How To Be a Crappy Mother Part I

Morning

Stay up really late reading a book about a woman in medical school. Try to, but don’t pull yourself away from it, because you have gotten it in your mind that you, too, want to go to medical school. Read and read until your eyes drip tears of exhaustion. Crawl into bed with your children. Program ‘911’ into the instant dial function of your portable telephone and nestle it next to your ribs, in case someone breaks in and you have time to hit only one number. Your husband, the lucky duck, is out of town on business and staying (hopefully) alone in a hotel very far away. Go to sleep and dream about vampires. Wake up to the sound of crying. It is the baby: let him nurse you dry. Notice the deflated shape your breast takes as it lays across the mattress. Go back to sleep. Roll over and accidentally pull down the twin fitted sheet that you have nailed over the window, as you have been too busy to repair the curtain rod that fell down last month. Go to sleep wrapped in the sheet. Start to wheeze because the cat, to which you are allergic, slept on the sheet when it fell down the day before, but don’t take your inhaler because the medicine keeps you awake. Wake up again to the sound of crying in another room. Feel around in the dark for the bodies left in your bed. Touch the five-year-old’s long leg. Don’t find the three-year-old. Think: she is abducted! Panic. Change your mind when you hear her crying from the other room. Peek out the window to see if it is light yet. Squint as the street light directly across the street drills into your eyeball, causing you to hiss like a witch and recoil in pain. Note that it is not yet light, yet your neighbor, the bakery guy, has already left for work. Estimate that it is somewhere between five-thirty and six a.m. Based on these few facts, use your diamond-cut parental logic to correctly guess that the child is crying because she has blown out her night diaper, as she had a glass of cider before bed and has a bladder capacity which can’t be contained in one pull-up. Kick the dog off the bed, call it a nasty name, then trip over it in the dark as you stumble to the children’s bedroom.

 You did not close their curtains last night – and the same brutal street light that made you spit and cower shaves the warmth from this room too. Find your daughter sitting on the floor in an angled swath of ghostly white. See that she is marinating in a pool of pee, her footie pajamas half off, yet twisted and inside out enough to render her as helpless as if she wore a fuzzy, size four - T straight jacket with a Winnie the Pooh over the left breast. Note the eviscerated night diaper oozing from under her buttocks.

Croon to her. Ask her why she didn’t just call out to you instead of trying to take those dern complex jammies off by herself. Suck air through your teeth when says she has been calling you for a long time.

Change the child. Sop up the pee on the floor with your husband’s favorite bath towel. Pray that the child was not sufficiently stimulated to be interested in really getting up. When she rubs her eyes and says, “Mommy, I’m sleepy,” give yourself a mental high five and put the child down in her own bed. 

 Don’t dare wake the other children left in your bed, but instead crawl over them into your drafty sliver of space. Fling the cat off the bed, accidentally landing it on the dog. When the dog leaps up, thrilled to have actually touched the cat, it attempts to chase it. Scream silently when the cat rebounds onto you, leaving ten holes in your chest you could insert Lite-Brite pegs into.  Fling the cat off the bed again, this time at the door, hoping it will lead the dog downstairs and temporarily out of your life. Forget that the baby gate is up and the dog cannot go downstairs. Say “Spit on a shingle” when the cat flees by hurdling the gate, and the stimulated dog has no recourse but to go to your now sleeping three-year-old and bark several times directly into her face. The child says, “Mommy? I can’t sleep.” Note: it is five thirty-seven. 

 Play “quietly” with the three-year-old in her room. Beseech her repeatedly to use her inside voice so you don’t wake the baby. Crawl into her bed with her and read stories, thinking everything is going well until you wake up from the sound of your own snoring amplified inside the Little Golden Book covering your face to find the child is gone. Groan loudly when you hear her in your room shaking her tambourine and shouting the same, “Stick out my wiener, stick out my wiener!” she heard the boy next door chanting two days before. Assume correctly that she is standing on the bed dancing directly over the baby and the five-year-old.

Count one, two, three, four….and on five bring your hands up like a conductor and cue in the baby’s cries. Get up for good. Unzip the five-year-old’s footie pajamas and tell her to go to the bathroom and empty her bladder. Dress the younger two, while they play pinball with their bodies by bumping into or bouncing off of everything three-dimensional. At six-fifteen, take them downstairs for breakfast because, even though you are exhausted, the onus is on you.

 Make frozen waffles because they are easy, even though the children ask for something else. Add sliced bananas to their plates so you can at least say, no matter what awful things happen between you that day,  that you offered them fresh fruit. Let the baby transfer all of the food in the dog’s bowl to its water dish, because he is happy doing it and, for three minutes, not hanging off your kneecaps. Occasionally fish hard chunks of kibble out of his bow-shaped mouth, letting him chew on them first because he is teething. Think: how am I going to fill thirteen and a half hours with three children devoid of reasoning skills, twenty-nine degree weather, and ten dollars?

Decide to take them to church because the day before the three-year-old asked, “What is church?” and because church is free. Remember the few times in your single days when you went to church – it was a Unitarian Universalist one which offered a loose Pagan ceremony culminating in a barefoot group dance down the aisles with percussion instruments and pan pipes. Look up “Churches” in the yellow pages and find a Unitarian church not too far away. Without yelling at the children or the dog, who you find eating the crotch out of your only pair of stockings, manage to get everyone ready. Notice how, in their winter clothes, your children look like blood-stuffed ticks. Pack them, as they whine about being too hot, into the twelve-year-old wreck of a Saab with which your husband is having an affair. Wonder if he is up yet and reading the paper in a quiet, clean hotel bed on other side of the country.

 Find the church and park in the parking lot, which in the pouring rain looks impossibly far away from the church door. Carry the two younger children, who are now crying because the freezing rain is whipping them in the face, into the church, dragging the hem of your long velvet skirt in mud puddles as you go. Ignore the five-year-old who is complaining because she is convinced that you love the other children more because they got carried. Endure the service, which the children criticize and yell through, then go to the coffee hour in the basement. Look around for people who don’t have that glazed, New Testamentesque appearance. Get nervous when you notice that everyone is white and older than you, and the L.L. Bean denim jumper/hunter green turtleneck factor is too high for your comfort. Try to leave, and get immediately cornered by a pushy woman in one such jumper whom you fear is a designated ‘greeter’ after she immediately begins asking you questions about yourself. Act distracted and crane your neck around rudely, trying to locate your children. Spot the three-year-old across the room taking one bite out of a cookie then putting it back on the plate at the food table she is just tall enough to reach. Watch her take four bites out of four more cookies and put them all back before you can make it through the crowd to her. Corral the children and force them out of the church, which they now don’t want to leave, and back into the car. Insert the key into the wretched Saab. For good measure, since you are in the church parking lot, pray that the car will start. When it doesn’t start, wipe the rain from your dripping eyebrows and curse. Turn the key and accept the dull ‘click’ that follows to be punishment for consistently making life hell for that kid, Jeffery, on the school bus in fifth grade. Admit that you deserved it at some point, it might as well be now. Pop the hood and get out. Suck on the rain dripping off of your lips and stare into the engine like you know what you are looking for. Jiggle the battery connectors and see a spark. Hear the children whining from inside the car. While you sit back into the car, note that a Range Rover, a Suburban and two Volvo wagons pass by in the parking lot driven by blank, faceless drivers. Think, ‘Yuppie flipping fishbreath!” at them for not stopping to help, and marvel at this particular combination of almost-curses you have vowed to use ever since the five-year-old has asked you to stop being so foul.

 Try to start the car. Sense a slight difference in the way the car doesn’t start and guess that you are on the right track. Get in and out of the car eight more times, jiggling the battery cables and listening to the car almost start before it finally does. Drive away in pouring, freezing rain, blasting whatever you can on the radio, which is Hootie and the Blowfish, to drown out the sound of angry discourse between the three-year-old and the five-year-old in the back seat. It's time to go home.

 See How To Be a Crappy Mother Part II

Comments

[Kelly]

I am in stitches here! So sorry to laugh at your pain, but most of those things have also happened to me. Bear in mind that I have twice as many children, so I'm sure you'll understand when I confess that I've let them do far worse things than chew on dogfood, just because it kept them quiet and occupied. I can sooooo relate to settling for a sliver of bed just to avoid awakening them and the pitiful state of a nursing mom's used-up . . . well, you know! Take comfort in knowing you provided THIS tired mommy with a hearty, much-needed laugh!

[Black Belt Mama]

When my husband used to travel a lot, I clearly remember those "how many hours until bedtime" days. You capture it well.