by Jill Kargman
Contents
Cover Page
Title Page
Dedication
The Momzillas Glossary of Terms and Abbreviations
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Chapter Twenty-four
Chapter Twenty-five
Chapter Twenty-six
Chapter Twenty-seven
Chapter Twenty-eight
Chapter Twenty-nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-one
Chapter Thirty-two
Chapter Thirty-three
Chapter Thirty-four
Chapter Thirty-five
Chapter Thirty-six
Chapter Thirty-seven
Chapter Thirty-eight
Chapter Thirty-nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-one
Chapter Forty-two
Chapter Forty-three
Chapter Forty-four
Chapter Forty-five
Chapter Forty-six
Chapter Forty-seven
Chapter Forty-eight
Chapter Forty-nine
Chapter Fifty
Chapter Fifty-one
Chapter Fifty-two
Chapter Fifty-three
Chapter Fifty-four
Chapter Fifty-five
Chapter Fifty-six
Follow-ups
Acknowledgments
Also by Jill Kargman (WITH CARRIE KARASYOV)
Copyright
To Corinne Kopelman,
the anti-Momzilla and best
mother in the world
and
to Sadie and Ivy,
if you love me half as much
as I love your grammy,
then I’ll know
I’ve done a great job
THE MOMZILLAS GLOSSARY OF TERMS AND ABBREVIATIONS
AFFLUENZA: Malaise of the extremely wealthy; symptoms include panic over which color Bugaboo to buy and night sweats about which $20,000 pre-preschool to apply to. Common occurrences of dissatisfaction despite comfort of riches.
BALL-ON-STICK: Super-skinny pregnant woman who works out like crazy and counts calories, resulting in bony body with uterus as only evidence of pregnancy. Often wears stilettos.
BLUE RIBBON BIRTHER: Mom who brags about her natural childbirth and thinks she deserves a prize for forgoing drugs. See EB.
BW: Babysitter Worthy; i.e., I haven’t read the reviews for that movie, I’m not sure if it’s BW (since tickets + ’corn + bevs + sitter fee = $100).
COMPETITIVE BIRTHING: Racing to have more kids faster than everyone else.
EB: Epidural Basher; woman opposed to the use of anesthesia during childbirth. Generally brags about her own long natural labor.
FRESH BAKED BREAD: See Glossary of Extinct Terms.
GOALIE: Birth control; as in We’re ready for baby number two so we’re going to pull the goalie.
HYPOCHONDRIMOM: Mom who constantly thinks her kid is sick and/or that other kids are sick and will infect her kid.
J-RO’s: Jack Rogers sandals, a cornerstone of the Momzillas’ spring/summer uniform (metallic a plus), which also includes white cigarette-leg pants and beaded tunic.
LABORSPIEL: Endless, minute-by-minute playback of mom’s labor; often peppered with unsolicited gory details, as if it were first birth in history.
LM: Liar Mom; i.e., Madison slept through the night starting at two weeks old!
MANNY: Male nanny. Usually attractive and younger than his charges’ mom and dad.
MILF: Mother I’d Love to Fuck.
MNJ: Middle Name Junkie; mother who always calls her child by first and middle name; as in Julia Charlotte loves Mandarin class.
MOMO LOGUE: When a mother goes on and on about her kid as if s/he’s the only child in the world.
MOMSICLE: Chilly, unaffectionate mom who never cuddles her kids; will probably call her son “Son” and will be called “Mother” in return.
MTD: Mom’s Two Dinners; one at sixish with the kids, consisting of mac ’n’ cheese or chicken fingers. Second dinner is with husband later on.
NAME POACHER: Thief of someone’s already chosen baby name; as in We’re naming the baby Mabel but don’t tell anyone ’cause we don’t want some name poacher to steal it.
NANNYJACKER: Mother who can’t deal with screening/hiring a nanny so she hits the playground and tries to snatch someone else’s.
NURSING NAZIS: Brigade of vociferous moms who compete over who breast-feeds longer; often judge/bitch out bottle-feeders.
P’N’P: Preggers and Proud; moms-to-be who bare belly in midriff-exposing shirts and/or often rub bump every two seconds. Often gush about how “alive” they feel.
PUSH PRESENT: Expensive gift from husband to wife for pushing the baby out, usually in the form of jewelry. C-section deliveries rate even though they don’t technically involve pushing.
’REXIMOM: Mother who drops baby weight in two weeks or less.
SANTA MOM-ICA: Breed of L.A.’s west side mothers; see Nursing Nazis.
SANCTIMOMMY: Preachy mom who thinks she knows what’s best for not just her child but also everyone else’s as well.
SATURDADS: Fathers who can be seen desperately trying to entertain tots solo on weekends; often members of the DDC (Divorced Dads Club); usually seen with kids sans mom on days they have custody.
SIP ’N’ SEE: A tea-time party to welcome home a new child from the hospital where guests sip tea and see the newborn. And bring gifts.
SPERMINATOR: Guy with four or more kids.
SUICIDE HOUR: Generally from five P.M. until husband comes home. “Happy Hour” for the rest of the world.
TECHNO TWINS: Trend of in vitro–fertilized Gemini; sometimes slighted by moms who claim to have “real” twins.
TOO POSH TO PUSH: Women who can’t deal with labor and/or the possibility of a stretched-out vagina, who sign up for elective cesarean sections, often ten days early so as to avoid an extra week of pesky weight gain.
YUMMY MUMMY: Sexy, attractive mother; see MILF.
One
I am staring at the crystalline frozen tundra of ice-licked Alaska. Surrounded by an endless snowy desert, a little Eskimo girl pounds her way through the rushing, snowflake-laden wind as cheerful music plays.
“Put on your kami-kluk to stay warm and dry…”
No, I didn’t board a flight to Juneau. I’m watching Sesame Street with my daughter, Violet. It’s one of Grover’s world-friendly segments where global cultures are profiled through the dewy, pure lens of a child’s eyes. We visit a Chinese boy who is a top acrobat and can spin fourteen plates on his face and a little Indonesian girl who can balance six bowls on the top of her head. While dancing.
Today Grover has transported us to the forty-ninth state—and our local lass is suiting up to face the Arctic chill, with the help of her mother, who sews fur pelts together to fashion a tikiyook, or coat, to repel the subzero temps. The child rushes out into the crisp fresh air to meet other children, also clad in PETA’s worst nightmare, and skips off into the fluffy white mounds, laughing sweetly.
It all looks so wholesome, so simp
le, so uncomplicated. No fancy schools to get into, no apartments to compare. It looked pleasant there, out in the bleak but weirdly alluring slate of glistening frost punctuated only by playful tykes toting their homemade lunches to school in swinging buckets.
But then the bilious pit in my stomach reasserted itself, and I couldn’t help but think this awful, impure thought: I bet one of the moms is looking over the other kids’ kami-kluks to see if the stitching is better. Or if the book sack one mom made is as creatively patterned as another. I am certain one family’s igloo is grander, another’s dogsled more impressive.
I was watching this on my television, in my apartment, not set in a downy white backdrop, but rather in the lion’s den of competitive mommies: New York City’s Upper East Side. In California, where my husband, Josh, and I lived before the relocation plunge a month ago, the one orange Bugaboo stroller on our block was so strange and uncommon a sight, people thought aliens had delivered it via flying saucer. In New York, the Rolls-Royce of strollers is as common as yellow cabs—and the streets are just as jammed with them, but instead of reeking of an overpowering air-freshener-and-curry combo, they smelled of Kiehl’s-scrubbed babies.
It’s gotten to the point where I don’t even want to walk up Madison Avenue; while my kid looks like Baby Old Navy exploded, I routinely bump into neighbors with children so perfectly preened in smocked dresses, rickrack-collared linen blouses, shiny Mary Janes with lace socks, and enormous bows in their styled hair. My mother-in-law gives us baby clothes that are marked Dry Clean Only. Unless they’re linen, in which case yours truly gets to crack out the ironing board. I just want to hide. Boy, am I living in a crazy place. Maybe I should call Air Alaska.
It all started when Josh got a call from Parker Elliott, his best friend from Harvard Business School. He knew Josh was sick of his job in San Francisco, dreading working the East Coast hours on the West Coast and getting up well before the ass-crack o’dawn. The bank that employed Parker was willing to make Josh an offer he couldn’t turn down, so suddenly our laid-back California world was history. I was getting my PhD in art history at Berkeley right before Violet was born, but bagged after the Master’s because a) of the impending stork arrival and b) I didn’t know what the hell I wanted to do with a PhD. So when the call came for Josh, I was a perfectly transportable, abundantly educated, stay-at-home mom.
I grew up in rainy Seattle so the storm-whipped weather “back east” never cowed me like most California residents; in fact, even though I’m a born-and-bred West Coaster, I actually always felt more at home with the northeastern vibe—crisp autumns lazing indoors and avoiding the sun due to my ultra-pale, all-too-easily-burnable complexion. When I met Josh and we started dating, he told me straightaway that he wanted to move back to his native New York to raise a family one day. I was game; I just didn’t know that day would come so soon. I’d liked our shimmering, carefree San Francisco bubble, far from his socialite mom, cozy in our solitude between our close group of friends, our favorite haunts, and mellow routines. I always loved Manhattan when I visited every fall, but it was all a glistening October collage of Broadway shows, plush hotel rooms, designer sushi, and kissing in burgundy-leafed Central Park.
The transformation from romantic tourist to entrenched inhabitant was bumpier than I had anticipated. The offer and subsequent arrangements happened so quickly; it seemed that within days I was loading up boxes, boarding a plane, and moving into corporate housing, all before I could even get used to the thought of it.
The night we arrived, Josh ordered a Chinese feast, and after we tucked Violet into her Pack ’n’ Play, we chowed take-out cartonloads of chow fun and General Tso’s chicken by the flickering light of nonaromatherapy candles.
“Hannah?” he said, smiling over his chopsticks.
“Yes, sweets?”
“Thank you.”
He came over and hugged me and I blinked to release a lone tear, which he wiped away softly. Suddenly here we were: away from our friends, my family, my coast—and planted in a new world of the elite, his mom and fancy prep school pals included. My tear flow increased.
“As if I don’t already have enough salt from this meal,” I laughed as he kissed me, wiping my cheeks. “I’m already the fattest girl in this city and the MSG intake ain’t helping.”
“Shut up. You’re beautiful.”
I looked at him gratefully and sighed.
“We’re going to be fine here,” he consoled, stroking my hair. “Better than fine. You will love New York, Han, I swear.”
Joshie has always wanted me to adore his hometown as much as he does, and he’s done everything he can to infuse me with his passion for it—from Woody Allen screenings in our den to museum binges when we visited, to excited samplings of his favorite foods (the perfect bagel, the best hot dog), to showing me the most sublime walks, to pointing out the most diverse, most intellectual, most kaleidoscopic array of eclectic, sometimes freakish citizens. He was a real die-hard, love-the-gray, eat-up-the-noise, relish-the-smell-of-streetcart-food New Yorker. Ever since I’d known him, Josh had gone back home every few months for his fixes, like a junkie filling up on the buzz and heat and lifeblood of the twelve-mile island he thought of as the center of the universe. He was so ecstatic to finally be back, and I was thrilled for him. But gone were the days of him rolling home at four thirty P.M., taking evening walks as a fam, and eating early dinners in our favorite holes in the wall. He had warned me that in this new job he couldn’t cut corners and would be pretty much swamped, handcuffed to the office at least for a while. And I’d be navigating the rough waters on my own. Waters teeming with sharks. Kelly-bag-toting, Chanel-suit-wearing, Bugaboo-pushing sharks.
“Bee is calling you on the cell tomorrow to meet up,” Josh said, trying to lift my spirits. “Parker said she wants to take you to some children’s clothes show or something. She’ll introduce you to all her friends.”
“Okay,” I said, exhaling and nodding. I wanted to be supportive to Josh. He had been so down at his old job and I had hated seeing him miserable. This was a chance at a fresh start for him, and I needed to match his enthusiasm. But just hearing the name Bee made me nervous.
Two
Bee Elliott was pretty much the most drop-dead-gorgissima person I had ever seen up close—like that untouchable girl in high school two grades above you who all your friends stared at in the main hallway. With blond shoulder-length hair (that probably fell into place as she stretched and yawned at sunrise, barf) and a modelesque frame, she maintained her skeletore bod (or “lovely figure” as ol’ school people would say, i.e., a stick with boobs) after giving birth to her son, Weston Burke Elliott. She was basically SuperMom, but not in that horrifying suburban soccer mom kind of way. She didn’t wear pleat-front “Mom Jeans” like in the Saturday Night Live faux commercial featuring asexual, minivan-driving, baked-goods-wielding, newscaster-haircut women.
She was a stunning New York fashion plate. Her photograph appeared in magazines for her philanthropic efforts, which she managed to juggle between being class mom at her son’s nursery school, running around the reservoir twice every morning, going to ladies’ luncheons to benefit causes close to her heart, and showing up looking astonishingly beautiful when she accompanied her husband, Parker, to a dinner party or charity gala.
But don’t get me wrong, she was no Stepford Wife. Some brain-free bimbo without wiles wouldn’t make me nervous. Bee had gone to Princeton, which she let you know quickly enough to think “overcompensation,” and had worked at Lazard Frères up through the delivery of her son before taking the maternity leave that never ended. She nursed for a year, lost the baby weight in six weeks, and was in a bikini the weekend of my California wedding.
At the reception, while it was truly the greatest day of my thirty years next to the birth of little Violet, the one nanosecond of real stress (aside from my mother-in-law remarking that my dress was “so simple”) was when I said hello to Bee. Everyone—I mean everyone, not to brag�
�gushed about how stunning the wedding was, how soulful, how perfect, but Bee said only a terse “congratulations.” I know my reaction was my own issue and that I was probably reading too much into it or even searching for her approval in some odd way, but it was obvious that next to her blowout, high-society wedding, mine was a sandy, ramshackle beachfest with a barefoot bride and a clichéd sunset.
Bee’s epic, peony-dripping, Colin Cowie–planned wedding to Parker Elliott was in New York, where they had both grown up. She’d gone to Chapin, he to Collegiate—both single-sex, old-line academies. They met in third grade at Knickerbocker ballroom dance class. Yes, ballroom dance, complete with white gloves. At age eight. I think at the time I was involved in the slightly less chic endeavor of frying bugs under a magnifying glass on our lawn. But Bee’s life path seemed glamorous from her first steps, probably taken in satin ballet slippers. Her parents, who were old friends of Josh’s mom, had an apartment in Paris, a ski house in Aspen, and an oceanfront estate in Southampton. So it should have been no surprise that her wedding was, next to Lady Di’s, which I watched on TV as a kid, the most spectacular extravaganza I’d ever witnessed.
The four-hundred-guest University Club nuptials were captured on the glossy pages of Town & Country: her fourteen bridesmaids shimmering in crimson Vera Wang, four blond flower girls floating in white tulle skirts with white hydrangea wreaths on their towheads, and two ring bearers in tiny Ralph Lauren suits with little suspenders and bow ties. Joshie was up at the altar as best man, so I was alone in the pews for the ceremony, immediately feeling like a weird “plus one” on the guest list. It’s strange when your guy is in a wedding and you’re not; it’s that “I’m with him” feeling, like you’re not in the bride’s inner circle and you don’t fully belong. I sat next to Josh’s mom, who raved about the “exquisite” and “sumptuous” Oscar de la Renta couture wedding gown, the towering bursts of peonies, and the fourteen-foot Sylvia Weinstock tiered cake. Forget the bride’s inner circle—I kind of felt like I didn’t even belong in the four hundred.
