Stop Dressing Your Six-Year-Old Like a Skank

by Celia Rivenbark

They skittered away to hassle some other victim, no doubt hissing the whole time about my “lack of commitment” and my “refusal to be a team player” and my “really wide brownie-eating ass.”

  Those Supermoms can be real bitches when you think about it.

  We could all take a lesson from men, if you ask me. Because no matter how slack a dad is, if he does the least little thing, people gush over him.

  When I went on a business trip a while back, everyone marveled at the “good job” my husband did.

  Why is that? Is it like seeing a chimpanzee play the clarinet? Sure, it’s possible, but you don’t honestly expect to ever see it in your lifetime.

  Or is it like the Arkansas rooster I remember from childhood? The one that could take your dollar bill, punch a cash register, and give you change back? He even had his own postcard. Is someone, somewhere, printing a postcard with a similar apparent freak of nature? The caring daddy who managed to not completely screw up a week of single parenthood?

  “Your husband did such a good job,” cooed a teacher at our daughter’s elementary school.

  “You should have seen how, when he realized it was PE day, he just flew out the door and went home so he could get her tennis shoes!” gushed another. “She’s one lucky little girl!”

  A woman whom I don’t even know stopped to tell me that my husband “sure was a great dad while you were gone!”

  What was next? A memo from the central office announcing that the school’s name would be changed to honor him?

  Again, I ask, Why is it a man performs the minimal task of getting his kid to and from school dressed in anything that’s not Hello Kitty pajamas and he’s all of a sudden frickin’ Keanu dismantling a bomb on a city bus?

  Feeling ridiculously guilty, I renounced my slacker mom status temporarily and immediately signed up to take pecan tartlets to the teachers’ tea. Where was my ticker tape parade? Who judged the schoolwide essay contest every year? Who had been class mom for three years in a row? (Okay, y’all know it wasn’t me but it could have been.)

  Clearly, after a week away, my stock was low. Plus, I’d gotten into a fight with the carpool Nazis that morning.

  “We just want it safe for the children,” one hissed at me.

  Because I was holding my daughter’s hand and we were on foot, I failed to see a threat here. What were we in danger of doing? Taking out a few roly-polys before their time?

  “You shouldn’t walk here! You should walk there!” the second carpool Nazi screeched, sounding rather like a hostile Dr. Seuss and pointing to a space approximately two feet away.

  Jesus. Give somebody a Day-Glo vest and they think they rule the world.

  That night, I told my husband that his favorite slacker-mom had once again gotten it wrong. I’d offended the car-pool volunteers.

  “You didn’t?” he fairly shrieked.

  “Yeah, so what?”

  “I have to live with these people,” he moaned.

  “Not anymore. Slacker mom’s back on the job now, remember?”

  “Oh, yeah,” he said, brightening. “What’s for supper?”

  Celebrities

  11

  Celebrity Moms

  Don’t Hate Them Because They’re Beautiful

  (When There Are So Many Other Reasons to Hate Them!))

  I’m sure that y’all are just as relieved as I am that actress Denise Richards had her baby and it weighed, like, five pounds or some similar celebrity-baby weight.

  Our long national nightmare is over. Denise was starting to rival Kate Hudson for the longest gestation. Celebrities announce their pregnancies through their publicists on the morning after conception and thus begins the very long season of photos in the park of them wearing ball caps, their two-hundred-dollar tank tops stretched tight over blossoming tummies.

  Celebrities generally don’t give birth to big, fat, standard American babies. They tend to work out during their pregnancies, drinking wheat grass shakes and nibbling on sun-dried particleboard. Then, immediately after the birth, they hire a full-time personal trainer to whip them back into their prepregnancy weight of roughly ninety-four pounds.

  If there was any way they could insert a tiny home gym into the womb and encourage the baby to start working out now, they would. (“Hush now, little Artemis. No pain, no gain!”)

  Celebrities are not like you and me, my hons. And not just because they eat with their feet. No, no, it’s because they don’t even call babies what they are. They call them bumps. An entire cover story in People magazine was devoted to showcasing the bumps of Gwyneth Paltrow, Carnie (“Would somebody please tell me again why the hell I had gastric bypass surgery?”) Wilson, and “double bumpers” Marcia Gay Harden and Julia Roberts.

  Celebrities also tend to wear skin-tight clothing throughout pregnancy, a look that is, as I have said before, just plain wrong. Yes, we get it, you’re pregnant and you’re fabulous! But we find it hard to relate. Instead of waddling into the IHOP twice a week to order “lemon crepes and keep ‘em comin’“ like those of us out here in the Real World, they are instead stepping up the yogilates sessions with Simone and Rafiki. Makes me want to snap their twiglike celebrity necks like a Cheeto.

  Mmmm, Cheetos. Sorry. Where was I?

  Oh, yes. Britney Spears. See, here’s the thing about that celebrity mama. Britney is, at heart, just a good ol’ Southern girl. I’m sure that her rich friends were horrified by her wearing that shirt that said BABY with an arrow, but I thought she was just being fashionably retro. Either that or she wanted to make sure nobody thought it was just some rogue goiter.

  God bless Britney for naming her baby Sean Preston, a nice, normal name that sounds like it came straight off The Young and the Restless, which is where decent regular folks get their baby names. We don’t name our kids things like Coco or Mosaic or some such, because we know they’d get their ass kicked on the playground. At church.

  I also loved Brit for gaining, like, a gazillion pounds while pregnant. Girlfriend ate fried okra and spoonbread and mac and cheese the whole time, and I know that the other L. A. moms must’ve been horrified.

  (Note to Britney: If Kevin starts saying you need “to drop some elbees,” remind him that you could lose 140 pounds right quick with the right divorce lawyer. Hell, you’ve done it before. And I don’t want to say Kevin Federline isn’t smart. I mean, just because he believes that Geena Davis is really the president doesn’t mean he’s dumb, does it?)

  Britney had a C-section, which is terribly un-celebrity-like.

  You know, it’s the celebrity moms-to-be who first popularized the doula movement. Doulas are like uppity midwives; they hate drugs and forceps and anything else truly useful. They are tres chic! I’m sure that I will now get very earnest mail from doulas and their, uh, doulettes, about how I don’t understand the incredible level of support they bring to the birth process. Then again, who cares?

  I suppose if I sound bitter, it is because I’ve seen too many photos of Denise with her baby moments after delivery, not a hair out of place, luminescent skin and tastefully understated eye makeup. You want to see what a real woman looks like moments after birth? Watch A Baby Story on The Learning Channel: sweat-soaked, bloodshot eyes, doula-less.

  And knowing that bump isn’t going any-damned-where for at least a year.

  Once baby arrives, celebrities have a new dilemma. What to do with them while mom’s on the set or in the recording studio.

  Well, thank goodness for a new whiz-bang video program created just for the celebrity who must be away for many hours at a time. The system allows the celebrity babies to watch a computer screen that plays a slide show of the many faces of the famous mom, accompanied by a caption identifying her as MOMMY.

  Hollywood moms are crazy about this because it’s tiresome to constantly have to say, “No, no, little Zeitgeist, that’s not Mommy; that’s Nanny. Mommy just got paid many millions of dollars to simulate the devil’s aerobics with Brad Pitt. Isn’t Mommy a-ma-zing?”


  Of course, to a six-week-old, the caption on the video might as well say potato or egomaniac, but let’s not quibble here. The intention is to make sure that there is no confusion about just who the mommy is.

  This way, the procession of starched and background-checked nannies will never be mistaken for the actual birth mother. I should think it might also be helpful to switch the video to have a picture of the nanny with the words NOT THE MOMMY OT ILLEGAL ALIEN as Caption.

  Speaking of aliens, as I write this, Tom Cruise and Katie “I’m With Crazy” Holmes are expecting a celebrity pod-baby. Yes! The seed has been successfully planted and now is growing and flourishing in the formerly Catholic womb of Ms. Katie.

  I say “formerly Catholic” because, as we all know, Tom Cruise is a huge Scientologist, and he likes his women like his coffee, hot and full of beans just like him.

  Let’s not sugarcoat this one, hons. I don’t think Tom is the baby daddy. I’m not convinced that he, uh, has it in him, so to speak. My friend Courtney agrees and repeatedly refers to the Cruise kid as “that fake-ass baby.” Well, I didn’t say she was my nice friend.

  Tom and Katie are planning a Scientology-approved method of birthing, which consists of “silent contemplation and no drugs.”

  Funny thing, I don’t remember childbirth as a time of silent contemplation so much as a time to turn my head all the way around in a perfect 360 spin. Hey, you say to-mah-to.

  Celebrities love Scientology, apparently because they don’t have any decent Baptist churches out in Hollywood, so they must cling to the teachings of some guy named Ron. Scientologists believe in mind over matter. One of its biggest fans is actress Kirstie Alley. So am I the only one who thinks it’s funny that she finds the gospel according to Jenny Craig much more useful than that of L. Ron Hubbard in shedding all those mind-over-matter pounds?

  John Travolta (maybe he’s the baby daddy) is a huge Scientologist and his wife, Kelly Preston, is always yammering about her Scientology birthing style.

  Scientologists believe that words spoken during birth are recorded in a baby’s subconscious mind and can cause irrational emotions later in life.

  Ooops. Do you think the phrase, “You did this to me, you scum-sucking sack of shit” screamed repeatedly over the course of nine hours counts? If so, my bad.

  I think it’s hilarious that the only damn time Hollywood celebrities don’t do drugs is when they’re giving birth. What’s wrong with this picture?

  Tom Cruise says that you don’t need drugs to birth a baby, because drugs are the evil spawn of the pharmaceutical industry’s marriage to mainstream medicine.

  He is so adamant about this that he even blames psychiatry—in a crazy-man-screaming-on-the-subway kind of way—for the Holocaust. Yes, that Holocaust.

  The whole Rosemary’s Baby feel of this particular celeb coupling is just indescribably delicious. And the tabloids have a new staple: Tom dipping Katie, apparently in a rather awkward height-compensation gesture. I’m guessing poor Katie can’t even walk across the kitchen for a bowl of corn-flakes without Tom springing out and dipping her.

  He dips her at the supermarket, the soccer game, walking the dogs, everywhere. At last we have a replacement for the stock photo of Angelina Jolie with that eighty-pound Maddox glued to her hip or Paris Hilton with seventy-five-pound Nicole Richie glued to hers.

  Oh, and speaking of Paris, she has said that she is ready to have a child. I guess this means that the future is in good hands. Of course, we don’t know where they’ve been.

  Why does Paris want kids?

  “I know that kids complete your life,” she said in an interview with People magazine. “I think having kids will make me happier than I am. Plus, I already treat my three puppies like kids!”

  Yes, well, as long as you have a realistic notion of motherhood. The goal of any baby should be to bring happiness to his shallow-as-a-pie-pan mother. And if you can train that baby to eat on all fours from a five-hundred-dollar bowl bought at a Rodeo Drive boutique and shaped like a giant bone, well, so much the better!

  Holy God, where is Dr. Phil when you need him? He needs to have one of those knee-touching sessions with Paris, look straight into her soulless eyes and say, “Paris, if you think raising up young’uns is the same as hauling around that Gucci dog carrier of yours with a two-pound mutt that looks like a toilet brush with eyes, you’re crazier ‘n cactus juice.”

  Paris Hilton having a baby is just a bad idea. Parenthood is about sacrifice, and I don’t mean having to choose between the dead sea mud treatment and the high colonic at your private spa.

  Oh, and one more thing. If Paris is really serious about her desire to have a baby, she should probably know that if she thought that Brazilian wax was painful, she might want to hire a surrogate for the actual birthing. They’re hot.

  12

  Something Stinks

  And I’m Pretty Sure It’s Tonya Harding

  This Christmas, it seemed to me that every celebrity introduced a “signature fragrance.” If all you want for Christmas is to smell just like Donald Trump, you’re in luck. I haven’t seen it yet, but I’m guessing that Trump Cologne smells like money. At sixty bucks for less than an ounce, it should be called Sucka. I’m sure Apprentice fans would love a gift set featuring Trump flanked by (much) smaller vials of George, which smells vaguely like crotchety old man, and Carolyn, which comes with its very own stick to insert up your ass, never to be removed.

  Also just in time for holiday gift-giving: Britney Spears’s flirty floral, Curious, rumored to attract scruffy, ill-dressed man-boys whose skills are limited to fathering children out of wedlock and—oh, sorry, that was all.

  Also new this season, a citrusy mix from the folks at Adidas. Right. I’m going to buy perfume made by a company known for products that combine rubber and sweaty feet. Pass.

  Paris Hilton (insert your favorite joke here) was supposed to introduce her new signature scent for the masses later, but her handlers felt that she’s so hot right now that there was no sense in waiting. No name yet, but I’m rather fond of Mattressback!

  Jessica Simpson has a huge line of smell’um, including a “threesome of deliciously kissable Taste.” Gawd, it must be true what they always said about preachers’ daughters.

  Kim Cattrall, who’s not really a ho but just played one on TV, has introduced Spark Seduction, and Boston Rob Mariano, a second-place finisher in TV’s Survivor, has unveiled Foreman, which “combines scents of juniper and clean sweat.” Mariano said he chose the name because he used to be a construction foreman before becoming Mr. Ambuh. Cool. I used to work in a restaurant; meet my new scent, Fry Cook.

  Perhaps the weirdest celeb scent I’ve encountered is Full Throttle, from father-son team Paul Teutul Sr. and Jr., of Orange County Choppers, a cult hit on The Discovery Channel. Both Teutuls look kinda scary but, as we’re reminded every year at Christmas until we just wanna puke, hardcore bikers are all just gentle giants wanting to deliver gifts to poor kids. Whatever.

  The entire cast of All My Children has teamed with Wal-Mart to introduce Enchantment. I presume that with just one spritz you’ll be transported to a fictional town where women wake up with flawless hair and makeup in the arms of their husband’s best friends.

  That doesn’t smell; it reeks.

  Of course, those are all real products available in real stores. But I believe there are so many more celebrities who could be tapped for perfume pitches. How’s about Rehab, a clean new scent from Whitney Houston? (Free gift-with-purchase: Bobby Brown’s spicy scent, Jail Thyme.)

  Skater-turned-professional-wrestler Tonya Harding loves to talk tough, so I’m thinking her perfume might be called Smells Like Ass.

  Okay, that could hurt sales.

  Although the endless celebrity perfume is tiresome, it’s still not so irksome as the celebrities thinking that just because they had a cameo on Bay watch one time, they’re now ready to write for kids.

  Madonna’s leading the pack with an
entire series of children’s books. Whose idea was it to give Madonna a five-book kids’ book deal? What next? A parenting book by Michael Jackson?(What to Expect When One of Us Is Painfully Weird at Best or a Child Molester at Worst?)

  Why does every celebrity think they should write a children’s book? Usually they’re still feeling the last bliss of the epidural when they bark at the nurse, “Call my agent! The world needs my children’s book!”

  Sometimes it works. Fergie transformed her tattered toe-sucking image by writing a sweet series of children’s books about a talking helicopter. I’m less optimistic about new poppa-of-three Jerry Seinfeld’s foray into kid lit. I mean what’s that gonna read like? I’m guessing: “What’s the deal with porridge? I mean, is it oatmeal or is it Cream of Wheat?”

  But Madonna? Does the world really need her take on Puss ‘n Boots? (Then again, the original features a velvet-vested cat wearing nothing more than the vest, a smile, and some fetching thigh-high leather boots, so perhaps we have nothing to fear.)

  Still, this is the woman who created a coffee table book that was so scorching, it was shrink-wrapped before it hit the stores.

  One wonders what Dr. Seuss would think of Madonna’s literary pursuits if he were still alive.

  Perhaps something like this . . .

  I would not, could not read this book

  Not on a plane or by a brook

  Not in a boat or on a float

  So I ask you, Thing One and Thing Two

  What would you, should you, have me do?

  Read it? No! You ask too much!

  I don’t like bondage, sex, and such

  What? It’s sweet, it’s good kids’ stuff?

  It’s nothing nasty or even rough?

  Okay, then, I shall give it a try

  But keep the smelling salts standing by

  Am I being harsh? Maybe. But would you let Madonna babysit your toddler? (“I spy with my little eye . . . a transvestite nun and a dozen choristers wearing nipple rings!”)