This drink of alcohol is warm inside of me. I can feel my self-consciousness unknotting itself. I feel . . . comfortable?
“Amy.” I hear my voice before I even know what I’m saying. “I think what you did in there was really . . . cool.”
Amy has the kind of smile you know comes straight from her soul. I wonder if she has an Instagram. I should follow her.
“Thanks, Kiki. I think you’re really cool. How have we not met sooner?”
I’m smiling at her like a doofus, trying to come up with a funny way to say that we should make up for lost friendship time by “grabbing a coffee” soon, when my brain focuses back in on the conversation that Amy and Carla are having.
“I just have too much going on to give a shit about anybody’s lice but my own kids’,” Amy says, taking a really big sip of her own drink.
“Your kids have lice?” I don’t mean to, but I jump back. I have four kids, I can’t be combing through four heads for tiny bugs and their larvae! We did that last year, and I still find myself keeping my distance if they so much as scratch their heads once.
“No!” says Amy, laughing. “I mean, who knows, don’t kids always have lice?” Amy takes another big sip from her drink. “I mean, I don’t have time for anything right now. I barely have time to brush my teeth at night.”
I run my tongue over my teeth. Did I brush them today? I honestly can’t remember.
“My kids haven’t been to the dentist in a year and a half, and I don’t even have a job.” This Manhattan is really something. Also, it’s gone.
“You have a job,” Carla says. “You spend all day with your fucking kids. I would rather wax a thousand nutsacks a day than do that. No offense.”
“None taken! At least it’s just three of them home now. Although I don’t know how long that will last because Bernard’s teacher said that the two of them don’t seem to be making a connection and it might be time for the two of them to explore other options and I don’t know what she means by that but also she doesn’t reply to my emails.”
“Smart,” says Carla.
The silence that follows isn’t awkward at all. Which is strange because everything is awkward for me. So, maybe the silence is awkward, but I just don’t know it?
Amy is the first one to talk.
“This is really nice, guys. I can’t remember the last time I just . . . went out?”
“I can’t, either,” replies Carla. “It’s like my life is a revolving door of work, sleep, and other boring shit.”
It occurs to me that the warm feeling I have from my shoulders to my waist, this little vest of happiness I’m wearing, might be that I’m drunk? Kent says that drunkenness is a sign of a low intellect.
“I think I’m drunk!” I announce, and the two of them laugh. I think they think I’m joking, but I have been drunk fewer than three times in my life. I took DARE very seriously as a child.
“So, Amy, you said that you have a lot going on right now, Amy?” Kent has a book called How to Win Friends and Influence People, and one of the steps is to remember to say people’s names a lot, and to ask them questions about themselves.
Amy waves me off. “Oh, forget it. We all do. I’m just . . . so tired. It’s work. It’s my marriage. It’s . . . it’s so hard to be a good mom. I feel like every day that passes, I’m just closer to the end of a rapidly fraying rope. It’s like I’m juggling five bowling balls while riding a pogo stick balanced on top of a ball and if I mess anything up, the entire world is going to end and my kids are going to grow up and write memoirs about me.”
Carla is nodding, but I can’t even speak. Did I just hear what I thought I heard? That being a good mom is hard for a woman who looks like she could be on the cast of a popular late-nineties sitcom?
“Oh my God, I know,” moans Carla. “There are so many rules.”
“Yes!” I scream. “The rules! And they always change! Like, children need boundaries . . . but don’t say no to them.”
“Or,” Amy adds, “screen time will make them stupid . . . but no screen time will mean they’re behind their peer group and destined to fail at life.”
“Yes!” This feeling of validation is almost better than being drunk. “And . . . let your child decide how much to eat, but if he doesn’t eat fourteen different vegetables a day, he’s going to be malnourished and probably die.”
“Good moms don’t work full-time,” Amy points out.
“Good moms volunteer to be the class mom,” I reply.
“Good moms have clean cars and clean kids and don’t forget to take their kids to the dentist for two years.” Amy smiles.
“Good moms remember to pick your kid up from baseball! Good moms don’t let their kids have fast food for two meals a day! Good moms don’t sleep with the janitor at your kid’s school!” Carla shouts.
I hope she doesn’t mean Rusty.
“You know what being a good mom got me so far? TMJ, migraines, and carpal tunnel from building my kids’ blue-ribbon winning dioramas . . .” Amy leans over the bar to grab a bottle of alcohol and pours some in each of our glasses. “So, fuck it, ladies. Let’s be bad moms.”
Amy raises her glass, and we all clink our glasses together. My first toast!
“To being bad moms!” Amy declares, and we all take a drink.
I’m still gagging from the taste of whatever I just ingested when my phone buzzes.
KENT: If you haven’t left the grocery store yet, Bernard and I want pork tenderloin for dinner tomorrow.
“Fudge!”
Amy is pouring another round of whatever hellfire she selected, but she pauses to ask what’s the matter.
“I have to go to the supermarket.” I sigh.
Amy and Carla share a look, then pour their drinks down their throats. Neither of them look like they want to vomit.
“Fuck it,” says Carla, slamming her glass on the bar, “let’s go get some fucking groceries.”
15
Amy
Look, I’ve worked retail. I know that there’s nothing worse than someone waltzing in the front door ten minutes before you close. But sometimes it’s 9:50 PM on a weeknight and your new best friend needs to get some essentials for her family and you could use a couple bags of chips for the house anyway, and yeah, you’re kinda buzzed, so you stroll into the supermarket just before close and avoid eye contact with the manager.
“Oh my GOD, this place is depressing,” Carla says in a voice that is the exact opposite of avoiding eye contact with the manager. “Do you come here every month?”
Kiki has dutifully wiped her cart with antibacterial wipes and is navigating through the aisles in the most efficient display of grocery shopping I have ever seen, while Carla and I eat extra-cheesy chips right out of the bag. Kiki and I spent the whole car ride comparing mom notes: how Pinterest should be labeled as a terrorist organization for convincing every mom we know that birthday parties need to be themed and decorated as if the party is going to be photographed by Vogue, how crappy it feels when stay-at-home moms tell me that they can’t imagine being away from their kids every day, and how shitty it feels for Kiki when working moms treat her like she’s an idiot just because she spends her days with her kids. Carla mostly just told us we both needed to take a chill pill and offered us some weed cookies from her purse (pass).
“Fudge,” says Kiki, “I need diapers for the twins. They’re like twice as expensive here.”
“That’s ’cause they know they’ve got your balls in a vise,” Carla explains. “Formula costs more than a case of decent beer, you know why? Because they know you’re gonna pay it.”
“Just like they know if they put juice boxes with cartoon character faces on it right at kid level, you’re going to buy it because it’s easier to spend three extra dollars than it is to physically wrestle your child in public.” I can’t imagine Kiki wrestling her child, but I can see why she wouldn’t want to. She’s very petite.
We cruise through the aisles, pointing out all the way
s that the Patriarchal Capitalist Machine attacks us: diet soda in slim cans, razors for women that cost more than the same ones for men, scented tampons! I say “pointing out,” but to clarify, we are definitely using outside voices.
We’re just rounding the corner from Dairy to Cleaning Goods when I see her. The face of everything wrong with modern motherhood. No, not Gwendolyn. The “spokesmom” for a name-brand chemical company whose entire ad campaign centers on a mom who “does it all.” The campaign is called—I kid you not—“Like a Mother,” and features a C-list actress showing how much easier her life is with the help of this all-purpose cleaner that smells like lavender. In every video she’s breezing through life: working like a mother, cooking like a mother, being very hot in a bathing suit like a mother? This woman haunts me in Facebook videos that blow my cover with loud voiceover when I’m just trying to enjoy a little scroll time during a boring meeting, in commercials when I’m just trying to enjoy a marathon of a show where people suck at baking, and now in the grocery store? Do we really need a life-size cutout of a woman who likely has someone to clean her home for her looming over us in this sacred space where we come to page through gossip magazines while we wait to pay for the food our kids will whine about?
The decapitation is Carla’s idea. Or maybe Kiki’s. Kiki definitely starts it, ramming her cart repeatedly into the display while shouting, “I’ll show you how to clean like a mother!” It’s Carla who performs the final ritual, ripping off the cardboard head and presenting it to Kiki like an offering.
“For our Queen,” she says, bowing down, then hoisting Kiki’s little body into the cart. If I have to pinpoint where our night changes, it’s this moment. Because once Kiki is named our Queen, once we get her into the cart and start referring to it as a chariot, once we allow ourselves to get sidetracked by the impulse purchases at the endcaps (a lemon-shaped plastic dish to store . . . your lemon?), we are no longer three moms at the grocery store. We are three wild animals with debit cards, spraying diet soda like we’re NBA players celebrating a championship, taste-testing the flavored lube (which does not taste like cherries), and moving all the full-fat yogurt to the front of the dairy case because who the fuck decided our yogurt had to be fat free?!
It’s clear during checkout, as Carla slips her number to the manager and Kiki begins to sort her coupons like she’s the star of her own reality show about extreme frugality, that I will never be able to return to this Stop-N-Save again.
16
Carla
Jaxon is supposed to wake me up by seven, but he either didn’t try hard enough or I was unresponsive, because by the time I snap out of my near coma, it was time to leave ten minutes ago.
Lucky for me, Jax knows the drill. I slap on some makeup and perfume; he grabs a Pedialyte from the pantry and cracks it open for the drive to school. If I can chug a liter of this shit before drop-off, I’ll be okay.
Lucky for Jaxon, his mom only needs six minutes to go from hot mess to just hot. If you can’t apply mascara while driving a stick shift, you have no business driving a car.
“Ma,” Jaxon shouts from the kitchen, “why is there a cardboard lady head on the kitchen counter?”
17
Kiki
Kent didn’t wake up when I came in last night. He didn’t wake up when I dropped a gallon of milk on the kitchen floor and tried to clean it up with a broom. He didn’t wake up when I tripped over his underpants trying to sneak into our bedroom. But he’s awake now, and the smell of his coffee breath makes me want to puke all over him.
“Keeks, babe, you feeling okay?” The back of his hand is on my forehead, checking me for a fever. I do feel sweaty. And cold. Should my skin hurt? I remember the time I was drunk in college, when my roommate and I split a Mike’s Hard Lemonade and I immediately threw up in our sink and she threatened to report me to our Resident Assistant if I didn’t let her borrow my Abercrombie hoodie. This is worse.
I want Kent to leave, and to take his pleated khakis with him. All the things I usually love about him—the smell of his cheap generic bar soap, the sight of his biceps in a polo shirt—make me want to drop dead. After what seems like a hundred years, Kent is done taking my temperature.
“You’re burning up. You forgot to use hand sanitizer at that PTA thing, didn’t you?”
Downstairs, I can hear the kids going absolutely bonkers.
“Take a vitamin, you’ll feel better,” Kent says, heading for the door. “I’ll be home around five thirty. The kids are starving, by the way. And the floor is really sticky.”
18
Amy
One of my eyes seems to be glued shut, but with my one good eye, the room begins to come into focus. It appears the sun has already risen. That . . . can’t be right. I peel my eyelid up. I slept in my mascara? Jesus. I slept in my clothes? What the actual hell happened last night?
Next to me is a life-size cardboard cutout of a popular TV spokesperson used to advertise cleaning products. She’s headless. Each of my heartbeats echoes inside of my head, and I realize with horror that I’m . . . hungover. Not “I had two glasses of wine with book club last night and I’m a little fuzzy this morning.” No, this is “I disassociated from my body and my life last night and became a college sophomore in a thirty-something-year-old body.”
The stairs seem particularly treacherous today, like someone has rearranged them while I was sleeping. Why am I so sore? Why are my legs so tired? My brain serves up a small flash of me teaching Carla and Kiki a short barre routine in the cereal aisle. “Tuck! Tuck! Tuck!” Carla scooped her hips back and forth like a natural. Kiki peed a little bit, which is totally normal—she’s had four kids.
“MOM.”
Dylan and Jane are sitting at the kitchen island, expectantly.
“Where’s our breakfast?” My instinct is to panic: to grab two frying pans and four eggs and get my babies fed. It takes two pans because they have different breakfast requirements: Dylan will have two “scrambied” eggs with sausage links. Jane will have two “poachies” with veggie bacon. And I do reach for the pans, but there’s a dirty baking sheet on the stovetop covered in . . . nachos? Or, at least some tortilla chips covered in what must have been cheese before they were burned to a crisp. I made nachos last night? I pull a few cheese-crusted chips from the baking sheet and turn to assess the situation.
I’m . . . possibly still drunk. I have no business operating anything that involves a flame. And Dylan and Jane are big enough to reach the cupboards. They’re smart enough to add milk and cereal together in a vessel of some sort. They’re old enough to know that toast is just bread that’s been placed in a toaster. You just push one button.
Instead of the eggs, I reach for my phone.
“MOM. What are you doing?” Dylan is not amused.
“I’m calling the cops,” I say calmly. “If your breakfast is missing, I think we should get the authorities involved.”
I think this is the best joke I’ve ever made, but Dylan and Jane look at each other like I should be institutionalized. I’ve been standing up too long, and my body is starting to break into a cold sweat. Please, I pray to any god that is listening, don’t let me puke in front of my kids.
“You’ve got twenty minutes till the bus comes. The stop is on the corner. Put your dishes in the dishwasher before you go.”
The two of them protest as I shuffle out of the kitchen and prepare to climb the stairs. Dylan and Jane can’t believe what they’re hearing today. They don’t know how to ride a bus, they cry! How will they know when to get off? Does it even have seatbelts? Is it safe? And they’re serious. My kids are smart, capable children who claim that they don’t know how to enter a motor vehicle, sit on their butts, and disembark when they reach their destination? Have I really never made them take the bus? It’s a free service provided by the school district. It picks them up less than twenty-five yards from our house. Plus, my car is still in the McKinley parking lot.
By the time I reach the top of th
e stairs, which might have taken anywhere between two and twenty-seven minutes, I can hear cabinets banging in the kitchen. I smile. They’re gonna be okay. They’re gonna be better than okay. They’re gonna be functioning members of society. Today it’s breakfast, but tomorrow it could be doing their own laundry. Changing their own sheets. Packing their own lunches. In a few decades, they’ll pay their own mortgages and finance their own cars! But first, the bus.
“You’ll figure it out,” I call weakly from the landing. “I believe in you!”
THE CURE FOR A HANGOVER HASN’T CHANGED SINCE COLLEGE. It takes thirty-two ounces of red Gatorade, two Advil, and a big, greasy breakfast: three fried eggs, over hard, white toast, and any kind of fried potato product.
When was the last time I ate a meal alone? A real meal, not just shoveling chips and salsa into my mouth while standing at the counter scrolling through work emails at 10:30 PM.
I’ve read the entire newspaper. The real newspaper. The one that’s made of paper. Usually, I let them collect on the front step until they’ve become a massive, soggy mess, and then I throw them in the recycling. I could cancel my subscription, but having a newspaper subscription is one of those things that makes me feel like I’m a real grown-up. Actually reading it? I feel like nobody could possibly doubt that I am a woman who has my life together, as long as they don’t get close enough to smell the booze seeping out of my pores. I read every inch of that newspaper. I actually chewed my food before swallowing it. And forty-five minutes later, when I had finally read the very last obituary—rest in peace, Beverly Howard—I felt great. Relaxed, even.
At this point in the day, I’d typically be in my sixth meeting. It would overlap with two other meetings, so I’d arrive late and leave early, offering apologies to everyone in the room like this wasn’t their fault for seeing that my calendar was full and booking a meeting with me anyway. I almost feel guilty, except I don’t. I’m only a part-time employee. I don’t have a 401(k) or healthcare benefits. I don’t get paid enough to answer emails before the sun rises, or to spend my Christmas on the phone with Dale, talking through his latest stupid idea. I get paid to do half of one job, three days a week. That’s exactly why I took the job.
Bad Moms Page 9