Mommyphobia

I've been having that kind of week . . . the kind where you look at your sweet child(ren) and honestly understand why some creatures eat their own young. Oh yes. You moms know what I'm talking about.

First of all let me put this out there, I am SO NOT Mommy of the Year material. To be quite frank, I'm not all that good at being a mom. It's just really difficult for me. Probably because I'm a selfish, self-involved person, especially with my free time, and sharing that time is incredibly difficult for me. This is not something that Supermom deals with, I swear. Supermom always plays with her kids and they always look nice and act polite and never do naughty things, and Supermom herself is so disgustingly good at it that you kind of want to bash her head into a wall just to give her a handicap to put her about level with yourself.

So. Mommyphobia. Let me explain. Mommyphobia is what you have when you find yourself completely and utterly overwhelmed and stifled by the cute little blessings in your life. You love them dearly, you always will, but if you could hire a babysitter for the day, you would do it and run away for a few hours without a backward glance. Just to go somewhere to get that crazed look out of your eye that makes you want to take a baseball bat to every single toy in the house.

It's like being claustrophobic (fear of small spaces), agoraphobic (anxiety in situations where it is perceived to be difficult or embarrassing to escape), and suffocating all at once. You feel panic, sheer and utter panic, and it's a very unstable lid that you're keeping on it all. You want to run away, you want to scream, you want to bury your head under your pillows and cry. All that is happening is your child wants you to play, just take the big giraffe and follow her prompts and play house with the little giraffe, but it feels like you're being water boarded and there's no way out.

As you can imagine, this is a problem. This is a situation that really has no solution. The best you can do is turn on one of those sickeningly happy and perky kids shows that you hate, send your little angel in to watch it, and hide for a bit. Eat a pound of chocolate, chug a 64 oz. Dr. Pepper, turn on soothing music, try to back away slowly from that anxiety attack you've been flirting with. If you have a babysitter, now would be the time. If you have a spouse or family around to help, now would be the time. Preserve your sanity while you can!

Because you know that in fifteen minutes, your little darling will be coming to barge in on your little cocoon of seclusion, waving around another plastic toy to play with, demanding string cheese and chocolate milk, and you are going to have to suppress the urge to scream while you smile and remind them to say please.

You love them, you adore them, you really do. But some days you feel a stunning oneness with the creatures that eat their own young.

Soap Is Not A Plaything

My dear darling daughter brought something to my attention today that I hadn't noticed before, and it's significant enough to be worth pointing out. The child is extremely talented at creating disasters. I'm not talking your everyday, run-of-the-mill child disasters, like coloring on the wall with a crayon. I'm talking the big whoppers. Like coloring on the wall, the chairs, the cabinets, the table, and their own bodies with a marker. Of the non-washable variety. These disasters happen fairly frequently, such as the ketchup-smearing party. The great toilet paper caper. The bathtub tidal wave predicament. The chocolate-milk-spitting occurrence. The water-and-dog-food-mixerama. The juice puddle oops. The deliberately-peeing-on-the-floor-instead-of-the-toilet incident. The apple and orange throwing game. The dance-on-the-crackers-on-the-carpet day. The popcorn-is-confetti misunderstanding. The doggies-like-to-eat-a-whole-box-of-vanilla-wafers problem. And, sad to say, and we had another one today.

To qualify as a disaster, the act done by the child must have one or more of the following requirements: significant (definitely more than normal) cost, cleanup of site and/or child, aftereffects, side effects, and mental and/or emotional damage to parent. Please, if any of you have stories you'd like to share, do tell. I'd love to hear about kids that are either better or worse than mine. Because both kinds carry some kind of status for me. "My kid is better than yours, ha ha." "My kid is worse than yours, pity me."

Anyway, about the incident today. I like to call it the soap-is-not-a-plaything experiment. You see, Sammy is fascinated with soap. She loves to play with the stuff, the bubbles in the tub, the hand soap when she washes her hands, shampoo. Well, shampoo she recently became less enamored with because she discovered that it tends to hurt when it gets in the eyes. But bubble bath and hand soap are very dear toys for her.

Today she learned why that may not be the wisest of choices. You see, apparently she decided to empty half the bottle of hand soap onto the sink, spread it around and all the way down the cupboards, and smooth it up her arms as well. And didn't wash it off. I hear her start her "hurt cry", and go running to find out what she got stuck in, under, on top of, or out of. I go in to my room and see her standing on the bed with white streaky stuff on her face while she's screaming and crying. I realized it's soap, she's covered with it and it's in her eyes, and pick her up and take her to the bathroom to rinse her off. She didn't appreciate it, and by the time we were done with that part, her whole face was red and splotchy like it gets when she cries hard. Then we had to rinse her off in the tub because her clothes were covered in soap and her arms were too. And then, since in my haste I hadn't really had time to survey the damage except for the top of the sink, I found the copious amounts of soap and water running down the cabinet under the sink.

I had to take a few deep breaths. We got Sammy dressed again, did her hair again, and set out to clean up the soap. Yes, she helped. No, she did not want to. Yes, we had a discussion about why playing with the soap is a bad thing. Yes, she cried again. No, I did not feel bad AT ALL for making her listen to why playing with soap is a bad thing and making her help clean it up, even with her red eyes.

Now, I was in a bad mood anyway. Pete went back to work today, I work every single day this week, and my room is a mess. I really did not need this today. Nor did I need to buy soap again so soon. Or toilet paper, since Sammy is still under the impression that toilet paper is a toy. But now I have half an hour until I need to leave for work, I need to change my clothes because now I'm covered in soap, I have to clean up lunch because Sammy HAD to have mac and cheese AGAIN, and thanks to the clean up in the bathroom, I have an extra load of laundry to do before I go to bed tonight. Joy.

Garfield, I'm so there with you buddy. I hate Mondays.