You’d think being responsible for someone else’s life would make you really uptight, but it has the opposite affect. You spend your days tending to someone else’s feces. In the before-time, you could enjoy the luxury of disgust, and silly fears. It was an indulgence, you know, to run screaming and flapping around when you saw a spider.

 

Now you have the gravity of a woman who would reflexively grab a hornet’s nest with her bare hands and run with it under her arm like football player toward the goal posts, if doing so protected her kids.  

It grounds off the rough edges of your pride, stretches a permanent flexibility into your soul as it did the skin of your abdomen. You don’t care about all that…outside…stuff as much as you did. You simply haven’t the energy and shit, man, you made a human. You don’t have to impress anyone. 

Oh my plans, my beautiful plans. I remember in the early days of the first child, relating to potential gift-givers in what I’m sure was not a total elitist snob voice, “We’re really going to try and keep plastic toys away from the baby? You know they just aren’t quality and are less likely to stimulate the child’s intellect? Also, wow, we really try to steer of anything, like, mass-produced, or with cartoon characters on it, y’know? Those things just lack substance? and it’s not the kind of environment we want to, like, create?” We even disconnected the TV.

My child only plays with sunshine and friendly forest animals!

Baise-moi. I was an idiot. 

Fast forward six years, to me shouting over Rob Zombie, “LE, just eat your damn Mcnuggets and I’ll put together the Monster’s Inc. toy when we get home, awright? Quiet! This is the cool part!”

“slam in the backa my DRAGULA…”

At home…
“Where’s the baby?”
“Outside, likely.”
“When’s the last time you saw him?”
“Well…definitely before we started watching Hoarders. He had that stick we used to poke campfires with and I made him take it outside. It’s fine, he loves it out there. I dumped most of the rain water out of the kiddie pool yesterday so he’ll be ok.” 

I know other parents aren’t as glazed over as I am, because I was swinging in the sweet hammock of apathy to begin with. But it changes everyone. I have seen the transformation of women so hyper-organized, women bristling with kinetic energy, women who need to control every stick and stone of their lives.

Now, they sit on floors staring off peacefully, while their children use them as a human jungle gym. Like a tired dog who lies patient and long suffering as her puppies climb and sniff and gnaw. Not upset, nothing wrong. Because this is how it is now, and that’s fine. 

Nah, I’m ok. Just tired.