Bossypants (24 page)

I was defensive and grouchy whenever the topic came up. At a party with a friend who was successfully nursing her little boy, I watched her husband produce a bottle of pumped breast milk that was the size of a Big Gulp. It was more milk than I had produced in my whole seven weeks—I blame
Entourage.
As my friend’s husband fed the baby, he said offhandedly, “This stuff is liquid gold. You know it actually makes them smarter?” “Let’s set a date!” I screamed. “IQ test. Five years from today. My formula baby will crush your baby!” Thankfully, my mouth was so full of cake they could not understand me.

Once I let go of my guilt, which took a while, the only remaining obstacle was the Teat Nazis.

These are the women who not only brag endlessly about how much their five year old still loves breast milk, but they also grill you about your choices. You can recognize the TNs by their hand-carved daggers:

“Are you breast-feeding? Isn’t it amazing? I really think it’s how I lost the weight so easily. Did you have a vaginal birth? I went natural and I didn’t even tear. Are you back at work already? Do you feel weird about going back to work? I just love my baby so much I can’t imagine going back to work yet.

You’re not nursing? She’s only fifteen months; you should try again!”

Now, let me be clear; millions of women around the world nurse their children beautifully for years without giving anybody else a hard time about it. Teat Nazis are a solely western upper-middle-class phenomenon occurring when highly ambitious women experience deprivation from outside modes of achievement. Their highest infestation pockets are in Brooklyn and Hollywood.

If you are confronted by a TN, you have two options. One, when they ask if you’re breast-feeding, you can smile and say, “Yes. It’s amazing.”
(You owe it to your baby to lie.)
Or you can go for the kill. The only people who can shame the Teat Nazis are the Adoptive Mommies. If you have a friend who has an adopted child, especially one from another country,
bring him or her around,
because they make the Teat Nazis’ brains short-circuit: “How can I… feel superior… you… bigger sacrifice… can’t judge…” and their big ol’ dinner plate nipples pop off as they crumple to the ground and disappear.

Lesson learned? When people say, “You really, really
must
” do something, it means you don’t really have to. No one ever says, “You really, really
must
deliver the baby during labor.” When it’s true, it doesn’t need to be said.

“Me Time”

Any expert will tell you, the best thing a mom can do to be a better mom is to carve out a little
time for herself. Here are some great “me time” activities you can do.

Go to the bathroom a lot.

Offer to empty the dishwasher.

Take ninety-minute showers. (If you only shower every three or four days, it will be easier to get
away with this.)

Say you’re going to look for the diaper crème, then go into your child’s room and just stand there
until your spouse comes in and curtly says, “What are you doing?”

Stand over the sink and eat the rest of your child’s dinner while he or she pulls at your pant leg
asking for it back.

Try to establish that you’re the only one in your family allowed to go to the post office.

“Sleep when your baby sleeps.” Everyone knows this classic tip, but I say why stop there? Scream
when your baby screams. Take Benadryl when your baby takes Benadryl. And walk around pantless
when your baby walks around pantless.

Read! When your baby is finally down for the night, pick up a juicy book like Eat, Pray, Love or
Pride and Prejudice or my personal favorite, Understanding Sleep Disorders: Narcolepsy and Apnea; A
Clinical Study. Taking some time to read each night really taught me how to feign narcolepsy when my
husband asked me what my “plan” was for taking down the Christmas tree.

Just implementing four or five of these little techniques will prove restorative and give you the
energy you need to not drink until nighttime.

A Celebrity’s Guide to Celebrating the Birth of Jesus

Goldie and Kurt like to soak in the crystal blue waters of St. Barts. Melanie and Antonio prefer the festive chill of Aspen. Tina and Jeff are absolutely mad for Route 80W between Philadelphia and Youngstown! We never miss it.

Lying on a beach feels a little “first thought” to me. I prefer the retro chic of spending Christmas just like Joseph and Mary did—traveling arduously back to the place of your birth to be counted, with no guarantee of a bed when you get there. You may end up sleeping on an old wicker couch with a dog licking your face while an Ab Rocket infomercial plays in the background. It’s a modern-day manger.

Our annual pilgrimage from one set of in-laws to the other happens every December 26, or, as they call it in Canada: Boring Day.

We always plan to leave around seven in the morning and, like clockwork, we’re out the door by ten. After gassing up, deicing, and turning around for an unanticipated bowel movement, we glide onto glorious 80W by ten thirty. Sure, there are those trendy types who prefer 76/70 because it’s “more scenic” and “they have a McDonald’s,” but I think 80W has a certain
ceci me déprime
.

My husband drives the whole seven hours because I don’t have a driver’s license. It’s just one of the many ways in which I am developmentally stunted. I don’t drive. I can’t cook meat correctly.
And
I have no affinity for animals. I don’t hate animals and I would never hurt an animal; I just don’t actively care about them. When a coworker shows me cute pictures of her dog, I struggle to respond correctly, like an autistic person who has been taught to recognize human emotions from flash cards. In short, I am the worst.

There are plenty of
positives
to being married to me. I just can’t think of any of them right now, and I’m sure my husband can’t think of any of them either while he’s driving wideways across Pennsylvania.

Still: There’s something hypnotic and relaxing about cruising through the Alleghenies, frantically searching for a radio signal. If traffic is moving well, you won’t ever find a station that lasts for an entire song. So you nestle in between your baking-hot dashboard and the freezing-cold door and enjoy the radio’s static with occasional fragments of a shouted religious broadcast.

KHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH—Friends, are you living in such a way that there is a crown in heaven waiting for you?—KHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH—a man must die of self—KHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH.

When you feel about to “die of self,” pull over and enjoy one of the local eateries.

I recommend the Roy Rogers at Exit 4B or the Roy Rogers at Exit 78. If you’re a die-hard

“foodie,” hop off the road in DuBois and enjoy a Subway sandwich made at a place that is eighty percent gas station.

“Youngstown!” my husband always yells as we pass the sign. He yells it in a way that you can actually hear the letters getting bigger at the end like an old-timey postcard. It never fails to startle me and make me laugh. Half the time it wakes me up. Yes, I fall asleep while he’s driving. Did I mention that I’m the worst?

In the last hour, highway turns to snowy country roads and the GPS system shuts down because you’re in a part of the world that Toyota doesn’t recognize (and the feeling is mutual).

We always pull up carefully, making sure not to run over any outdoor cats. (One of the best-kept secrets of “country life” is that people accidentally crush their own pets a lot.) The house is cozy warm from the wood-burning heater. There are hugs and kisses and pies and soup and ham and biscuits and a continuous flow of Maxwell House coffee with nondairy creamer. We City Folk can pretend that we prefer the rotgut from Starcorps with skim milk and Splenda, but who are we kidding? Maxwell House with French vanilla corn syrup cannot be beat.

If there’s one thing my husband’s hometown has that St. Barts does not, it’s the water. “Legally potable” doesn’t quite capture it. Straight from the tap it smells like… How can I describe it?—if you boiled ten thousand eggs in a prostitute’s bathwater. It turns your jewelry green, but it leaves your hair soft and manageable. So, while I couldn’t
find
it in St. Barts, I could probably
sell
it there.

My in-laws always have a huge dog—a dog so big that even I can see it. For years it was Robbie.

When Robbie passed away from surprisingly non-vehicle-related causes, they got Bear. Another way my body rejects dog love is that I am allergic to them. Those first few Christmases, I had to dose myself with Benadryl to survive. I would end up sleeping half the day and then shuffling aimlessly around the house like later-years Judy Garland in a Christmas special. Most of my in-laws didn’t experience my actual personality until Claritin was invented. By then it was too late to get rid of me.

My three sisters-in-law have always been welcoming and affectionate, and boy, can they clean a kitchen. After a big family meal they rinse and scrape and dry and Saran-wrap like nobody’s business. I pitch in half-assedly like the spoiled suburban younger child that I am. “Where… should I put… this…

chicken bone? Throw it out, or…?” See above, re: “worst.”

I can’t promise you will find a family as lovely as my in-laws to stay with on your Route 80

Christmas. Honestly, I know you won’t, because we had Mamaw Pearline. Pearline was eighty-seven when I met her and she lived to be ninety-six. She spent almost all her time upstairs in the den watching TV and chain-smoking. She had gradually retired from working hard all her life, raising kids, cleaning, and cooking in a coal camp in West Virginia. She had earned the right to refer to the
National Enquirer
as

“the newspaper.”

By the time my daughter was born, Pearline’s short-term memory was gone. She’d come downstairs and smile at the baby. “Whose little baby is this?” “IT’S JEFF’S!” we’d yell. “Look at those dark eyebrows.” She’d smile and pat the baby’s head. “I never saw a baby with such dark eyebrows!”

Then, two hours later, she’d come down for a cup of coffee. “Whose little baby is this? Look at those dark eyebrows!” This went on for three days.

For reference, this is the swarthy little baby she was talking about.

We did seven or eight 80W Christmases in a row before I had to be a fool and mess with perfection. Why couldn’t I be like Goldie and Kurt and stick with what works? I couldn’t because as glamorous as the drive always was, it got even more magical and glamorous when the baby became a toddler. One year, I believe, she screamed all the way from Hazleton to the Moshannon State Forest.

And who could blame her? She didn’t understand why we had strapped her into this frozen contraption only to shove cold Roy Rogers fries in her mouth.

In an attempt to make things easier for myself, which is the basis for all of history’s worst decisions (see: “George W. Bush’s Repeal of the Estate Tax,” “Scott Peterson’s Plan,” and
“Dred Scott v.

Sandford”
), I invited the whole family out to New York for a Christmas adventure. I learned quickly that trying to force Country Folk to love the Big City is like telling your gay cousin, “You just haven’t met the right girl yet.” They just don’t like big cities. It’s okay. It’s natural. They were born that way.

When you see your Big City through a non-admirer’s eyes you notice things you normally would not.

“Hmm. I guess there
are
a lot of dog turds on Eighty-third Street.”

“No, it’s great. We just put our garbage out the back door and when it starts to overflow the super picks it up.”

“Who,
that
guy? Yeah… he’s playing with himself. Okay, let’s go in the playground the other way.”

The Christmas in New York Adventure didn’t go so well. My father-in-law tripped on a crack in the pavement and spent the rest of the week politely pretending he had not dislocated his shoulder. I dragged all the kids onto the subway and through the crowd to see the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree, which is unlike any tree in the world, except for hundreds of trees near their homes in Ohio.

If I had one bone to pick with the Country Folks, it’s that they are not gastronomically adventurous. Family-style Italian sent them all running for the Alka-Seltzer. Greek yogurt left my sister-in-law stymied, like I had offered her a bowl of caulk. But who am I to judge? I have never been able to get my head around ham salad or pickled eggs. And I would like it explained to me in writing what’s so great about apple butter.

After four days, I could see the city wearing them down. It was too much walking for them, oddly. It turns out City Folk walk way more than Country Folk.

My young nephew went to the deli with me. “There sure are a lot of foreigners here.” No, I explained, those people live here. In the “Great American Melting Pot,” rural Ohio may be a lump of white flour that hasn’t been stirred properly. Not that New York is any better. New York is that chunk of garlic that you bite into thinking it’s potato and you can’t get the taste out of your mouth all day. It all blends once you mix it, but sometimes you really have to grind it against the side.