Category — Ramblings

I’m turning into “that mom.”

You know, the one who’s 10 minutes late to EVERYTHING.

I hate it. Hate it, hate it, hate it.

I’ve always prided myself on my punctuality. I think that tardiness translates, on some minor and occasional level, into self-centeredness. After all, why is your time more valuable than mine? Shouldn’t we both respect the importance of each others’ schedules and plans?

Before kids, and even during the first few months, I was always early to every appointment, meeting, call and date. At worst, I was on time. I get the idea of being fashionably late to parties, but since I considered “fashionable” to be about 10 minutes, I was generally the first one to awkwardly arrive to any event.

Then I had the twins. Over time, my tardiness has gotten worse. Despite my best efforts, despite all common sense, despite pre-planning,  I’m finding myself running late to almost everything.

This is among the many (many) “Oh, I get it now” lessons I’m learning as a mother.

You know what I’m talking about:

Before: Why is you kid so effing filthy?
Oh, I get it now: My kid SCREAMS when I try to wipe off his hands/face/mouth/feet and I have 18 loads of laundry piling up . . . So, after almost dropping him from his high chair and poking him in the eye seven or eight times in an attempt to make him presentable, I concluded that the spaghetti sauce stains kind of match the shirt and hey, aren’t kids supposed to be filthy?

Before: Do you not hear you stupid kid crying in the middle of XYZ Department Store/grocery store/pharmacy? If you can’t shut your child up, you shouldn’t be in public.
Oh, I get it now: Crying is not an emergency. Crying is just someone trying to speak when they have no vocabulary and, in this case, they’re saying “I want to pull everything off the shelves!”

Before: Can you please not expose your freaking BOOBS in public?
Oh, I get it now: Boobs? Oh, I didn’t even notice.

Before: It’s been a year since your kid was born and you’re still holding onto baby weight? No excuses for that one.
Oh, I get it now: OH. I GET IT NOW.

1. Aside from a few words that get me beer and food, I don’t know any German so I looked this post title up on Google Translate. According to a subsequent Google search, “Verdammt noch mal” means something in the vein of “Damn it!” “Damnation!” or “Dadgummit!” Close enough.
2. This post contains TMI for most men, every coworker past and present, and all family members. No, seriously. Proceed with caution.

Still with me? Okay.

***

For those of you unfamiliar with ovarian activities, mittelschmerz is a lower-abdominal pain that occurs with ovulation. I’d never heard of it until I was 29, when I tossed out my birth control pills and let my body do its thing.

Since going off the pill, I’ve discovered that my hormones and lady parts are certifiably WHACK. My uterus tilts to the right. My BO changes almost daily, with breastfeeding and according to where I’m at in my cycle. Pregnancy hormones make me incredibly euphoric.

And, with a menstrual cycle sans synthetic hormones, I get mittelschmerz.

I’ve since met other ladies who get mittelschmerz too. I don’t know to what degree they feel the pain, but Holy Mother . . . For me, the pain is un-fucking-real.

It begins with a noticeable cramp in my uterus. This lasts for a day or two. Then, I start getting what feels like a stitch in my side, just under my ribs. Depending on which side I feel it, I can tell if I’ll be ovulating from my right or left ovary.

***

Are you still there? I know, I told you. TMI.

Moving on.

***

The stitch grows into an awful stabbing pain extending from my lowest rib to what I assume is my ovary. No exaggeration, it feels like a scorching knife being plunged at a diagonal angle into my side, 24/7. The pain is always there. This is the worst part. And, unfortunately, it lasts from two to four days.

It gets so intense that it hurts to walk, breathe and sit. So I’m pretty much screwed. Sometimes, I just have to curl up into a fetal position and moan.

On the one hand, mittelschmerz is super convenient for family planning. Who needs an ovulation predictor when you’re fucking INCAPACITATED on the couch because a microscopic ova is being released from a walnut-sized ovary?

On the other hand . . . Well, the “other hand” feels like having my reproductive organs sawed into with an electric turkey carver.

***

La-di-dah. You’re more than welcome to click away now if you’re freaking out.

***

It’s hard to get people to truly understand or even believe how serious this is. And there’s nothing I can do about it. Mega doses of ibuprofen, pain pills, rest, ice, heat — this stuff doesn’t even begin to touch the pain. I just have to suffer through it every month.

Between the breakouts, the BO, the ovary pain, the PMS-y mood swings, the weight gain and the actual Monthly Visitor, I feel like I’m constantly in one state of menstruation or another.

***

Hey, I warned you. Don’t bitch at me now.

I’m having a tough time, guys.

I’m stressed, sad and tired. The latest events with our cats is wearing on me. Kramer developed a fever and I took him in to the vet. The way he has his jaw wired in place makes him drool and backwash everywhere, including into his food bowl. He drips and sprays slobbery cat food EVERYWHERE, including the walls, my hair and all over the floor. I spend a good portion of the day cleaning up fish stink and shielding myself from flying cat food.

I feed him meds through a tube in his neck. I’m pretty sure he’s blind in his right eye. The vets have all assured us we did the right thing, his quality of life will be great. They assure us. And the bills pile up. And the guilt, the guilt, the guilt of what I’ve done . . .

I picked up Vincent’s ashes. I sobbed like a child. Seeing his urn meant he was really dead. Really, really dead. Killed. We miss you, man.

(I felt a very strange and very unmistakable presence in the house today. Twice. Like someone walking by, behind me. Definitely a person. Kramer started meowing like Vincent. I wasn’t even drunk.)

We missed a mortgage payment and we’ll never make it up. We just won’t. We’ve never been late on a payment. I have perfect credit. Not so much anymore. Talking to the bank today didn’t help.

We still plan to buy a better camera and somehow, I only feel slightly guilty.

I’ve barely left the house in almost two weeks. I’m so tired that I don’t want to deal with anyone. I have a million things to do around the house and zero motivation or money to do them.

I’ve only exercised a couple of times in two weeks and I’m terrified to step on the scale. I just wanted to lose six lousy pounds by August and I can’t even do that.

I spent a good five hours in the kitchen today, cleaning and cooking and cooking and cleaning. Dishes. Making baby food. Cleaning cat food syringes. Cleaning stinky cat food bowls. Dishes. Cleaning up cat slobber. Spilling an entire can of Coke. Entertaining babies. Feeding. Cooking. Feeding.

Now that I’m staying home with the girls, I’ll never be able to go back to work. Being a SAHM is not legitimate. You don’t get a line for that on your resume. Just because it’s a 24/7 job, constantly on, never rest, only work work work. At this point, I couldn’t act smart enough to get a job anyway.

I wonder if my years-long battle with depression is finally creeping back after my pregnancy euphoria. Dammit. My old shrink doesn’t take our new insurance.

Not that I’ve checked.

I have bags under my eyes. The bags have bags. I feel like shit. I’m lonely. I’m a failure. I want to hide.

I need, need, need. I need help.

I have begun way too many sentences with “I” in this post. <–Stated with complete self-awareness.

Lesson of the evening: Don’t blog and bitch. Because man, that publish button is a bitch . . .

I had a root canal today.

Ugh.

For months, the very last molar in the very back of my mouth on the bottom left has been acting up. I ignored it until the tooth finally gave up the subtle cues and started screaming BITCH PAY ATTENTION TO ME.

I haven’t been to the dentist in years. I could have called the last guy I went to, but I felt like I was being spammed every time I went there. “Buy the $200 Pulsonic 4000 toothbrush or your teeth will ROT!” “Try our gold-plated floss for only three payments of $34.99 or your teeth will ROT!” “Invest in a commemorative DVD of your dental visit or your teeth will ROT!” “Quit smoking or your teeth will ROT!”

Instead, I did what any rational woman would do: I called the dentist that had the tasteful tile work on the sign out front.

Tasteful Tilework Dentistry was a converted house in the historic district. The waiting room had plush leather lounge chairs. Colorful arts-and-crafts windows. Restored original hardwood floors, polished to a high shine. The receptionist had the eye makeup of a porn star. The doctor herself was so cute, it was kind of hard to believe she was actually a dentist and I wondered how many dicks she sucked to get her degree.

Anyway.

They took a couple of X-rays, which were immediately displayed on the flat-screen TV hanging on the wall. Luxe. Then, the dental assistant took out what looked like an electric toothbrush, but it was actually a camera to take a picture of my tooth. Well then. She snapped a few pics of my molar, which also displayed in high res on the TV.

You have to understand that the last time I went to the dentist, it was a novelty to have a Walkman playing Amy Grant to drown out the drilling sound.

Within five minutes, Dr. Adorable was able to tell me that I had a pocket of infected disgust surrounding the root of my molar. I would need to start up on antibiotics and either pull the tooth or get a root canal and a crown.

I’m only 31. I might be unemployed, and I might not be able to make the mortgage payment this month, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to be missing teeth this young.

But a root canal? Really?

You see, I’m not what they call a “good patient.” I’ve had a root canal before and it wasn’t pretty. I was trembling so hard that the doctor wouldn’t work on me. He sent me away with a prescription for horse tranquilizers and told me to come back another day. I took a pill and came back. Nothing. Two pills? Nada. Three pills? Okay, now we were getting somewhere. I sat in the doctor’s chair and promptly snored my way through the rest of the procedure. When I woke up, he told me he’d had to prop my mouth open with a roll of tape to do the root canal.

So.

This time, Dr. Sucked Her Way Through Dental School gave me a couple of Xanax to make it through. Within 20 minutes of taking the first pill, my legs felt like lead and I couldn’t put on my pants, but I was pretty sure I was going to FREAK THE FUCK OUT when I got to the endodontist. So I took another.

I’ve obviously never taken Xanax before.

I vaguely remember waking myself up with my own snoring while the doctor ripped nerves out of my face.

An hour-and-a-half and $385 later, I’m the proud new owner of an empty shell of a tooth.

I have to pump for 24 hours to clear out the Xanax, but believe me, it’s been totally worth it.

Yeah, I said it.

I’ve always had a penchant for sending crazy emails. Random, empty can in my 12-pack of Sunkist? Email to the manufacturer. Typo on a menu? Email to the restaurant.  I enjoy the smell of your new line of deodorants? Email to Degree.

But now that there are children involved, my electronic correspondence is getting nasty. Since becoming a mother, I’ve become shameless. Hormonal, even, to the point of employing ALL CAPS the angrier I get.

The story:

While I was pregnant, I registered for this baby monitor. I’m really not sure why. The two-monitors thing kind of turned me on, me daydreaming that I’d be out in the yard gardening while Chris re-tiled the pool and the babies slept peacefully for six or seven hours at a time. You know, because babies don’t cramp your style or anything. And because having twins would magically motivate the two laziest people on the planet to become DIYers.

Anyhow, after the girls were born, they slept in their bassinet next to our bed for the first four months so we didn’t use the monitor. When Althea started to roll over, she also started smashing Elise and waking her up, so we moved them to their own cribs in their room. This is when we finally tried out the baby monitor. It worked for exactly one night before the damned thing stopped transmitting a signal.

Because it’d been so long since we purchased it, Babies R Us wouldn’t take it back. I had to contact Fisher-Price directly. The half-wit on the phone convinced me that I needed to unscrew the back of the receiver piece, even after I insisted it was the transmitter piece that was broken. After I destroyed the receiver trying to follower her instructions, the company sent me a new receiver.

But I still had a broken monitor. Because the f’n TRANSMITTER was broken, lady. Ugh.

Keep in mind that this entire time, I’d been sleeping in the girls’ room on the spare bed because we didn’t have a monitor.

Anyway.

Once the new piece arrived, I promptly called the customer support line again. This person listened to me and agreed to send a voucher for a new monitor in the mail once I mailed back the faulty monitor. Cool. Except for the part that I had to pay for the shipping costs to mail back a piece of shit monitor that they manufactured.

Dammit.

I waited more than two weeks. No voucher. This is when the nasty emails began. Note the use of ALL CAPS GODDAMMIT to convey my anger.

From: Me
To: Fisher-Price

Hello -

I mailed the monitor to you over two weeks ago and still have not received a voucher. I’m really getting frustrated with your company and lack of attention to a faulty product. I haven’t been able to sleep in my own bed for weeks because of this. Now that I’m looking around the house, EVERYTHING that we have for our twins that has broken has been Fisher-Price. I will NEVER buy anything of yours again and will warn fellow parents to not purchase from Fisher-Price either.

Please inform me of the status of my voucher. I’m angry that I’m being forced to purchase another one of your products.

***

From: Fisher-Price
To: Me

Thank you for contacting Mattel regarding your Private Dual Monitor.  We apologize for any disappointment or concern this may have caused and thank you for bringing this matter to our attention.

We have attached a traceable United States Postal Service mailing label for the return of your item.  You will need to pay the appropriate postage for your package when you take it to the post office.  It’s important that you request and retain an insurance receipt for protection against loss during transit.

Our mailing label has been sent in PDF format, which can be viewed using Adobe Acrobat.  If you do not have Adobe Acrobat, you can download it for free at the Adobe website, http://www.adobe.com/.

Please return your Private Dual Monitor to us within 30 days.  Upon receipt of your returned package, a voucher in the amount of $56.00 will be sent within 4 to 6 weeks.  If your product is still within the service policy and if the purchase price is more than this amount, it is necessary to include your original sales receipt showing the retail store name, the product name, the purchase price and date.

We appreciate this opportunity to assist you.

Sincerely,

Mattel, Inc.
Consumer Relations

***

From: Me
To: Fisher-Price

Today, I received the voucher you sent. The problem now is that the monitor we bought cost $64.99 and you sent a voucher for $56.

I cannot even begin to tell you how FURIOUS I am with Mattel/Fisher-Price. I demand that you send a voucher that will cover the FULL price of the monitor, including taxes. I can’t believe I’m even having to ask for you to pay for a defective product that your company made. On top of all of this, you made me pay for shipping to send the monitor back to you! Unbelievable!

Florida state sales tax is 7% for a total of $4.55, bringing the cost of the monitor to 69.54. Please send a voucher for the remaining amount immediately.

***

From: Fisher-Price
To: Me

Thank you for contacting Fisher-Price. We appreciate the opportunity to respond.

Under separate cover, we are sending an additional $14.00 voucher, for the difference in the cost you paid for your item.  We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.

We appreciate the time you took to check with us.  If you have any questions or concerns in the future, please feel free to call us at 800-432-5437, Monday – Friday, 9:00 am – 7:00 pm, ET, and Saturday, 11:00 am to 5:00 pm, ET.

Sincerely,
Mattel Consumer Relations

***

So we went back to Babies R Us and got another of the same damned monitor! But I sure fooled Fisher-Price. I had a coupon that made my monitor much cheaper. This allowed me to use the vouchers for more Fisher-Price products, so we bought toys! There was a $16 overage that I had to pay in the end, but . . .

Wait.

Dammit.

They won again.

Your Daddy and I love you more than anything in this world.

I fit into my old size six pants.

Okay, so “fitting” is a stretch. However, I can stuff my multi-layered ass into the pants and zip them up without splitting any seams or breaking any buttons. 

Okay, so I only tried one particular pair of size sixes.

And I didn’t dare bend or sit.

There was muffin top involved.

BUT.

I got them on, goddammit. And that counts for something.

I think I’m about seven pounds away from comfortably fitting into some of my old pants, and realistically I’m 12 pounds away from being in the neighborhood of my pre-pregnancy weight.

I really don’t try hard enough, though. I do work out four to five days a week. I even started doing a pseudo-jog thing while pushing the girls in a totally non-jogging stroller.

(You must understand that I am not a runner. I am not athletic. I don’t “do” exercise in the way that some people “do” exercise. But I do it because I have to and ultimately my ass heart thanks me for it.)

But I don’t consistently watch what I eat. I have ice cream every single night in serving sizes that defy any caloric quantification, which I stuff into a tiny ramekin because it makes me believe that I’m eating less than I actually am. I eat bacon, mayonnaise and cheese, but insist on buying 1% milk and pouring it over mulch-in-a-bowl cereal for breakfast. As I type this, I have splatters of oil all over my shirt from tonight’s dinner — something called “chicken-fried chicken,” which I prepared with homemade buttermilk ranch dressing. 

And served it over organic spring salad greens.

I used to eat like shit. But I’d only eat, like, four bites of shit. I just can’t do that anymore, not now that I’m trying to, you know, nourish two babies and all.

Sigh.

As I run errands at Burlington and Kohl’s and Target, I’ve started eyeballing bathing suits too. Not bikinis, mind you, because although my stomach is less scary than I thought it would look, it’s still not ready for its beach debut. No, this year will be the Year of the Tankini. And boy, those things are uuugggglyyyyy. The patterns are horrifying. And breast support? Nada! My boobs look like lactating pancakes underneath swaths of Lycra-psychedelic-grandma prints. Since I’ve never had boobs before in my life, I’m not sure if this is normal.

(Here’s a visual for you: Hold up a flip-flop to your breast area. That’s what my boobs will look like after I stop breast feeding.)

Anyhow, what I’m finding interesting about this whole post-partum body experience (which is not unlike an out-of-body experience) is that, while I have every right to be — nay, I should be self-conscious about what has happened to my body, I just kind of don’t. I have brazenly stripped off my shirt and pumped or breastfed in front of friends and family, knowing full well that they see my bizarre-o stomach shape and stretch marks, but I just haven’t cared enough to be modest. It’s almost as though I defy anyone to say shit to me because if I can carry 13 pounds of people in my uterus, I pretty much have the right to throttle anyone who dares say anything about my body.

This afternoon, I was changing Althea, my little firecracker. She was doing her thing, twisting her back and legs to flip herself over, making me curse a few times in laughter and frustration. After some goofing around, she flipped onto her back and I managed to get a diaper under her. Her happy cheeks round with a smile, she grabbed the fat — er, skin on my forearm with her strong little fingers.

In that moment, an otherwise insignificant moment captured in time, I remembered my grandma.

Grama had a lingering Boston accent and enjoyed a cold beer on a hot day. She smoked. She laughed. She read voraciously and snacked on Spam with crackers, taking careful nibbles with her front teeth while flipping the pages of another Agatha Christie mystery. She took clogging lessons.

Grama was buddies with the Lord and didn’t care which church she found him in (she, an alabaster Irish woman, once attended an all-African American gospel church — even purchased traditional African garb — and found that the Lord there was the same Lord she prayed to anywhere else, goddammit).

When I was a little girl, Grama would drive me to the 99-cent store in her long, white Oldsmobile. On our walk through the parking lot, I would stroke Grama’s arms, the sagging, loose skin so soft under my fingertips. I would explore the thick veins in her hands and caress her freckled arms.

This skin was different from mine. I delighted at this discovery, the soft skin loose and saggy with age. I would rub at it with my fingers and tell her how soft she was.

When I grew up, I wanted to have soft skin like Grama.

Now that I’m an adult, I realize she probably cursed all that loose and sagging skin, probably thought it was disgusting and unattractive, a reminder of how not-young she was. But to me, it was human silk, a touchy-feel that represented all that was comforting and right with the world.

My Grama’s skin.

Althea’s fingers digging into my forearm, I slid the diaper under her tiny little bum. Those big, bright eyes. Those apple-round cheeks. The gummy grin. Grabbing at my skin with exuberance and innocence.

Week Three: I’m still trying to find my balance at the whole stay-at-home mom thing.

The first week at home, as I reported earlier, was really lonely and slow and weird and emotional.

Then, on Wednesday of week two, I discovered Mommy Group.

Mommy Group is hosted by the hospital where I delivered. The first group is for 0-6 month olds; the second is for 6 month to one-year olds. This means I’m slipping into the group and getting to know people just as I’m ready to “graduate” to the next group. Dammit.

Anyway, I showed up to Mommy Group early. I’m particular about punctuality. Always have been. I plan my entire day around arriving early or on time for appointments. This, apparently, is not good practice with moms (or doctors, or hair stylists, or walking buddies, or movies, or dinner dates, or phone calls) because nobody else ever bothers to be on time to anything. This royally annoys me.

Moving on.

I sat on the floor with the girls on a blanket and waited. After a while, other moms with their (singleton) babies started filtering in. We discussed our concerns, observations, struggles, anecdotes. Afterward, most of us went out to lunch. And the whole time, all I could think was braaaainnnnss peeeeople. After being cooped up in the house for a week and a half, I was high on the presence of other adults.

It was like a drug. I needed more.

Through the end of the week and all this week, I kept myself busy. Grocery shopping. Walking. Visiting with other moms. Most embarrassing? I actually went to see Kate from “Jon and Kate Plus 8″ sign her book. I don’t even like her. At all. And yet, here she is in all her spiky-haired glory, taking up space on my camera phone.

But after several days of errands, car rides, meet-ups and missed nap times, the babies couldn’t take anymore. Several epic, sleep-deprived baby meltdowns later, I canceled tomorrow’s mom coffee date. I realized that, shit, I’ve been running all over the place for my own good, not necessarily for my daughters’ entertainment.

My apologies in advance, and I know I’ll regret saying this, and obviously no offense if you currently or previous or plan to have spit-up in your hair for potentially days on end — but I’m scared of turning into a mom who has spit-up in her hair for days on end. Do you know what I mean? I just have this image of Roseanne Barr with corn-chip toenails and hammer toes and a bad perm that I’d really like to avoid.

(Okay, so I’ve actually gone to work with spit-up in my hair. Whatev.)

This is all so new to me and kinda sorta daunting. Being a mom. Being relied on by a crying child who will not be comforted unless I come in to hold her or nurse her.

Maybe . . . maybe . . . what I’m scared of is raising my own babies. I generally feel pretty good about trusting my gut when it comes to being with the girls and doing the right things for them. But that innate self-doubting mechanism kicks in and I wonder what the hell I’m doing trying to raise two babies at the same time. Seriously? Me? The girl who never wanted to get married or have kids?

But at the end of week three, I’m starting to feel okay. Don’t get me wrong — the finances are not a good thing. But emotionally, I feel like this is a new life, a new job, a new purpose. I’m recognizing things about the girls’ behaviors and personalities that I’d wouldn’t so easily see if I were away now. I suspect things will just get more challenging as we start on solid foods (ugh, in the next week or two) and the girls get mobile and vocal. But for now, I’m feeling better and more comfortable with being an at-home mama.

The internet. It’s like a great lover who treats you like shit. Most of it sucks, but you keep coming back because of those couple-few times it hits you so good.

I find myself staring at my browser, clicking on the same few tabs over and over again. Refresh. Refresh, click, refresh. Anything new? Ugh. Same shit. Why doesn’t anyone say anything fascinating? Or why am I so jaded? I use Chrome so I don’t Stumble anymore, and I’m too lazy to go back to Firefox and deal with its increasing slowness. 

There’s nothing on the internet tonight.

Right now, my ‘net habits are composed of a handful of mommy blogs I check out, job searches, email checks and Facebook updates. Surely there must be something out there that will diddle my Skittle more than that.

Please. Someone share something mind blowing with me!