smug

I was so smug this morning. Bryan forgot his cell phone and while I felt bad for him not being able to receive my possibly frantic phone calls wherever he might be, I also felt this shard of smugness. I thought, I wouldn't do that. I'm much more organized. And then I forgot to put the stroller frame into the trunk when I packed the kids inside the car to take Hamish to daycare. I got home and opened the trunk and was greeted by the lone Phil and Ted's double stroller and my heart dropped into my Uggs. I knew I'd used the stroller frame. And I looked up the street and there it was, untouched, unmoved from its place on the sidewalk where I'd left it twenty minutes earlier. Thank God I didn't go to Target like I'd planned. I'm saving that fun-tastic outing for the weekend.


Other things I've forgotten since becoming a mother? The stove burner. I left it on low all morning, just the right temperature to ruin the brand new Fiestaware oven mit I'd bought on Amazon, but not high enough to torch the apartment. And then there was the historic time I parked the car to pick Hamish up at daycare and left my driver's side door wide open, inviting anyone and everyone to come and steal the car, and nobody even stole the change from the ashtray. Please let my days of forgetting be over. The thing is, I had a relatively good night's sleep last night, I ate breakfast, had coffee, so what's my excuse? I'm going to be a mom, God help me, for the next billion years. I don't like this new personality trait of mine. And my neighborhood is no angel in terms of lawfulness. It's a frigging miracle the stroller was still there, and not in Chinatown being hawked for scrap metal. Which reminds me that I've also had neighbors call me to return my wallet, sans cash, but still. I have faith in people. Maybe it shows? I dunno. Not that I haven't been robbed. My bag got stolen right off my stroller at the King's Plaza Old Navy. But I don't want to get into that. It's just ugh. Bad memories.

I'm still doing the yoga tapes and itching to get some new ones already. I've done the three tape rotation a few times now and am already feeling myself gearing up to make excuses to not do it. Spending money on more tapes should cure me of that.

Hm...So...Oh yeah.

I have to vacuum! Every time I'm perched on my mat in downward dog, all I see is how filthy my rug is. All that hair and cat litter that Hamish picks up daily and asks, "What's this?" about, like Mary Poppins. Sometimes he picks it up in his mouth, which isn't very smart. We tell him to go throw the litter crumbs in the toilet. It's so gross. People are gross. And cats make us grosser. How did I get here? What the fuck am I writing about? Slap! Slap! Snap out of it woman! It's Monday, see, that's the thing. My hair is slowly filling in, that's a good thing.

Oh here's something. This morning when Hamish was waking up, and I was helping him along to the land of consciousness since it was near eight o'clock, I went in there to putter around, open his blinds, throw Stella's diaper away, and he looked up at me from his borrowed toddler bed and said, "Get out of here." I kept my chin up and told him to say instead, "I want to be alone, please," and he did, and I left, but it kills me. I know I'm his only mom, I'm irreplaceable, and that he loves me, but the rejection can sting like a motherfucker. And it's not like I don't take advantage of every break I get offered. But my self-esteem is so fragile when it comes to his affections and rejections and I want so much to rise above it, to just be the mom and not the friend, but it's hard. He'll tell me all the time that he wants Daddy, or Grammom or Pop. They tell me it's just because I'm always there, but oh the pain.

One of our neighbors called Bryan a rich man yesterday, or she said, "You have a rich family," and she's right. So poo poo as my mother would say. Why does my mother day poo poo? It's to put a little poo on something great, so that someone or something doesn't come along and poo it for you. You want to beat the baddy to the punch. I guess it's the same thing as when Chinese furniture makers scratch the underside of a piece the've just completed, to say, nothing is perfect, and maybe that there shouldn't be perfection. Perfection makes us crazy. That's why it's good that I yearn to upgrade my apartment. Do you see how I slipped that in there? I am content with a lot of things a lot of the time, but me being neurotic me, prone to bouts of tears and self-pity, envy, entitlement and feelings of deprivation, if I don't have something seemingly negative to dwell upon, my head might explode. It's like that bit of The Tipping Point I read about Bernie Goetz, the subway vigilante, where Malcolm Gladwell opines that Bernie was an angry guy, and the only way he could live happily with his anger would be to give it a place to feel justified, so he chose to live in the then drug and crime infested Chelsea neighborhood. So my small apartment validates my yearning ways. And then there's that adage I've been seeing recently, oh yeah because of that Capote movie, that "more tears are shed over answered prayers than unanswered ones." So I guess I'm philosphical this morning.

Hey, did you see The 40 Year-Old Virgin? Holy shit that's a great movie. So I should embrace my small apartment, but there are other reasons to do that. We don't have a mortgage, for one, and our maintenance is cheap. We save money for our children's futures living here, and I can afford a pedicure once in a while. I don't want to give up that purchasing freedom for three hundred more square feet, although I did Friday afternoon when Hamish was napping and Stella was crying and I sequestered us in his teeny bedroom like Anne Frank hiding from the Nazis. So I guess it depends on which day you catch me. Because people ask, "When are you going to get a bigger place?" kind of regularly, but every time Bryan and I stop to discuss it we go in circles. "But the mortgage we'd have...but we still won't be able to afford an actual house unless we move to the outermost suburbs and we have no desire to live in Yonkers (no offense)...but but but..." and then CRACK, the blender pitcher needs replacing and the car is burning oil and we're seriously considering buying a seven hundred dollar chair from Crate and Barrel (I know--crazy!), and I think, with all these things to buy, we'd better not move, because one, there will be even more space to fill with crap, and two, uh, what's two? Oh yeah, we won't be able to afford a scrap of it with the mortgage we'll have. Let alone the therapy bill from having to sacrifice daycare. Boy this is a post! And I didn't even go into the laundry situation.