Ketchup Is a Vegetable: And Other Lies Moms Tell Themselves (8 page)

I can tell you this for a scientific fact: men do
not
hear as well as women. I have to sleep with earplugs to keep from hearing every snort, grunt and shifting of blankets that comes from the nursery. Every sound your baby makes in the middle of the night is a potential emergency. Since Aubrey's birth I have had Mommy-Post-Traumatic-Stress-Disorder. Every time I lay down to sleep and somebody makes a noise, every nerve in my body
jumps.
It's a jolt of adrenaline and electricity that makes my fingertips and toes twitch. I sit straight up in bed, unhook my nursing bra and scream, “WHO’S HUNGRY?!” My husband on the other hand, has slept through innumerable middle of the night tantrums thrown by screaming, crying, inconsolable babies without ever stirring.

When Aubrey was three-months-old, I came home from a twelve-hour shift in the ER at 11:30pm to find her
screaming
bloody murder. I picked her up and ran through the house with my heart racing, thinking my husband must be hurt. Someone
must have
broken into the house and attacked him and I would find him sprawled in the floor or
maybe
he was sick, doubled over the toilet with some highly contagious and deathly strain of a stomach bug or... I skidded around the corner into our bedroom and found him — asleep. He was actually
sleeping
while our child screamed. He was out cold, with the baby monitor at full volume.

From that point on he had to put her
in
the bed with him to go to sleep and I would put her in her own bed when I came home. I found them on more than one occasion cuddled up in the bed with Daddy fast asleep and Aubrey looking at me like, “Poor little guy, he was all tuckered out.”

Once we transitioned Aubrey from the baby bed to the big girl bed, we had a whole new set of problems. My husband had been officially relieved from night duty with our kids when I heard him talking to Aubrey at six-weeks-old in the middle of the night, “WHAT is wrong with you??? Stop
crying
and just tell me what you want!” Her continued crying and his continued
sensitivity
weren’t exactly compatible with Mommy getting a full night’s sleep so we developed day and night shifts and stuck to that schedule until Emma, our second child, came along.

Emma threw a slight kink in our system because many nights I would get one child down just as the other was waking up. On nights that both girls were up, I would deal with Emma, since I was breastfeeding and Zeb would take care of getting Aubrey back to bed.

I was making Aubrey’s bed one morning and found a piece of petrified string cheese.

“Hmmm,” I thought to myself. “How in the world did that get there?”

When Zeb came home from work that evening I casually said, “I found an old piece of string cheese in Aubrey’s bed today.”

“Oh she woke up the other night and said she was hungry. She wanted string cheese so I gave her some and put her back in the bed.”

“YOU DID WHAT?!”

“I gave her some string cheese. She said she was hungry.”

“Are you kidding me? You gave a two-year-old string cheese and put her in the bed with it! What were you thinking? She could have choked to death! She only said she was hungry as a stalling tactic! And guess what? Now she KNOWS you are a SUCKER and now she’s going to come back for more! DON’T you EVER, give my baby food and put her in the bed with it! YOU are going to fix this! Do you hear me? Don’t be waking me up in the middle of the night when she comes begging you for more cheese!”

Thus began the week-long cheese fiasco. Every night around two in the morning, Aubrey would creep into our room, slip over to Zeb’s side of the bed and
wail
for string cheese. He would get up and put her back in the bed, minus the cheese. He was learning his lesson the hard way, or so I thought.

A couple of weeks passed and I was beginning to think the cheese fiasco was over. I was up before daylight one morning nursing Emma, when Aubrey came walking sideways into our living room and pointing to her back.

“Wook, Momma, wook,” she continued to point.

There on her Elmo pajamas was a piece of string cheese that had melted with her body heat into a circle the size of a personal pan pizza. I took her shirt off and began the arduous process of scraping the cheese off her favorite pajamas without putting a hole in them.

I called Zeb, “Dude. You are so busted.” I didn’t need to say anything else on the matter. The cheese fiasco was finally over.

Road trips are another great time to bond with your husband. We have always lived hundreds of miles away from our extended families in Alabama. We are used to loading up everything we own and taking road trips with our kids. Zeb usually drives, reluctantly I might add, while I spend most of my time turned around backwards tending to the kids, passing out snacks and picking up whatever toys they have dropped.

Usually somewhere along our route to Alabama, I will glance at Aubrey and notice that she is asleep with the DVD still running.

“Zeb, is Emma asleep?” I’ll whisper to him.

“How am I supposed to know?” He’ll say, “I’m driving.”

“ZEB, look in the rear view mirror, OR pretend you are checking your blind spot and GLANCE at her to see if she is asleep.”

“That’s really not safe, Robin.”

Is he serious? Does he realize that I drive with them in the car every day, and can keep one hand on the wheel, my eyes on the road and still reach their baby dolls in the back seat when they drop them?

“LOOK AT HER!” I’ll hiss at him.

“Yeah, she’s asleep.”

I turn the DVD player off and slam it shut.

When we made the move from Savannah, Georgia to Mt Pleasant, South Carolina in November 2007, he was driving his car and pulling a trailer with his motorcycle. Because my car has the DVD player, I had eighteen-month-old Emma and three-year-old Aubrey in the car with me. We got into Charleston around dark and as we were crossing the Ravenel Bridge, my cell phone rang. It was Zeb.

“Did you see that battleship?!” He began to describe the USS Yorktown in
vivid
detail.

“What battleship?” I asked him.

“The one we are driving over.”

Smoke began to pour out of my ears and my blood began to boil, I could feel my chest tightening as my blood pressure rose. “I’m SORRY! You mean the one that is 500 feet BELOW us, and a quarter of a mile BEHIND us? Are you for real? You are pulling a trailer, talking on your cell phone and driving across a six-lane bridge you’ve never driven on before, IN THE DARK, and you aren’t capable of looking in the back seat to see if your child is sleeping?” I hung up the phone.

The next time we were in the car headed to Alabama and things got quiet I asked “Is Emma sleeping?”

“I don’t know,” he said “I’m driving.”

I was quick to reply, “Just pretend she’s a battleship.”

Regardless of the idiotic things your husband does to or in front of your kids, you married him, so you have to deal with it and you’d better be careful how you deal with it. Zeb called one Sunday to tell me he was on his way home from work. I hung up the phone and turned to the girls, “Daddy’s on his way home!” I knew they would be excited to see him because he had worked all weekend. A few minutes passed and Aubrey said angrily, “Why you call my Daddy a jerk, Momma?”

“Which time?” I thought to myself, as I scrambled to try to figure out what she was referring to. It finally hit me and I exclaimed,

“I didn’t call Daddy a JERK. I said, he’s on his way home from WORK!”

Aubrey looked at me with scorn and said, “I don’t fink so!”

I have to admit that I married the perfect man, though. He is a man’s man but ended up with three daughters. He can fix anything, which is nice because I break just about everything. In exchange for staying up late with whichever child isn’t cooperating, he lets me sleep late
every
Saturday
and
Sunday, and has never complained about it. (He is mine and you can’t have him and yes, I would take my earrings off and fight for him.) He washes dishes or the kids every night after dinner. And he lets me pick which of those chores I’d rather do, which means that most nights I end up cleaning the kitchen and sipping on some Mommy Juice (read: whatever brand of wine was on sale at Wal-Mart this particular week), while he bathes the girls, brushes teeth, brushes “knobs” out of hair, and reads the girls a story before bed. He works up to fourteen hours a day some days, and comes home exhausted but willing to do anything I ask of him. Not only can he change my oil and build an exact replica of the Pottery Barn bookcase I’ve been eyeing, but he can also give a mean pedicure. He (thanks to extensive training from his mother and three sisters) has learned that when a girl cries, it’s not always for a reason and the appropriate response is
always
a hug and an apology. His only fault is that he is a man and doesn’t do things the way I would.

Ah, well. I guess nobody is perfect.

O
ne thing I know for sure is that you can never appreciate the sacrifices that your own mother made for you until you are a mother yourself and realize what an ungrateful little jerk you were. Even as a young adult, when you start to realize that your own mother isn’t the complete idiot you thought she was during your teen years, you still don’t really get it.

True understanding comes when you are sitting on the toilet at two o’clock in the morning, four days after having a baby, experiencing diarrhea and attempting to still breastfeed your child because your husband is asleep and there is no one else to take up the slack.
You
are now the Momma.
You
are now in charge. You start to think about all those years you were able to go to sleep whenever you wanted to, without a thought as to who would clean up the mess in the kitchen or if everybody in the house had clean clothes to wear the next day. You begin to see that while you were lying in bed reading the latest Babysitter’s Club book, your mother was working her butt off for your ungrateful, smart-mouthed self. And now, it’s your turn.

Once you are somebody’s Momma, you begin to learn the meaning of the word “sacrifice.” Some sacrifices are made simply to shut your children up. These sacrifices have few negative results for the mother and produce a quick and convenient stop to a tantrum in progress.

When I was a little girl and my mother would go out of town or even out for the night, and I was really missing her, I would go in her closet and steal a nightgown to snuggle with. Being able to hold on to something of hers, something that smelled like her was so comforting. The only thing I can think of to this day that smells better than my mother is my babies after bath time. And if my mom has been holding one of my babies and they get the Shuggie/baby combo going, I’m likely to sniff them until I get light headed or my husband tells me to stop because people are staring.

When Emma was two-years-old, she didn’t feel well and had trouble sleeping through the night. One night she came in our bedroom and wanted to crawl in the bed with us. She
thrashes
violently in her sleep, so in order for Zeb and I to get any rest, she had to go back to her bed. She was crying for me as Zeb was picking her up to carry her to her room.

“Emma, you want to sleep with Mommy’s shirt?” I asked her.

“Yeah, I do Mommy. I do!”

I snatched my shirt off, threw it to Zeb and went back to sleep in my sports bra.

A few nights later, Emma was still running a fever and wanted to sleep in our bed again.

“Pweeeeeze Mommy! Can I sweep in you bed? I be weally weally still and a good gull. I will Momma!”

“Emma, I already said no. But I’ll lay down in your bed with you for a little while, okay?” Zeb told her as he scooped her up and carried her to bed.

After nursing the baby, I went in to the big girls’ room to let Zeb know I was getting in the shower.

“MOMMY! Daddy laid in Emma’s bed and snuggled wif her and not wif me! It’s NOT FAIR!” Aubrey cried.

I sighed as I laid down with Aubrey for a few minutes to console her.

“Alright, give me a kiss Aubrey.” She puckered up and gave me a kiss as I tried to escape from their bedroom to hit the showers.

As I leaned over to kiss Emma she started whining, “MOMMY! You laid down wis Aub-a-rey and not wis me! It not fair!”