because you know he will fling himself back onto the filthy bathroom floor and crack his head against the tile, possibly rupturing one of those fragile arteries that could cause a hemorrhage in his brain -- you have read about them so you know they exist. Impress yourself by discussing in depth the types of bacteria that might be found in a public restroom with the five-year-old who asks, “Mommy, why would I get sick if I lick the toilet flusher?” Remember that you did well in microbiology in college and wonder if, based on that fact, you would be able to cut it in medical school.

 When the three-year-old, out of the blue, asks to get her ears pierced, look at your watch. Sigh. Exhibit very poor judgment and say yes, but you have to make tracks. Walk to the piercing place quickly, lugging the bucking, screaming baby, as the five-year-old attempts a precise depiction of how much and how little it hurts, comparing it to medical procedures involving needles that they have both experienced. At the piercing place ask the three-year-old if she is sure and when she says yes again, help her pick out a pair of heart earrings. Watch carefully with her as a slightly older child gets her ears pierced without crying.

Let a young salesclerk hold the baby. Sit in the piercing chair with the three-year-old on your lap as she looks around brightly, yet shyly. Love her to death. Feel like her betrayer when, after the piercing girl stabs her simultaneously in both ears, she starts shrieking and does not stop. When the baby, never one to miss out on anything, howls along in concert with his sister, kneel on the floor of the piercing shop and rock them. Yell, “No!” when the five-year-old asks you to buy her a fur-covered diary. Look at the three-year-old’s ears and notice that the earrings are wildly askew, realizing that the piercing girl has completely botched the job. Get very angry and refuse to pay, and although you are not ordinarily a nasty person, smirk when they tell you to come back for a free re-do when the holes have closed up. Tell them if they ever see you again it will be in court. Drag your screaming children four hundred yards through and out of the mall to where you parked the wretched rust-heap of a Saab. Feel the same small stab of disappointment you usually feel when you see it hasn’t been stolen. Buckle everybody in. Straighten up to get out of the car and hang yourself on the shirt hook again. Ask the three-year-old to unhook you.

 When you try to start the car twenty times and the engine doesn’t turn over, yell, “Bite me!” Unbuckle everybody. Pick up fifty-six pounds of wretched children and carry them four hundred yards back into the mall to a pay phone. Call the AAA that your parents gave you for Christmas last year -- a subtle hint that they do not think that your husband is a good provider, with your finger plugging your other ear to block out the sound of the five-year-old crying because you love her brother and sister better than her. Wait for a tow truck while the mall shops close around you. Watch as your three-year-old, recovered from the piercing ordeal, flounces about asking strangers,” Do you like my new earrings? I used to be a girl without earrings, but now I am a girl with earrings. My mommy made me get them,” then quietly, “It really hurt,” and the baby eats a third of a jumbo pack of sugarless gum and its foil wrapper. Sigh deeply when the girls start whining, and the five-year-old speaks for the group, “Mommy, you never feed us and we’re hungry! Can we eat gum?” and the mall custodian stares at you.

Spot a tow truck trolling around the parking lot. Promise your children food if they come quickly with you now. Run through dark puddles of cold rain as you chase down the tow truck. Shake your head as the tow truck guy jump starts the car in the two minutes it takes you to buckle everyone back into their seats. Dig the muffin chunks out of diaper bag and hand them to the children. When the tow truck guy warns you to not stop anywhere else on your way home, snort wryly. Drive home with the five-year-old tracing raindrops on the window, the three year-old, her crooked earrings in her beet-red ears sucking her thumb, and the baby burping mint, slumped and broken-looking in their car seats. Cry hard as you drive down the highway. Hate the fact that you use a highway. Hate everything about who you’ve become. Wish that you lived on a commune, so you wouldn’t be so alone, even though your commune neighbors would clearly be malodorous, hairy, textured protein-eating freakazoids. Pull into your driveway, looking for signs that a robber is in or has been in your home, by staring intently through the shears for shadows and misplacement of objects. Carry your now sleeping children one at a time into the house, putting them straight to bed in their clothes, assenting to willingly be damned if you wake any of them up. Kiss their sticky mouths and filthy cheeks and whisper, please forgive me, I promise to do better tomorrow. Feel like a crappy mother and wonder what kind of a doctor you could possibly be if you can’t even manage three healthy children through one long Sunday. Fall asleep on the couch with your shoes still on. Wake up to check the locks on the doors and bring the portable phone into bed. Check to see if 911 is programmed into the instant dial function. Fall back to sleep to the sickening sound of the cat licking itself at the foot of the bed and dream of fat, milk - white lizards crawling through the round letters of the alphabet.

Comments

[gloria]

Wa-hoo! I'm a crappy mother, too. Love your blog. Love your writing. Wish you'd been around when I was raising my kids (3 girls, a single at 19 and set of twins at 24--they all turned out fine w/o schedules).

We seem to share a similar parenting style and over-all philosophy of life--I firmly believe that if the world stopped producing clothing right this minute, there would be more than enough to last til the end of time. I refuse to buy new clothes while there is so much perfectly good stuff available that someone else is tired of.

Welcome to the WWH group. You'll be a fun addition.

~gloria

[Black Belt Mama]

I was about to say that I think I'll give all my baby stuff away. ;-)

[karrie]

Phew, now that's a mouthful. Reminds me that one is fun, two are for fools and three are not for me! I've asked my mom, who had three kids, what is was like the first year she had three. Her reponse, "I was numb" and therefore didn't recall much. She does recall propping the bottle in my baby brother's mouth while she dealt with my sister's tantrum. Me? Well, I was the good, older child...