Anne Nahm

Welcome to the Surprise Monday post, brought to you by my daughter, screaming furiously in ‘time-out’ as I write this.

Anywhoo, over the holiday, I had a few blissful days of fantasizing about what it would be like to have the new baby here. This mostly involved how I was going to go on a wicked diet, have lots of energy, and realized that having two kids was just as easy as one. Stop laughing, please. I was also compiling for you a detailed list of how I was actually going to be cooler with two kids than I had been with one.

It’s kind of hard for me to retrace my thinking in this (especially now as my brain is assaulted with my daughter’s siren song of wailing in the background), but I know that this fantasy was supported (in my mind) by the idea that I *had* ended up 10 pounds lighter from pre- to post- pregnancy. So, ‘slightly skinnier’ could prove that ‘slightly cooler’ was possible. Right?…Right??? I was so delusional, my fantasies involved the labor tub at the hospital as some sort of hot-tub that I would sit peacefully in for hours, uninterrupted by phone calls or children. I was seriously thinking about bringing a book to enjoy while there.

Anyway, I was delivered from this blissful dream by my daughter waking up in the middle of the night last night, screaming inconsolably. As I tried to squish my wide body onto her small twin mattress to calm her sobs and get her back to sleep, I had the following thought; “what am I supposed to do when there is another baby screaming? I mean, I can only be in one place at a time.”

And duhhh. I mean, of course they will both scream at the same time. Of course my oldest daughter will be off-kilter and freaked out by a new person in the house. We will all be sleep deprived maniacs. And, as little kids will do when a household is stressed, my daughter will probably be both clingy and cranky, which will allow me no time to sleep even when the newbie buttmunch is passed out cold from a breastmilk bender. And in the darkness, I had sudden mental clarity of exactly how sucky it was to take care of a newborn, and just how much more sucky it will probably be to take care of a newborn while also taking care of a soon-to-be 3 year old.

Even on a good day, I am only abut 36 sleep-deprived hours away from being a total nutjob. So last night, as I tried to ease out of my daughter’s bed for the 4th time, only to hear her go off like a fire-alarm as I passed the threshold of her room, I realized I had failed horribly at motherhood. My child was too coddled, and soon now, I would be dumping her into the battlefield of sibling rivalry after she had spent her life believing she was the actual center of the universe.

And with this new understanding being beaten into my head (by way of my eardrum via my daughter’s wailing), I realized that forces far greater than I are conspiring to strip away my coolness. I had come to foolishly believe that reclaiming my coolness was a matter of putting on some lipstick and heading to the gym. Now I see that the universe has brought bigger guns to the fight – what good is a cute butt in the face of sleep deprivation? How can I possibly ward off the doldrums with a good book when every shirt I own has a big breastmilk stain right on the left boob? No, I realize now that efforts to be cool are most likely to be lost in the landslide of this upcoming child’s birth.

So, this probably isn’t the most cheery post, but it will serve a valuable function. I will post it on my refrigerator once I get to the point that it would be possible for me to conceive a third child. I will also have it laminated and sent to my sister. I will instruct her to bring it to my house should I ever show an interest in having another child. She will then be instructed to bitch-slap me with my own laminated post until she knocks some sense into me. And following the birth of this child, I may very well tell my sweet husband that if he tries to get his wiener near me again without getting snipped, I will break out the toenail scissors and do the job myself. Because damn, in the time it has taken me to write this post, the only time there has been silence from, “mommy-mommy-mommy-mommy!!!!” has been when the child has gasped for air. And this is only one kid.

Because Only Sisters Can Have A Conversation Like This:
MY SISTER: “So I’m getting really good at cutting hair!** I’m developing a reputation among my friends as the person to go to for a free trim.”

Me: “uh-huh?”

MY SISTER: “Yeah! I’ve cut like 5 of my friend’s hair so far, and then my one girlfriend’s new boyfriend has this really heinous back hair all over -”

Me: “Uh, Yeah… I think it’s time to end this part of the conversation.”

MY SISTER (really fast so I can’t interrupt): “No, listen! His back hair is way out of control and so my friend asked me to -”

Me: “Do I have to stick this spoon in my eye to get you to stop? Nothing that starts with beautician skills and back hair can end pretty.”

MY SISTER: “When I saw it — you have never seen such a furry mat on anything not in the zoo, and he asked me if I would –”

Me: “You know the only story that could top this ? If you started telling me you had become a shampoo girl and then met a girl with the hugest Bee-You-Ess-Aich***–”

MY SISTER: “What? What did you say?”

Me: “Bush! I was spelling ‘bush’ because I’m a mommy now!”

MY SISTER (all sweetly reminiscent) “… Awww… Now I miss [recently ex'ed ex-boyfriend].”

Me, (horrified): “I say ‘huge bush’ and you start missing [ex-boyfriend]? How did this conversation get worse than cutting back hair?”

MY SISTER, punching my arm, “Because we were both bad spellers! Not because he had a big bush!”

**my sister has no formal training in cutting hair
*** That’s me spelling bush even though my daughter is halfway across the house sleeping

Ta-Dahhh! My sister is coming out for Thanksgiving! Here are some great things about my sister:

1) She once swallowed a suppository
2) She would give you the shirt of her back in a heartbeat, but she would also root around your closet and steal a cute shirt of yours if you didn’t watch her carefully
3) She is often the very cutest when she is making a face that should make her look really ugly
4) She always says what she really thinks

Here are some really irritating things about my sister:

1) She keeps calling and asking if I am ‘Orca’ big yet
2) She is quite a bit younger than I am, and not pregnant, so she always looks way cuter than I do
3) She always says what she really thinks

Yay, holidays! Yay, sisters!

And like a message from Above following my bitter ranting, I trip over this piece of amusement. Some scant proof that whatever inner artiste inside a person *can* be squelched, but will ultimately find some way of escaping into your daily life.

Link stolen from evwhore

from Ernie’s House of Whoop-Ass

Workplace friendly, sound a definite plus.

I’m not sure if this makes me more or less cool, but I am about to go to the gym in maternity spandex that leaves very little to the imagination. I mean, it’s not a thong or anything, but I am forgoing the baggy shirt and pants. There is a woman I occasionally see at the gym who is hugely pregnant. She just wears a sports bra and spandex shorts. She is *fearsome* in that outfit. I? Maybe not so much fearsome as fear inspiring. Rawr! Perhaps another day, we shall talk about those strange men who seem to find pregnancy mesmerizingly sexy and cannot help but fawn over pregnant women increasingly as they develop. PS – this is not why I am wearing spandex. I am wearing spandex because, damn it, nothing else fits.

I have been in something of a funk the past few days. I had been tooling through life, minding my own business, when I got a flyer from my alma mater. I immediately flipped to the back to find out what my other class mates had been up to. And yes, I always flip straight to the back even though I steadfastly refuse to ever write in and say what I am doing. I’m sure this represents some hypocrisy on my part, but I don’t care to really examine it.

Anyway, there was the handful of marriages, updates, and births. I was somewhat shocked to find that our school’s beloved pot fiend slacker was now completing his M.D. at a well known medical school. But mostly, I was struck by a rather long entry from a kid in my class I hadn’t heard about in years. The monologue post included a prestigious job in a banking company, a recent marriage, a house in the suburbs, and a dog named Fluffer.

Now, every time I turned my mind to this little blurb, I must admit that the first thing that bubbled into my head was, “ermm… I was pretty sure you were gay.” I mean, the Halloween you came to our school party dressed as Joan Crawford? The quiet distain for girls? The love of drama club? The shoes you wore that were always shiny with some sort of ‘loafer lightening’ solution?

Yeah, and since I read that little blurb, I have been slapping myself on the wrist. After all, gay men do get married, cross-dressing men are not always gay, and my snarky little gathering of stereotypes probably says more about me than it does about my old classmate. Blah-blah-blah.

Two days later, wondering if I had developed some sort of weird psycho-sexual fixation on Mr. Joan Crawford, I finally realized why it was that I couldn’t stop mentally rejecting his blurb. Besides my uber-mature, “Come on – I’m pretty sure you were gay.”

It was really the whole package. I didn’t read that he was in some off-Broadway production, or living in a loft in Manhattan. He certainly wasn’t being seen around town with some beautiful boy-toy. He was tied down to a life that included a dog named something I can only hope refers to what they do to porn stars. It’s like this guy carefully constructed himself a closet and then locked himself into it.

And really, if I am going to turn a scathing eye on this poor guy, I should really turn it on myself as well. If I wrote a blurb to the alumni board, wouldn’t somebody out there read it and say, “ermm… I was pretty sure you used to be cool.” And they would be on point.

The thing is, we’re the kids of Baby Boomers. And while our parents were popping pills and divorcing and ‘finding themselves’, we were the latch-key kids who had to pretend that everything was OK, and that we were fine coming home to a dark house and popping something into the microwave for dinner.

I think a lot of us are Generation ‘X’, but we are also Generation ‘It’s OK’. As in, “I’m going to make everything look OK on the outside. I’m going to make myself easy to be digested by the general population. Why? Because I lived through my parents doing anything that felt good regardless of the price to others.”

I also think about being a teenage girl and reading women’s magazines that spouted “You CAN have it all!” (featuring some covergirl in massive shoulderpads or that limp-penis bow-tie blouses). They also barfed out ideas like “it’s the quality of the time you spend with your kids, not the quantity!” and the concept that there was some magical formula by which a modern woman could ‘shatter the glass ceiling’, become CEO of a major company, co-habitate with a man who was ‘in touch with his feelings’ and all the while be a full time mother to 2.5 kids. I’m really not surprised cocaine was the drug of choice in the ’80′s.

When you talk to baby booming women, you sometimes find them still trying to find that impossible balance. Our generation is much smarter. As the kids, we figured out pretty quickly, “hey, dumbass – you can’t do that all at once.”

I also think that the scar of watching our parents grow up is that we are often now afraid to try anything at all. We are much safer going back to some rigid lifestyle, no matter how boring and/or excruciatingly painful. Look how vigorously we attack the people who don’t get themselves into a proper box. Look at how SAHMs snark the living hell out of moms who work. Look at how working moms look disdainfully down their noses as SAHMs. How are we going to find a happy medium of existence when we have been so burned by our parents’ “Me Generation” attitude?

So, I almost didn’t post this, due to the fact that it is largely self-absorbed, ranty, and narcissistic. But after some thought, I decided, “aw hell, this is an annonymous blog. How uptight am I that I must also censor myself here?” So there. I can only hope my old classmate is somewhere out there blogging about butt-pirating and that we shall both be free of our shackles soon enough. Arrgg, matey! Good luck!