Wiped!

by Rebecca Eckler

  Again, I can’t help but wonder if it’s postpartum depression that makes me feel like this, or if all mothers feel this way about the news section of papers. Surely some mothers out there read the news pages. Or maybe all mothers just read lifestyle stories. Nice, light, lifestyle stories about dog shows.

  January 13

  11 A.M.

  Being back at work, with not so much to do, also means I get to procrastinate again. I’m thinking about which friend to call when, just that second, my cell phone starts to vibrate. It’s my friend Marci, who moved to take on a new job in a different city than mine.

  “How are you?” I ask excitedly. “How’s the man?” The last time we spoke, she had been boasting about a new guy she’d been seeing for three weeks. It had seemed promising, as most relationships do at the beginning with Marci.

  “He broke up with me!” she says immediately. “I think.”

  “You think?”

  “Yes, I think. He turned out to be such an asshole,” she says miserably.

  “Are you okay? Are you okay?” I ask. “Tell me what happened.”

  She explains the situation. As breakups go, it’s not an original, by a long shot. Basically, this guy, after three months of blissful dating, went AWOL on her. He won’t return her calls. He won’t respond to her e-mails. She has even dropped by his house and heard him rummaging around inside. He didn’t answer the doorbell, though she rang it seventeen times. He has numerous belongings of hers held hostage.

  I try my best to cheer her up, saying the usual things: “You deserve better.” “He’s such a jerk.” “Men are tricky.” “You’ll meet someone when you least expect it.”

  She sighs and says, “I know. I know,” like she’s heard them all a million times before. Which she probably has.

  It’s at times like these, hearing stories like this from my single friends, that I am reminded it’s nice to have a partner and a child. It’s nice not having drama. It’s nice knowing that I’ll never be in the situation where I’ll fall in love with a man who holds my belongings hostage.

  “Are you sure you’re okay? Really? Are you sure?” I ask her. I can’t believe the tone of my voice. God, when did I start talking to grown women in a baby voice? I’m asking her “Are you sure you’re okay?” in the same tone I use for the the baby when she walks into the countertop.

  I remember one of my colleagues, a mother, telling me that when she went to meetings, she found herself asking others, “Are you hungry? Do you want something to eat now?” in the same tone she used with her three-year-old. I guess it happens to the best of us. I almost ask Marci if she would like to put her head in my lap and have me run my fingers though her hair.

  1 P.M.

  I decide to call Lena, my best single and very outrageous friend. Lena and I do talk quite often. She’s definitely the one single friend who has made a point of keeping in regular contact with me. She’s forty years old but looks thirty. She’s just never met the right man so has never really “settled” down in the traditional sense. I feel bad for her sometimes because when she goes out, and meets a potential, she feels the need to tell him her age. She thinks it’s not fair, because she looks so much younger than her actual years, not to let men know how old she is. This is because she wants to make it clear that it may be very difficult for her to have babies, in case they’re looking for a woman to be the mother of their child. This can be very awkward because she also tells them the reason she’s telling them her age—the possibility that she will not be able to conceive. Funnily enough, many men, upon hearing talk of babies, even talk of the possibility of no babies, run for their lives. But some don’t. And Lena has a very active social life, which sometimes makes me jealous, even if the men don’t last.

  Lena is working on a book and has decided to give up on men, at least for the time being. “You know, it’s like having a baby. You think about it all the time, you slave over it, and it takes years to turn into something you love,” she tells me.

  I don’t tell her that at least her book doesn’t require diaper changes. And you can go out and leave a book unattended. And a book can’t pick up a crayon and write all over your walls. I do tell her that I’ve done something very stupid.

  “What? What did you do?”

  “I sent an evil, stupid, very mean e-mail to my boss, telling him that I wasn’t being treated properly and there were laws that protect me after coming back from maternity leave. I’m so stupid.”

  “No, you’re not.”

  “Oh, yes. Yes I am. I’ll probably be fired.”

  “What exactly did you write?” Lena asks.

  “I don’t even know. I swear, after I sent it I deleted it in my sent file so I couldn’t reread it. I regretted it the minute I sent it. All I know is that I went on a rampage about how some of my editors weren’t treating me the same. I couldn’t stop myself!”

  “Well, if that’s how you feel.”

  “It’s not that simple. I’m not quite sure they are treating me differently. It’s just this feeling I get.”

  “Well, you’re usually right with your feelings. That’s what’s so great about you. If you don’t like how someone’s treating you, you let them know.”

  “Yeah, I guess. I just know nothing is going to come of it. It’s a losing battle.”

  “Well, you never know.”

  “Oh, I know.”

  Stupid e-mail. I contemplate sending another one to the editor explaining that I have been diagnosed with postpartum depression and I’d like to take my previous e-mail back. But I don’t. Like I said, I don’t want pity. I just want to be treated like I was before I gave birth. I look at my screen saver, a beautiful photograph of the Dictator, and feel a little better about life. Fuck my editors. I have a beautiful baby.

  3:30 P.M.

  Guess what? My beautiful baby is…just below average! A round of drinks for everyone, on me! Did you hear the news? My child is just below average!

  “Our child is not a genius, not advanced, not even average! She’s slightly below average,” I say to the Fiancé, who is at work.

  “What are you talking about?” he asks. He sounds flustered, like he has a lot of papers on his desk and a lot of work to do. I hate him for having a lot of work to do. Well, I’m a little envious of him, because what I had just done was pretty ridiculous. Even more ridiculous than sending that rant of an e-mail to my boss.

  “I did one of those baby-IQ tests,” I tell him, which is what one does when one most certainly does not have a lot of work to do. It’s so funny to think that when you have a lot of work to do, you hate it. But when you don’t have any work to do, you also hate it.

  “Why did you go and do that?” he asks.

  “I don’t know. I was bored. I found it on the Internet. They ask questions like ‘Can your child point to objects you point out?’ and ‘Can your child build a tower with blocks?’” I explain. “And then you add up the results and it will tell you if your baby is a genius, or, in our case, just below average.”

  “You can’t trust a baby-IQ test on the Internet,” he says.

  “Why can’t you?”

  “Because she’s too young to be tested for IQ. Shouldn’t you be working?”

  “Thanks for reminding me,” I say. “I should be working. I’m getting paid to be working. But my work, apparently, doesn’t need me anymore. I don’t have anything to do,” I moan. “Which is why I am doing IQ tests for the baby!”

  “Beck, did you pitch stories?”

  “Yes, I did. I guess I’ll just wait until I hear back from them. But waiting for them is depressing me. It really feels like they are treating me differently,” I tell him for the millionth time.

  “We can talk more about that later at home. Why don’t you enjoy yourself, then? Go get a massage or something.”

  “Maybe,” I say.

  “Good. I’ll speak to you later. I have a ton to do. And stop playing with the Internet!”

  “Yippee for you,” I th
ink. “It’s so much easier being a man,” I also think. He didn’t seem worried at all about our child being below average. I don’t really care either. In fact, we have often talked about what kind of child we want. We both agree that we want a sweet, nice, happy child above everything else. We also want her to be smart, but not necessarily a genius. We want her to be good-looking but not too good-looking. I once said to the Fiancé, “I kind of hope she turns out to be the geeky book type. That way, I won’t have to worry about her staying out all night and missing her curfew and having sex.”

  “Well, geeky book types do have sex,” he responded. Right. Of course they do.

  January 13

  7 P.M.

  The Fiancé is royally pissed off. You’d think it was his car that had a tire slashed, not the baby’s stroller. Somehow, one of the tires on our Bugaboo Frog—the Porsche of all strollers—has been puntured. For the past few days we’ve been using a crappy twenty-eight-dollar stroller.

  Nanny Mimi told me about the tire more than a week ago. But because the Fiancé and I are not good at that whole “getting right on it” thing, Nanny Mimi had to remind me about it again a couple of days ago, and then again two days ago, and again yesterday. It was definitely time to take action. There is nothing worse than being reminded, over and over, that you haven’t done something that really does need to be looked after. Nanny Mimi, for the past week, has been unable to take the baby for long walks, thanks to the flat stroller tire. (You get a backache using the twenty-eight-dollar stroller, because the handles are so low down, you have to bend to push.) “What happened?” I remember asking Nanny Mimi last week, when she first told me about the tire. I remember thinking, “Do I have enemies who would really slash the tire of my baby’s stroller? Does the Fiancé? Does Nanny Mimi? Does the Dictator have enemies?”

  “I think I pushed it over a broken beer bottle,” she said, just as I was imagining an envious knife-wielding mother running around the park looking to slash stroller tires.

  Anyway, the Fiancé spent two hours yesterday, leaving early from work, trying to find a replacement wheel for the Bugaboo Frog. This is harder than you’d expect. I, too, had called a number of stores, with no happy results. Having a slashed Bugaboo Frog tire is almost like having a Porsche and the dealership saying, “We can fix your engine, but because you have a Porsche, we’ll have to order the parts from overseas and it will be ready in three weeks.”

  Of course, it’s not like there’s a rental-stroller place. If Nanny Mimi wants to take the baby anywhere that requires a long walk, we need to either find a new wheel or get a new stroller.

  The Bugaboo Frog didn’t come cheap, so we really didn’t want to buy a new stroller. The Fiancé ended up taking it to a bicycle store and an employee somehow patched up the tire. The Fiancé feels he wasted enough time finding someone who could fix a stroller tire, so he was happy when I called him this morning at work to tell him the patched tire was working out great.

  He is far from happy when I call him again, a couple of hours later, to tell him that it’s no longer working and that we have another flat. (Seriously, flat stroller tires? What is happening to our lives?) The Fiancé, like I’ve said, is not good at fixing things and gets even more annoyed when something is fixed but doesn’t stay fixed.

  “We’ll get a new stroller,” he finally says. “That’s it. I don’t want to hear anything about the fucking broken stroller anymore.”

  We go shopping after work. Nanny Mimi stays late with the baby. We end up shelling out another $850 for another Bugaboo Frog. It is Nanny Mimi, in fact, who, when we said we were going to get a new stroller, insisted we get a Bugaboo Frog. While it may be a status symbol these days for new parents to have the “in” stroller, it is just as much a status symbol for the nannies who push the strollers around. No joke. Though he would never tell her so the Fiancé is pissed at Nanny Mimi for being so adamant that we buy another Bugaboo Frog. I’m not thrilled about it either, but I want to keep Nanny Mimi happy, because she is a really good nanny, and she’s the one pushing the stroller every day. I don’t want Nanny Mimi to get mad at us for any reason, because the Fiancé and I would be royally fucked if she decided to quit on us.

  “Well, it’s because Rowan takes her nap in the stroller, so we need a good one,” I tell the Fiancé, sticking up for Nanny Mimi.

  “And that’s wrong too,” the Fiancé argues. “She should be napping in her crib, so she’ll get used to it. She shouldn’t be getting used to napping in her stroller!”

  “Well, can you mention it to Nanny Mimi? She doesn’t listen to me,” I tell him. I very rarely, if ever, tell Nanny Mimi to do anything.

  I agree with the Fiancé that the baby should nap only in her crib. Nanny Mimi doesn’t mind walking and pushing the baby around for two or three hours every afternoon while she sleeps, but the Fiancé and I do. It’s been a pain in the ass for us recently on weekends, because the baby screams when we try to get her to fall asleep—I mean, put her in her crib—in the afternoon. This is because she’s so used to Nanny Mimi letting her nap in the stroller. We want the baby to get used to napping in her crib so we can watch television when she sleeps.

  “Why do I have to say something?” he asks. “Why can’t you?”

  “I have! Trust me on this. She listens to you way more than she listens to me. She still gets nervous around you, and she’s been with us for more than a year!” I’ve noticed that the odd time the Fiancé is still home when Nanny Mimi arrives at 8 A.M., she’s always super-friendly to him and overly eager to please, rushing around, scrubbing the counters or folding laundry. I guess she knows who writes her check, or she thinks she knows. I mean, it could just as easily be me who pays her. I work. I make money. (It’s not me who pays her…but it could be.) Maybe Nanny Mimi is really just old-fashioned this way, and thinks the man wears the pants in the house. (If only she knew. I also think she should know better by now who wears the pants in the house. I mean, she has been with us for a year.)

  He agrees he’ll mention it to Nanny Mimi again.

  I pick out the red Bugaboo Frog this time (instead of the black one we bought last time) as the Fiancé grumbles, “This is the last time we’re getting a stroller! If this one breaks, too bad.”

  I rub his lower back as he throws down his platinum card. I know, because I am a woman, that this will calm him down. Sometimes you have to baby your husband so he won’t have a temper tantrum. It works on one-year-olds, and it works on thirty-something-year-old men.

  January 14

  6 P.M.

  “What is she wearing?” the Fiancé asks, appalled, when he walks into the house and sees the baby and me in the kitchen. I asked Nanny Mimi the same question, in the same what-the-fuck tone, two hours earlier, when I arrived home.

  The baby is wearing a jean skirt, with rhinestones, a matching button-down jean shirt, also with rhinestones, and a red velour turtleneck underneath. Maybe this sounds cute. But it’s not. Unless you are Christina Aguilera, five years ago. In fact, this outrageous outfit is actually quite offensive to the eye. She looks like a badly decorated Christmas tree.

  “This is one of the outfits your mother bought,” I say to him. “From their trip to Palm Springs.”

  “Oh,” he says.

  “Yeah. I know.”

  You can tell whose clothes the Dictator is wearing quite easily. If she’s dressed like Britney Spears, circa 2002, that means the in-laws have bought the outfit. They gravitate to clothes that the baby would wear if she were in a child beauty pageant or a formal event. If she’s dressed in a knitted sweater, my mother has made it. If she’s wearing jeans or sweats, I’ve bought them. Most of the time, Nanny Mimi dresses the Dictator in the comfortable clothes I buy for her. But sometimes she has fun with the baby, or thinks she should dress her up for special occasions (“special occasions” is a very loose term because, for the baby, a “special occasion” can be art class at the Y). Sometimes Nanny Mimi dresses her in clothes that even someone visually
impaired could tell don’t match at all. It’s sort of funny, in a very tragic way.

  You realize when you have a child that what you think is appropriate and cute for a baby to wear is different from other people’s version of cute or appropriate for a baby.

  “Maybe you should start to lay out what she should wear?” the Fiancé suggested the other day when he arrived home to find the Dictator dressed in pink pants, an orange top, a blue vest, green socks, and brown boots. She looked like a clown.

  I had actually laughed out loud when I came home and saw her that day. “What is she wearing?” I had asked, not even caring if I was hurting Nanny Mimi’s feelings. My child looked ridiculous. And, being her mother and all, I’m supposed to think she looks beautiful in everything. But, no, she looked like a clown.

  “Oh, she just has so many clothes, and I wanted her to wear them, at least once, before she grew out of them,” Nanny Mimi had said, explaining why my child was dressed like a psychedelic light show. Apparently, wearing all her clothes at least once could mean wearing them all at the same time, even if they don’t match.

  I call Tammy and ask if she ever tells her nanny what she’d like Zack to wear, or if she lets the nanny pick out his clothes.

  “Usually I just let her do it. But sometimes I’ll say, ‘Dress him cute.’ And her version of cute and mine are usually very different. Once, I suggested to my nanny that he wear these cute green pants. I came home and he was wearing the green pants. And he was also wearing green socks, and a green shirt and a green jacket. He looked like the Green Giant!”

  “Hey,” I say, “you should come over and check out how my child is dressed today! You’d think Mimi was on drugs when she dressed her.”

  If we weren’t laughing so hard, we’d probably cry.

  Ten Mommy Moments People “Forget” to Mention

  1. No matter how cute and small your baby is, the smells it can make are unimaginable.

  2. Children’s performers, like Barney, become celebrities.