Tag Archives: the mom dilemma

“Which Sex and the City gal are you?”

39 Replies

I am going to bet that at one time or another 99% of the women were asked one or all of these questions:

“Which Sex and the City gal is your favorite?”

“Which Sex and the City gal do you want to be?”

“Which Sex and the City gal are you?”

I never knew how to respond. Because deep down in my heart, I know who I resemble the most, dread resembling the most even though I also know, deep down in my brains, that I am crazy (also self-presumptuous and self-delusional) for thinking so.

Laney Berlin.

Who?

Laney Berlin. From Episode 10, Season 1, originally aired on August 8, 1998. “The Baby Shower”.

It is no surprise you have no memory of her. My google search only came up with ONE picture of her:

Laney is the Fab Four’s former friend, or more accurately, frienemy and to Samantha, rival.

Laney Berlin. You can’t really describe her. You just had to know her. Chances are eight years ago you probably did.

Laney did A&R for a record label… Every time she went on a scouting trip, she came back with some hot new group… and a gynecological condition no one had ever heard of.

Those things make so many public appearances, they need a booking agent.

Disclaimer: Of course I am nothing like the above. I’ve never had a hot body for me to lament the loss over it. I’ve never had a wild, rebellious streak in my life, that is, until now… mostly inside my imaginary inner world, and even at that, with limitations. Tis sad that I channel Woody Allen even in my wildest fantasy.

In fact, Laney was another Samantha… until she found herself an investment banker, got married and moved to Connecticut. The Fab Four reluctantly went to Laney’s Baby Shower at her stereotypical suburban MacMansion surrounded by stereotypical suburban Stepford Wives. The gifts they brought? A fistful of cash. A bottle of Scotch. And pastel condoms.

Incidentally I gave birth to my first child in March 1998. I squirmed as I watched a dichotomy being artificially formed when the world of Sex and the City was split in two: Me and the pregnant, suburban Laney on one side; the gals on the other (And goddammit I want to be on that side with the Fab Four too!) and what happened when Laney tried to cross the bridge, back to the other side.

Laney, despite the outward appearances of marital bliss and contentment, felt regretful of her choices. Back  in the city, the gals found a pregnant Laney crashing Samantha’s party, demanding vodka (and attention naturally], offering to show her tits, and struggling on the stripper pole.

[Carrie] This is at once so sad…  and the most fabulous validation I’ve ever gotten in my life.

The image of Laney on the table surrounded by the party-goers who are obviously appalled has stayed with me since. I understand that 99% of the disapproval came from her being so “due any day now” pregnant and you simply DO NOT SHOULD NOT imbibe alcohol (and Vodka at that!) when a child’s life is at stake. However Laney on the table also symbolizes for me the attempt to grapple with the erasure of one’s (imagined or not) identity and the desperate attempt to retain/regain the last vestige of youth/freedom/autonomy/carefreeness/etc. It is that desperation that makes it so sad, that I respond to viscerally.

Every time when I behave like a wild child, act and dress against what I believe is age-appropriate and role-appropriate, flirt with strangers, skip down the sidewalk, party like it is 1999 (or 1997 aka 1 BC – “Before Child”), because this is who I am without thinking, I get a flashback of Laney on the table and I am immediately paralyzed by an onslaught of self-consciousness. I put myself in my place through the eyes of the others:

“Do I look like I am trying too hard? Too desperate? Do I look ridiculous? These people… What are they thinking of me? Are they laughing with me or at me?”

And the thought that I absolutely abhor:

“Do they feel sorry for me?”

I am desperate to not appear desperate. Insane? I know.

This is why every time when I am at a party I make a beeline to the bar and down 2 shots of vodka before the party starts for me. Because as it turns out, thank goodness, Laney Berlin can be warded off with alcohol.

“I want to be different. Deal with it!”

2 Replies

This came from my 6 year-old boy last night when I was putting him to bed.

“I want you to know that you are very special, and I love you very much.”

“Even if you hate me sometimes?”

Alarmed. Pause. Deep breath.

“Why do you think mommy hates you?”

“When you are mad at me and yell at me,” he said, matter-of-fact-ly.

“Oh, sweetie…” Another deep breath. Think. Think quickly. What does the parenting manual say as a proper response to this?  Oh, right. There is NONE! So we have to make it up as we go along…

“Oh, sweetie.  Even if mommy is mad at you sometimes, it does not mean that I hate you!”

Musing on this, he turned his back towards me.  After a second, which felt like an eternity (cliche alert!), he turned towards me again,

“Well.  I want to be different. Deal with it!”

A non-sequitur response.  One that made me laugh out loud and hugged him even more tightly.

“I want to be different. Deal with it!”

I have been thinking about this the whole night and this morning.

Here is a passage from Almost Moon by Alice Sebold that, together with my 6 year-old’s infinite wisdom, will be haunting me for a long time…

“I walked to the center of my front lawn and lay down, spread-eagled.  I looked up at the stars.  How did I end up in a place where doing such a thing marked you for crazy, while my neighbors dressed concrete ducks in bonnets at Easter and in striped stocking caps at Christmas but were considered sane?”

In addition to the Pre-nuptial agreement, draw up a chore chart and sign on the dotted line!

4 Replies

The following is a rant against men who do not help out around the house.  You have been forewarned…

I hesitate in calling myself a feminist. Because I am embarrassed.  Not because of the label, but because I would be living a lie if I call myself one.  I am the woman that Feminists hold up as a bad example.

An enabler.

The truth is: I still do most of the housework around here. I work full time. My commute is over an hour each way.  I travel for business.  I make as much money as my husband. (Even though this is not supposed to make any difference?)  I have a Ph.D. (I regretted putting this here: it was not my intention to brag. But rather a perpetual regret that I have wasted the best five years of my life getting a degree that has proven to be quite useless. And oftentimes a burden on my soul. I have let everybody down, myself especially).

Other couples fight about money, or so the myriad of studies showed.  We fight over who is doing what how much when with which one of the children for how long.  We fight over fairness.

“If you care about the house being neat, you should be the one that cleans up.  You are the one that’s anal.  I don’t care.”

I guess I can’t say anything about that if I don’t want to live a bachelor’s life.  And, seriously, I cannot expect everybody to want to get up in the middle of the night, like 3 am, to do the dishes, pick up the house, vacuum the carpet.  I am like Mr. Monk.  Mrs. Monk.  Ha.

I am one of those crazy women that get turned on when their husbands do the housework.  I am not making this up.  One of those women’s magazines did a survey and an overwhelming number of wives selected “My husband doing the household chore” as the thing that arouses them the most.

“How can you complain about doing housework if we have a cleaning lady?”

The cleaning lady comes every other week.  I guess it never dawns on him that ours is not ALICE from The Brady Bunch who lives with the family?

Hey, if they don’t mind a disgusting toilet bowl, why should they be the one to clean it up?  I can see the logic in that one too.

“If you spend less time on the Internet, you could have finished doing the dishes already.”

Oh. That. Is. A. Good. One.  Let me write it down for future references.

I have walked out many times in a fit of rage. Oh yes, believe me. Because I have a chip on my shoulder.

PSA to Men: You seriously don’t want an over-educated wife.  Just sayin’  Especially those that have taken Women’s Studies.

Most of the time though, I just swallow things that I want to say.  Because, when it comes down to it, do you divorce your husband if he does not pitch in a fair share of housework, on your mental scale?  Do you deprive your children of a father because you are tired of being the one responsible for doing the dishes, folding the laundry, picking up the house, and oh, everything related to the children?

Yes, he mows the lawn.  And he fixes things when things break inside the house.

Am I asking too much for some sort of help?

“I am going to clean up the house now.  I am going to turn on the music.  Do you mind moving somewhere?”

“Can I listen to the music too?”

“NO. To be honest, it annoys me to no end to clean up the house while you sit here and read your book.  So, it really would be better if you move somewhere else.  Just get out of here.”

He moved upstairs.  I turned up the music.  Way high.

Who is the Queen of Passive Aggressiveness??!!

p.s. Depiste my lament, I am relieved that I don’t have a daughter.  I don’t know what kind of an example I would be setting for a girl: “Don’t bother. It doesn’t matter whether you get an advanced degree or not. Probably worse. Because now you know to feel resentment AND guilt when you do everything around the house.”

My mommy cooks. My mommy cleans. My mommy loves me.

Leave a reply
 

 

It is almost a month since Mother’s Day and therefore I figure it is safe to ruminate out loud what I thought when I saw these loving and lovable pictures drawn by my 6 year old, with lots of love, without the risk of being accused as mean-spirited, bitter, spoiled, jaded, or worse, unfit-to-be-a-mother…

Turned out that my 6 year-old was more excited about Mother’s Day than I was. The weeks leading to Mother’s Day they had made so many arts and crafts projects at school to celebrate this day, and he was instructed to keep all these projects a secret until THE day so he could surprise me. Bless his heart. I am surprised that he did not burst from all the secrecy, and the trouble of keeping a secret from your mother when you are only 6 years old.

We had gone to the store in April when he decided that he needed to get me a Mother’s Day present. He was rather upset since he couldn’t figure out a way of getting anything without my knowing it.

He burst into tears when I saw the bag of chocolate he’s holding.

“You are not supposed to see this.”

“What? I don’t know what you’re talking about…”

“This! This is your Mother’s Day present. Now Mother’s Day is ruined! And it is all YOUR fault!”

“Honey. How about this? Mommy will pay for it and then you can hide it and I promise I will forget about it.”

“No, it won’t work!”

It took me an hour to calm him down, to convince him that yes indeed, I would erase the memory of this exchange from my brain.

When he proudly presented me with the book that he made at school, a book comprised of “Things my mommy does, and therefore I love my mommy” vignettes, I was really moved. Really, I was. He was beaming with pride, and naturally, I was beaming with pride too.

But later, it did give me pause to think my role as a mother. How I see myself and how I am perceived by my children, others, the world.

1. After 20+ years of education, this is what I am boiled down to: cooking and cleaning.

2. My job sucks, at least in my child’s eyes. If I were a hod dog vendor, or a street musician, it would probably be easier for him to draw “What my mommy does at work.” Truth be told, and in all fairness, he has attempted many times to understand what I do at work.

“So you work on the computer… But what do you MAKE?”

A conversation with him about my job always results in days of self-doubt in me…

3. Perhaps in all fairness, cleaning and cooking could be what he sees me do all the time. Is it telling that he did not draw “My mommy does the laundry” since our floor is constantly covered with laundered clothes transported straight from the dryer? And bless his heart that he considers grilled cheese and mac&cheese straight from a box cooking. I guess it is true that what you don’t know will not hurt you…

4. On the other hand, what if this is his ideal of a mother? A mom that cooks and cleans, while wearing an apron with a BIG smile on her face. So happy. So content. Perhaps this is a mother that he yearns for and not the harried, reluctant one he’s stuck with? Staring at the big smile in these drawings, I somehow feel ashamed. Guilty.

5. This is the conclusion I am most reluctant to draw; it took me a whole month to admit to myself: Maybe, just maybe, I am not spending enough quality time with my children. None of the pictures showed me doing things with him.

If I had made more efforts in doing arts and crafts, if I were more willing in playing Go Fish, if I had offered to go to the zoos, the parks, the playgrounds more often, if I had said, “Let’s go fly a kite” out of nowhere.

If. Perhaps he would have something other than cooking and cleaning to draw with.

My Mother’s Day Phobia

1 Reply

It is the Wednesday after Mother’s Day and therefore I figure it is safe to reflect upon the impact of Mother’s Day on me personally, without the risk of being accused as mean-spirited, bitter, spoiled, jaded, or worse, unfit-to-be-a-mother…

 

 

Although I have always been moved by the origin of Mother’s Day, an internationally recognized and celebrated holiday nonetheless (unlike Father’s Day…), I really do hate Mother’s Day, if I may be allowed to be facetious. For myself.

 

I do sincerely celebrate Mother’s Day for all the mothers out there who so rightfully deserve well wishes on their special day. The Collective Mother. The concept of motherhood.

 

I appreciate the opportunity to wish all the mothers happiness, a day of relaxation, of recognition. I appreciate the fact that my mother-in-law is probably one of the best mothers-in-law out there and I am blessed in this regard. I appreciate the reminder that I owe my own mother thousands of apologies for all the pains I have caused her, and that maybe for once I can talk to her on the phone without hanging up in a hurry because someone in my house screams as if his leg is being sawed off, or in a huff because my mother says something that does not jive well with my pseudo-feminist sensibility…

 

“What are you going to do with the kids when you travel for business?”

“Hmmm, they have a father too?” Click.

 

I hate all the commercials that unfairly raise my expectations of what my husband and children would do to “honor me” on Mother’s Day. I hate my own passive aggressiveness:

 

“What do you want for Mother’s Day? What do you want to do for Mother’s Day?”

“Whatever. I don’t care.”

 

I hate my husband’s taking my reply literally after so many years of marriage. Come on, man, you know the passive aggressive bitch that I am. DO SOMETHING. Anything.

 

I hate despite all my jokes of “lowered expectations”, I cannot help but have that smidgen of hope, that maybe this year, something would be done. A surprise would be planned. The secret conversations. The furtive exchange of looks. The stifled laughter as they worked on a conspiracy. And I would pretend not to notice.

 

Like I said, I hate all those commercials that plant unrealistic expectations even when I try to be rational about it.

 

I once read that, statistically, more people committed suicide on their birthdays than any other day of the year. (Or did a college friend of mine tell me that? After he phoned to check on me, to make sure that I didn’t do anything stupid. I was full of angst in my youth. Hermann Hesse. My husband would not agree on Demian as the name for our firstborn. Lucky kid…)

 

The same agitation I feel on Mother’s Days. I wish I could just forget about it. DON’T PANIC.

“Is it difficult to take care of kids?”

Leave a reply

My 6-year-old boy asked me this question last night when I was putting him to sleep.  (Actually, I still need to sleep with him every night to get him to fall asleep which has been a subject of heated argument sometimes between me and my DH…  I guess I do tend to take the easier way out.  Sorry, Robert Frost, “The Road Not Taken” is simply not for the time-crunched…)

My boy asked, “Mommy, can I ask you a question?  Is it really hard to take care of kids?”

Startled by the innocent yet loaded question, I employed the age-old trick, “What do you think?”  He thought about it and then said, “It must be hard.  But why?” So I tried to explain to him that unlike complicated machines that we have, babies do not come with instruction manuals, and each one is so different, and they behave differently on a day to day basis, so it is very difficult to know what the right things to do are.

I am such a lame parent…

Of course, now I wonder whether I have complained verbally out loud and he has heard me complaining about raising kids.  The natural extension of the complaint is, for a straight-forward thinker not privy to the complexities of parenthood, “I wish I didn’t have kids”. I hope he did not draw that conclusion on his own.

But I do have a confession to make: sometimes I do wish that I have kids that are more easy-going… which is, probably every other kid that is not mine that I have seen.

You are probably in the wrong place!

Leave a reply

I am never one for planning even though part of my job description involves research and I am a very good researcher if I am allowed to toot my own horn, and I guess I am, since Goddammit, this here is my blog! “Serendipity” in my case oftentimes does not come because of good luck, which I am sorely lacking hence the blog (more about that later), but because of creative thinking. Anyway, I digress…

So I was saying, I am never one for planning. I have been thinking about starting a blog just so I have some way to realize my self, and I have always thought that the Secret Inner Life of a Suburban Mom would be a good one, (sort of the same way young girls think of names for their would-be baby daughters). Notes from Underground was once a choice and would have been nice too, but I don’t want to be pegged as a literary snob or a name-dropper or a wannabe. Plus, the name is used for at least three blogs. (And of course, I am not suggesting that any of those blogs’ owners are a literary snob, a name-dropper, or a wannabe…)

Anyhow, I was saying, I am never one for planning, so tonight is a good time to start as any other time, and I really need to stop talking to myself inside my head, so I sat down and actually registered the name I have always wanted for a daughter (figuratively speaking) for my blog. I still cannot believe that this name is available. Come on! It IS a great name for a blog!

Anyway, half way through my inaugural post, it dawned on me, OMG! what if there is another blog out there with the same title? Since I am brand new in the blogsphere, I’d be in deep doodoo. (Hey, I am after all a MOM, so no naughty words here. Well, not in the first post anyway…) So I did a search, and OMG! there are so many different versions of suburban moms out there, and quite a few of them seem to have established celebrity-like presence. These moms must have 48 hours a day. Look at their blogs! Wow! Impressive! I am on the other hand, hoping to e-mail in my posts when I take the train to work or during long drawn-out meetings. (I am looking forward to the latter especially!)

So, what I am trying to say is: If you are reading this, you are probably in the wrong place. You probably have heard about a cool blog by a suburban mom who, surprisingly, is witty and humourous, intelligent and articulate, insightful and enlightening, and whose blog itself is blog-worthy. Sorry, dude, no dice. Not here. Do another search.

I am just using this here as a self-medicating device, before the downward spiral takes me too far away from my self until I do not recognize her any more when I meet her one day. This here is my therapy.