Sometimes I Feel Like a Nut (10 page)

Literally no fewer than three bejeweled hands went to their respective throats.

I felt that seventh-grade tsunami of panic that I was being talked about when I saw two moms whispering while looking at me, i.e., making the international gesture for “We’re talking about you.” But see, it wasn’t middle school, so I looked right back at them with a warm smile and said, “Is something wrong?”

They looked at each other. One grimaced and the other, caught off guard by my question, pursed her lips and leaned forward.

“Sorry, it’s just, no one really says that anymore. It’s not politically correct for the children.”

What, “Indian-style”?! You’re fucking kidding me. It’s not like my apartment is full of cigar-store headdress wearers and I’m sitting there in a Redskins jersey greeting people by holding up a palm and saying “
How.
”

The other mom leaned in, throwing me the parenting lingo life raft. “It’s called crisscross applesauce.”

Oh. Okay . . .

“Sadie, come here please and sit down crisscross applesauce.”

My husband and I had a good laugh that night about it, but not nearly as hard as we did the following week at a black-tie benefit for the American Museum of Natural History. Our friends Dana and Michael invite us every year, so we blow the dust off the tux and dress and hit the ’zeum in a glam night of people-watching and dining under an enormous whale. The cocktail hour, though, was in the main hallway, filled with life-sized dioramas of cave people with hairy boobs and animals about to pounce. I was click-clacking down the marble floor on my heels when I saw the Indians. Full feathers, drums, and a faux fire. They all sat around the sham flames with their legs crossed.

“Look, sweetie,” Harry said. “The Native Americans are all sitting around crisscross applesauce!”

In the end, I learned (and am still learning) to swallow the unsolicited instructions and comments made by the Experts (moms with older kids) with a boulder of salt. Because I have such an amazing mom, my instincts have generally led me in an okay direction and I feel aiiiiight. There have been a couple snags along the way, and I’m anything but conventional.

For example, at pickup one day when Sadie was three, the teachers, stifling a smile, informed me that my little smocked-dress-wearing daughter said the F word.

Mildly mortified, I asked for more detail.

“Well,” said the teacher, “Charlie told her that her dress was hideous and she told him to fuck off.”

“Oh, okay, well, she used it in the right context then!” was my reply.

I probably should have been
way more horrified and punished her in some way but the truth is (shhhh!) I secretly dug it. My kid wasn’t going to take shit from anybody. So glad that apples don’t fall far from trees. Crisscross applesauce is so much more fun that way.

12

10. Ivy asking someone at the supermarket checkout when the baby was coming. It was a dude.

9. My son, Fletch, at eight months, getting a baby doll in music class and proceeding to dry-hump it, causing one mom to suggest I film it and submit it to
America’s Funniest Home Videos
.

8. On a crowded airplane, baby Ivy having a very bad Code Brown, the up-the-back kind. It was so fucking gnarly that when I walked her down the aisle passengers gasped as if in need of military-caliber gas masks.

7. Having Sadie ask the father of a girl in her class if he was her grandpa.

6. Fletch hitting so many kids, we started calling him Osama bin Kargman.

5. Sadie refusing to walk down the aisle as flower girl at a friend’s three-hundred-person wedding.

4. Ivy announcing in a quiet restaurant that she has a “
big big doody
.”

3. Fletch projectile-vomiting Similac onto Mommy’s friend’s silk dress.

2. Sadie telling an older heavyset man with a long white beard that he looks “exactly like Santa.”

. . . and the number one most blush-inducing moment . . .

1. On a packed JetBlue flight, having Sadie say (loudly), “Mommy, when the plane goes up, up, up in the sky, the wheels go up into the plane’s vagina!”

Ahhh, the humbling job of motherhood. You can try to be prim and perfect with matchy-matchy sibling outfits, the hair bows, the table manners, the polished smiles for the holiday card. And just when you think you can exhale at a crowded birthday party because your kids are fabulous, one smashes a chocolate-frosted cupcake on another’s white dress. Or pushes a tot in a bouncy castle. Or dances Hannah Montana–style . . . to organ music at a friend’s christening. Sadie used to dance so provocatively, I used to say she was four going on whore.

We can be the most preened and controlled adults, and even the most anal of us are simply forced to let go and surrender to the Fisher-Price explosion of pure chaos. In the preparent years, when a kid spazzed in a crowded theater, threw peas in a restaurant, or smacked his mommy, I just told myself what people have been telling themselves for millennia in order to propagate our fine species of
Homo sapiens
: when I have kids one day, they will never do that!

Oh, what a difference a broken water makes.

When the stork arrived with my oldest, Sadie, I couldn’t help but think she was the most perfect creature ever spawned. And of course all mommies shine their rose-colored lenses upon each of their babies as they innocently babble and roll and coo. And then . . . you get to know them. First of all, let the record reflect that I adore my kids. They are a spunky, quirky, colorful bunch and I relish our time together. They are a wacky crew full of incredible observations, big hearts, and electric smiles. And when I’m bummed or tired or stressed, their little arms around me in delicious hugs are the Hello Kitty or skull-’n’-crossbones Band-Aid on all that ails me.

And yet, of course, no kid is perfect. And by the way, if they were, they’d probably be boring nose-picking losers later. Our edges make us what we are, natch. Who doesn’t love a little sass and spice? But what about when that spice gets ratcheted up to the level of, say, a glob of wasabi?

Take, for example, the list above. Allow me to mention that if need be, I could probably do a top 100 list. Maybe David Letterman should hire me. This was easy! But when I think about some of the moments that made me blush, I realize that, sure, they can be cringe-inducingly embarrassing, enough for me to press a Dr. Evil button and get sucked through the floor, but they can also be . . . lovely. Here is one example.

When Sadie “graduated” nursery school, they literally had a whole rooftop ceremony complete with “Pomp and Circumstance” playing from an iPod dock. The children lined up at the base of the stairs leading to the super-tall jungle gym. The parents were all in rows opposite the looming apparatus, cameras ready, grins wide. The head teacher then read each child’s name. The child was to climb the stairs, walk to the tippy-top of the long slide, and slide down. At the base of the slide was the assistant teacher who gave them their little diploma to fête the milestone. Applause ensued.

Kid after kid slid down to spirited clapping. It truly was the cutest thing ever, a brilliant idea to cap off their little careers as toddler students. Then came Sadie’s turn. She walked up the stairs, and my husband, Harry, and I were poised clutching the digicam with pride.

“Sadie Grace Kargman,” the teacher said.

I drew a breath excitedly as my little munchkin got to the top. But then . . . she didn’t slide down. She just stood there.

“Come on, Sadie, sweetheart!” said the teacher encouragingly after a few seconds.

Nada.

“Honey, come on down!” she coaxed again.

I could feel the stares of the parents as they started to turn each of their blond primped heads to look at us. While they all loved Sadie, they knew she could be a total spitfire, prone to clowning around, shaking her ass, saying “vagina.”

“Geez, she’s a handful!” a mom in a shoe store once said to me, shaking her head after a little whiny outburst over M&Ms.

Harrumph. You know what? I fucking hate that expression. Handful? Yeah, bitch, a handful of flowers, of Barbie shoes, of blond curls, of M&Ms. There’s no more vulnerable feeling than the suspicion your kid is being judged.

“Slide on down, kiddo!” the teacher said, a tad agitated.

Probably only thirty or forty seconds passed but they seemed like forever. My heart was throbbing, my husband was sweating, and just as I was about to draw breath to call to her myself, she casually strolled across the top of the jungle gym deck away from the slide over to the fireman’s pole and shot the fuck down like a total badass.

That’s my girl.

One of the mothers commented, “That’s Sadie! She always has to do it her way!” with a saccharine smile. I wanted to bash her face in.
Hell, yeah!

Look, I was nervous and even maybe a tad blushy at first that she didn’t follow directions. Kids are taught to do what they are told, obviously. Still, it was a weirdly great moment. That pole was high and she had total balls to do it her way. The assets that are wonderful for life are not the ones that are wonderful for grammar school. When we’re adults, aren’t we supposed to go outside the box, break the chain, and have some fucking cojones? Why should I have been embarrassed? What she did was actually pretty damn cool.

So when I think about it on a macro level, I sort of turn a little mental page in the Mommy Manual. Sure, I feel terrible if my kids are freaking on a packed flight, but really, will I ever see these people again? Why sweat a liter and feel the stress hormones coursing through my veins? Why add wrinkles to my already grooved forehead over a bizarre goody-two-shoes mommy comment, a thrown object à la Russell Crowe, or some whiny behavior? They’re
kids
!

Deep in my gut, I know one day, when my little nuggets are older and have their wits and manners hammered into them as parents and society demand, I will feel wistful about all those inappropriate comments, the unusual hues of an off-color observation, and the unpredictability of a chaotic life. I will long for the pulse pounding that accompanies their innocent social blunders, their lack of edit buttons, their blissful lack of awareness. I will miss blushing.