A Walk to Remember

Sometimes at night, after my kids have gone down to bed, I creep into their rooms and run my hand lovingly down their soft, cherubic little cheeks. They look so sweet and so innocent I am compelled to take a picture because a) I want to chronicle the moment of peace and b) I've heard that if demonic possession is actually a thing, it can sometimes manifest itself in photography.

The results remain inconclusive.

Today my parents came over and we decided to walk a quarter mile from my house to an Italian restaurant with the kids to get some pizza. My mother had purchased a kid's umbrella for my daughter and she wanted to let her try it out on a little neighborhood walk like an elderly, Asian woman waiting for a bus so we all headed out into the warm Arizona air.

My daughter was completely stoked.

Until she refused to hold the umbrella high enough to see and we had to pluck her out of that rain gutter   you see to her right.

At which point we advised her that if the umbrella was going to be a hinderance to her vision we were going to have to take it away. This prompted a response of, "You can't talk to me! No talking!" and a look of hate so pointed and so well cultivated that I had to give the little shit some props. She definitely knows how to make someone feel like a dick.

My mother then got down to eye level with her and said sweetly, "Well, I expect you to hold that up high or I will be sad. Okay?" and then whispered to me, "I had to get tough with her. Sorry."

I found this rich considering that this was the same woman who'd once swung a vacuum cleaner cord at me after lassoing it psychotically over her head like the Lone fucking Ranger while promising my death if I didn't get the hell away from her but I guess the definition of getting "tough" with a kid could have changed since the early 80's.

The walk continued, until my son decided that he'd had enough and slunk to the ground next to my dad. I picked him up to continue our journey (we'd gone a block. You'd think we had jogged a 5k at this point) and was met with rage that I wouldn't let him down so he could continue to stubbornly refuse to walk and scream "No!" at all of our attempts to nudge him into motion.

I tried reasoning with him.

Which just caused him to go full Chris Brown on me.

The evening ended with us triumphantly reaching our destination only to have my children crawl under the table to sit with "Bapa" because their associations with him are filled with joy and rounds of "This Little Piggie" as opposed to associations with me that include rounds of "If You Say Poop One More Time to the Cashier at Fry's I will Throw Your Donut Out Of The Window on Ray Road When We Get Into The Car."

So I take pictures of them when they're sleeping. Tomorrow is a new day.

The Pinterest Generation and What Makes Me a Shitty Mother

Pinterest.

I'm not new in both lauding and lamenting Pinterest and all it stands for, but I think it still bears mentioning what Pinterest and its ensuing cultural ramifications have meant to me as a parent, wife, woman and human.

Pinterest makes me believe, in the wee small hours as I mindlessly scroll through post after post of lasagnas in muffin tins and dresses made from men's flannel shirts, that I can create my own reality. It has me thinking, as I print out Nutella recipes and templates for a firefighter birthday party that I can throw under a canopy of DIY fireflies in mason jars surrounded by mugs with baked on Sharpie drawings that life is simply a means of finding a creative solution to everyday problems. Need to lose weight? Print out this daily workout schedule followed by 200 lunch recipes under 200 calories that feature avocado and hibiscus leaf for maximum fat burning. Have a kid who holds their poop until it is turtling out of their butt while they run screaming from it because they are somehow frightened by their own bodily functions? Just take a regular spray bottle, fill it with water and affix a cute "Poop Spray" label to it. Once you spray the toilet (and maybe their ass for good measure) with it that kid will buy your line that the spray makes pooping fun and they'll be flushing their logs in no time.   Pinterest gives you the feeling that you can navigate life through a series of life hacks, tricks and DIY innovations and sometimes you can.

And then, sometimes, you find yourself at Peter Piper Pizza for a 6-year-old's birthday party with both your 3 and your 2-year-old in tow and you realize, there isn't a life hack for this. This is no quick trick to navigate through the crush of greased up, cracked out children all converging on the candy skill crane like it's a life raft in the last moments of Titanic. There is no step by step guide to prepare you for the 2-year-old running away from you through the restaurant with the speed of Jackie Joyner Kersee, your only chance for catching him to some how corral him into a corner like a wolverine while the 3-year-old pees herself on the big plastic tube slide, strips naked in the middle of the throngs and then screams at you for not letting her ride the carousel that way, her point driven home by the clenching of her angry and dimpled butt cheeks as you desperately carry her tantrum stiffened body over to a booth.

What do you do? I don't have a Pinterest pin for how to deal with this situation and I think it's because of the dark, underlying theme of our Pinterest generation. We are all trying to convince ourselves that we are good at this by mod podging baby pictures onto bricks. When that fails, we try desperately to cling to the idea that we can fool others into thinking that we are by our craftiness. But the thing is, as I realized tonight while I looked at the parents who were staring at me with horror in the restaurant while I tried to jam jeans that had been in the diaper bag as a spare set of clothes for so long that they no longer fit on my now moistened daughter, no one is buying it. They see that I, and any other parent out there like me, am barely holding it together. I love my kids, genuinely love them, but they can see the wheels turning in the Target while my son is screaming "damn it" at the top of his lungs. They know I'm thinking about punting him across a vast distance. Hopefully they see that I never would, but they see that I'd like to just the same. They know I'm not good at this. Fuck, they know I'm not even really passable at this.

So what does a well intentioned but dumb shit parent do when the urine hits the polyurethane? All you can do is gather them up and make good on the 17 threats you'd made through out your excursion to leave while a child behind you makes their way down the tube slide, exclaiming to their waiting mother, "Mom! The slide is slippery!"

Then you take them home, put them to bed after story and good night song and write a blog about how truly you suck at your job, and it isn't for lack of trying. Sometimes, I suck the very most when I've tried my very hardest. There is no rhyme or reason to it, but the results of my days as a pseudo stay at home mom are rarely without stories and that is where this blog comes in. If you are the type of parent who has this shit down pat, well then pull up a chair and prepare to laugh at the asshat who can't quite seem to get it right. But if you're like me, if you suck at this too, I hope you can relate. Either way, I am writing this to chronicle my time spent as the mother of a boy and a girl that my husband and I decided to space 16 months apart as a comic relief in a day that often involves bodily fluids, broken items and copious usage of the phrase "shut up mommy", and that is just from the 2-year-old. If you wanna feel better about yourself in anyway, stay tuned.