All Barnes & Noble stores smell the same. After days of feeling like I couldn’t breathe — both literally and figuratively — I walked through their doors and inhaled deeply the aroma of high-quality paper and coffee. It smelled like … Continue reading
You know what this world is lacking? Authenticity. So I’m going to put out some unapologetic honesty in the hopes that it will counteract all the people who are trying to be something that they aren’t. I’m a big believer in balance. You take a vitamin, you eat a cookie. You drink a beer, you drink some water. You eat cake, you go for a walk.
The Earth is full of women who are not willing to be authentic, and as a result, almost all of us are lonely. The authentic ones have trouble finding other authentic ones, and the ones who are faking it just end up with a bunch of other equally fake friends. Womanhood can be incredibly isolating, which is why the handful of friends I’ve got who really know and understand me are stuck with me forever.
Why is it so hard for people to just speak the truth? It really will set you free. Tell you what, I’ll start: Potty training is hell and I’m so thankful for mommy amnesia because eventually I’ll forget how much it sucked. Today I had Doritos for breakfast and M&M’s for lunch. I want to yell “What the FUCK?!” at least twice per day, but I don’t. It’s going to happen one of these days because I feel like I’m surrounded by crazy people. I already feel terrible about it and it hasn’t even happened yet.
Sometimes I am really annoyed that I don’t get paid for being a stay-at-home mom. My job is hard. All I want is a paycheck so I can buy myself a plane ticket and go somewhere … because I’d like that.
I don’t believe anything they say on the Fox News Channel.
I smear Vaseline on everything. Like my face.
This weekend I tried to sell two stacks of old jeans at Plato’s Closet and they said they were too outdated. I took them to Style Encore which is similar, but geared toward women in their mid-twenties to mid-fifties, and they said my jeans were too outdated.
What the fuck.
This is a picture of my latest issue of Southern Living.
I asked Robbie to screw down this hutch thing down that sits precariously atop of Maverick’s desk because it was a major hazard. My kids don’t have a great track record with furniture, and every time the baby went in there, I had visions of it toppling onto her.
Yesterday he was completing his “list” and crossed that item off. But I didn’t see where it was screwed together, so I asked him about it.
“I super glued it,” he said.
Oh. Okay.
“Damn, girl! Did I do that to you?!”
This week I have been working on potty training Asher. I have been peed on more times than I care to recount. I have taken deep breaths, gotten on my hands and knees, and cleaned up puddle after puddle of pee, over and over and over again. I have walked in it, yanked the baby out of it, and hopped over it.
I. hate. pee.
It is now Thursday, day six of this undertaking. As I stood with Maverick at the end of our driveway at 7:30 this morning waiting for the school bus to arrive, I suddenly looked down and realized that I am exactly what I never thought I would be. I was standing out there in broad daylight, wearing straight up pajamas with my bra hanging out, as my middle child ran around in nothing but a t-shirt and his underwear. When I used to have a job and wear high heels, I remember spotting moms standing on corners looking crazy and I totally judged them.
Shame on me.
I just didn’t know.
I spend a lot of my day getting crawled on.
Being a mom is so, so hard. So to all the other mothers who stand at bus stops with half-clothed children, and suddenly look down and realize they are also half-clothed … I want to say hello, my name is Harmony. I’m joining your club.
“Asher’s potty training. He sucks at it. We had to go to Target to buy him more underwear today because he keeps pooping in his pants, and Mommy refuses to wash them out. She just throws ’em away. I don’t blame her.
Anyway, she made this huge deal over the fact that he peed in the Target bathroom — OMG, it was so disgusting, he touched all over the toilet and he took off his shoes, because he’s gross — and Mommy was trying to hold me and help him put his shoes back on but he kept touching us with his potty hands. It was awful, but she said she was proud of him.
Then we got home and he proceeded to pee all over the laundry room. That made her pretty upset, so I crawled all in it for my own entertainment.
It was warm.”
Filed under “Made Me Giggle.”
Carpool is terrible.
That’s right. I’m writing a blog post about carpool. The people of this world who are doing real things, like anything related to accounting, delivering babies, or the Ebola virus, are entitled to roll their eyes. A friend of mine from high school (Hi, Genya Dana!) has a PhD and is now a Senior Science Policy Officer at the U.S Department of State. She sometimes reads my blog, and if she reads this post I would expect her to roll her eyes. I’m totally fine with it. I would too.
But … silly as it is, this is my life. Right now my world is wrapped up in figuring out the public school system and potty-training my middle child, and those two things pretty much leave me spent by the end of the day. It’s a damn good thing I’m not working at the Center for Disease Control or the U.S. Department of State. Just the thought of it makes me panicky; the stress of it all would render me asleep under my desk by noon.
When I first became a stay-at-home mom, I had all these ideas of what certain mom-like things would be like. Carpool was one mom task I figured I’d be doing eventually. It sounds so fancy: carpool. You hear of parents sitting in the carpool line, and I never quite got a grasp on how horrible it really is. After three days of waiting for 30 minutes, twice a day, in an ass-long line of cars with small children screaming from the backseat, I mentioned to Maverick that maybe he could ride the bus.
The bus!!!!!! His eyes lit up with excitement. Desperation eroded whatever worries I had about putting my 5-year-old on a big yellow school bus, and on Monday morning I got us all dressed and began the long walk to the end of our street. We stood at the busy corner and we waited. Not ones to waste time, Maverick and Asher spent the longest 8 minutes of my life throwing pine cones, sticks, and rocks at cars (NO!), into the street (again, NO!), at houses (NO!), and at each other (NO!). They then proceeded to stand in ant hills, peel bark off pine trees and dig holes in someone’s yard, all while I tried to stop them and keep the baby out of harm’s way and smile and wave to the people who drove by as if all was well, so they would not notice that I was completely losing my mind.
And then, the bus arrived. The driver took one look at us and asked which house we live in. When I told her, she said “I’ll stop in front of your house from now on — it’s much safer there.” And I thanked her for making my life exponentially easier as I tried to keep Asher from boarding the bus behind his brother.
I planned to get a picture of Maverick as he climbed into the school bus for the first time, but it was too late. As I was talking to the driver, he found a window seat and waved excitedly as they pulled away and Asher sobbed.
At 3:40 that afternoon, the bus came back and deposited my child, as if by magic. He’s been taught and fed two meals — breakfast and lunch — and transported to and from our home without me doing anything except getting him out the door. Public school is the bomb, y’all. So far I am completely a fan, definitely the mom who goes overboard with appreciation to everyone who plays a part in my son’s education because I CANNOT DO IT WITHOUT THEIR HELP.
So THANK YOU, Mrs. L the bus driver. I would have hugged you, but you said you had to go.
Modern Mommy Madness 