Moms Don't Think

We used to tease my mother-in-law for her preferred mode of weekend entertainment. It consisted mostly of watching movies with little to no dialogue, but brimming over with blood, gore and broken limbs. She explained that she did not care to think in her moments of repose, which would have been the case if she were to watch fiction of the verbose sort.

While, in the interest of maintaining my digestive peace, I still question her choice of genre, I no longer wonder at her reason. I understand her now. After a week of slaving over soul-crushing cubicle work that is the demand of necessity rather than interest, and dealing, in a personal and professional capacity, with the mind-boggling angst and nonsense of a constant stream of bipeds in arrested emotional maturity, it is too much to require additional strenuous mental exercise on a rest day.

I understand her even better because I find myself in the same situation, stretched so thin by the demands of full time employment and parenthood that I refuse to use my brain a second over Friday's sunset, by which time I demand my inalienable right to nonsensical rest and recreation.

In my case, I find my comfort in my trove of books, but while my younger tastes leaned towards the likes of Poe, Kafka, Fitzgerald and Dostoevsky, I now find myself in need of much, much lighter fare, so utterly bereft of depth that I am ashamed to admit the crime of reading them, and am therefore constrained to hide the evidence in the bowels of a nondescript eBook reader.

But even then, the lack of spare brain cells to process even my dumbed down diversions requires me to reread sentences thrice before I comprehend their import, an affliction first manifested by my own mother, who, paradoxically, has a degree in English Literature. This has led me to the conclusion that mothers aren't, by nature, slow or uncomprehending. We're just tired!

(Thanks Rocky for sharing this. >:D)

Now the question is, shall this be the permanent prevailing state of affairs? To that I say, I refuse defeat. After two months with my eBook reader, I have been forcing my grey matter to gradually migrate, cell by cell, back to its usual haunts: Tolkien, Dickens, Eliot, Chekhov, Hemingway... God help me.

The Half of It

It happened one bright afternoon when vendors were setting up their stalls for the weekend flea market. She had expelled copious amounts of undigested matter, soft projectiles so formidable, they sent one stall owner and her kin running for the hills, leaving me with the unenviable task of demonstrating my inadequate cleaning skills in front of oddly delighted spectators.

It happened again in a posh upscale mall. This time it was the youngest who had deigned to enhance the tiles of beige and cream with his ecru-hued dinner. At least his color combination was impeccable. By this time, my cleaning prowess had elevated to ninja level; I had to wipe the mall restroom too when his digestive tract decided it had more to share to the world.

Halfway there

My mother assured me I hadn’t seen the half of it. I wondered what worse things I’d done as a child to make her say that. I have no recollection of having made her acquainted with the byproducts of failed digestion. But then, our adventures together may have been of a more extreme nature.

There was that time I slept at the car’s back seat and downed a lungful of carbon monoxide. Senseless and, according to her, looking possessed and grinning like the devil, I very nearly crossed over.

Then there was that unique swimming episode when I plunged into the mouth of a dead volcano that had been converted into a water reservoir, with my salvation in the hands of a man, who himself, did not know how to swim. I swear my mother’s agitated gesticulations during and after my Olympic worthy dive could have won her the championship at a hip hop dance contest. 

Multiply all my other escapades by six (my siblings) and you’ll arrive at the conclusion: No wonder my mom is one crazy tamale.

I strongly suspect though that I am fast approaching the point of “seeing the half of it” or at least reaching my mother’s level of insanity. I have, after all, carried an unconscious 25 lb asthmatic boy for three hours because the ER had no beds left, and I have held vigil and cleaned after a bloody food poisoned little girl. And yet, that really is just part of the half of it, because they’ll grow up and there’ll be more frightening things to look out for, like prom dates and abominable teen fashion.

This isn’t intended to scare. If anything, this is really an exhortation to be kind and forgiving of the people who’ve raised you. Ruling out some detestable exceptions, many parents do the best they can with their limited skills and understanding and despite their frustrated dreams. The best of us expect no other reward than the memories of little arms lovingly wrapped around our abdominal spare tires and soft grateful kisses on our raisin faces permanently wrinkled with worry.

Cheers to all parents past and present who have seen and survived the halfway mark.

Finally Found the One

My parents are pretty cool, if only because, growing up, they could hardly care less if I brought home an academic medal or guavas. So while other kids had to endure advanced classes in some seemingly esoteric subject; maintain grades achievable only by those close to insanity; learn 99 ways to pain through ballet and karate; and master a foreign language, I was in the backyard making mud pies and getting acquainted with primitive organisms in pools of rainwater. In short, I enjoyed being a kid. It wasn’t until college that I was advised to do my best.

Twenty years from now, nobody will care how many ribbons you got in pre school

Of course I know the importance of training kids to aim for academic excellence. It develops confidence and instills discipline. I do believe in encouraging kids to do better in school, but only if kids really want to and not just because their parents desire it with a violence bordering on criminal, in which case, the parents, not their kids, should be standing on the school stage with medals round their necks.

Most importantly, I think the pursuit of good grades should not be made at the expense of values formation. When kids are made to feel that they must achieve something by hook or by crook, there’s a 50% chance they’ll turn into crooks. If they aren’t taught to achieve goals legitimately and honorably, they will be swine in the making, heirs to Janet Napoles and Mark Solis.

My friends joke that I secretly like to collect school uniforms because I’ve moved my child to three different schools already. Her two previous schools focused more on developing the mental abilities of students to the point of developing telepathy than on stressing the importance of honest, hard work.

I think I’ve finally found the one though. A small indication of this is the Models of Honesty list, of which my kid is a part of, on the school bulletin board where normally, other schools display top ten lists. Side story: Yes, my daughter is in that list because she is super honest. She never fails to tell me in public how fat I am and how much I need to exercise.

To be clear, I’m not saying I’m leaving values training to the school. I’m saying I want my kid to be in a school where its values are aligned with mine so that training is consistent even when I’m not looking.

I just hope we can afford this school long term. Apparently, charity is not one of their values.

Top Five Mom Upgrades I Wish I Had

I’ve lost my nanny.

To full time working moms with kids this translates to the end of time --- as in never having enough time for almost everything. Brushing one's teeth and bathing must now be considered luxuries.

This explains why I’ve missed giving my opinion about various developments:

• Vice Ganda stuffing his hoof in his mouth with his r*pe joke
• Charice transforming from a butterfly into a happy caterpillar
• Pol Medina Jr.’s unceremonious exit from the Inquirer and his near fatal allergic reaction to nuns
• Congressman Benjo Benaldo’s gunshot wound on the chest and that new song playing in the airwaves, Straight Through the Lung

It’s all well and good that I didn’t have the time to write about these incidents. Only Medina would have welcomed being made fun of. If I joked about the other three incidents, I would probably get tomatoes and eggs thrown at me on Facebook. Not a bad way to make omelet really, if I didn’t have to wipe the ingredients off my face first.

So what should the rest of this post be all about now? How about top five mom upgrades I wish I had so I can have more time and energy to write sarcastic humor even without a nanny.

#5. An External Brain – Just like an external hard drive. So I can have enough mental room to swirl ideas for hundreds of web articles while never forgetting immunization schedules, PTA meetings, kids’ school projects (that only parents can really make) and my kids’ names of course.

#4. An Extra Eye – I need one that can extend and retract so I can send it downstairs while I work on my articles upstairs. It should have a nicely arched frowning eyebrow so the kids know it’s time to stop fighting over who gets the last cookie.

#3. Four Arms – I know a mom who can juggle babies and bales of fish while hanging on for dear life inside possessed jeepneys. My arms though, just aren’t as strong. I need an extra two so the two I have now don’t have to go into the intensive care unit.

#2. Lithium Batteries – I need these because all this stress has made me perpetually sleepy. I’m always so sleepy I can sleep anywhere --- in jeepneys, restaurants, movie houses, heck, I bet I can even fall asleep in a roller coaster. My husband says if he could paint me black and orange using Photoshop I’d look exactly like Garfield --- fat and always sleepy.

#1. Patience on IV Drip – Is this all really going to last 20 more years? If only I can order extra patience as easily as I can order extra rice.

If you're a busy mom or dad too, what parent upgrades do you wish you had?

UN Day Celebration and Ruffled Feathers

RIP peacock. May you rest in peace. (photo source)

Do peacocks die if all their tail feathers get pulled out? I guess not, but I can imagine them dying of shame. I only ask because last month, during the UN Day celebration, I saw a child strut on stage wearing a peacock costume so big it could blot out the sun.

I don't make fun of other countries' national costumes, even those so poorly reconstructed they deserve to be petitioned, but I feel I need to throw darts at this one and it's not just because some departed peacock's spirit is now weeping over his bare bum.

Because national costumes cost so much, I'd have to sell an arm, a leg and all my internal organs to get a new one made. My daughter was Ms. Panama two years ago so I told her she'd be Ms. Panama this year and every year thereafter until the costume no longer fits.

To my dismay, one parent, who'd been pushing her daughter to compete against mine since last year, made her daughter wear the dearly departed peacock's feathers and a Panama sash too even if the kid was supposed to be Ms. Costa Rica. Her costume was so big and shiny that not even Ms. Zimbabwe who skinned a chicken for her headdress could hold a candle to her. Of course the judges couldn't tell the difference between a national costume and a national disaster so she won the contest.

My daughter is no spoil sport and would have been happy for her classmate if she didn't feel like her country was stolen from her. The offending parent's story is that she made a mistake and thought it was Costa Rica's costume she had made.

I didn't know that if you searched for Costa Rica on Google they'd serve you results for Panama. If that were indeed the case, someone should tell Google they missed Costa Rica by a few kilometers.

Come on, I work online for a living. I use Google everyday and although it's possible for irrelevant results to show for a search term, there is no way anyone can confuse one country with another unless the searcher has a reading disorder that'd make her read Panama as Costa Rica.

My kid soldiered through the event as if nothing had happened but on the ride home, she put her head on my lap. When she sat back up again, her cheek was wet. Unless my thighs were sweating through my jeans, I'd bet a million feathers those were tears.

I was crushed and for the first time in years, Google couldn't tell me what to do next. My pal Irene says I should make sashes for every country plus Ms. Lost Atlantis and Ms. Bemuda Triangle sashes and sashes for every known planet, give it to the other girl and declare her the queen of the universe in perpetuity. I suppose though that the insult would be lost on the mother who, if she says she doesn't even have the sense to use Google properly, probably won't be able to understand the sarcastic gesture.

I settled instead for a chat with my daughter over chocolate ice cream, explaining to her why winning isn't worth it if you have to step on others.

If Only Kids Were Self-Developed

Can human kids self-develop too?

After reading Arnel Pineda’s story, I concluded that nearly everyone has abilities they can use to become successful. Even young stars who sing in the key of O (as in Off) have the uncanny ability to send teens into fits of delirium with the judicious introduction of dimples in a chorus. But just when I decided to take a shot at fame and fortune, life throws a wrench into my plans.

My bid for success will have to wait because my two kids and their nanny got food poisoned. Faster than we could sing, “I ate that moldy piece of beef and I liked it,” their bodies attempt to flush out the toxins and then it’s me with a cleaning cloth versus an endless gush of bodily solids, liquids and gases.

I hadn't seen so many Xs since high school algebra.

It didn’t take long before we had to rush one kid to the hospital for rectal bleeding and severe dehydration. We were required to force both kids to consume so much medication that I hadn’t seen so many Xs (from the Rx) since high school algebra. Since then, my eye bags have begun to grow in layers as if the first layers gave birth to second layers and had grand kids, the third layers.

I now know that being a parent is THE full time job. Everything else from pursuing a career to brushing my teeth must be done on my free time. Even when the kids aren’t sick, it takes so much time, effort, patience and resources to take care of them and raise them right.

In my case, it's tempting to be a bad parent and resort to shortcut parenting. By that I mean:

*When my daughter asks for help with math problems involving numbers above ten
Response: Go ask your father.

*When my kid asks where babies come from
Response: The FedEx guy just leaves them in doorsteps.

*When my toddler is still having difficulty forming words
Solution: Turn on the TV and let him watch Justice League for hours until he can say Batman flawlessly.

*When the kids fight downstairs while I'm working upstairs
Solution: I scream to the top of my lungs, "What's going on?" Followed by, "Whatever that is, NO!"

*When kids get frightened by a gigantic prehistoric looking cockroach
Solution: Run to the hills and hope someone else kills it.

I suppose this was what our moms were trying to warn us about when they told us, “Don’t get married and have kids before you’re physically, mentally, emotionally and financially ready.”

But you know how messages get delivered between moms and their grownup children. Somewhere in the space between our mothers’ mouths and our ears, the warning not to have kids unprepared got translated to, “I’ll nag you every single day about this.” So we left and had kids of our own.

Kids aren't born self-developed like Prony from Bohol. All they come packaged with are extra doses of cuteness, but that kinda helps. Every time things get difficult I see how adorable and cute they are and somehow I lose the heart to go ballistic or use shortcut parenting.

When Time Stops

It's unavoidable. Working moms can try to balance work, family and self to maintain some semblance of sanity but there is no defying the natural limits of time so ultimately priorities have to be made. In the mad daily rush that defines a family woman's life, family comes first followed by work and then self.

That explains why I often get to comb my hair only once a day and not even properly such that only half of all my strands are in their proper place. The rapidly expanding natural life saver around my torso has also been left so seriously unattended that I'm certain I'll soon develop enough fat to naturally protect me from the cold. The previously allotted schedules for 100 brush strokes and stomach crunches are now dedicated to my hyper active screaming banshees and to extra gigs to make more money that's just never enough.

That's just how it is and I don't resent it. Besides, there are those moments when circumstances force you to stop. The other night, we had to rush my daughter to the hospital and after all the panic had subsided and she'd been given medication, we were told she still had to be admitted.

In a room with no instant internet connection and no way to chat with clients, time stopped. I didn't complain. Nobody likes to be in a hospital but staying put with my favorite girl in the world watching Bizaare Foods on cable was the best treat I'd had in weeks.

Tween Romance With Pimples On The Side

My six-year old kid has developed a liking for a tween-oriented Sunday show. When I’m not snoring away to recuperate from my endless quest for financial survival (if that quest were equivalent to physical exercise, I’d have washboard abs), I get to watch snippets of the show with her.

It’s a lot like watching a visual scientific exposition of the life, death and multiplication of acne. Every forehead and cheek shot is an insight into the oily bane of adolescents. Other than that, I didn’t think the show had any more biology lessons to teach my daughter.

Yesterday, she asked me if the cute pockets of acne in her favorite show were boyfriends and girlfriends. I missed a beat.

It’s not just the show that taught her the concept of romantic relationships. In our neighborhood, adults already have “pairs” in mind for their kids. In fact, my 2nd child, who still has more gum than teeth, already has his pair. In school, the more astute little kids, just a year out of their diapers and now missing front teeth, already steal kisses.

They start so early.

I never like lying to my girl. When she asks sensitive questions, I like to stick as close to the truth as possible. Of course, I still really wish she’d just ask me about the life cycle of Propionibacterium acnes.

Mall Rats and Mall Horses

Malls are marvelous inventions of modern society. They’re like the Swiss Army knives of life. You can do almost anything in a mall--- shop, eat, work, take a nap while sitting through two hours of Richard Guttierez’s stoned/stony/stone age movie acting. Despite initial objections, Catholics can now also pray in malls in the midst of worldly allures.

One of the more recent additions to mall services are play areas. Now you can drop your kids like bags in a baggage counter and claim them with a numbered card after an hour of shopping. I do that all the time. After all, I only have two arms and two lungs, not enough to lift 30 kilos worth of kids through endless aisles of merchandise.

The all in one play areas are the best options to deposit little people with short attention spans because these places have varieties of diversions to choose from. Specialty play pens with shorter play minutes have been offering good competition though. These are perfect pit stops for parents who just need to make a trip to the loo.

One of the more popular specialty play areas here offers stuffed horseback rides. This one I find a little disturbing. Just like I’ve never really warmed up to masses in malls, there’s just something odd about fake animals in malls.

I’m not over analyzing this. It just feels weird. I was lucky enough to have ridden a real horse as a child. I’m not sure if my kids will ever be able to ride more than stuffed animals. That’s sad.

Remember Your First Real Dance?

That poor chap outside of your family circle in his father’s extra large suit, who had the misfortune of being picked for the first rose in your 18th birthday, was not your first dance. Go back many years more and you might be able to dig up suppressed memories of that fateful day when you were led to believe you looked cute in crepe paper, a banana headdress and a polka dot dress. Our minds are wonderful auto organizers so if you’re having a hard time recalling, you’ll find your memories filed in a folder labeled “Embarrassing School Foundation Days”.

My daughter just had her first dance. We were never told there’d be one. The kids were measured for costumes without parents’ consent and the next communication simply gave us the bill. I had the courtesy to ask my daughter what she really wanted to do with her life and she said she wanted to dance instead of getting a PhD in nuclear physics.

I figured she wasn’t being exploited or abused so I let her do the twist with her friends. They danced happily, oblivious to the world around them and even to their flailing, out of step partners. Despite the complete lack of synchronized movement and understanding for what they were doing, the kids managed to draw oohs, ahhs and wows from their captivated blood relations.

The older pupils who were required to dance upwards of the 60s didn’t fail to please their parents as well but the kids themselves looked like they were in mourning. These are the kids trapped between the internal tug of war between childhood and adolescence and who are incapable of busting a convincing groove if a song doesn’t contain “Baby, baby” every ten seconds.

One group dutifully pointed up and down to the tune of the 70s under the watchful eyes of teachers who probably included “grades” in every sentence to the pre dance pep briefing. That group forever redefined the Bee Gees’ “Stayin’ Alive”. Except for those who enjoyed the shiny costumes and the fake sideburns, the rest had the pained, unhappy expressions of kids under raw vegetable diets. I’m sure it got worse for some of them. Young parents under the spell of his royal geekiness Mark Zuckerberg will not fail to populate the web with photos that will forever defy “delete” or “forget”.

Seriously, why do we do this to our children?

Motherhood Smile On Me

I read somewhere that women in Canada are given a year’s maternity leave, three months of which are paid. After a year, they can expect to have a job waiting for them. Wow!

It isn’t so bad here. Mothers get roughly two months off for normal deliveries or a little more than that after C-sections. The female body doesn’t take long to get up and running after childbirth. What’s really difficult is the separation. I remember crying when I had to leave my first baby to get back to work at which point my father-in-law took me to task and reminded me that I had to pull myself together and work for milk, diapers and seventeen years of tuition fees.

Two years after I gave birth to my eldest child, I decided to go freelance, a term I prefer to use for picking odd tasks in a constant state of panic to make ends meet. So by the time I gave birth to my second child, the situation was a bit different. I had another C-section but I couldn’t take time off from my laptop. I was hooked back to my virtual dextrose only after a few days in the hospital. I swear I could feel my intestines jiggling to the tune of Jingle Bells as I typed away.

Within a few days, my stitches popped and I nearly fainted. The doctor assured me that an ingrown nail with a sprinkling of nail fungi on the side was a far worse condition than my dislodged stitches but I just couldn’t help myself. One part of my wound was pouting like a pale lip. At night I dreamt of my gut and the possibility of finally getting intimately acquainted with them through Emperor Palpatine’s cavity infested grin on my belly.

But I survived and that belly grin is settling into a smiley smudge, a reminder that I have a lot to be thankful for even if I don’t live in Canada. I’m a live mother to two live, happy, healthy babies who still love me even if they can talk to me sensibly only on weekends after I’ve come off of my internet dependence.

My Mother is Not a Pig

The realization of the year just hit me. Our parents are not as neurotic, psychotic, paranoid or unreasonable as we think. They'd been telling the truth all along but we'll never really get it until we're about their age. By that time, we'll look back and realize we acted like medieval thinkers hell-bent on burning our parents at the stake.

Now I look with horror at my own future burning. She is only four and already she scowls at what she perceives to be my dictatorial reign.

If my mom were half the antagonist I'd imagined her to be, I suppose she'd be cackling right now. In between her sounds of mirth she'd probably say, "I told you so."

Day Sickness

I hear about them all the time. Those women who say they feel absolutely wonderful when they're pregnant. I wish for at least one day that I could relate to what these women feel because pregnancy for me is 8 months of grueling distress, like 8 months of daily colonoscopy, 8 months of being suspended on a hand glider or 8 months of being suspended by Google.

I shouldn't be complaining. After all, I wanted baby #2. My agonized whining would also be a slap on the faces of many of my acquaintances who would readily give me a million neck rubs so they could suffer in my stead and have babies. But I can't help it. Why me? It's like getting picked in a lottery you don't want to win.

It all begins when I wake up in the morning and an invisible pump suddenly starts forcibly drawing out the contents of the deep well that is my gut. I throw up nothing but for a moment, it feels like my entrails would like to go ahead and take the place of that nothing. I eat so I can have something to throw up. If my previous pregnancy is any indication, I'd probably be in this state for the entire duration it takes my little one to form ten toes, ten fingers and the gray matter that fourteen years from now will acquire the potential to challenge a mother's reasoning and break her heart.

But my frequent voiding from the opposite hole is not my only problem. My last pregnancy introduced me to the discomforts of regular infections. I am beginning to show clear signs of my first one today. They say it's all because of my rising sugar levels. That's why I have to limit my food intake. How in hell am I supposed to limit my intake more when I vomit everything?

Through this all, my patient, enduring husband takes care of everything--- the laundry, the cooking, the washing, the cleaning, the toddler and the earning. Maybe it's logical to first fall madly, deeply in love with each other before deciding to get married and have babies because the challenges can break apart those less attached.

Right now I keep telling myself that this is what I want. What I really want to say is, somebody help me!

Just When We Thought...

In my husband's eyes, our daughter was showing great promise. For years, she watched mainly Batman and the Justice League; she preferred cars over dolls and she actually asked to have a Captain America figurine on her birthday cake even though Cinderella was right beside the man in star spangled tights.

To my husband, the unconventional taste of our daughter was something to be happy about. It's like an assurance that she'd never grow up like other girls in frills and skirts, some of whom end up with huge Avon bills for daddy and long lines of salivating packs of testosterone at the gate. Then again, my husband was a popular kid in school so he doesn't know that unconventional girls in school are the butt of all pranks and don't fit anywhere, not even on the walls as wallpaper, leaving them to wonder if they were really alien babies switched at birth. Yes, weird kids pray every night for spaceships to come along and take them to a home where weirdness is the norm.

Fortunately (or unfortunately) there's been a switch in our kid's interests lately. After initially showing reluctance at watching singing mermaids, dancing chambermaids and effeminately beautiful prince charmings, she finally agreed to watch some of Disney's fairy tales. Disney must have invested on hypnotic techniques because she is hooked and is now singing Under the Sea, not knowing that in reality it should really be Under the Oil Spill. Well, at least our kid doesn't have to think she's an alien and she can now relate to girls her age when they talk about the latest fashion in pink and baby blue.

Of course, there is a price for normalcy. It is now my responsibility to find a way to tell her that people don't get married and run off into the sunset after meeting only once and singing to each other in chirping voices. People meet; fall head over heels over each other's nice teeth, eyes, brains and pleasing personality; grow sick and tired of each other then either stab each other in the back or muster the will needed to crawl (after all that tiresome running) to that sunset together.

Then of course there are babies, rising costs of everything, unemployment and the husband's former officemate with better vital statistics to think about...

Puppy Dog

A friend once told me that if he had been Hitler’s father and he had known that his son would turn out the way he did, he would have (ahem, excuse me) done the “ACT” all by himself instead of with his wife (you get the drift, don’t you?).

I wonder what Hitler’s parents would have done if they had known who Adolf would grow up to be. Would they have taken his life even before he was born or would they have allowed him to be born and changed his environment or the way they raised him instead?

I used to be a staunch supporter of the nurture theory—that adults are more a result of how they were raised and of the influence of their environment (that’s like saying you have my parents and the world to blame for the plague that I am to you; Hahaha). I’m beginning to think though that nature, our genes, does have as much of a hand at influencing who we become.

At this point, I would like to divert from my usual depressed, bitter self to look into the brighter side of things—that side where Barney teaches the Care Bears to sing family-oriented songs in a ghastly way. Seriously, there are just some things that can soften not just the hardest of hearts but the more tragic cynical and sarcastic ones too.

On the first day of this year (when we Filipinos got another excuse to stuff each other with too much food) our pressure cooker blew up in our kitchen. That resulted in a near Jackson Pollock cow oil masterpiece getting imprinted right on our kitchen wall and ceiling. My husband got a share of the rare abstract work on his skin because he was standing in front of the pressure cooker when it blew up. You can imagine what he was doing then; he was the one cooking because people get sick when I cook. Since he had second degree burns, he had to sleep on the floor near our bed so he wouldn’t accidentally rub his ointment-coated skin on me and our daughter.

Our two year old daughter who had always slept beside us since she was an infant couldn’t keep her eyes off her father. After a long time of just staring, she took her stuffed toy, puppy dog, and placed it on her father’s stomach.

I could only stare at her in disbelief. My daughter never sleeps without her puppy dog. I asked her why she did what she did. She explained in her usual simple talk that she wanted her father to have her puppy for the night because he was sick. She had trouble falling asleep the whole night but she never took her toy back.

That just blew the caps off my jaded heart and my bladder full of bile. Of course we try to teach her to be a good kid but never specifically to do such things. I was expecting she’d exercise her right to be a tyrant at least until she turns three.

A counselor once told me it is only at around three that a person’s moral self, his ability to determine right from wrong and his ability to understand compassion, develops. How could my little daughter know that her dad needed her puppy dog that night? If I never forced her to give up what was most valuable to her, then she probably did it out of her own accord because she has some innate goodness that can either be nurtured or redirected.

I suppose all of us have that seed of innate goodness. Maybe Hitler had it too but then he could have digested it out of his body or others did that for him. I wish the good seed could just grow no matter what.

New Year Potty

I was thinking I’d write something wise and inspiring for Christmas and the New Year, something filled with such beautifully constipated words that you’d have no choice but to hail me as the next great religious cult leader. But alas, my dreams of world domination and wealth beyond my capacity to count would have to wait for the next season. I’m stumped. It’s not just because I’m nearly incapable of thinking of pink cotton-candy-cloud puffy positive thoughts. It’s not even because my writer’s block has grown into a brain tumor. I can’t write right now because I can't think. I can't think because I’m potty training my daughter.

The New Year is fast approaching and she will soon be three years old so I was thinking that it’s about time she knew where real shit should go to. Sadly, I am the one who is swiftly learning that shit does happen in life— the real kind that smears on floor vinyl, stains every fiber invented by man and gets into your nerves. It’s a good thing my poor father-in-law is an ace at wiping poop off floors. Otherwise I would have wept over the offending deposits until they got up and walked off by themselves.

If I think hard about it though, I feel as if my daughter is indirectly teaching me something. It’s like she’s telling me, “Other kinds of shit happen in life ma. Chances are, some of them will happen to you next year and they don’t always go down the toilet like you want them too. You’ve just got to learn to wipe and disinfect.”

Sigh. Of course, that’s exactly what this little cute tyrant is telling me. I can just make out the words of wisdom if I listen closely to her broken syllables and her nervous weeping.

What I want to tell her in response is, “Bless you my child. May you have a potty full of shit this year and may all your potty contents go down the toilet.”

I wish all of you the same this year.

Gender Toys

It’s getting harder to shop for toys for my kid every year. It’s not just because every single cheap toy that we average earners can afford seems to come with a bonus service— free lead poisoning. Actually, I used to play with cheap, lead-coated toys when i was a kid and look at what that made me— insane and loving it.

Although I still do worry over the paint messing with my child’s cells and making a better monster out of her, my real problem is the issue of gender toys.

My daughter loves playing with cars, action figures and basketballs. We didn’t teach her that. She does have at least three feminine dolls that she has so neglected that dust has now made dreadlocks out of their hair.

I don’t think there is anything wrong with my daughter’s toy preferences but my blood boils over when people call my attention. Society says girls should play with little tea cups and anatomically impossible dolls in pink tutus.

I was wondering, if my daughter absolutely refuses to host perpetual tea parties for rewinds of Ken and Barbie’s wedding, preferring instead to fight crime with Batman and Robin, would that make her any less female? Would she suddenly forget that she doesn’t have balls and insist that she can grow facial hair just as well as her father?

Honestly, I’m afraid that society’s stress on gender toys might confuse her about what she really wants for herself. She can grow up preferring to be a member of the third gender but I want her to make that decision not because people told her she wasn’t a normal girl.

Believe me, I’ve been there. For a time I thought I wanted to be a guy just because I played with G.I Joe and Voltes V until I met my husband who could spit farther than me, looked more manly than me and shared my passion for little katana-wielding plastic toys that could bend their knees and arms. So then I wanted to become a girl because he liked girls who liked boys and not girls who liked girls and would compete with him for the attention of other girls (whew!).

I want my daughter to know that she can still be female if she wants to even if she likes racing cars and shooting hoops. But gender toys are a reality so I would have to deal with that. At least my daughter likes pink over any other color. Maybe I can just buy her pink wheels and Barbie with a pink broadsword.