I am having a mid life crisis. I am sitting here, in my bed, with the TV tuned to a marathon of “Keeping up with the Kardashians” and I am re-reading Twilight for the third time. As I read, with the TV volume low enough as not to interrupt my thoughts, I fantasize that I am a 17 year old girl who is madly in love with a vampire. The minute I get lost in my thoughts, however, I am jolted back to reality when I hear my 10 year old shriek “MOOOOOOMMMM we have no food in this house!!!” Unfortunately for me, she is right. There is no food in this house. Although I am a stay-at-home mom, I am in no way your traditional June Cleaver. I do not make meals for my kids. I rarely do the dishes. The beds remain unmade most of the time. The laundry sits in piles all over the house, in various stages of need- clean, folded, not folded, needs to be put away, etc. I would much rather lay in my bed, watching re-runs of sitcoms or old movies than do housework, or God forbid, spend time with my kids. Don’t get me wrong, I love my girls. I just don’t like my girls, especially my two older ones. My 12 and 10 year olds are rude, disrespectful, demanding and entitled, all traits that I have created in them, and now don’t know how to handle. So I just hide out in my room, with my DVR’d shows, watching TV, reading books or hanging out on Facebook. My new motto is “have MacBook will hide in bedroom.”
My husband sits quitetly alone on the couch, in the dark, watching the Giants, and occasionally screaming profanities. He is in the dark because, as he often states, turning on the lights is a waste of money. Sometimes when he isn’t home, I turn on all the lights in the house in an act of defiance. It is my way of being somewhat in control of my life. 2 out of 3 of my kids are at playdates, and I know that they have to come home at some point, a thought which makes me want to dive under the covers and hide until they have all left for college. When all three of my girls are home together, my house sounds like a horror movie- screaming, fighting, stabbing, gunshots, running and crying. And that just comes from me and my husband. The girls behavior is so much worse. My 7 year old can shoot you a dirty look and call you a beyotch with the best of them.
OK- enough about the girls- lets get back to my mid life crisis. I am 41 years old and have been married for 15 years to a wonderful man (kind of cliche huh). I have a wonderful life (another cliche). I live in a beautiful home, in an upscale upper-middle class neighborhood. I drive a nice car, have designer clothes, shoes and bags, and vacation a few times a year. We have friends, Saturday night plans, parties and plenty of social outings. I am fucking bored to death.
When I was growing up, I had dreams of getting married, having children and being a stay at home mom. I would have a nice house with a white picket fence, a pool, a swingset, three great kids and a doting, adoring husband who would love and worship me as if the sun rose and set in my honor. In reality, however, I only got the swingset.
Women of my generation were told we could have it all- lucrative professional high power careers and then, once we were established in our careers, we could add husband and children to the mix. Even after embarking on a career, we knew that there would be time for children at some point, and that when we were ready, it would be a beautiful thing to leave work and stay at home with our babies. This was exactly my vision and my path. After graduating top of my class from law school, I started work at a prestigious law firm as an associate. At the time I was 24 years old and making more money than I could imagine. After a few years as an associate, I had my first daughter, Samantha. I then went back to work “part time” as an associate, only to give birth to my second daughter, Hallie, 18 months later. The entire time I was a working mom, I yearned to be a stay at home mom. I eventually quit my job, and was able to fulfill my dreams of playgroups, gymboree and pushing my babies in a double stroller around the lake while talking with my new mommy friends.
When I first made the decision to stay home full time, I jumped into the stereotypical suburban mom role with both feet. I made friends, had lunch, dropped my kids at pre-school and chatted in the parking lot with all the other moms. We would use our 2 free precious hours to have coffee, and after picking the kids up from pre-school, we would go to the park or the playground and let the kids run around. At the time, I felt a lot of pressure to conform to the way these women were raising their kids. I remember feeling that my kids needed to have certain toys, attend specific music classes, go to gymnastics and sports classes, have playdates and friends so they could “socialize”. There was nothing more stressful than having a playdate with 3 or 4 two year olds, who, by the very nature of their age were not ready to socialize and it would ususally be my kid who would inevitably bite or hit another kid. No, my kids were not good sharers, and yes, they were bossy and demanding and often mean to the other kids. But I have learned that this in no way was a permanent sentence for them, and I am proud to say that they no longer bite or hit, and they are pretty good sharers. The other mothers were so judgmental about the behavior of two year olds, and I went right along with the pack.
So at this point I forged ahead in “mom to three little kids land”, feeling all the while that the other mothers knew better. In the beginning, when we were either pregnant or had newborns and toddlers, everything was fun, new and exciting. By the time I had my third baby, I didn’t even bring the camera to the hospital. After about 5 years of stay at home motherhood, I was bored and lonely. I soon discovered that the women who I considered my “friends” were merely there to satisfy a need. They were not necessarily people who I would choose to be friends with, but rather people I needed to be friends with because we had children the same age. Once my girls got older and went off to elementary school, I started to lose contact with these “friends”. I had made new friends by that time, women who I chose as friends, and who I have a lot in common with. These women are still my closest and probably only true friends. I have made a lot of acquaintences along the way, but I was quick to learn that many of these women have an agenda, and I am not interested in being a part of it.
So, for now, I am living in what many women would give up lipo for: I get to stay home and raise my family. Whoopeee! I want to take all the young, single women who are now looking for a husband to share their dreams with, shake them and tell them to run for their birth control pills, and take 2 at a time. I’m not saying that women shouldn’t have children or that I regret having mine. I just want everyone to know the truth; the dirty little secret that you don’t hear on The Martha Stewart Show, or even on Oprah. Staying home, raising children, taking care of a house and dealing with a husband day in and day out absolutely sucks. There is no other way to put it.
My days are all the same. They begin at the crack of dawn, when I wake from an ambien induced sleep, painfully roll out of bed, stiff from my workout the day before, and in pain from my 2 hernitated discs. I climb down the stairs and hear the hungry sqweek from my guinea pig. Yet another living creature who expects to be fed in this house. After throwing a carrot in the cage, I turn on the coffee machine and wait...and wait...and wait until the ready light comes on. As the coffee flows into my cup, I feed the 5 goldfish, which were acquired throughout the years from various carnivals. Most of the time goldfish live about 24 hours until I find them floating at the top of the tank. Unfortunately for me, these fish have been around for the past 2 years and seem pretty sturdy. I note that the water is cloudy and in desperate need of changing, but decide I really don’t give a shit about the color of the fish tank water. By this time my coffee is ready. I add some soy milk and take my first sip. I don’t really like the taste of soy milk, but I feel somewhat pressured by all this organic, healthy living crap, so I attempted to make changes in my eating, so I figure soy milk is a good start and won’t take too much effort. AHHHHH. My day can almost begin.
As I walk past the sink, I notice that last nights dished are still there. UGH. In order to finish up the dishes, I first have to empty the dishwasher. Dont have energy for that right now (or the deisre). I grab 2 brown lunch bags and throw whatever I can dig out of the pantry into each, hoping that the teachers won’t notice that my kids will be eating cheese doodles and diet coke for snack at 9:30 in the morning. OK- I have procrastinated long enough and now it is time to rouse the sleeping lions. This is without a doubt one of the most stressful time of the day. You see, I am not a morning person, and neither are my kids. I usually start out with the 7 year old, Sophie, who by the way, sleeps in my bed. On most mornings, I find my husband sleeping in Sophie’s white eyelet canpoy bed with Pottery Barn floral quilt and an oversized Kooky Pen pillow. Poor guy. So I bring Sophie a clean outfit from off the floor of her bedroom, which is where I left the pile of clean folded laundry 5 days ago. It was my intention to put the clothes in the drawers and closet, but I blew that off because I found better things to do. As I rouse Sophie from a drooling finger sucking sleep, she starts to scream that she doesn’t want to go to school. She complains of a headache, stomachache, assache, any thing that she can think of to stay home from school. She starts to kick me. It is at this point that I get angry and start screaming. It is only 6:55 am. I manage to get her dressed, while she is still laying in bed, brush her hair and teeth (on occasion) get her shoes and coat on and get her out the door to the bus by 7:20. Breakfast? No. Maybe if she’s lucky I will throw a Pop-Tart at her, but on most mornings she is off to school with a few sips of water and a kiss on top of her head. Fortunately her elementary school has a breakfast program, so as long as there is money in her account, she has learned how to order herself breakfast. And fortuntaley again, her account is on automatic payment attached to my credit card. She also buys hot lunch everyday.
One down, two to go. Now comes the really hard part. My 10 year old Hallie is a vampire. Since she was 2 years old, she has been a terrible sleeper. When she was 3 we put a TV in her room so that she could stay up and watch TV and we could get some sleep. Dr. Ferber would have committed suicide if Hallie was his patient. Now that she is older, she still watches TV late into the night. On weekends, she can sleep until 1:00 in the afternoon. I know you are thinking why the hell don’t you just take the TV out of her room and make her go to sleep at a reasonable hour? (Like we didn’t think of that). Well, there are a few reasons. First, she doesn’t sleep, no matter how tired we may think she is. She just doesn’t sleep. Second, we have tried that in the past, and instead of crying herself out and eventually falling asleep, she ripped wallpaper off the walls, make holes in the sheetrock and kept the entire house up until 5 am. Putting her in the garage didn’t work either- we tried that. So, in an attempt to keep some sanity at night, we let her have her TV as long as she stays in her room all night, which she does.
Although Sophie and Hallie go to the same school and should get on the bus together, I have discovered that it makes my life easier to get Sophie on the school bus, then drag Hallie out of bed and drive her to school. This is no easy task.
I have lost my coffee. I’m sure it is one of the many rooms that I have already been in and out of in a frenzied effort to get my kids to school on time. The hell with the coffee- I will just pop open a can of diet coke. The sound of the can opening and the fizz of the carbon dioxide escaping is music to my ears. My first sip of my diet coke is second only to the first sip of coffee. I slug down a prozac with my soda, and now I’m really ready to get Hallie. “Hallie” I say sweetly. “It is time to get up”. No response. “Hals”. No response. “HALLIE GET UP”. Now I am shaking her, softly and first, then with more fervor. Still no response. I walk out of the room. I walk back in, now angry that once again my day is going to start with a fight. “If you don’t get out of bed now, there will be no playdate later”. I know this is an empty threat. Who the hell wants her home all afternoon, up my ass begging me to buy her songs on itunes. On my way back in her room, I step in a dirty bowl full of cereal and milk. In yet another act of defiance Hallie has taken food into her room, again. It is unbelievable to me that my children cannot understand the words “All food is to be eaten in the kitchen only”. I have even tried to break down the sentence for them, making sure that they understand the meaning of each individual word. I often question their intelligence, but then come to realize that they just don’t give a shit about my rules.
I finally get her out the door and to school. I go home and sit myself down on the couch to catch up on the Today show. Ijust love Matt Lauer and Meredith Viera. I have to admit that I miss Katie Couric, but Meredith will do.
I procrastinate on the couch, drinking my now cold coffee- i found it on the coffee table in the den- and remember that my oldest is still upstairs sleeping. “The Queen” as I call her doesn’t like to take the bus. This means that I drive her to school every morning. Why do I do this to myself? I don’t know. OH! And the queen expects to be taken to Starbucks every morning for a grand mocha frappucino. I throw on workout clothes (my uniform), and walk into the Queens room. In the bed, where once a cute, chubby cheeked sweet little girl used to sleep, has been replaced with a snarling, nasty, green smoke coming out of her mouth pre-teen. ,As soon as she says she's ready, I start nagging her about brushing her teeth. Why a 12 year old girl forgets to brush her teeth is beyond me. Doesn’t she care about morning breath? Of course, she lies to me and tells me she did it. She even turns on the water in her bathroom, so she can “trick me” into thinking that she brushed her teeth. My thinking is, if you are going to go through all the trouble of turning on the water, why not go the extra mile and put the toothbrush to your teeth? Call me crazy! When her teeth fall out of her head, it will be her consequence. Hopefully it will be her husband’s problem and his expense.
I sit on the couch again, waiting for the Queen to emerge from flat ironing her hair, trying to decide what it is I want to do with my day. First, the gym and some attempt to keep my aging body from looking and feeling like a woman who should wear a polyester pant suit. One of the things that stay at home moms do really well is diet and work out. I shouldn’t say really well, I should say that it one of the obsessions we have. It is almost expected that we should be up on all the latest diet fads, and we have tried them all. If someone suggested that weight loss were as simple as standing on your head for 30 minutes a day, then believe me, we would all be on our heads. Instead we turn to weight ins and meetings, disgusting prepackaged meals, even voo doo medicine men, all in the hopes of finding the next greatest weight loss breakthrough. On the top of this list would be the bead doctor. The bead doctor was an unattractive, overweight guy in his early 60s, who had lost most of his teeth. He would bring about 8 to 10 of his "patients" into his consulting room and give them a speech about his briliant weight loss plan, which consisted of strategically taping beads behind your ears, asking you to rub these beads for 15 minutes each hour. Oh and by the way, your diet consists of the following: you could only eat between the hours of 12 noon to 5 pm. After 5 it was only water. M-W-F you could only drink milk. Tu-Th you could only have fruits and vegetables. People paid good money to go on this diet, and the "doctor" laughed all the way to the bank. My other favorite diet fad is the "blow diet". No, this does not involve your husband. Rather, some random man flew in from California, asking for $200 cash from each women (in denominations of $100 bills only), told you "no more packaged cookies" and literally blew on you. I personally did not participate in this one, but I do know that this "man" flew back to California with a pocket full of $100 bills. Unbelievable right? Let's not forget Atkins, South Beach, Weight Watchers, Jenny Craig, Nutrisystem, and the 9 day cleanse. I digress. Back to my day.
My mind starts to flurry with the myriad of mindless errands I have to run. Target for birthday presents, get my nails done, supermarket, meet a friend for lunch, buy tuna, get bagels, guinea pig food, pick up dry cleaning, have dress altered, take the car in for inspection, blah blah blah. I know that you would think that getting my nails done and having lunch with friends doesn’t sound so painful. It is. We are the first generation of women who went to college, obtained professional degrees, had "careers", some of them "high power" careers, and then chose to abandon all that we worked so hard to achieve to stay at home and raise our children. After all, isn't child rearing the most important job we have? Isn't it our goal to raise self-sufficient, confident, independent, happy and successful children that can go out in the world? Why is it then, that we have given up so much, out of choice, but so many of us are feeling so lost. I recently watched Chris Rock's comedy special on HBO and he was talking about Desperate Housewives, and how the women on this show didn't work, had nice houses, everything they could ever want, including sex with the young hot gardener, but they were still complaining all the time. He said the show should be called "Ungrateful Bitches." Although I laughed out loud at that, I realized he was right. Was I an ungrateful bitch? Perhaps. I try to remind myself that I am really fortunate. But everything is relative right? On a day to day, moment to moment basis, it is hard to keep in mind how lucky I am. My reality is fighting kids, a house that needs to be cleaned again, laundry that needs to be folded and put away again, and a sink full of dishes...Again.
As parents, we are all guilty of over-indulging our kids. We over-indulge with "things" and we also over-indulge with time. What I mean by that is our kids believe they are the center of the universe, and our time is no where near as important as their time. Let me explain. Saturday morning. My eyes aren't even open yet, and my blackberry is buzzing that I have a new text message. It's from the Queen, who is by the way, in her bedroom down the hall. It reads "can u take me to the mall". Taking her to the mall is not the problem. The problem arises because next thing I know, I am taking her, 5 of her friends, Hallie and Sophie to the mall. OK, so I guess its my turn to take the Queen's "posse" to the mall. Getting ready is a huge ordeal. Not for me- jeans and a ponytail. But the Queen and her friends all congregate at my house, straighten their hair for about an hour, put on their best skinny jeans and black eyeliner, all the while texting EACH OTHER and other kids about this trip to the mall. I don't understand why a group of tween/teens will text the person sitting next to them or across the room. Have they lost the art of conversing??
Back to the mall. Apparently, they are planning to see a movie. Now here's the part that pisses me off. The Queen never asks me if she can do something, she TELLS me what she is going to do. "We are going to the movies, then to Anna's house, then to town for pizza, then to Jamie's house and then I am sleeping over at Alex's house." OK- first of all, how are you getting from place to place? "Can you take us" asks the Queen? Like I have nothing else to do all day then to drive you and your friends around town. And by the way, do you have any money? The Queen replies "Uh, no could you give me some money?" What am I, The Bank of Mom??? Now here comes the "world revolves around me" moment. "By the way" I said to the Queen, "Daddy and I are going out tonight so you have to babysit your sisters." I brace myself for the reaction that I know is coming. "MOM-A" she yells. The Queen has her own language. For some obnoxious reason, she adds an A at the end of her sentences. One of her favorites is "OH MY GOD-A." Another classic around our house is "WHY AM I BEING PUNISHED...I DIDN'T DO ANYTHING-A." So here comes the Queen’s babysitting wrath- “Why can’t you hire a sitter-A”, “Why can’t Hallie babysit-A”, “I have plans-A.” She even actually says “Why do you get to go out and I don’t-A.” For a girl, my daughter has a huge set of balls. She truly believes that we should stay home because she has plans. You see, she is entitled to her plans. We are just the schmucks who should drive her to and from her plans, and of course. pay for them.
OK- Back to the mall. We finally leave the house, 7 girls in tow, but not before the Queen lays down the law to her sister Hallie. “You are not allowed to hang out with my friends-A.” This of course starts a screaming match between the girls about who didn’t let who hang out with whose friend last time they were over. This argument continues the entire ride to the mall. Once at the mall, the girls pile out and the Queen starts telling me where we are going.
