like a giraffe he was going around eating
VALIDATED RACK
Nora and I sometimes take showers together. This is a big treat for her, and I have never understood why. But now I do!
Nora: You have good breasts.
Me: Why, thank you.
Nora: And the nipples. The nipples are very nice too.
Me: Thanks again.
Nora: I never liked them when I was a baby, I liked bottles instead. But your breasts are still nice!
Now I know everyone has a story like this, and I am not claiming to be unique with my cutesy little My Child Said Something Borderline Inappropriate post. I also know that some people will laugh and some people will squick and some people will probably email me immediately to say Oh You Are A Terrible Mother With The Nudity, How Highly Concerning. (Are you finished composing that yet? Come on, my in-box is waiting.) (Wow that sounds dirty.) However, to me the funny lies not in the “I like your breasts part” (I mean come on, who wouldn't, they are fabulous) but in the part where Nora thinks it was entirely her choice to breastfeed or not as an 8-month-old adoptee. I picture her with the bottle in one hand and making “get those things outta here” gestures at my breasts with the other.
(For the record, I never even considered adoptive breastfeeding. To me it seems rude to suddenly make a non-newborn change the entire way he or she eats. Nora had been eating just fine for all her short life, and then she moves to America and is expected to give up the one thing that makes sense in her brave new world? Rude.)
Speaking of adoption and rude, I have half a mind to pop over to this disgusting, shitheaded, downright-evil Yahoo Group and flame-broil them to Burger King headquarters and back. I have been metaphorically sitting on my hands, because to do so would be rude and I am not so much about the rudeness. I am ALL about: ripping your arm off with my bare hands and then jokingly waving it in the air and shouting “Bartender! Over here!”; going Godzilla and stomping your car into a flat disk of scrap metal; and leaking a damaging memo about the non-tastiness of your mom's casseroles. But not rudeness.
Seriously, it makes me sick that this message board even exists. That a subset of people want to “re-home” (a repellent euphemism meaning “dispose of”) their children. If I were to express such sentiments over there (rude), I am sure there would be a flurry of text about how I can't know, haven't walked in their shoes, haven't lived with a child with severe attachment disorder, autism, oppositional behaviors, etc. Bullshit. Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit. I can tell you one thing I do know, even from my privileged position of mother to a normal kid with normal problems: I would never decide to “un-parent” my kid. Never. I can theoretically see myself making the heartbreaking decision to try institutional care, if my child ever needed more help than I could provide. But walking away from YOUR KID is not a choice. I mean for fuck's sake, what the hell are you even talking about, let's all just make the “choice” not to breathe while we're at it. God. I was going to say something like “bring back public shaming” but I guess we have. Hello internet!
WINE, WOMEN, AND PUPPET LEMURS
Friday night LT and I went to a cocktail party given by one of the parents at Nora's school. At their gorgeous skillion-dollar home in a nearby Chicago suburb. I kept my eyes peeled for tinges of tackiness, but alas there were none, so make that their gorgeous, historic, tasteful, comfortable, skillion-dollar home in a nearby Chicago suburb. But aha, booty hooty hoo, they may have lovely tasteful lives but they don't get to live mere blocks from the site of Chicago's first triple hammer murder like I do!
(It is rare that one gets to have a “favorite part” of a triple-hammer-murder story, but I do:
The neighbor said he overheard authorities recounting what they saw and heard when they first arrived at the apartment on North Washtenaw. “When they went in, he was hitting himself with a hammer,” the neighbor said. “And he said, 'I'm almost finished.'”
Just a minute! Almost done! Be right there!)
Anyway, we knew almost no one at this party, because the guests were more “everyone the hosts have ever known” than “the parents of Nora's actual classmates.” But hey, free drinks. And not quite enough hors d'oeuvres. And me drinking faster than normal because I feel a bit nervous, and not able to be my normal party self (read: “wasted”). The circle of life, the irony revealed, is that I end up wasted anyway, but in a subdued and hiding-it-well manner, and the stress of it all gives me a headache. Wheee Saturday night, that wasn't fun at all, let's not do it again sometime. Now I need a proper session, at a proper bar. Name the place and I promise to not make fun of your pants.
Sunday morning I recovered by snuggling Nora in front of back-to-back Zoboomafoo episodes, and I find this show semi-disturbing for several reasons:
1. I think the Kratt brothers have a secret clause in their contracts to appease wet-and-messy fetishists, for not an episode goes by without one or the other of these man-children falling in mud, water, applesauce, whatever.
2. The mystery animal morphing itself around in clay form scares the crap out of me. There have been nightmares.
3. I am troubled by Zoboomafoo's tendency to exclaim “I can't believe my mind!” or make other, similar, Berkley-influenced outbursts about what his “mind” “thinks.” I just think a preschool nature show is not the place to present a theory of immaterialism and I would rather my kid not be influenced in her search for meaning by a puppet lemur with a serious mind-body problem. Every time he says that I wish Martin Kratt would run into the shot shrieking, “I refute it thus!” and kick a rock. Because that would be funny. To about three people. Insert Venn diagram of Zoboomafoo viewers and philosophy nerds here.
4. The theme song is a duet, and the bridge is a call-and-response between the voices that goes like this:
Voice #1: Where are we going?
Voice #2: I don't know!
Voice #1: How do we get there?
Voice #2: Come on let's go!
I don't know which I hate more: the irrational exuberance of #2, or the nonsensical follow-up question of #1. I am inclined to agree with #2, I guess: come on let's go. Away from this show. Come on Nora, let's go take a shower.
—mimi smartypants tap-danced her way into America's heart.