by Jill Kargman
Accompanying look: As if my kid looks like Hannibal Lecter with an enormous sucky mask and will be mute for the rest of her life because of it.
Comment: “You must do this playgroup: we have a PhD in child psychology come and we meet at different people’s apartments, and it’s like three or four grand but the babies are so advanced and it’s worth it for the school process.”
Look when I politely decline: Incredulity that a mom could be so uncaring about her child’s brain development.
So I began to notice there was a breed of hypercompetitive type-A mothers whom I dubbed the Momzillas. I had my next book idea. Now I just had to get them to keep talking so I could harvest some material.
Cake.
I immersed myself in their scene, listening to diatribes on the choking hazards of nonsliced grapes or the merits of teaching Mandarin at age two. I lived my life gleaning conversational gems I couldn’t have dreamed up for fiction. In fact my editor said I might want to tone down some of the over-the-top scenes and was floored when I informed her that the ones she had singled out were all 100 percent true.
When I signed up Sadie for our first Mommy and Me class, she was tooling around the room with her diapered bum, unable to sit down. As the teacher walked in, all the other moms quietly assembled in a circle on the floor.
“Sadie, honey, come here,” I said, tapping the carpet next to me. “Come sit down Indian-style.”
Gasps.
Literally no fewer than three bejeweled hands went to their respective throats.
I felt that seventh-grade tsunami of panic that I was being talked about when I saw two moms whispering while looking at me, i.e., making the international gesture for “We’re talking about you.” But see, it wasn’t middle school, so I looked right back at them with a warm smile and said, “Is something wrong?”
They looked at each other. One grimaced and the other, caught off guard by my question, pursed her lips and leaned forward.
“Sorry, it’s just, no one really says that anymore. It’s not politically correct for the children.”
What, “Indian-style”?! You’re fucking kidding me. It’s not like my apartment is full of cigar-store headdress wearers and I’m sitting there in a Redskins jersey greeting people by holding up a palm and saying “How.”
The other mom leaned in, throwing me the parenting lingo life raft. “It’s called crisscross applesauce.”
Oh. Okay . . .
“Sadie, come here please and sit down crisscross applesauce.”
My husband and I had a good laugh that night about it, but not nearly as hard as we did the following week at a black-tie benefit for the American Museum of Natural History. Our friends Dana and Michael invite us every year, so we blow the dust off the tux and dress and hit the ’zeum in a glam night of people-watching and dining under an enormous whale. The cocktail hour, though, was in the main hallway, filled with life-sized dioramas of cave people with hairy boobs and animals about to pounce. I was click-clacking down the marble floor on my heels when I saw the Indians. Full feathers, drums, and a faux fire. They all sat around the sham flames with their legs crossed.
“Look, sweetie,” Harry said. “The Native Americans are all sitting around crisscross applesauce!”
In the end, I learned (and am still learning) to swallow the unsolicited instructions and comments made by the Experts (moms with older kids) with a boulder of salt. Because I have such an amazing mom, my instincts have generally led me in an okay direction and I feel aiiiiight. There have been a couple snags along the way, and I’m anything but conventional.
For example, at pickup one day when Sadie was three, the teachers, stifling a smile, informed me that my little smocked-dress-wearing daughter said the F word.
Mildly mortified, I asked for more detail.
“Well,” said the teacher, “Charlie told her that her dress was hideous and she told him to fuck off.”
“Oh, okay, well, she used it in the right context then!” was my reply.
I probably should have been way more horrified and punished her in some way but the truth is (shhhh!) I secretly dug it. My kid wasn’t going to take shit from anybody. So glad that apples don’t fall far from trees. Crisscross applesauce is so much more fun that way.
12
10. Ivy asking someone at the supermarket checkout when the baby was coming. It was a dude.
9. My son, Fletch, at eight months, getting a baby doll in music class and proceeding to dry-hump it, causing one mom to suggest I film it and submit it to America’s Funniest Home Videos.
8. On a crowded airplane, baby Ivy having a very bad Code Brown, the up-the-back kind. It was so fucking gnarly that when I walked her down the aisle passengers gasped as if in need of military-caliber gas masks.
7. Having Sadie ask the father of a girl in her class if he was her grandpa.
6. Fletch hitting so many kids, we started calling him Osama bin Kargman.
5. Sadie refusing to walk down the aisle as flower girl at a friend’s three-hundred-person wedding.
4. Ivy announcing in a quiet restaurant that she has a “big big doody.”
3. Fletch projectile-vomiting Similac onto Mommy’s friend’s silk dress.
2. Sadie telling an older heavyset man with a long white beard that he looks “exactly like Santa.”
. . . and the number one most blush-inducing moment . . .
1. On a packed JetBlue flight, having Sadie say (loudly), “Mommy, when the plane goes up, up, up in the sky, the wheels go up into the plane’s vagina!”
Ahhh, the humbling job of motherhood. You can try to be prim and perfect with matchy-matchy sibling outfits, the hair bows, the table manners, the polished smiles for the holiday card. And just when you think you can exhale at a crowded birthday party because your kids are fabulous, one smashes a chocolate-frosted cupcake on another’s white dress. Or pushes a tot in a bouncy castle. Or dances Hannah Montana–style . . . to organ music at a friend’s christening. Sadie used to dance so provocatively, I used to say she was four going on whore.
We can be the most preened and controlled adults, and even the most anal of us are simply forced to let go and surrender to the Fisher-Price explosion of pure chaos. In the preparent years, when a kid spazzed in a crowded theater, threw peas in a restaurant, or smacked his mommy, I just told myself what people have been telling themselves for millennia in order to propagate our fine species of Homo sapiens: when I have kids one day, they will never do that!
Oh, what a difference a broken water makes.
When the stork arrived with my oldest, Sadie, I couldn’t help but think she was the most perfect creature ever spawned. And of course all mommies shine their rose-colored lenses upon each of their babies as they innocently babble and roll and coo. And then . . . you get to know them. First of all, let the record reflect that I adore my kids. They are a spunky, quirky, colorful bunch and I relish our time together. They are a wacky crew full of incredible observations, big hearts, and electric smiles. And when I’m bummed or tired or stressed, their little arms around me in delicious hugs are the Hello Kitty or skull-’n’-crossbones Band-Aid on all that ails me.
And yet, of course, no kid is perfect. And by the way, if they were, they’d probably be boring nose-picking losers later. Our edges make us what we are, natch. Who doesn’t love a little sass and spice? But what about when that spice gets ratcheted up to the level of, say, a glob of wasabi?
Take, for example, the list above. Allow me to mention that if need be, I could probably do a top 100 list. Maybe David Letterman should hire me. This was easy! But when I think about some of the moments that made me blush, I realize
that, sure, they can be cringe-inducingly embarrassing, enough for me to press a Dr. Evil button and get sucked through the floor, but they can also be . . . lovely. Here is one example.
When Sadie “graduated” nursery school, they literally had a whole rooftop ceremony complete with “Pomp and Circumstance” playing from an iPod dock. The children lined up at the base of the stairs leading to the super-tall jungle gym. The parents were all in rows opposite the looming apparatus, cameras ready, grins wide. The head teacher then read each child’s name. The child was to climb the stairs, walk to the tippy-top of the long slide, and slide down. At the base of the slide was the assistant teacher who gave them their little diploma to fête the milestone. Applause ensued.
Kid after kid slid down to spirited clapping. It truly was the cutest thing ever, a brilliant idea to cap off their little careers as toddler students. Then came Sadie’s turn. She walked up the stairs, and my husband, Harry, and I were poised clutching the digicam with pride.
“Sadie Grace Kargman,” the teacher said.
I drew a breath excitedly as my little munchkin got to the top. But then . . . she didn’t slide down. She just stood there.
“Come on, Sadie, sweetheart!” said the teacher encouragingly after a few seconds.
Nada.
“Honey, come on down!” she coaxed again.
I could feel the stares of the parents as they started to turn each of their blond primped heads to look at us. While they all loved Sadie, they knew she could be a total spitfire, prone to clowning around, shaking her ass, saying “vagina.”
“Geez, she’s a handful!” a mom in a shoe store once said to me, shaking her head after a little whiny outburst over M&Ms.
Harrumph. You know what? I fucking hate that expression. Handful? Yeah, bitch, a handful of flowers, of Barbie shoes, of blond curls, of M&Ms. There’s no more vulnerable feeling than the suspicion your kid is being judged.
“Slide on down, kiddo!” the teacher said, a tad agitated.
Probably only thirty or forty seconds passed but they seemed like forever. My heart was throbbing, my husband was sweating, and just as I was about to draw breath to call to her myself, she casually strolled across the top of the jungle gym deck away from the slide over to the fireman’s pole and shot the fuck down like a total badass.
That’s my girl.
One of the mothers commented, “That’s Sadie! She always has to do it her way!” with a saccharine smile. I wanted to bash her face in. Hell, yeah!
Look, I was nervous and even maybe a tad blushy at first that she didn’t follow directions. Kids are taught to do what they are told, obviously. Still, it was a weirdly great moment. That pole was high and she had total balls to do it her way. The assets that are wonderful for life are not the ones that are wonderful for grammar school. When we’re adults, aren’t we supposed to go outside the box, break the chain, and have some fucking cojones? Why should I have been embarrassed? What she did was actually pretty damn cool.
So when I think about it on a macro level, I sort of turn a little mental page in the Mommy Manual. Sure, I feel terrible if my kids are freaking on a packed flight, but really, will I ever see these people again? Why sweat a liter and feel the stress hormones coursing through my veins? Why add wrinkles to my already grooved forehead over a bizarre goody-two-shoes mommy comment, a thrown object à la Russell Crowe, or some whiny behavior? They’re kids!
Deep in my gut, I know one day, when my little nuggets are older and have their wits and manners hammered into them as parents and society demand, I will feel wistful about all those inappropriate comments, the unusual hues of an off-color observation, and the unpredictability of a chaotic life. I will long for the pulse pounding that accompanies their innocent social blunders, their lack of edit buttons, their blissful lack of awareness. I will miss blushing.
13
To the Namer in Chief, Essie Nail Colors
Hello!
As a longtime fan of your shades o’ polish and their funny names, I thought I’d propose a few others, free of charge!
Petite and Perky
Bathing Beauty
Hamptons Hot Tub
Asspen
Backseat Blow Job
South Padre Island Orgy
Duplexxx
Stiletto’d Slut
Janie’s Got a Gun
Cock Gobbler
Virgin Vamp
Booze Cruise
Hummer Holly
Twilight Temptress
Battered Wife
Seductive Sally
Gstaad Roadwhore
Gondola Fondle
Sincerely yours,
Jill Kargman
14
Living in a fourth-floor walk-up with a small child is no easy feat. Now add some rodents and fraternity-boy neighbors and you can start to see what my first two years of motherhood were like. When the movers put the boxes down and left, Harry and I looked at each other over my swollen belly.
“Our first apartment as a family,” I said, looking at the fresh coat of pale yellow paint in the nursery for the baby whose sex we didn’t know yet. I know, so annoying. I hate when people do that now. “One day we’ll leave here and miss it . . .”
Wrong.
First off, let me explain that while it was a very nice location—Seventieth between Lex and Park—it was also the rat capital of New York, after Chinatown. As any Upper East Side dog owner who does late-night strolls will attest, the block is teeming. The Mellons’ garden? Undulating with bodies. The summer months, especially, are a carnival of crawlies, feasting on the refuse from Corrado bakery on the corner and the former falafel joint downstairs. (By the way, the falafel smell wafted to my pregnant nostrils, causing much upchuckage. As my dad says, it’s called falafel cause it makes you feel-awful.)
But lemme go back. We found the apartment not through a Realtor or even online but from a serial-killer-scrawled ad taped onto a phone booth. That’s right, a phone booth posting, back when there were phone booths, complete avec those scissor-sliced tabs you can rip off and call. It seemed too good to be true, a spacious full floor of a town house for a ridiculously bargain-basement price.
As we climbed up the steep stairs for the first time with the owner, we noticed that the third-floor apartment had full-on crime scene police tape covering the door.
“Whoa,” I said. “Was there, like, a dead body in there?”
The owner laughed. “Hahahaha! No, no, just some bad tenants who didn’t pay the rent and they’ve been evicted.”
“Oh, sheesh!” I replied. “Glad they’re out!”
After three months of no Law & Order tape removal I started to get a bit suspicious. One morning on the landing, I met the woman on the top floor, a lawyer who worked all the time, and asked her about the derelicts in arrears on the third floor.
“Um, is that what they told you?” she asked with a raised brow.
“What, about the people not paying and getting evicted?” I asked, confused.
“Yeah, no, that’s . . . not the real story.”
I decided to walk with her to the subway.
As it turns out, the people downstairs were not what had been described. The apartment was, in fact, a brothel. A full-on Upper East Side whorehouse filled with Eastern European hookers who serviced local guys.
“W-what?” I stammered.
“Oh yeah, I had my buzzer going all night long with drunk guys coming for a blow job. All these Fifth Avenue Wall Street types with three sleeping kids and the wife at home would say they were walking the poodle. I swear, some
nights I’d come home and there were seven dogs tied to the banister pissing themselves while Daddy got head upstairs.”
See, you can’t write this shit. I was obsessed. As it turns out, fiber-optic cables had been installed to observe the operation and after a while there was a full police raid complete with handcuffing of Svetlanas and their johns. My neighbor said she and her teenage kids looked aghast from their fifth-floor window as the drama went down and half-naked girls—literally wearing boas—were led into waiting cars.
Then she dropped the bomb: our landlord was also indicted. He was in on the whole thing. In the coming weeks a police document was taped on the front door. My neighbor and I took it down and read it, jaws on floor. The state seized the space (which is why there was the police tape) and served the owner with a packet of countless charges. The packet included the price list: $800 for sex, $600 for a beedge. We were giggling but I was horrified.
I gave birth to Sadie a few months later, and as if I wasn’t getting little enough sleep already, we got our first three a.m. horndog buzzer the one time she appeared to be sleeping.
“Hi, the password is four-one-one,” a male voice slurred.
“Excuse me?” I yelled into the intercom, heart pounding.
“The password. It’s four-one-one. I wanna see Josie.”
“Oh fuck,” I said to Harry. “It’s a john.” He ran to the window, where you could see whomever was on the stoop.
“Holy shit, he’s wearing a tuxedo,” Harry said. “The bow tie’s untied. And he’s wearing a wedding ring!”
I pressed the button to talk to our late-night ’truder.
“Let me tell you something,” I said. “I’ve got the four-one-one for you. Josie’s gone, so go back to your wife!”
We looked at each other, eyes wide, and I ran to the window. We watched him grumble disappointedly down the steps back toward Park Avenue.