When You Look Like a Terrible Parent

I’m very glad that I don’t know how often I look as though I am being a terrible parent even when I’m not, because I think the social anxiety would kill me.

A few weeks ago I went to visit my brother and sister-in-law.

We were having breakfast.

In the course of this, my brother burst out “Mean Mama!”

I thought, perhaps, he was making a joke. Like, “Life is just so hard, having to eat toast for breakfast!”

He continued. “I saw that!”

He looked at my child. “Mama’s being mean, huh!”

At this point, I decided to give up the cool charade I try to present when I think people are making suave jokes that I should be getting.

I looked up. “What?”

My brother continued to address my child. “Mama is teasing you, huh? She keeps offering you food and then taking it away!”
“Umm, no,” I said, “I keep offering but this kiddo keeps on dodging my hand. So then I eat it.”

“Oh.” My brother stood there for a few seconds.

“Watch: Let’s try toast… no success. Now let’s try a bit of rice crispy… easy.”

I think he got it, but it was still a little awkward.

However, it could have been a much worse misunderstanding.

I would know.

Like on the day when I took my baby to campus in the middle of the snow.

It was blizzarding, so I decided the safest method to transport my baby was via a carseat strapped in a stroller. I had brought a snowsuit for my baby, but it wasn’t going to fit in the stroller, so I laid it on top of my baby as an extra blanket.

It looked vaguely like this:

I remember walking through the torrents of snow, in a very elated mood, alternating between cooing at my baby and looking at the snow and the other students around me. I definitely noticed that many students were giving me sidelong stares, some with more alarm than others, but I chalked it up to the fact that I was strollering my baby in the snow. Personally, I wasn’t worried; my baby was bundled up well and had the shelter of the car seat umbrella.

Eventually I made it to the right building and up four floors to my Professor’s office, where I knocked.

He opened.

“Come on in,” he said.

He paused.

“That looks dangerous.”

He pointed at the stroller.

I gave him a confused expression as I took the snow suit off of my baby and began to unbuckle the car seat.

“Oh! I thought that was the baby,” he said, pointing to the snowsuit.

It was a good reminder for me in seeing other parents doing things that seem a little crazy. Things aren’t always as they seem.

It Gets Better (especially when you are at the beck and call of your brand new offspring)

Imagine walking into a room where a women is in labor. She is screaming and sobbing and shaking. You raise your eyebrows and say, "you know, it's just gonna get harder," and then walk out. Perhaps that would have been the better comic, but I'll leave it to your imagination.

It's absurd, and yet, if you are a new mom or dad, you might just have had an interaction like this. Like, fifty times. (Or if you're pregnant, which may well be harder than the insane demands of being a new parent).

If you are anything like me, this is one of the most soul crushing things you hear, and sometimes you just want someone to tell you that no, you aren’t crazy--caring for a newborn is a *ridiculous* amount of work, and eventually it will won't be so hard.

So let me tell you. It DOES get easier. Unless you have the easiest baby on the block and have been bestowed with superpowers, or, in the other direction, unless you have a highly medically demanding child (and even often then, I have heard), it gets better.

Babies are precious and magical and somehow have the telepathic ability that enables them to know exactly when you were about to eat dinner or use the restroom or watch a show and derail your plans, and sometimes you’ll probably be able to feel that awesomeness, but sometimes you absolutely won’t feel that way because you will be just so, so tired. And, as my dad says, some things will get harder. But many things will get easier.

Baby Snot Mustaches: A Catalog

In your time as a gainfully unemployed wardrobe and grooming manager for minors at their earliest stages of development, you will come across many confusing fashion statements.

However, amid the drool ties and pasta bowl hats and bubble beards and milk mustaches, nothing beats snot mustaches when it comes to variety and versatility, as these can come in all shapes, sizes and textures, and at any day or hour of the year.

The handlebar mustache leads the way in baby fashion as the primary staple. While other mustaches may have a short lifespan or take time to accumulate, this one is like a phoenix, rising again and again from the ashes.

You may find yourself seeing this when your baby is towards the end of a cold and just starting to have softer nasal discharge.

This particular configuration is also more likely to happen if you baby is a fan of licking their mucous off of their face or pulling at their stuffy noses, thereby dragging snot down along their upper lip and the corners of their cheeks.

The Charlie Chaplin 'stache may not present itself regularly unless your baby is sleeping or within a few months old, as this mustache requires a period of undisturbed snot buildup.

However, any attempts to remove this delicately poised mustache will almost certainly not result in a clean face and instead simply morph into an alternative snot mustache.

Snot sideburns may be especially common if your baby is prone to ear infections and tugging on their ears.

This may cause alarm in parents who fear that their baby is draining brain fluid from their ear canal, but rest assured that this is almost surely the result of fluid that has migrated from below the nostrils.

Should you come across the everywhere mustache in your endeavors, we wish you the best of luck.

As your little one may respond to any approaches you make involving aspirators or wipes with impressive acrobatics and sonic-booming screams, we recommend enlisting as many tag-team supervisors as you can and stocking up on peanut butter or chicken pot pies for your sanity.

When Bad Things Don't Happen to You

All kids (or at least all kids in big families, or at least all middle children in big families, or at least all two-braided children with a penchant for eating twigs) at one point or another, really really really really want something terrible to happen. Preferably something like surviving a tornado by crouching under a sink while the house is shredding itself into pillow feather-sized scraps of paint and plaster and roof tiles, while the windows spontaneously disintegrate in a shower of baking soda. You imagine scenes of total chaos with sad or angry concertos playing in the background and some how you are invincible as you watch this sad apocalypse until you look down and realize that your leg has too many angles and a rib is poking out of your skin, and you’ll need to be rushed on a stretcher (in the middle of the night, probably) to a hospital where faces with looks of horror and pity swarm around you like a kaleidoscope.

Unless I have really terrible amnesia that is so bad I’m not even aware of it, nothing like that has ever happened to me. Once I broke my collar bone by walking in front of a swingset-in-use when I was three, but I don’t remember that, and I didn’t remember it in elementary school either.

So when my brother broke his arm skiing during my second grade year, which was a lot more impressive than walking in front of a swingset anyway, I felt lots of jealousy--the same kind of jealousy I felt for my sister’s diabetes and the shots she had to take every day.

Unfortunately, I was neither brave enough nor smart enough to realize that if I started doing dangerous things like downhill skiing or jumping on the trampoline on top of a full sized rocking horse that was actually a cow, like my other brother did, I might get a chance to break a bone or crush my skull or disembowel myself. If I could just do those things, I might have my day of physiological trauma and the recovery period following it, a recovery that I always pictured with classmates who never had cared about me before showing up at my doorstep with baskets of flowers and chocolate.

Deep down, I could never compete with my brother and his ability to get into trouble of all sorts, especially the kinds he did: disapproving adults by laughing up and down our neighborly street after three in the morning, or crushing his other arm, years later, under a construction roller at his job. But it just wasn’t fair that he got to wear his cast for two months and got to be subject of so much gossip from adults, and admiration from peers, and sympathy from both. He just didn’t know how good he had it.

I also couldn’t think of anyway to have so many things I wanted without seriously compromising my ability to do things like carry a plate of burritos from the microwave to the table.

But, I did know that you didn’t always have to do super dangerous things to get hurt and that things everybody did, like jumping on the tramp, could make you break your arm too.

Then I realized, just maybe, I could get away with not breaking my arm but it seeming as if I had.

So, one morning, shortly after my brother’s arm was better I got up extra early and hid the thick brown bandaging in my backpack, started my walk to school, paused along the road so my brother would go ahead without me and wrapped it around my arm.

Mrs. Finnigan, my second grade teacher, noticed immediately when I walked it, just as class was starting.

So far, it was probably the best school day I had ever had.

No one else said anything about it, but I wasn’t too worried because they still had plenty of time to show up at my doorstep with flowers and chocolate--they had weeks.

However, someone must have noticed and passed the word along, because my brother cornered me about it after school.

Brother: Lizzie, did you wear a cast to school today?

Me: Nope.

Brother: Are you sure?

Me: Um. Definitely.

Brother: Okay, I’ll believe you.

Me: You will?

Brother: But if I see you wear a cast tomorrow, I’ll tell everyone in the school that you lied.

So I didn’t put it on the next day.

The worst part was that nothing terrible happened. My brother didn’t report me to my parents or the principal or all of his friends. I didn’t even get in trouble for misbehaving. I didn’t even have the guts to keep on misbehaving. You would think that if I couldn’t have my days in an arm cast, I could at least get some notoriety for misbehaving so badly--that would have been some consolation. Instead, I remained the not-trouble maker to whom life-threatening situations and other disasters didn’t happen.