“Um. She’s ... um. Do you know how the weather is supposed to be today? I heard it might rain.”
It might rain a shower of Mom’s herpes book on you, if the other kids find out and have a library card. If Dr. Ruth is your mom, you can be very proud, but not too proud to shorten your last name to West and head that direction away from anyone who can trace your lineage back to your real mom.
OCTOMOM
—Creepy? Check. Attention-seeking? Check. Dishonest, delusional and superbly oblivious about her children’s well-being? Check, check and check. Octomom gets bonus bad mom points for attracting the likes of fuchsia-lipped Gloria Allred, who scares children as much as she scares opposing counsel.
Nadya Suleman, an unemployed single mother of six who added to her brood by having octuplets using in vitro fertilization, is such an easy target that I was tempted to skip her, but that would make this whole list suspect.
Not only does the Octomom seem to be filling some deep psychological hole by continuing to have babies she can’t afford, she also seems like a compulsive liar and media hound. And there’s the question one always asks the mother of multiples: With that many kids, how can you possibly exploit each one of them equally?
Getting lost in the shuffle would actually be a best-case scenario for an octo-kid, because a day out with Mom at Disneyland means fighting for camera time while you get ignored in favor of any digital recording device.
JOAN CRAWFORD
—“No wire hangers” is as famous an awful mom line as there is. Whether
Mommie Dearest
is totally factual or just the narrow way Joan’s daughter, Christina, recalls her childhood doesn’t matter now, because Joan is the subject of a kitsch classic and is inextricably linked to the campiest maternal fit captured on film. The eyebrows, the image obsession, the succession of boyfriends Christina had to call “uncle” and the daughter-annihilating, scenery-chewing meltdowns forever cement Joan in the collective consciousness as one of history’s worst mothers.
Ultimately, one of the worst things you can be called in the world is a terrible mother. There’s a special ring in public relations hell for bad moms. I’ve been through my own mother situation, and the last thing I want is to be anywhere near this list.
These women took the hits, and sometimes gave them, so the rest of us could have some perspective. Maybe I’ll take a wrong tone in explaining how the tooth fairy doesn’t exist, maybe I’ll send you to school with mismatched socks, maybe I won’t be helpful with civics homework, but listen, future child: I won’t drown you, smother you, abandon you, thwack you with wire hangers, eat you, mortify you with talk of herpetic lesions or marry Jon Gosselin. If I can avoid those things, I’ll basically be doing all right. While it’s inevitable to compare myself to those altruistic moms with boundless energy and enthusiasm for parenting, those who neither undermom nor overmom, when I look at the ledger I’ve created, I’m just hoping to be closer to Judge Ruth than Dr. Ruth.
twelve
A Million Little Reese’s Pieces
M
y husband takes me to Ojai for the weekend, where we find a little coffeehouse in town and I order a veggie sandwich with pesto and Swiss cheese. I tell myself I’m going to eat only half of it, like an alcoholic tells himself it’s just a slice of rum cake and it won’t set off a bender and then ends the night with one shoe and forty-seven stitches at County General.
I am just going to eat half the sandwich and wrap up the other half for later. And maybe a few bites of the fruit on the side, because you know, it is Ojai and everything’s organic and there must be some nutrients in there the baby sorely needs. Don’t want a fetus with scurvy just because I’m trying to keep the eating under control.
And as I’m ordering the sandwich, and planning just to eat half, I’m seriously considering a chai latte, because we’re on vacation and it’s a vacation chai, and I think I smell nutmeg and what could be as creamy and comforting as a warm spicy beverage on an overcast day? Mommy needs it when she can’t even have a glass of wine or a smoke to take the edge off. Everyone knows empty calories take away the empty feelings, or make the thoughts stop skipping like a broken record in my brain:
How much is child care? Is my vagina going to rip when this kid comes out? How exactly do stitches in the vagina feel? Where are we putting the crib? What crib? Are we really supposed to take a parenting class? How much does that C-section thing scar? What is a layette and do I need one? My stomach itches. My stomach itches. My stomach itches.
The doctor advised us to go on a weekend getaway before it was too late to travel, but while my body is only in the second trimester, my mind is in the sixty-third. I actually spend time worrying about my son drinking and driving, which may or may not happen
sixteen years from now.
And that’s where a giant sandwich stops the record skipping with the mollifying power of pesto. Of course, when you use a sandwich to solve a problem, you then have two problems, especially if you’re pregnant and running out of stomach real estate.
I feel like someone who has had gastric bypass surgery. My appetite is bottomless, but even half a sandwich makes me feel painfully full and gasping for breath these days.
No matter what I eat these days, even an orange or a handful of nuts, it feels like I have undertaken a massive binge. Whatever is happening to my insides makes me feel both starving and obscenely full almost all of the time. It’s weird for your mind to want something your body can’t tolerate, to be insatiable and overstuffed, magnetized and repulsed, craving and bursting. I eat the rest of the sandwich before I remember not to.
This leads to a pressure on my diaphragm like someone has glued a thirty-pound lead paperweight to my solar plexus.
No way I’m overeating again, I tell myself, but food amnesia takes hold and by dinner all I can hear is the siren song of homemade corn bread, singing to me from a basket on the table, luring me into dark, carbohydrate-infested waters.
As you may have already deduced, I have an eating disorder, something I’ve announced hundreds of times after introducing myself at meetings in church basements several times a week as part of a recovery program. This is not a book about addiction, no
Million Little Reese’s Pieces
—especially because nothing here is fabricated—but my background of serious body image and food issues does make this weight gain come with a side order of extra disquietude.
After eight years free of crazy eating disorder behaviors, every pound gained makes me question if this is just normal for my particular pregnancy or a little bit of relapsing. As is the tradition in my recovery program, I call a woman every day to check in with her, and she says things sound fine, to take it one day at a time and keep calling her every morning, which I do, but I’m concerned and I never want to go back to how I was.
Look, I wish I had any other kind of addiction, because this one has always seemed the least glamorous, and I’m pretty ashamed at how low a girl can get just because she goes from a size four to a size eight to a size fourteen and back to a size six a couple times a year for twenty years. It wasn’t selling my grandmother’s wedding ring for crack, but it was demoralizing and isolating, and without help I’m sure I would have ended up eighty pounds or four hundred pounds or dead.
Here’s how it looked. As a waitress, I would do things like scarf down the untouched crab cake on a customer’s plate while busing it back to the kitchen. As a college student, I would walk two miles in the snow just so I could work out at the gym for hours, which I had to do to burn off the large pizza I would order and eat alone in my apartment. At a temp job once, I was hired to answer phones while the staff went out for a holiday lunch. When they cleared out, I spied a giant vase of M&M’s, both plain and peanut. I ate a few handfuls, promised myself I would stop, but couldn’t. When the staff returned hours later, their temp was asleep with her head on the desk, candy-colored drool on the sides of her mouth, the vase empty, the phone ringing away. That’s how it looked. I know, not exactly
Permanent Midnight
, but a good way to ruin your twenties.
So, you get the idea. Boo hoo, I was a lonely kid who ate candy to keep herself company on the bus and starved to fit in at ballet class and the nuttiness continued into adulthood until I got help.
Hopefully, you can’t relate, but maybe you can. In any case, while I have and will continue to make light of my weight gain, it’s also a trigger.
I haven’t owned a scale in eight years, and I’m not about to buy one now. When you’re pregnant, however, the nurse weighs you at every visit, and I have vowed not to let the number scare me into either starving or spinning (on a bike or mentally). It’s a medical matter now, more about my ability to carry a baby than carry off a pair of Joe’s Jeans. I still go to meetings every week, just to stay connected, and when I introduce myself, I find myself wanting to say, “I’m Teresa, pregnant, not bingeing. I don’t have a problem, I have a fetus, so don’t bother with the concerned outreach calls but bless you for thinking of me.”
While I’m pretty sure my old patterns are in the rearview, so is my size-four body.
When the dust settled on my first trimester, I had gained sixteen pounds.
To put it in perspective,
What to Expect When You’re Expecting
, the so-called pregnancy bible reportedly read by 93 percent of pregnant women in America and translated into over forty languages, suggests gaining between two and four pounds in the first trimester. Oops. I saw your two pounds and raised you fourteen.
The author, Heidi Murkoff, delivers this nugget: “Slow and steady doesn’t only win the race—it’s a winner when it comes to pregnancy weight gain, too.”
Heidi and I have broken up a couple of times, but that’s because our relationship is kind of intense. I need Heidi when I have scary bleeding—or jammy discharge after my CVS test—and require her hand-holding to be sure everything is normal and not, in fact, a sign of imminent miscarriage. Many a night I’ve clung to Heidi’s comprehensive index (now dog-eared and smeared with Dorito seasoning), looking up spotting, breathing difficulty, hot baths, mood swings, mosquito bites—everything from abscess to zygote. But two to four pounds for the entire first trimester? Is she high? Or just high and mighty?
This is an important, classic and time-tested book, and I acknowledge it is a bible. However, like the Bible, it occasionally says some really fucked-up shit.
“Gradual weight gain also allows for gradual skin stretching (think fewer stretch marks),” adds Heidi, chirpily. And I know a subtle threat when I hear one. Translation in my mind: “Hey, fatty, you keep up the eating if you want an ass full of stretch marks, and don’t say I didn’t warn you.” Still, Heidi is just trying to help and I can’t stay mad at her in case I need her stupid index again. In any case, it’s not her fault.
But it’s not my fault, either. Despite a past filled with treating food like a drug (and, of course, treating drugs like drugs, just never getting hooked), I actually just seem to be eating for a simple, well-adjusted reason: Um, I’m hungry. I’m
huuuuungrry
. And for the first trimester, there was also the queasiness quelled only by crackers and toast, the sudden revulsion toward vegetables, not to mention the quitting smoking.
Now the nausea is subsiding, but the peeing is gaining momentum. There is no such thing as sleeping through the night, because if the hunger doesn’t wake me, the hunger to relieve myself will.
This is to be expected. It’s almost a pregnancy cliché. Even Heidi will tell you that your bladder is now under pressure, but like most pregnancy symptoms, I’m still surprised by it. It’s like, because the pregnancy still seems kind of unreal, the idea that I should expect what other people expect while expecting seems unreal, too. Anyway, every trip to the bathroom reminds me that this pregnancy is sticking, and so while I’m grateful for my crowded bladder, I’m also awakened by it, and if I’m awake, I’m hungry.
I remain ravenously, ridiculously, painfully hungry.
It’s the large intestines rubbing together, physical desperation for fried potatoes and eggs kind of hunger you feel when you wake up hungover on a Sunday morning after one too many Jamesons. It’s the type of hunger that makes you order a coffee and an orange juice at a diner the morning after and look longingly at your waitress as if to plead, “Seriously, look at me. Get me that juice before you get table four their waffles. This is food and beverage triage, sister, and I’m bleeding out.” I want wheels of cheddar, ropes of black licorice and still, strangely, that Guinness beer, which I fantasize about chugging from a frosty stein.
You could probably extrapolate from the above that now, at twenty-one weeks pregnant and just over halfway through, I’m pretty hefty, a weight gain outlier. I’ve gained twenty-eight pounds so far. According to Heidi, that should pretty much be it for almost the whole pregnancy. Too bad I have four more months to go of important baby growth development time.
Even my ears are fat.
How do I know? Because when I work as a host on a deep cable show that plays on half the screen while the other half scrolls through better programs you could be watching, I use an earpiece (IFB) so the producer can talk to me during the show. About a month ago, it started popping out of my ear. I’ve used it for years doing live news. As is customary, an audiologist molded the IFB to fit my ear perfectly and no one could figure out why it suddenly kept flying out. It took a new sound guy to point out tactfully that “Sometimes when people change sizes, their ears change shape, too.”
I’ve also outgrown my underpants. I can’t bring myself to buy large panties because they remind me of the old days, so I squeeze into medium Victoria’s Secret Angel panties just to see how deep and festering a red gash I can acquire from elastic digging into my hip flesh.