I have a broken wrist and limited typing ability. I will tell THAT entire story some other time. Until then, I will bring you: The Top 5 Christmas Carols For Bad Moms. Because I can do it with minimal typing. Phoning it in FTW!

5.  Queen – Thank God It’s Christmas.  “Oh my friends it’s been a long hard year.” The refrains of epic relief that another insane year is finally over is common to all bad moms, isn’t it?

4. Boney M/Jose Feliciano: Feliz Navidad. Nobody can understand a goddamn word, but we all sing it anyway.

3. The Ramones. “Merry Christmas, I don’t want to fight tonight” (As we assemble this stupid toy for Santa)
Merry Christmas, I don’t want to fight tonight” (That has ten thousand goddamn pieces and instructions in Cantonese and German BUT I DO NOT SPEAK THOSE LANGUAGES)
Merry Christmas, I don’t want to fight tonight with you” (Even though you said you’d pick up batteries and you FUCKING FORGOT YOU TWIT)

Ahhh.

2. Fairytale of New York. “You scumbag, you maggot, you cheap lousy faggot, happy Christmas you arse I pray God it’s our last.” Amen.

1.  Frankie Goes To Hollywood – The Power Of Love. Not always labeled as a Christmas song, but you remember being in the high school gym during the Christmas prom and waiting for the cute boy to ask you to dance but then he asked that icky Elizabeth to dance instead even though you know he was going to ask you but she came over first and oh never mind. It’s a good song.

10 days.

10 days I am in England.

Without my child.

It’s a really long story. We meant to go for a month and take her. I envisioned walking through Hyde Park with her in the stroller; taking her in to Mamas and Papas on Regent street and buying adorable little outfits; taking her on trains and seeing the wonder in her eyes as we discover all sorts of new and interesting things.

But then every time we travelled this summer with her it went – not much else can be said for it – badly. Her routine, once disrupted, always turned to crap. Planned excursions to fun and interesting places turned into marathons of toddler torture, meaning lack of sleep, food throwing, generalized screaming and hell for her and everyone else. The thought of taking her on an overnight flight and managing her jet lag, then staying in a new place for a month away from our own surroundings no longer sounded attractive. It sounded hellish. She would have been miserable. We would have been miserable. So we changed our plans. The toddler was going to Grandma’s to get spoiled rotten while we travel. But because someone else was relying on our plans, I couldn’t cut my trip down to only a week. I had to be here for longer. And here I am, in London for 10 days.

Without my daughter.

I keep telling myself I need to appreciate it. I can stay out til all hours of the night. I can go anywhere without a stroller or a bagful of diapers.  I can eat a meal in peace and have a glass of wine or five. I can sleep as long as I want.

Heaven, right?

But then last night we went in to a restaurant and at the table next to us sat a two year old boy with his Thomas trains. He had Thomas and Percy and Sir Topham Hatt and he was driving them along the table top and it made my heart lurch.

I see a child running through the park with a frilly pink tutu, dropping and picking up her purple balloons with chubby toddler arms, and I cannot take my eyes off her.

We left her behind for a reason: in order to take a real pseudo-vacation.

But all I’m learning is that without her, nothing is really any fun.

I am all for encouraging imaginative play. I am totally down with mixing toys and letting Thomas chug through the barn or giving the toy frogs group hugs in the bath because frogs need love too. So, you know, usually I go with the flow. But sometimes, mainly because I’m a rookie mom, I just have to ask if things are OK, if I’m doing this right.  Because occasionally, things just get a little weird around here.

Case in point: Her dollhouse.

Ideally, you would think, when it comes to playing with their dollies, a child would model what (s)he sees in her home.  A happy, nuclear family, all in their specific roles for familial harmony. You would think you would see scenes such as this:

The Sweet Little Girl, washing her hands after age-appropriate use of the potty:

The Daddy, cleaning up the kitchen in this liberated household:

The Grandma, rocking the baby to sleep in the attic:

Or perhaps taking a breath of fresh late summer air on the balcony:

Meanwhile, Mama is sitting having a cup of coffee while contemplating deep, complex, world-saving thoughts:

And the well-behaved canine lays on the kitchen floor:

Except that exactly none of that is the way it rolls around here, aside from the part where Mama is sitting on her ass drinking yet another goddamn cup of coffee. The two year old isn’t potty trained, Daddy doesn’t even know where the dish soap is, and the dog is usually either eating someone’s underwear or licking his own junk. But still, you’d think the actual dysfunction of our own home would.. I dunno… be represented a little more accurately? I swear to god, none of the stuff that appears in her dollhouse ACTUALLY HAPPENS in real life. She just likes to … pretend it does?  Case in point: (Lighting effects added by me, to give the whole thing an air of CSI:WTF?)

The kitchen has been ransacked. Fire support is on scene.

The refrigerator upended, with random pork helping themselves to leftover cannoli:

Meanwhile the bathroom is filled with livestock who are obviously high on E. Medical assistance has been called in but by the looks of it this young bit of paramedic skirt got seduced by the lure of easy drugs and smooth talking cows:

Grandma is face down in the bedroom. The doctor is administering assistance, but the guy with the bad liver in the background probably needs help more:

The Sweet Little Girl is chatting online with a person who swears that they, too, are an eight year old girl! with ponytails! who lives just beside the park!! and has new puppies!!!!! WHEN CAN WE MEET?

The plumbing has been trashed, some guy in a red suit is carrying the pet goldfish around like a boom box, and the dog has apparently eaten the baby. The Police are unable to subdue the revelers.

Daddy’s bed has somehow ended up in the barn, where he has collapsed in a gin-induced coma next to a sheep and a midget.

And where, pray tell, in the midst all of this chaos is Mama? Why, yakking off the balcony.

This is all what we call normal imaginative play, right? I mean, she doesn’t know that cows don’t take baths in the people bathroom or that daddy’s bed doesn’t go in the barn. This is all just two year old creativity! Right?

Right?

Oh, god.

Yes, we are those parents who ditch the kids with Grandma in order to go have fun by ourselves. Yes, I know there are plenty of parents who don’t leave their kids with anybody until they’re 16. Yes, I know that there are plenty of parents who”ve never spent a night apart, never left anybody to change a diaper at 3 am or soothe a bad dream or leave someone else in charge of dietary decisions.

We are not that family.

We’ve gone away. We’ve gone away for personal reasons or professional, trips for us to reconnect or conferences in cool places. Still, that doesn’t mean it’s easy to leave her. I worry the whole time, wondering if she is OK, if Grandma is feeding her the Right food or letting her watch too much TV. But mostly, I just miss her desperately. All I think about is going home, and how we’ll walk in the door and she’ll spot me and yell MAMA! And run in to my arms for a giant hug.

But toddlers like to surprise us. The first time we went away, there was no giant reunion hug.  Instead, we walked in the door and I took off my coat and leaned down to say Hello to my sweet daughter. Who looked at me coolly then went back to playing with her tea set.  Dismissed.

I knew it was just a kid thing. I knew she was giving us the brush off for what was probably some Very Good Child Psychology Reason – whether she was expressing her displeasure with us for going away in the first place, or perhaps she was overwhelmed by some emotional thing she couldn’t deal with, or maybe she just didn’t give a crap that we were back because Grandma took her to McDonald’s every night and let her watch Elmo all day. Whatever the reason, it stabbed me through the heart. I thought of all those moms who never left their kids and how I bet they never got the cold shoulder and how we never ever ever should have gone away in the first place no matter what the reason and I sat with my heart feeling like a swollen tooth until an hour passed and she finally rushed in to my arms for a hug and everything came back to normal.

Eventually my heart got over the frosty reception, which was a good thing because it happens every time we leave. Whenever she’s overnight with Grandma, we get a decidedly frigid reception on our return. I’ve gotten used to it. As we drove home from the airport yesterday, I was even able to laugh about it.

“You know she’s gonna ignore us completely for an hour, right?”

“Yep,” said the husband. “She’s got Grandma. Grandma feeds her french fries and babbles to her all day and buys her clothes and lets her trash the place. She loves it there.”

I laughed, then sighed internally. Right now, every toddler cold shoulder is somehow a harbinger of things to come, things when she’s 15 and slams her bedroom door in my face and yells how much she hates me. I sighed again and steeled myself for the next hour of being ignored by my own child, my c-section scar burning in sympathy.

We walked in the door and spied my girl across the room, modeling her rubber boots and rain jacket for visitors. She turned around when I called her name. For a long second, I expected her to turn back around and tromp off to the other side of the room, her displeasure with us clear.

Instead, a smile slowly spread across her face. And to my amazement, the little rubber boots started tromping towards us. Finally she stopped right in front of me as her smile grew so wide her eyes crinkled. And then, softly, her little voice whispered “Mama!” in a tone of toddler delight.

My heart bursting, I scooped her in to my arms and gave her an enormous hug. A hug for every other time we’d come home, and every other time we would come home, and for this time. Because right now, she’s still my girl, and no matter how awesome it is to get away occasionally, it’s always, always better to come home.

Persona non grata.

I might be a bad mom, but I’ve totally gone soft.

I used to swear by True Crime TV. Law and Order in all its flavours. CSI in all its locales. And Criminal Minds, that one-step-removed-from-torture-porn series with all the cutie FBI agents, was a weekly ritual (Ha. Get it? Ritual, like serial killers have rituals? Oh never mind.) I loved the characters, the intrigue, the plots and storyline twists, the implausible confessions, the pulp-fiction of it all.

Then I had a kid. A kid, a vulnerable baby whom I was tasked, by society and by nature, to protect from all the big bads in the world. And it was like a switch flipped. All of a sudden, any show that had any kind of violence, any of those Big Bads that I need to protect my child from, made me almost physically nauseous. Student nurse strangled on SVU? But but but – that was somebody’s DAUGHTER! Cheating wife found dead in her apartment?  But that woman has two children! Who will have to grow up without her! THOSE POOR BABIES!

From that point on, I could not watch any plotlines involving rape or murder or violence – which, as luck would have it, most of my favourite shows were essentially based on.  Now, every time a show has a person with kids getting killed – or, god forbid, kids themselves being involved somehow – I can’t take it. I’m lucky if I can change the channel fast enough to keep myself from crying. If I somehow got sucked in to the plot before it took that awful turn and I can’t stop myself and want to see how it ends, I can forget about sleep that night. I lay there and I think about what if I were captured by a white formerly upstanding completely normal person who suddenly snapped and turned serial killer and trapped me in his basement -

and I seriously cannot even take that attempt at hyperbolic humour any further because I CANNOT DEAL.

And it’s not getting better. It’s getting worse.  Yesterday I went to a movie. First movie I’ve gone to since the kid got too old to go to the Mommy and Baby movies. And there was this trailer:

Trailers: Scaring The Living Crap Out Of You Since 2011 (Ed. note: we can’t figure out how to embed this, ugh, sorry. Please to click through and come back!)

ALIEN INVASION. KILL OFF THE INDIGENOUS POPULATION. WE ARE BEING COLONIZED.

This trailer scared the living daylights out of me. Seriously, people, I AM LOSING IT.

Seeing this trailer led to me having endless thoughts of oh my god I need to dig a bunker under our house so that when the aliens come I can take my daughter downstairs and we can hide from the scary alien invasion and I can keep her safe. Never mind we’d be the last two people left on earth, or that even if the human race survived a Terminator-Kyle Reese style existence isn’t really among the dreams I have for my daughter’s future.

And, you know. Never mind it’s nothing more than a flight of Hollywood fancy.

MUST SAVE DAUGHTER FROM ALIENS.

I see what they mean now by “parenthood changes you”.  My neuroses have taken on lives of their own.

When you’re two years old, and you’re standing at the bottom of a toboggan hill, and there’s a toboggan coming your way, DO NOT MOVE. Just stand there, and then yell at everybody when the toboggan hits you, because HOW DARE THEY.

We do love birthdays, because, really, what’s not to love about birthdays? Cake, balloons, presents: it’s all pretty awesome.

But really: have you ever been to a five year old’s birthday party? Can you honestly tell me that there’s a significant difference between what happens when five year olds hear the sounds of gifts being unwrapped and smell the distinct aroma of NEW TOY…

… and what happens when zombies hear the movements of LIVE BEINGS and smell the distinct aroma of BRAINS?

I thought not.

(Have I told you guys how much I love The Walking Dead? I so love it. I think that I should do a series on how The Walking Dead is one long commentary on attachment parenting. Or something like that.)

(Got ideas on how to mitigate the zombie horde frenzy of PRESENTS PRESENTS YEE HA NEW TOYS! with kids and birthdays? Weigh in over at Her Bad Mother and you could win a new Windows 7 phone. Or candy. CANDY YUMMY LIKE BRAINZ.)

(You can also get a chance to win a phone or yummy candy by commenting at Katie’s post, here, about LO THE VAGARIES OF TIME, or, how a working mom makes time for her kid.)

If you were ever to visit my neighborhood, I would love for you to drop by. I’d be thrilled to see you, and I would totally invite you onto my verandah, and I would fix us up a nice pot of coffee and we would sit outside and eat cupcakes – fresh from the bakery down the street – and drink our coffee and chat. Or maybe it would be, like, late afternoon or evening and I would bust out the wine and the cheese and we would sit outside and enjoy the sunset and it would be lovely, really, just perfectly lovely. But I’d really hope that you wouldn’t ask to use the bathroom. Because I’d really kind of rather you not come in my house.

It’s not that I have anything against you, or that I have weird bathroom issues. It’s just that, you know, if you’d just dropped by? And I hadn’t had enough notice to do a total sweep of the house in advance of your visit? I just would totally not want you to come inside. Because, really, it usually looks something like this:

That’s what it looks like, all the time. Worse even. That room at the back? That’s supposed to be the dining room. Needless to say, we don’t do a lot of dining there. We actually moved the table out so that there’d be more room for things like, say, easels and chalkboards and paints. Also, giant stuffed cows and little plastic grocery carts. The piano is there, just off to the right, and it does get played, but it also functions as a toy shelf and Dora puzzle storage unit.

Oh, we try to keep it tidy. Two or three times a day I shove toys and books and miscellaneous child crap into the various baskets that you see strewn about. Then I vacuum. And then the room looks clean for about fifteen minutes before Jasper and/or Emilia begin upturning baskets and flinging toys everywhere again.

And then it looks something like this:

And this isn’t even the worst room. If I, in a fit of transparency, let you in the front door, I still wouldn’t let you up the stairs. That’s where I hide the real mess: the piles of laundry, the unpacked suitcases (seriously), the random pieces of barely used baby equipment, the children. The bathroom is also upstairs, which is why, if you mentioned a need to use the facilities, I might suddenly suggest that we head to the cafe around the corner. For cookies! They make the best cookies! Also, their restroom doesn’t have childrens’ toothpaste smeared across the vanity mirror, and they probably actually put the toilet paper on the roll.

It’s a losing battle for me, keeping house. I just can’t do it. I have a ten-month old baby who is just starting to walk and using his newfound mobility to seek out things to scatter and destroy, and a three-year old who loves nothing more than to mark her territory by spreading toys and books as far as she can see. And I have a husband who has trouble figuring out the relationship between socks and sock drawers and two cats who have an enthusiastic affection for dragging miscellaneous crap underneath sofas and leaving it there to collect dust. It is Sisyphean, I tell you, the work of managing a household while tending to two very small children and a tidiness-challenged husband. It is impossible, and unavoidable, and necessary, and it causes me no end of stress.

I can look at pictures, in magazines, of skinny mom-celebs – the Gwyneths, the Angelinas – and it doesn’t bother me, because, please. I know the work of a trainer and a private chef when I see it. But I see images of tidy homes – homes that are ostensibly occupied by families, by people with children – and it makes me a little bit crazy. Because even though I know that images in magazines are set-decorated and fluffed and faked, it still worries me, the idea that somewhere out there, other parents are keeping their homes tidy. I do not, and cannot, keep my own home in a state that even approximates something that even resembles a simulation of ‘tidy.’ And I have no idea how to change that. If I really wanted to lose my muffin-top, I would join a gym or do that shred thing and I would have some reasonable expectation of having some success. But getting my house organized? And keeping it that way? Figuring out the alchemical formula for turning cat turds into gold seem seems a more attainable goal for me.

So I’m trying to come to terms with it, in the same way that I have been trying to come to terms with the muffin-top. Embrace my outer slob, as it were. And it would really, really help if somebody – anybody – out there would stand up and to admit to some slobbiness, too. You don’t have to post photographic evidence (although if you wanted to do that, I’d be really impressed. And grateful.) (Here’s a Flickr group to post to, if you’re so inclined.) Even just a show of hands? Anyone else out there losing the battle of the mess? Anybody else pretty much just ready to surrender?

If not, that’s fine. You’re still welcome to come visit me. Just make sure that you pee before you get here.

As you can tell from the image of Jasper, this is not a new post. This is AN OLD POST, and if you were reading carefully above, you will know that IT PROBABLY HAS DUST ON IT.

I AM YELLING BECAUSE I AM NOT ASHAMED.

Okay, maybe a little. My house still looks exactly like that.

Acknowledging that one’s children are monsters is a powerful first step toward understanding how and why it is that parenting sucks the very life blood from one’s person.

Obviously, I am speaking figuratively — OR AM I?

Look, I love my children, regardless of whether or not they sprout little fangs and keep me up all night. Just don’t blame me if I toss a little garlic outside the nursery door every now and then.

More Kinderbeasts here. PROCEED WITH CAUTION.

I would say that this borders on child abuse – making children perform like this – but I actually think that the abuse is perpetrated on the listener. Maybe it’s both. In any case, it’s a little bit disturbing (note: NSFC – Not Suitable For Cats).

Cute? Or creepy? Bad moms wanna know.

source.