Mompromises (rhymes w/”compromises”) and the Funky Towel

When you become a mother, a certain amount of pride goes out the window. For most women, this divestiture begins with pregnancy. Unless you are a member of a few particular professions or are an ardent nudist, you have probably taken great pains throughout your adolescence and adulthood to prevent people from seeing you naked. You can kiss that  modesty goodbye as you shuffle your awkwardly burgeoning body, barely concealed by a thin medical gown that opens at the back, down the hall between the doctor’s office and the ultrasound room. Make this a long, meaningful kiss, because you’ll never see that modesty again, at least not in its familiar form. You will get so used to donning that flimsy gown that reveals more than it covers and spreading your legs regularly for the better part of the year that when the time for actual delivery comes, you will cease to care at all if various loved ones and entire teams of people you’ve never seen before in your life poke and prod your completely nude or insufficiently clad body in places formerly known only to your lovers, and even then oftentimes with the lights out.

It was a funky, musty towel that got me started thinking about the continuum of Mompromises–the personal compromises we make over the course of our mothering. For example:

• Modesty, general (see above).
• Boob Modesty: For those of us who breastfed our kids, I’d hazard a guess that whipping one out anytime, anyplace and plugging it into a tiny mouth ceased to merit a second thought. If you were one of those proper ladies who always covered said boob and baby with a blanket, hats off to you. My trial-by-fire in this department happened in Starbucks when baby #1, The Lawyer, was a few weeks old. Struggling to free a giant, swollen-solid breast from the unfamiliar and corset-like, E-cup nursing bra while cradling the tiny screaming infant, I fumbled, dropping my football-sized breast out into the open for all to see. After that, it was pretty much all downhill in the modesty department, especially once my Jedi-nursing skills increased, my boobs shrank down to human proportions, and baby grew ever onward and upward towards the same.

• The loss of Boob Modesty, by the way, has repercussions that last well beyond the nursing years. It’s been about 5 years since I weaned last child, The Diva, (at age 2); most of my friends have kids in elementary/middle school. We are light years beyond that warm, fuzzy, milky cocoon. Yet at a recent cocktail party, a group of us ladies were chatting in the kitchen as we mixed drinks when the subject turned to mid-life boob-droop. Several of us immediately opened our shirts and lifted our small, modest bras to illustrate our hyperbolic points and compare the results of our Mompromises, with nary a thought to either the husbands roaming without or the whereabouts of the omnipresent kids who were ultimately responsible for this sad state of affairs.
• Personal Space: The ubiquitousness of comfortable baby carriers such as the Ergo, the improved Baby Bjorn, and a variety of different slings (my favorite was the Over the Shoulder Baby Holder) mean that more people are spending more physical bonding time with their young progeny. This is great, especially if you’re a Dr. Sears acolyte. But it also means that an entire generation of kids is getting used to being on you as much as possible, day or night, cementing their claim to that body and what you formerly considered a small but real no-fly-zone of personal space surrounding it. Nothing is sacred, from the late-night rendez-vous with your husband in your own bed to a trip to the bathroom. One battle-weary, early-parenting memory permanently seared into my brain is having to lug a big, loudly fussing baby with me to the bathroom a putting her on my lap as I peed so she didn’t wake up my husband, who had to go to work in the morning.
• Ditto for all the things you used to enjoy doing by yourself, such as shopping for wine or trying on clothes. I once saw a woman usher a toddler and a preschooler into the handicapped dressing room at The Gap, then wheel in a giant double stroller full of baby before shutting the door behind her. I’m sure she got in a lot of quality shopping that day. Luckily for me, our fabulous local discount wine-and-liquor warehouse, the Wine Library, has a GIANT fish tank filled with a variety of tropical fish on the second floor. When the girls were smaller and with me 24/7, I’d tell them we were going to the Millburn Aquarium when I needed to make a liquor run.
• Bathroom Privacy: When’s the last time you went to the bathroom in your own house with the door closed? Yeah, I thought so.
• Personal Grooming: Brushed hair now counts as presentability; a shower means you’re out to make a good impression (PTA meeting/job interview), and makeup means it’s your BFF’s birthday/Girls’ Night Out/high school or college reunion.
• Personal Hygiene Threshold: How low can you go? In a former life, if I ever had to share a beverage with a close friend, I’d simply say with faux generosity when she handed it back, “No, that’s okay, you can finish it. I’m fine.” In the past 10 years, however, I have routinely consumed half-eaten leavings from the plates of my offspring, and–in dire, drought situations–handed them the lone water bottle first, meaning I got to belt down a mouthful of floaties. And then there’s the impetus for today’s non-hurricane-related post: The Funky Towel. I remember when we were young my younger sister was slightly pickier about food than I was, so if there was a too-dark piece of toast on the table my mom would eat it and pop another in the toaster for my sister. Today I did not consume burnt toast, but I did get out of the shower and dry off with The Funky Towel. Why? Because it’s summer and perfectly nice and clean towels get smelly after one usage since they never fully dry in this humidity, then guess who gets to launder an entire linen closet full of not-even-dirty towels? I’ll just wrap my anomalously clean body in the musty funk, thanks.
• Expedient Mompromises: These are arguably the worst, as they mitigate not only the person you thought you were but the newly reconstituted MomPerson you thought you had become. For example, The Lawyer didn’t watch TV before she was walking, and then only PBS shows like Sesame Street, Teletubbies, and Dragon Tales. I made her first birthday cake from scratch and sweetened it with honey and agave nectar; she was almost 2 before she tasted chocolate for the first time.

The all-organic-ingredients, home-made, 1st birthday carrot cake, which I believe she never even tasted.

• Meanwhile, The Free Spirit’s (child #2) very first food at the tender age of 5 months were Goldfish crackers snatched from her sister’s hand. Her TV repertoire expanded to include Barney, as well as assorted Rugrats videos that were administered when I needed to grade papers (I was working as an adjunct professor at the time). When pregnant w/The Diva, I used to pop in the newly purchased Brother Bear movie for the tiny Lawyer and Free Spirit and gratefully snatch a gestational nap. When awakened by, “Mommy, mommy, the video’s over!” I would remotely direct The Lawyer, age 5, to press rewind and play it again. The Diva was pretty much the final nail in the coffin of my ÜberMother standards. She was the first one raised on Nickelodeon shows; at age 2 she surprised me by counting to 10 in Spanish at the playground. When I incredulously asked where she’d learned that (Daddy? Innate genius?) she responded: “Dora.” Oreos? Processed lunchmeats? White bread and Costco birthday cakes? Check, check, and check.

Baby #3, not quite 1 year old, getting down on some chicken at a party

Evolution, growth, give-and-take, checks and balances; nothing lasts forever in this dynamic process: it all comes out in the wash.

Mompromises: you’ll know them when you make them.

Pennies and Nails

The side of the road is either lucky or malign, depending on your perspective. A runner could turn a profit from picking up the spare change scattered along her regular routes, but there are priorities when it comes to gathering luck and money. Some coins merit a full stop, others are noted and passed over on the fly. Not forgotten, though; the runner is not a wasteful person. On an bad day she might reach back to tally that week’s uncollected treasure so as to divine the amount of  deferred luck she could reap at some point in the future.

The ubiquitous, battered pennies tumble unloved and unmissed out of shallow pockets, not even meriting a look back when a driver exits the car and walks away. Scored copper surfaces reveal the cheap aluminum souls of the newer ones that skulk in the dirt, ashamed of their damaged deception. Older pennies are immediately identifiable by their more somber hue and deportment, bearing the nicks and scratches of their neglect like veterans. They deflect the sun’s rays with a dignity earned from  years of circulation and memories of value; of riding in sweaty palms that arrived at the corner store one cent short of that Tootsie Roll.

Sometimes the memories we choose to keep hurt more than the ones we pretend to let go. The kept ones shine from the dirty gutters of our minds with a dishonest brightness earned at the expense of their darker siblings; the family vacation filled with sunshine rippling on the peaceful water of the lake; the couple giddy with laughter as they leave the lawyer’s office where they closed on their first house; the face of the brand-new daughter asleep at your swollen breast. The other ones, the discarded ones, deepen until they are too saturated to fade but too heavy to pick up: the summer where the tears could have filled the lake, the ghostly image on the ultrasound screen forever pulsing in that moment between everything being possible and nothing at all being real.

Nickels glint resentfully amongst the pebbles and sand of the roadside. You can still round down to us, they huff as you slow down to scoop them up. I bet she wished she’d turned back for me when she found out that latte was $3.95, they grumble as they settle in between your sweaty palm and your iPod. Dimes and quarters, on the other hand, are not only few and far between but also harder to spot. Neither resentful nor desperate, their silence provides camouflage against the grey asphalt but sharp eyes can see them rejoice at hiding in plain sight. Confidence in their own value makes them smug: somebody wants them for his dime jar, somebody else had to dart into the Chinese take-out place to break a dollar, cursing under her breath because she could have sworn she had a quarter for the meter.

How much sweetness will it take to prevent the bitterness from taking root? How much will it take to fill that putrifying wound and what will it cost? Sometimes you think you can afford to live this double life; laughing carefree on the sunlit water where last summer you malingered with first-trimester nausea. That’s the price I have to pay, you thought then, your roiling stomach pulling you permanently off-balance, coating your tongue with a bad taste you couldn’t spit out and the heaviness in your head lulling you bedward. That night you felt her while lying in bed, though: oh, it was all worth it all over again. The open windows let in air chilled with moonlight, alive with crickets and those faint flutters of the quickening were haunted by the incomprehensible ululations of the loons. Now the moon’s glare is the worthless, tinny echo of that peaceful happiness, contaminated.

A quarter, a dime: these merit a full-stop retrieval when I run across one. It makes them feel better that although they’re yielding their valuable freedom I’m the one who has to bow, trying to scoop up the coin like Atalanta after the golden apple with only a minor genuflection breaking my stride. My shining fairies, the ones I have, these are what keep me moving one foot in front of the other. I reach for the glimmering reflections of them in my mind and they make it worth my while to keep going because I can’t afford to stumble like a normal person wrapped in elastic skin that can absorb one more break, that still has room for scars. If I can’t pick it up without stumbling anymore well then I just let it lie. Leave it lying.

Lying on the table before the neonatal specialist came in was the last time I can honestly say I was of sound mind and body. Everything after that has been permanently scarred by dyscalculia. How many weeks are you? how many digits on that last finger wait a minute let me see that again hang on a minute I’ll be right back with the doctor how many brutal syllables in hypoplastic left-heart syndrome what’s that mean? the heart should have four chambers but she only has two oh. oh no no oh no we need to do amnio now yes now how many chromosomes oh no no no

Unlike the change, the nails have no value unless they’re being used. They scoff at their stamped and polished distant cousins with a warrior’s disdain even as they rust, warped and useless by the curb. The slender, newer ones are less bitter, having known no other life in between the box at Home Depot and the gutter. Cars scare them and like all cowards, they aim small, saving their malignancy for bike tires or a thin-soled flip-flop. Cast-off warriors are dangerous, though. Remember when you ran by that ancient rusty one as big as a dagger? Maybe if you if you hadn’t seen it in time you could have really been messed up. Maybe if you hadn’t swerved you could have gone down hard and come back up with tetanus. But maybe you went around it, twisted away at the last minute and yet you didn’t manage to pass it over. Maybe it got you after all but you haven’t put your foot down so the pain has yet to hit.

Averill Lake

So the thing about actually being under a canopy of stars—a ridiculous, Home Shopping Network Bedazzled [trademark] night sky with some Stevie Nicks gauzy drama thrown in—is that shooting stars are a dime a dozen. You sit clutching your wineglass, Bedazzled and sure you’ve had an otherwordly vision or glimpsed the secrets of the universe but your capitalist wheels are churning underneath the solemn blanket of awe: “Omg a shooting star, what to wish for? Money? Size 2? World peace?” By the time you figure it out, there’s another one.

Fuck…maybe I should’ve thought of world peace first?

The stars where you’re from are niggardly, though you feel guilty about using that word even in its legitimate context because, well, you know. They scintillate beneath the opaque layer of your culture’s pollution and unless you break away you never appreciate the profundity of this violation, never realize what you’re missing and that the fact that you’re missing it is a goose-pimple raising “FUCK you” from the universe for taking a look at the MAP they laid out for you and shitting all over it. Well, not you per se, but the location of your birth makes you complicit. When, thanks in part to that fortuitous birth in which you, personally, had no agency, you access enough privilege to move somewhere else for a few weeks in August and then see the stars for the first time you pick your jaw up off the ground and pat yourself on the back.

“I’m finally part of something bigger,” you think. “I’m looking at the same stars the ancients looked at when they figured out the constellations!”

Of course you try to pick out the Big Dipper. There it is…wait, maybe that’s it? No, that’s the Little Dipper…are they side by side? How are you supposed to tell them apart? You remember something you read in World, the educational children’s magazine your parents subscribed to before they got divorced and forgot about you: the light from the stars you see is actually thousands to hundreds of thousands of years old. This fire has nothing to do with your transitory and entirely unoriginal quest for meaning. In fact, that one lame constellation you’re looking at/for was considered “the Plough” in the British isles, a parrot by the Maya, and a bear by both the ancient Greeks and indigenous North Americans.

What do you see in that moot, ancient light illuminating the fiascolated first evening of your inebriated twenty-first century vacation? The Big Shopping Cart? The North 7-11 Sign of Freedom? Prada Pursa Major?

In the sparkling black silence a frog objects. His ancestors survived the boyish massacre visitors to the lake inflicted on his small, neighboring slough thirty years ago. Real people, maybe even your ancestors, read a map to freedom in this cold dead light. The stars’ indifference refuses to bear the weight of your lethargy, your nihilism.

Across the water the loons call out, inconsistent, trying out a new dog-like ululation that’s not for your ears, but you benefit all the same.