damn damn damn

Tempest broke something tonight.

It was, on the surface, a little soy sauce dish. But it was a soy sauce dish that belonged to my grandmother, that she bought on one of her trips to Japan. Although I have a lot of my dead grandmother's things, losing even one of them doesn't feel good.

My fault really. I have no idea how that dish got in her room, why it was on a high shelf, why it was in the way when she decided to climb up preposterously on an ad-hoc step-stool made of a giant stuffed unicorn and a giraffe-coat-rack in order to retrieve an equally ill-placed package of glow-in-the-dark sidewalk-chalk...but clearly I must have had a hand in creating the situation, somewhere along the line.

Which brings me to a problem that's been plaguing me of late. Really the problem is a plague. A plague of crap. Crap on every horizontal surface in my room, stacked in piles that would alarm even the Cat in the Hat on a rainy day visit. Pre-school art, toddler shoes, tiny little doll accessories, stuffed animals, Legos, crayons, plastic fruit, blankets, puzzle pieces, comically giant paper clips, regular paper clips, fingernail clippings, stray pieces of string cheese...all in vertical piles three feet high on every available surface. There's no "away". I can't really give in to my barely-containable urges to beat the children within in an inch of their lives when I step on the sadistically painfully sharp fluke of a plastic whale in my family room if said whale has no "away".

So what will I get for my disorganizational crimes? Tally for today:

• broken soy sauce dish, probably made by some adorable septuagenarian artisan in Kyoto
• broken foot (the whale is unscathed of course)
• children who will, in all likelihood, be swearing like sailors by the time they enter kindergarten
• a hangover tomorrow
• one less thing to remember my sweet Gram by

My Gram probably would have called Tempest a rapscallion or a rag-a-muffin. I call her a fucking-remorseless-asshole-sent-by-the-Devil-to-torment-me-daily.

Not to her face, of course. She's way too cute.

Of fantasies and crushed spirits

One of my favorite lines from The Simpsons is when Homer observes of Bart: "He reminds me of me before the weight of the world crushed my spirit." I don't think of that when I look at my kids, but rather when I look at my childless friends and coworkers. You know, people with lives.

When I was married-but-not-yet-a-mother, I made many resolutions about how I would conduct my life, post-baby-birthing. Some of these resolutions were long-held from childhood, others from as recently as my first pregnancy, forged to steely resolve by observing Other People's Kids. Now, I see these resolutions for what they are: pure fantasy, spun from the purest hubris. Perhaps someday I'll release my attachment to them, but for now I continue to wallow in my crushed spirit.

When you're pregnant for the first time, people with kids, both known and unknown to you, bombard you with this message repeatedly, and unrelentingly: "It will change your life forever." They are completely right, of course, but you know what? It's not like one can prepare for one's life to be changed forever, and you wouldn't want to prepare even if you could. If anyone had a clue about the misery they were about to shackle themselves to, nobody would ever have kids again. If you listen very carefully, you may be able to detect that when they say "It will change your life forever!" they really mean "Oh man, your life is about to turn to shit! Shit I tell you! Literally, shit!" It's just not something you want to know about ahead of time. And so as a defense from this onslaught, you polish your resolutions, hone them fine, until they glint in your mind with the shininess and solidness of the Code of Hammurabi.

So here I offer to you, Dear Reader (that would be me), my top 10 fantasies (nee resolutions) about life after babies:

1. I will see my childless friends from time to time
2. I will still watch entire 49ers games on Sundays
   
3. I will never spend 60-90 minutes putting my kid to sleep
4. I will still travel, with baby strapped to my back
5. I will never go more than a month without sex
6. I will never allow myself to get fat
   
7. I will never seriously contemplate going out for milk and not coming back
8. I will never let my kids watch more than an hour of TV a day
9. I will not let my child scream on a bus/train/plane
10. I will never yell at my child for smearing jam/paint/soap/snot/shit all over her/me/the walls

Parenthood is messy (especially when there's shit on the walls). It's a good thing they are so damn cute when they sleep, and that my love of sitting on the couch drinking and watching Survivor is so strong. And that I'm married to Zen, who never seems to tire of telling me that we're doing fine, and it's all going to be okay. Yay Zen! Yay Chartreuse! Yay almost-series-finale-of-Lost! I've just found my will to live for another day.

Giving away my expertise

This past week marked Tempest's fourth birthday (well, fifth if you count the day she was born, but you know what I mean). According to my calculations, even allowing for time spent sleeping (very little), and in the care of her nanny (lots and lots), I have still far exceeded the requisite 10,000 hours required to be considered an expert parent.

The problem is that I still suck at it. I am an expert sucky parent.

Friends have offered a few explanations and excuses, but I buy none of them. E.g. "your kid is constantly changing, and so the skills you need are continuously changing, so you can never get in your ten thousand hours." But if that were true, I'd have to play the same piece of music on the same piano for ten thousand hours before becoming an expert, and we all know that's silly. The skills required to gain expertise in any field grow more complex and difficult the more you practice. One does not become an expert programmer by writing "Hello World" in every language. Yet every day with Tempest I feel as though "Hello World" is all I've got in my toolbox.

Tempest: I don't WANT to go to school today! I want to watch Mulan!
Me: You're going to school.
Tempest: NO! NO MOMMY! I WANT MULAN NOW!
Me: Hello World!
Tempest: AAAAGH! ARGLE BARGLE! WAHWAHWAH!!!!
Me: HELLO WORLD!! Hola Mundo! Bonjour Tout le Monde!!

You can probably guess that this approach is not very effective. And yet, in any other field other than parenting, people would be paying me a lot of money for my experience. Somehow, when it comes to raising children, you only pay dearly for consulting time from people who aren't parents. If I were to have that conversation with 100 children, I could build me a website and charge hundreds of dollars to exasperated parents who can't motivate their pre-schoolers to get their asses dressed so they can go to school. "I've motivated hundreds of children to joyfully prepare for school, and I can prepare yours!" See how easy? No ten thousand hours required.

I'm gonna be rich.

Oh, how I've missed you, my little blog! So many months, so little change. Sunny is sunny, just with more teeth. Tempest rages on, just now with pre-school. Zen and I have been married for 7 years, yet can never seem to remember our own anniversary. Where does the time go?

We're just getting over Christmas and Sunny's first birthday. She needs a bed. Believe it or not, it's hard to have a normal marriage, with the whole sleeping together thing intact, when there's a baby sleeping in the middle. We'd like to move her into Tempest's room, but it's unclear how well she'll sleep when Tempest wakes up at 3am in full on reptile-brain mode, screaming because she's wet the bed but too upset to allow anyone to touch her. When those episodes happen, all logic circuits in her brain are shut down, in full-on lockdown mode, and all attempts at reasoning with her or explaining patiently what needs to happen and why are met with violent opposition.

Tomorrow night, I'm going to add i or Fourier transforms to my argument. Clearly my odds of success are better in imaginary space.

I'm told the first 4 years of a kid's life are like a tunnel you have to go through as a parent, with your life waiting for you on the other side. Tempest's 4 years are almost up, but Sunny has 3 to go. That's a long tunnel. While I'm working on those FFTs, maybe I'll take a crack at bending the space-time continuum too.

Much better.

Last night I slept with Zen's pillow over my head. Could hardly hear the screams.

I love the Sleep of the Just.

The road to hell is paved with popsicle sticks

Last night we had a rare thing in our house: Quality Family Time. It was almost idyllic: Zen and Tempest went into the backyard and picked some lettuce and carrots and made a salad. We all sat down to dinner together, and Tempest told us about her day as we ate. I should have known that all this family bliss could come to no good in the end.

I came back from changing a diaper to find Tempest eating a popsicle at 7:20pm. A friggin' popsicle! Zen, in his eternal optimism, assumed that when the box said "Whole Fruit" that it meant it. Oh, sweet sweet Zen. So trusting. As I read him the label ("Water, fructose, fruit puree...") it dawned on him. We were doomed.

Anyhoo, long story short, instead of being asleep by her usual 9pm, Tempest finally fell asleep a little after 10pm, after 2 hours of concerted effort on my part to avoid poking my eye out with a sharp stick.

Now, Dear Reader, you might ask yourself, why did I need to attend to the monster child for those two hours? Well, Zen and I practice what is pithily called attachment parenting. It's sort of the opposite of Ferberizing, for which I have no stomach. But after nights like last night I'm ready to go out for milk and not come back for a couple of years.

After a bad dream and wanting nothing to do with Zen, I was back in Tempest's room at 1:30am. I foolishly offered a stuffed animal for comfort, which prompted a request for her favorite stuffed animal instead, which was (I thought) in the car. After a delightful 90 minutes of "I want Doggie NOW!! NOOOWWW MOMMA!!!" an exhausted Tempest finally passed out. Thirty minutes later I was nearly done processing my rage and self-loathing (why did I offer that damned dog, and where the hell was Doggie?) and just about to fall back to sleep in my own bed when Tempest woke up again, distressed to find that Mommy was no longer in her room. Another 30 minutes of failed attempts to substitute Zen's presence for my own, then I was back in bed with her, keeping myself sane by thinking about this very post. My time with Tempest didn't end until Sunny woke up and needed to nurse around 4am (bless you Sunny, you good sleeper you!). Then miraculously Daddy passed the bar of acceptability and we switched places. On occasion, Tempest can be cool and understanding. This occasion was particularly surprising, given that a mere twenty minutes earlier she was trying to kick and claw past Zen to get to me.

And that is the story of how I came to get only three or four crappy hours of sleep last night, impacting my ability to write a quality post here tonight. Can't wait until I have teenagers who want nothing to do with me and I can get some sleep. Is that soon?

Note to Self

Happy Mother's Day to me! And here begins what is perhaps a catalog of all my deepest, darkest thoughts on motherhood, read by no-one but myself. Thanks Blogspot!

I have two children (a fact I'm still getting used to), and they'll need some pseudonyms: let's call them Angel Baby and Devil Child. Hm, beautiful symmetry aside, those may become tiresome. Okay then, how about a weather metaphor? Try this out: Sunny (four months) and her sister Tempest (three years old). Yeah, that works.

Sunny is lying on my lap blowing raspberries and yakking away like a baby pterodactyl (I'm sure they were mouthy little raptors) as I type this. I imagine that people who only have babies like Sunny will find this blog horrifying. But if you have a Tempest at home (and I know who you are because you made meaningful eye contact with me during Screamfest 2009 on the sidewalk the other day), you may see your darkest thoughts put to print. God help us both.

It's no accident that it's Mother's Day and Tempest and her mother are not currently co-located. That's because, despite the fact that I love her with the fiery intensity of a thousand burning suns, the best treat I can think of (this one-day-a-year-where-theoretically-I-can-do-naught-but-my-heart's-desire) is to spend as much time away from Tempest as possible. Why weren't the other 50-odd hours this week that she spent with her nanny enough, you ask? Because, Dear Reader, Tempest is quite simply (to borrow a description from Louis CK) an asshole. And until she grows out of it (Dear God let her grow out of it), I mostly don't enjoy her company. At least this blog will give me someplace to put my guilt whilst I treasure these precious moments of (pterodactyl-y punctuated) silence.

Sunny is what Tempest has never been. But she's still a baby, and babies are tiresome. Last night I paid our nanny (let's call her Gloria) $140 so I could be an adult for an evening and see a show with my husband (who we'll call Zen, because, well, he is). That's just how desperate we've become, when we're willing to pay $140 on top of dinner and Shins tickets just to get out of the house on a Saturday night. Why didn't we call the grandparents, of which we have multiple sets within a 50-mile radius? Because even though they managed to raise me and Zen without much permanent damage, I don't trust any of them as far as I can throw them with a baby for 6 hours. Especially not with a baby who's got an insanely self-centered, demanding, contrary (what is the word people use? high-spirited?) sister. When looked at in that light, I suppose $140 is a small price to pay for an evening without fear or excessive guilt.

So welcome to our happy little family, which isn't in reality extraordinarily happy or little. And now Dear Reader I must away, as the patience of little Sunny is worn thin. Even though I have more to say to introduce myself as a contender for Crappiest Mother of the Year, even I can't be completely immune to her cries for more than a couple minutes. Time to suckle my littlest piggy.