I grew up in a Christian fundamentalist household and believe it or not, we were fundamentally happy.
My dad was a teacher, high school football coach and even the school bus driver to make ends meet. My mother stayed at home or worked part time. We went camping, took road trips and had family night every Sunday. We had what I refer to as the Christian Conversion Van; complete with blue shag carpeting for the interior, floor to ceiling. We didn’t have a lot of money. It wasn’t all Slip ‘N Slides and swimming pools. But, it’s safe to say I had the quintessential childhood.
Now, that I have my own children, I’m trying to figure out what makes my children’s childhood seem so vastly different.
Oh, wait I know.
I work full-time.
My husband works full-time.
My kids spend 8 to 11 hours a day with complete strangers. No wonder they don’t even vaguely resemble the children I spend a couple of hours a day trying to mold them into. By the time I get home, I’m too dang tired to be Supermom.
My mom was June Cleaver. I feel like Courtney Love.
My baking skills begin and end at banana bread. Woah, I can mix a bunch of crap in a bowl and hit “bake.” I dread the day my kidlets need help with a science project. I will probably just suggest that whole baking soda volcano thing EVERY YEAR. My mom actually made our playdough. My mom actually baked our birthday cakes. I stand in line at the Publix bakery for one and feel frazzled.
BMX bikes and toasted marshmallows. This was my childhood.
While most stay-at-home moms probably daydream about power suits, fatter bank accounts and adult conversation, I’m sitting around imagining what it would be like to rush the kids to soccer practice in sweatpants. I want to have playdough stuck in my finger nails, not Carpal Tunnel Syndrome. I want to smell like a campfire, not like long-day-at-work funk. I want to finger paint with my daughter and kick the ball around with my son. Instead, it’s a mad dash to feed them, bathe them and rush them into bed so they can sleep so we can wake them up and clothe them, feed them and rush them to school. Wash, rinse, repeat.
My brother playing the piano on Christmas Eve. Me looking extremely hungry.
I’ve spent all of these years working overnight, working weekends and working holidays so I could give my children a better life than the one I had.
Now, I am slowly coming to the realization that less money and more time is what they need to have a childhood even a fraction as awesome as mine was. That and a Christian Conversion Van.
My daughter is 3, and simultaneously 16.
There are the obvious ways, like wanting to paint her nails every single day. We’ve told her that she can only do that for special occasions, but it doesn’t stop her from begging and whining EVERY SINGLE DAY. She’s already had two boyfriends. Xander was adorable, smart and sweet. Gus is cute, but more of a lackey, jumping up to get her bag for her every day and opening doors.
The less obvious ways are driving me insane!
How sweet! Except that look on her face means she’s perturbed with me that I called it a cat instead of a leopard. I was making the same face as the leopard seconds later.
Today, on the way to the zoo she said, “Turn the music off! I’m trying to rest!”
Tonight, she started screaming “Mommy, mommy, mommy!” from her room. (par for the course) I contemplate whether there is even a remote possibility that she’s gouged out one of her own eyeballs with a colored pencil and pray that she just has to pee.
In reality, she called me in there to say, “I want to play with the strings from the toy, not the toy.” I said, “That’s fine.” To which she responded with disdain, “Take the toy out of my bed, so I can sleep!”
Motherhood=indentured servitude.
I know this is the point in her life when I need to be “putting my foot down” and “laying down the law.” But, there’s the other part of me that happens to overhear her imitating my “angry voice” when talking to ME.
Today when she was exasperated and trying to explain her goal in putting a certain blanket on a certain doll in a certain way she said, “No, it goes like this. See how that works?”
That’s my phrase. That’s my “I’m so pissed off at right now I could spit blood in your pretty little blue eyes… you just threw food at me intentionally, more than once, you’re going to time out, see how that works?!?”
Do I really want to create a little monster version of myself?
(As I write this, she is screaming “Mommy” from her room right now. I am guessing a serial killer isn’t hovering over her bed watching her scream my “name” repeatedly)
There are ways in which her maturity is cute, almost endearing. She loves to “mother” her little brother. She comforts him by saying, “It’s okay, Huck.” She rewards him saying, “Good job, buddy!” Mostly though, she just sounds like everything I dreaded about eventually having a teenager. She already rolls her eyes. She already says, “Daddy is crazy.”
In five years that will be, “Daddy is stupid.” In 12 it will be, “My Dad is such a f&^ing retard.”
What happened to the sweet stage? I thought we were supposed to get past the Terrible Twos and into the whole glorious, brilliant and doting child stage. She sometimes tells me unsolicited that she loves me.
Then there’s the day recently when she said, “I love Daddy, you love me, but I don’t love you.” I asked her if she was confused and to repeat herself. She said it again, “I love Daddy, you love me, but I don’t love you.” Crushed by someone so small she can’t even put on her own shirt. Breaking my heart daily.
I know I need to grow a pair, but I’m afraid my daughter already beat me to it. She’s walking around with bowling balls. I’m just the unlucky pin that suffered through labor to bring her into this world.
Any day now, I fully expect her to walk down those stairs dressed in ripped jeans and a crop top and ask, “Can my boyfriend spend the night, I mean what’s the big f&*ing deal?”
I thought she was being dramatic. Then I realized she’s portraying Geordi from Star Trek. She’s brilliant!
There should be a guide to surviving children’s television shows. I know I couldn’t write it. I get so sick of the characters asking me questions.
When we were children, Bugs Bunny didn’t grill us. “What’s up doc?” was rhetorical. Asking questions to your invisible audience doesn’t work, at least not on my kidlets. They both stare stone-faced when Mickey asks them a question. It could be, “What’s your name?” and I swear I can see drool drip from daughter’s chin during the 10 seconds of silence that follows.
In order to get by, my husband and I have employed a technique that’s sure to bite us in the ass someday when our kids overhear and start repeating it. We intentionally mishear song lyrics and catch phrases.
If you watch Super Why, you know they are constantly shouting enthusiastically, “To the book club!” Now, watch again and see if it actually sounds more like, “To the butt plug!”
On one episode of Tinga Tinga, there’s a Jamaican sounding turtle that says, almost clear as day, “Gimme that f&*ing gun!” Yeah, I know that’s not what he says but we can’t actually figure out what he’s really saying … so we just go with it.
You can also try to spot and/or point out the enormous failures of your kid’s favorite shows. My husband noted that Handy Manny only has four fingers on each hand. Not very handy.
Why are all of the animals on The Octonauts animals, except for Turnip. Why the hell is there a talking turnip on that submarine?
I’ll never understand Blue’s Clues. No matter how many times they change the host, he always seems like a serial killer.
The kids on Barney are terrifying. They’re like Stepford kids, all plastic and cheerful. Let’s not get started on the bad lip syncing on that show.
Even Sesame Street isn’t the same. I miss Barkley. I want more Grover. And Elmo is an annoying little shit. Even my daughter can’t determine if he’s a boy or a girl. She assumes girl, what with that heinous high-pitched voice.
But, the show that makes me want to turn to drink is Barbie. My daughter discovered “Barbie Shorts” on Netflix and it’s the most mind-sucking, brain-polluting garbage you’ve ever seen. Ken is clearly gay, which means we could be tight, but he’s definitely not feeling Barbie. Barbie manages to pull off complicated parties despite being a vacuous moron. And they decided to give Barbie an arch nemesis who is a slutty looking brunette who probably works nights at Mons Venus. (Because brunettes are obviously inferior and trashy in Barbie world)
Here’s the rub: Once your children graduate to movies where they can finally sit still and you’re super excited to watch incredible effects in Wall-E or get sucked into the storyline in Rango, you get to the end, feeling satisfied … until your toddler says, “LET’S WATCH IT AGAIN!”
Everybody knows that when you have children, they’re going to spend the vast majority of their youngest years infecting you with various germs and parasites. We’ve had several stomach viruses, the flu, RSV and of course lice. The day I had to put mayonnaise on my daughter’s hair and cover it with a shower cap was a goodie. We played together with our stinking Mayo heads and shower caps until her nap time. She woke up screaming when the warm mayo started to drip down her neck.
What nobody warns you about is the possibility your kid could give you a potentially deadly virus. My daughter came home from daycare with MRSA (Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus) on her arm. Then she came home with it on her butt … then it came back on her butt again and again and again.
Inevitably, I got it. But, I got it on my nose. Really? I ended up looking like Jimmy Durante or Gerard Depardieu (or as I call him, Gerard Depardicknose)
Eventually, it cleared up with antibiotics. But, then I got it again on my thigh. Any working parent knows how this story goes: I ignore it because I can’t call out sick, because I already call out sick way too much and I don’t want to get canned, so it festers and grows and suddenly I am waking up in the middle of the night with a dangerous fever, chills and an infection that has spread from my groin to my knee cap.
I went to the ER, assuming I would be sent home that night. When the doctor pulled my dress up over the wounds, he was taken aback. I spent two days in the hospital alone.
My husband would come and visit me, but he had to take care of the kids. The food was inedible. (Thanks Michelle Obama. I drew the line at the unsalted Saltines. How is that even possible?) 
They kept me in “quarantine” and used words like “decolonized” and “carrier.” They once neglected to bring me my dinner because the nurse didn’t want to come in because I was CONTAGIOUS. People at my work were freaked out. The boss had to hold a special meeting to alert everyone about an anonymous employee with MRSA. Like there was any doubt about which employee that was. For several days after I returned, people would joke around and tell me to stay away. It wasn’t Leprosy for God sake!
The best part should’ve been leaving the hospital, but it was sweltering outside. A young, inexperienced nurse was tasked with wheeling me all the way to my car. The older nurse told her emphatically not to let me get up and walk. Lil’ nurse got lost and ended up wheeling me around in the heat, sweating, with my hairy hospital legs exposed in the cut-off shorts my husband brought me to change into.
I finally just got up and told her, “I won’t tell if you don’t.”
I was supposed to be convalescing at home. Instead, I came home to about a week’s worth of laundry. If you have a family of four or more, then you know what that means. A pile of clothes so high, climbing it could make someone’s bucket list. No rest for the weary. No rest for a working parent, not even one with MRSA.
While my husband cooks dinner, I give the kids a bath. The next night, we swap. We’ve come to the realization that the only way to survive bath time is to give the kids what we call, “double bath.” Obviously, this means we bathe them both at the same time. Bathe one at a time and the other will walk up to the tub and throw something in like a remote control. Or you’ll hear that eerie silence which could only indicate your other child is digging in a light socket or has tumbled head first down the stairs, because he CAN.
Double bath it is. At least until they’re 15 or can wash themselves, whichever comes first.
This is no Bert and Ernie with a rubber ducky kind of situation. My son spends the whole time crying and trying to get as much water as possible out of the tub. My daughter has lately started trying to suck water out of all of the bath toys. Who made these things anyway? I know, let’s create a Petri dish that lives inside a rubber crab-shaped toy. “Fill it with water, leave it in the tub and see what grows!” The other day, I yelled at her again for sucking the water out, to which she responded, “I spit it back out, so it’s okay.” I then squeezed a rubber fishy and black crap came spewing out with the water. I tried to show her that it was dirty. Which elicited the endless stream of “why’s.”
I pride myself on trying to explain things fully to them, so I said, “Well, the water that just sits there in a closed space grows mold and mildew.”
“Why?”
Previous dirty water demo with travel toothbrush covers.
“JUST STOP DRINKING IT!”
After the bath, my son cries because when he wants to run naked and wet through the house instead of being dry and in pajamas. My daughter cries because she’s cold and wants to “be carried like a baby.” Half the time I end up leaving them with wet crevices and disheveled hair, which leads to wet pajamas… which leads to more complaints about being cold. Anyone else end a ten-minute speed bath with the kids drenched in sweat? I do. Every time. Oh, and I always end up in MY pajamas after every bath because I am basically soaked and covered in filth water.
There isn’t time to smile sweetly at my shiny, clean children afterward… because then it’s time for dinner! Yay! I will save that for another post. Or maybe several.
Until quite recently, I was a full-time television news producer, full-time mom and was losing my mind… full-time.
Ever been so frustrated with those precious little ones you tried so desperately to conceive that you wanted to scream loud enough to make yourself deaf, if only so you could stop hearing them whine, cry and insult you? Ever been so tired, you find yourself in a meeting at work nodding off like a heavy drug user? Ever get sick of people posting nothing but glowing, gloating anecdotes about their perfect lives and angelic children online?
Here’s the truth. Here’s my American dream.
Follow this blog, lovingly named Living The American Scream, for glimpses of life in our suburban Florida home — shared with two insane dogs and filled with regular visits from both the Cuban and Anglo halves of our family. Throw in a husband with a new business that requires him to travel, leaving me alone with two kids and a computer, embarking on a new journey as a stay at home mom, who knows what tales this blog will tell …
Whether you’re a working mom, an insane suburbanite looking for common misery, or you just find glee in learning of the travails of others, you’re bound to find something in these posts that will catch your interest. Or at least make you feel better about your life.
Living The American Scream 