Regrets

You know what sucks? My life.

God, that's whiny. This is exactly why I drop my blog when I get depressed. Depression is bo-o-o-ring. Especially coming from a woman who doesn't have to work and lives in a nice big house where it doesn't snow with two happy, healthy children and a husband who...well, anyway, a husband.

When I get in these moods, there are so many layers of regret and self-loathing that I don't know where to begin. I'll just say this: never, never, never become a stay-at-home mother. Ever. It seems like a great deal when that first baby is so little and lovable that you can't possibly imagine leaving him or her to spend eight hours a day in a beige cubicle. But after a year or two, or, in my case, almost four, you start to realize that your kids' time with the babysitter is infinitely more positive, educational, and fun than their time with you, and in the meantime you've created a black, gaping chasm in your resume that will hinder you for decades. Add to that a marriage that more and more resembles a caged death match, and suddenly you understand why so many moms in the 1950s were alcoholics.

Clearly, it is time for me to get back to work. And as soon as I can identify one or two marketable skills in myself, I will dust off my resume. In the meantime, I tend to my children, try to keep my house clean, and wonder how I ran my once-promising life into a dead-end.

Still freakin' sick

Simon keeps asking if I need anything, and I keep saying a loaded gun so I can shoot myself.

What have I got now? A cough that gets so violent it makes me pee if I haven't just done so, congestion that might be crushing my eye socket, a headache that's probably from the cracks along my eye socket, and now, possibly, a return of the stomach flu that kicked this all off last Tuesday night.

Actually, Simon just asked again, and I said I need him to juice a lemon for me, because that's my new "cure": fresh lemon juice and hot water with honey. He made a very irritated face. Apparently, he did not mean "anything." I think he meant did I need a glass of water. Either that or he was hoping I'd ask for the gun again.

I have now been bedridden-sick for almost an entire week. Of course, I haven't actually been bedridden, except for about a day and a half. This may be why I'm still sick.

This is the dilemma of the sick stay-at-home mom: who do you call in sick to? If I had a job, and thus a nanny, I'd just call my job, and stay in bed all day while the nanny did her thing.

I think this is where the co-parent is supposed to take a day off of their work, just like you'd do if your nanny were sick. We did that the last time I was sick. Simon didn't offer, I just told him I was taking the day off, and he'd have to figure out how to make that work. He was very displeased.

This is the other part of the sick SAHM dilemma: few people believe that you do enough to merit a day off. After all, isn't every day at home a day off? My neighbor Carl, the retired mailman, suggested I stay inside on the couch today. I consider it a victory that I didn't curse.

I have to be extremely grateful, then, that my sister, Maura, is in town with nothing better to do than come to Trader Joe's with Henry and I, then spend her afternoon visiting the park with the man while I napped.

I actually saw the doctor last Friday, who prescribed me antibiotics, which have been useless, and Robitussin with codeine, which has been a godsend, except for the fact that my unborn child is now ready for narc-anon. Poor addicted little fetus.

Meanwhile, my housewife and mothering skills, which were poor to begin with, are slipping. It is all I can do to wash dishes. The food under Henry's chair is simply too much for me right now. And the seven separate stacks of junk mail and magazines on my dining room table/desk? I cry if I even think about sorting through those.

I will be significantly better tomorrow. There is simply no other option. I've got a big freelance project, and my mom and Maura are lined up for babysitting, so I'm set to head into the big city (So. San Fran) to work in a real office (Simon's).

Husky Baby

Welcome to my blog!

Crap. I had this idea that a blog would be a fine activity for me and that maybe my struggles with motherhood/marriage/depression might be relevant to someone other than myself.

In my head I had these brilliant topics lined up. I am really, really pithy in my head. I'm freakin' Anne Lamott.

And now I sit down and I am reminded that my life is excrutiatingly boring. That, and I have only a very tentative idea of what a blog is.

So, you know, welcome and my apologies.

Here's me on a wild Friday night: On my ass, on the couch, trying hard to focus on writing instead of researching Aspberger's Syndrome because my 2-year-old son, Henry, has an obsession with auto insignias.

Henry's asleep. Simon, my husband and sometime nemesis, won't be back from his business trip until past midnight. It would be silent if not for the clothes drier that's almost always going.

This morning I had the horrible realization that my son may be fat. Not just chubby, but actually overweight. The light first flickered one when I slipped the 24-month T-shirt over his 22-month head, and it barely fit over his belly. Then, as he ran around with his buddies at baby gym, it occurred to me that he looks like a linebacker. As I mulled this over, I mentioned to my friend Susie that Henry stepped on my mom's scale the other day and it read 31 pounds, and Susie said, "Oh my God!"

Sure enough, I typed in his weight and height into a BMI calculator and it says he's overweight.

This is probably not a big deal in the scheme of things, but I have no job besides this, and so I take it as a failure on my part. I always thought fat kids just ate crap and watched too much TV. Henry eats berries and yogurt for breakfast! He eats raisins instead of candy! He spends half the day running laps around our house or our yard or the park.

The worst part is I wrote a column about childhood obesity back before I had kids and it was all know-it-all-y. It's so easy to give advice when it's purely on a theoretical basis.