Driving to Montana

This is an excerpt from It Sucked and Then I Cried: How I Had a Baby, a Breakdown, and a Much Needed Margarita, by Heather Armstrong (of Dooce.com).

It perfectly summarizes my life and thought process these days. I could never articulate this as wonderfully as she has here. Just insert CRAIG where it says Jon, ELLIE where it says Leta and this would be my life to a T. I hope you other mommies can relate. If not, I can not be friends with you. If you aren't a mommy (or daddy) yet, read this over and over and over until you go cross eyed. Even then, call me after you become a parent and let me know if you agree.

The baby's birth, however, seemed to have tripped a latent portion of my DNA that caused at least half of my brain to be consumed at all times with the thought of chores that needed to be done. In the time it took Jon to change Leta's morning diaper I could have the dishwasher unloaded, bagels toasted, coffee brewed, bed made, and dog pooped, and that was only if the diaper hadn't leaked. On the frequent occasion that she was covered in pee and Jon had to take a few extra minutes to change her clothes, I could wallpaper the living room and mow the lawn.

When I was a kid I hated this about my mother, her constant need to get something done around the house. If she was talking to a friend on the phone she was also dusting the living room or hauling dirty clothes to the washing machine. On Saturday mornings she was up at the crack of dawn vacuuming her bedroom or scrubbing the tiles in the shower, and I remember thinking, doesn't she know the Smurfs are on? How could she mop the kitchen floor when Gargamel was chasing Smurfette with a stick?

Once I became a mother I realized that free time was one of the many luxuries people give up when they decide to procreate. I kind of understood this going into parenthood, but it's not something you can TRULY appreciate, like everything else about parenthood, until it drops on your head like a piano shoved out of a window eighty stories high.

Free time was the four minutes it took Jon to change Leta's diaper; it was the one minute I had to use the bathroom after I set her down in the crib; it was the thirty seconds she would remain calm in the car seat after we returned from the grocery store. On the infrequent occasion that she remained napping for longer than twenty minutes I felt like a teenage boy who had just locked himself in the bathroom with a stack of porn magazines, like OH MY GOD, THE POSSIBILITIES. WHERE DO I EVEN BEGIN?

Before Leta was born, I used to hate to run errands, and I would put off going to the grocery store until the milk was so expired that it had grown arms, legs and a full functioning liver. But all that changed, and I wanted to go to the grocery store every day if only to see other human beings who spoke in sentences and could wipe their own asses. It reassured me that there was living, breathing life outside of the twilight zone existence of taking care of a creature whose primary means of communication was through her bowels.

One night Jon let me go to the grocery store alone, something a new father should be very wary of letting a new mother do, because once I was behind that steering wheel I became drunk with the freedom. I honestly thought that the car might sprout wings and take off in the air, and I was flooded with grand ideas about escaping to Montana where i could assume a new identity and drink martinis and sleep in until 8 AM. It would have been so easy to have kept driving, forever. Maybe no one would notice I was gone!

But five minutes into shopping at the grocery store I started to miss that little screaming baby at home. WHY WAS I MISSING HER? That was MY time. Why was I thinking about her little cold feet and her fuzzy hair and the yummy creases in her baby thighs? WHY WHY WHY? So I didn't gas up and drive to Montana, but instead came back home and immediately went into the house to smell the back of her neck. And while she was still under Jon's watchful eye I landscaped the backyard and remodeled the basement.