Blacklisted from the PTA

by Davidson, Lela

  Blacklisted from the PTA by Lela Davidson

  Printed Edition ISBN: 978-1-936214-43-3

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2011923314

  ©2011 Lela Davidson. All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission of the copyright owner except in the case of brief quotations embodied in articles or reviews.

  Author Photo: Calotype-Photography.com

  Published by Jupiter Press, imprint of Wyatt-MacKenzie

  jupiterpress@wyattmackenzie.com

  For John, Alexander, and Gabriella, my daily support and inspiration.

  FOREWORD

  by Lisa Quinn

  Author of Life’s Too Short to Fold Fitted Sheets (Chronicle Books)

  THERE IS A CERTAIN ACTRESS IN THIS MONTH’S VOGUE. SHE’S striking a glamorous pose in her perfectly appointed Tribeca kitchen, preparing “YUMMY!” locally grown, organic, butternut and beeswax after school snacks in an $865 Michael Kors crepe flounce skirt and 7-inch Louboutins. Her hair looks amazing, her skin sun-kissed, and while there appear to be a few toys tossed about, there is not an actual child to be found. Curious. In the interview, the starlet suggests several times that the key to all this happiness is finding balance.

  Duh. When will women ever learn?

  Is it bad that I want throw a greased watermelon at her to see how well she maintains that balance in those platform heels?

  The moment I met Lela Davidson I knew we were kindred spirits. She lives on the perfect cul-de-sac in the perfect suburb where the lawns are pristine and the neighbors always wave. But here’s the thing: she’s no perfect mother—and proud of it. While some moms spend entire evening tirelessly manufacturing impressive crepe paper peonies for the bake sale centerpiece, our gal would rather laugh than fret. She understands that a smile on her kid’s face is more important than a gold star on a chart somewhere, and if she’s wearing Louboutins in the kitchen, you better believe the kids are at Grandma’s and she’s not making after school snacks. While her Prada bag may fake, she’s the real deal. And if those women in the PTA can’t handle it? Well, their loss is our gain.

  The stories in this book are self-deprecating, honest, and funny. Lela Davidson opens up so we can too. You’re going to love it.

  INTRODUCTION

  I DIDN’T PLAN TO WRITE THIS BOOK. WHAT I WANTED TO WRITE was a novel, one of those quirky romantic titles that get made into a movie starring Reese Witherspoon or Kate Winslet. I didn’t know how to do that, so I set out to learn. Write what you know, the experts said. But what did I know? I knew how to quit a real job and pack up a family to move from Seattle to Texas, and that the Pampered Chef was not the vehicle to my self-actualization. All I seemed to be good at was sitting on the driveway drinking boxed Chardonnay and talking to my friends. So that’s what I wrote—the stories that made us laugh. I hope they make you laugh, too.

  More importantly, I hope that each and every one of you find your way to the PTA’s blacklist.

  Learn more about Lela:

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Birth, Babies, and Beyond

  The Terrible Twos, Give or Take a Few

  Suburban Bliss

  Blacklisted

  Happily Ever After

  The Journey

  Me Time

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Birth: You Can’t Plan It

  THE MORNING MY DAUGHTER WAS BORN I ROSE WITH THE SUN, listened to birds singing, and timed contractions. Then I called my doula, whose job it was to ensure that all doctors, nurses, anesthesiologists, surgeons, friends, family, and husbands, stuck to—The Birth Plan.

  In case you’re unfamiliar with the concept, The Birth Plan consists of detailed instructions regarding how your baby will enter the world. It is formulated in the comfort of your living room while you and your doula sip tea and admire each other’s pedicures. The actual birth takes place in a greenish room where instead of chamomile, you would gladly accept heroin from a street dealer should one conveniently appear.

  After suffering through one unplanned cesarean, I wanted to actualize my womanhood by pushing that second baby out. Most women worship the doctor who offers a scheduled CSection. Not me; I’m special. I opted for a VBAC—vaginal birth after cesarean—and in so doing also made my choice for minimal pharmaceutical assistance.

  “Natural childbirth was fine, Honey,” my mother told me. “But that was before we had the drugs.”

  I told myself I didn’t need the drugs. For hours I labored according to The Birth Plan. I breathed, counted, and groaned. It sucked. I got stuck in the bathtub, unwilling to move. Even when the water got cold I stayed there moaning like an injured cow. The contractions came so fast and lasted so long that they merged into one continuous, gnawing, increasingly unbearable pain.

  After eight hours, the physical torture finally brought me to my senses. I agreed to take the drugs. Just a little mind you— just enough to blunt the edge. But Demerol, it turns out, is a gateway drug. Forget natural; I wanted the needle. My Grape Nut eating, placenta-planting doula was disappointed when I requested the epidural, but she supported me anyway. It was, after all, a legitimate stipulation in Plan B, paragraph 3 of The Birth Plan.

  I spent the next several hours turning from side to side, elevating one or another part of my body, and visualizing my baby descending the birth canal. This is WAY easier when you’re high! But my baby didn’t want to come out. We would get her just to the brink and she’d twist herself back around, sunny side up. After hours of monitoring and measuring and changing position, fearing that without intervention she’d be stuck in there forever, we made our move.

  My husband smiled. The doula frowned. I surrendered. Nurses shaved me and counted instruments, then rolled me to the operating room. Suddenly I felt a sharp popping sensation unlike the slow and steady agony of labor. When I told the doctors about it, eyes opened wide and the surgeon ordered the nurse to check the baby’s heart rate. Again.

  “You’re going under,” the doctor snapped. I watched the mask cover my nose and mouth.

  Before I was fully aware, someone handed me a wriggly, sweet smelling bundle. Her fresh skin peeked out at me from beneath pink flannel. She squirmed in my arms and arched her disproportionately large head toward my breast.

  I couldn’t have planned it better.

  Maybe Mommy needed a basket full of Midol because I snapped. “I’m not the Easter Bunny. Okay?”

  Making Babies: Oh, the Glamour!

  I HAD MY LAST BABY WHEN I WAS THIRTY. AND WHEN I SAY LAST, I mean that’s it. I won’t be one of those women taking prenatal vitamins and Boniva at the same time. I don’t have the energy.

  I waited until the ripe old age of twenty-eight to have my first child, then followed up with a second only twenty-two months later. I had to work quickly because way back then we were afraid to get pregnant after thirty-five. A lot has changed in the last ten years. Pregnancy over forty is now accepted and, if you believe the celebrity photos, easy.

  As I inch toward forty, the biological clock still ticks. Instead of, “have-a-baby-have-a-baby,” it now says, “just-onemore-just-one-more.” I fantasize that I’d do everything right this time. I would coordinate perfect outfits, offer only breast milk and homemade organic baby food, and bathe myself every day. I’d even blow out my hair and put on makeup.

  I indulge this dream for about a minute before I remember the sleepless nights, continuous feeding, and emotional extremes. Between post-partum, PMS, and peri-menopause, I can’t imagine what older moms—even celebrities—are going through, but I suspect if you knocked on their doors at nine in the morning, they wouldn’t be re
d carpet ready.

  Despite the realities of baby rearing, glitz and ease is exactly what we see in those magazines we sneak read at the grocery checkout. People complain that Hollywood glamorizes young pregnancy by holding up Jamie Lynn Spears and Ashlee Simpson as role models, but I’m more offended by the forty-isthe-new-twenty-two celebrities that are selling us regular women a bill of goods.

  • Gorgeous Naomi Watts gave birth to a second son at age forty. She claims to have lost all her baby weight breastfeeding. I’m sure it had nothing to do with her live-in personal chefs and trainers.

  • Over-forty Australian actress Rachel Griffiths plays an American on Brothers and Sisters. She’s pregnant with her third baby and like our homegrown celebs, she has a penchant for unique names. She already named one son Banjo. Let’s hope age has wised her up. If not, she may end up with a cute little Fiddle or Harmonica.

  • Desperate Housewife Marcia Cross gave birth to twin daughters at age forty-five. Seriously? At least she’ll be able to use her AARP travel discount to take them on their senior trip.

  • Supermodel Stephanie Seymour had another baby at forty. Paparazzi caught her frolicking in the surf. Is it wrong to hate her? There’s not enough Pilates in the world to get me into a bikini post-childbirth—and I started young.

  • Perhaps the wisest is none other than the daughter of the King himself, Lisa Marie Presley. She welcomed twin girls at age forty. She had the foresight to birth two other children sixteen and nineteen years ago, so now she’s got live-in childcare. Now that’s planning ahead.

  I’d love to see these A-listers before their morning triple tall latte. Show me the beautiful people frantically chasing down a toddler, trying to get neon poop out of the carpet, and dripping in spit up. Then I’ll be impressed.

  My advice? If you’re planning to get pregnant over forty, do yourself a favor and cancel your subscription to People magazine.

  If I Had Tweeted My Labor

  I AM A LITTLE ADDICTED TO MY SOCIAL NETWORKS, ESPECIALLY Facebook. I’m not alone. I love these updates so much it almost makes me wish I could have another baby.

  Almost. I like to think I’d exercise restraint if I were having a baby in this social media-saturated world, but who am I kidding? I’d be so much worse than a few Facebook updates. I would Twitter the whole thing.

  OMG! Just started timing contractions. Totally on schedule. This is going to be soooo great. Can’t wait to start breathing exercises!

  I <3 #childbirth! Contractions R starting to hurt. Husband wants 2 go 2 the hospital but I’m calling the doula. No drugs! #naturalchildbirth

  Wow this hurts! Breathing exercises not providing much relief. Contractions are WAY worse than in pictures.

  Threw up on the way to hospital. Husband totally freaking out. #natural childbirth ?

  Trying to Tweet in the tub w/o wrecking phone. #pain

  Laboring in water = overrated. Tub now freezing but it hurts too bad to get out. WTF? Who thought of this?

  Way better now. Drugs will do that. Something with ‘cain’ in the name took the edge off. LOL Waiting for my #epidural!

  Dr. Feelgood just asked if I was in the middle of a contraction! ROTFLMAO! I’ll show him a contraction!

  Epidurals=NOT overrated!!

  9.5? WTF is 9.5? When is this monster going 2 get out of me? Seriously, suck this thing out NOW!”

  Totally should have gotten that one final pedicure. #vanity

  I give up. They’re shaving me now. Getting this kid out one way or another. K, the other way… #cesarean

  Does anyone speak anesthesiologist? What part of ‘Yes, I can feel that’ does he not understand?!?!?!?!?!?!?!

  I know I would have been unceremoniously separated from my phone before the actual moment of birth, but it would have been worth it. I mean, just think of how many new followers I’d get.

  Confessions of an Earth Mama Wannabe

  I WAS PREGNANT IN SEATTLE, WHERE I SHOPPED AT TRADER JOE’S, grew herbs on my condo lanai, and reused the protective sleeves on my piping hot lattes. I tried to be an Earth Mama, I really did. Before my son was born I was determined to attempt cloth diapers. Yes, attempt. Not exactly committed to the cause, but taking credit for the effort.

  I might have been stronger in my conviction for green diapering had I not been privy to the memory of my mother hunched over a putrid white bucket, rinsing a thick septic mess of my brother’s nappies. However, we’d come a long way since the stinking 70s. In my 1998 urban existence I had access to something my mother never could have imagined or afforded from the secluded farmhouse of my childhood: diaper service. With support I could be a Good Mother, an Earth Mama even.

  I could try, anyway.

  It might have gone down differently if not for the circumcision. Like most of my contemporaries, I had my baby boy snipped shortly after his birth. On the West Coast, this—along with not eating the placenta, or at least planting it in the yard under a Very Special Tree—put a serious pall on my potential for environmentally friendly mothering. I would have to pick a lot of blackberries in the park, do hours of yoga, and eat buckets full of granola to make up for this crime.

  At the nurses’ suggestion—to avoid diaper rash on his extra-Extra-EXTRA sensitive parts—we used disposable diapers for the first week at home. Throwaway Velcro was my friend, as was the space age mock-cotton that held about a gallon of “liquid.” Eager to prove my nature-loving worthiness, I circled the two-week mark on the calendar and called the service to schedule my initial delivery. On the big day I received a ten-foot stack of new diapers and a contraption for storing the soiled ones. The next week they would swap out the used for fresh.

  I quickly got to work trying out the new diapers. My son humored me, lying calmly through my struggles with the intricate diaper origami. Ten years ago you needed an engineering degree to maneuver a cloth diaper. My son and I blew through four outfits that afternoon, in part because of the gaping diaperto-skin issues, and partially because my dear progeny refused to pace himself.

  Still, I was determined. Right up until it came time to pack for a weekend trip away. I calculated the number of diapers I’d need for the two-day trip and piled them on the bed. Turns out you go through a lot more cloth diapers than disposable because, in contrast to their Earth-ravaging counterparts, reusable diapers hold approximately a quarter teaspoon of pee. I filled an entire suitcase with the mountain of diapers. I sighed, crossed my arms, squinted, huffed. Then I took the diapers out of the suitcase, loaded them back into the sack in which they had arrived, and called the service.

  “This just isn’t working out.”

  “Ma’am, don’t you at least want to give it until the end of the day?”

  “It’s been six hours. I get it.”

  It was not the first time in my brief tenure as Mother that I realized things would not always proceed as planned. But the pacifier incident is another story.

  One-fourth of a day. Not bad for an herb-growing, lattesipping, ozone-destroying Earth Mama Wannabe.

  My daughter looked like I’d just wiped out the entire balance of her iTunes account.

  The Legend of My Ten-Pound Baby

  DESPITE THE EVER-INCREASING RESPONSIBILITIES, THERE ARE NO promotions in motherhood. You’ll never get an annual review followed by a fat bonus and a healthy raise. There’s a once-a-year day of gratitude, but the rest of the time we take our props where we can. It is not enough that we (almost) singlehandedly grew an entire human being inside our bodies and then managed to keep the little sucker (literally) alive in the face of deadly car seats and crib bars. We value what we can quantify as credit for a job well done.

  I earned a gold star for my daughter’s birth weight. Despite a carefully constructed birth plan, an ancient Korean midwife’s fetal turning technique, and my doula’s soothing-sounds-ofthe-snow-owl CD, my second child, a precious flannel bundle, had to be pried out of me under anesthesia—with a big knife. She was born gray with an Apgar score of one, and nearly kil
led us both.

  Why? She was a ten-pound baby, that’s why. Ten.

  Okay, 9 pounds 14 1/2 ounces. I embellished, but when you have a baby that big you’re allowed to round up. An ounce and a half isn’t an exaggeration; it’s a shot of tequila. (Which may have taken the edge off the cheese-grater-on-nipple sensation of breastfeeding.) I’m just saying, it wasn’t a big fib. From Day One, my daughter was a 10-pound baby. For the last decade, all my kick-ass-ness as a mother has been implicit when I casually mention, “That one? Ten pounds.”

  Okay, just under ten pounds. Who’s counting?

  I would have perpetuated the legend indefinitely, but on her tenth birthday my daughter asked to look at her baby book. This couldn’t go well. Surely she’d notice her book consisted of a few good pages, followed by a few more of random baby items, and then two-dozen blanks. I figured as long as we didn’t break out the meticulous record of Big Brother’s first year for a sideby-side comparison, she might never know that she was conceived primarily as a playmate for our favorite child.

  I shouldn’t have worried. All she wanted to see was her birth certificate. My husband and I beamed over her shoulder as she flipped through the handful of pages devoted to her first days. Then the trouble started. There on the first page of the sub-standard baby book was her birth announcement, the one I had created with my own breast milk-stained fingers.

  “Do you see what I see?” I asked my husband. “What?”