by Jill Kargman
Guys who hear “Crazy Train” and sing out “Ay, ay, ay”
I know it’s a tic or something like Tourette’s where it’s literally uncontrollable, but that doesn’t make it less annoying. For as long as I can remember, when Ozzy’s guitars start rocking that song, dudes bust out the opening no matter where they are. It’s seriously like they can’t help themselves. I was once in a bar where it played on the jukebox and fifty of them sang it out. Painful!
People who bite their nails all the way to the white half moon thing
I’m sorry but ew. I was a nail biter as a child and it drove my parents crazy, but my nibbling was more of the grooming variety rather than mutilation. I basically bit off the long white part; but sometimes on other people I see it go down all the way to the nub like Frodo’s and it freaks me out.
Juice cleanse people
You want your green juice? Go for it! Enjoy! But why oh why can’t people do it in secret? You know, you don’t have to tell everyone you know how great you feel, right? It’s kind of like the lady doth protest too much: “I feel so great and have sooo much energy!” Sure ya do. Naturally you don’t hear about the hunger pangs and diarrhea.
Burning Man evangelists
Make it stop. Please. My friend Trip, whom I adore more than anything and who is Sadie’s beloved godfather, brought a guy to dinner at my house once. The guy seemed affable enough during cocktails, but somehow when we sat down to eat, someone mentioned the word desert, which sent him on a thirty-minute solo rant, pontificating on the myriad benefits of the annual festival. I heard about the bartering and the camaraderie in the sand, and the pieces of papyrus everyone wrote their sins or bad memories on and how they put them all in a Smurf village house and set it on fire. Just sitting through his diatribe was hellish enough—I know physically going would be an actual trip to Hades.
Mimes
Don’t even get me started on those fuckers. As one of the most talkative humans alive, I can’t imagine there isn’t some darkness underneath the white-painted face and creepy black tears. Stay away. When Dustin Hoffman pushed one to the ground in Tootsie, I felt less alone in the world.
Guys with ZZ Top beards who are not in ZZ Top
Dude, I know you’re an artisanal pickle maker in Bushwick, but must you have an ISIS-length belly-rubbing beard? It’s a trend that is so off-putting, because so many of them would actually be cute if I pinned them down and took a Gillette to that pile of chin pubes.
People who put those crinkly stretch headbands on babies
Sorry, moms, but that shit is akin to child abuse.
Men who ask for their guac mild
Now, this is a personal experiment I have conducted and I can attest: Men who have mild guac suck in bed. Get some fucking spice up in there, lame-o! Maybe they don’t want firerrhea and spicy poo burning their anii or something but it’s snoozeville. Do not go home with a guy who orders that.
People who have Bumper Badgers
Guys, live a little! Yes, your bumpers won’t have scratches, that’s the good news. The bad news is, you look like a massive idiot with the words Bumper Badger emblazoned on your ride. Seriously, that’s like people who keep plastic on their furniture or use paper plates at home because they don’t want to potentially break china. We’re all gonna be dead, so just fucking live and be free. Carpe the fucking diem, yo.
Moms with pigtails
Okay, if you’re going to the gym or skiing, great, get that hair back any way you want. But I’ve seen moms trying to look cool and mellow with low piggies with their overalls or some other trappings of youthful not-giving-a-shitness and it bugs.
Men in mandals
Put those toes away! Flip-flops are one thing, but full elaborate footwear to roam the streets with hairy toes is unacceptable unless you’re in the rural Pacific Northwest. I see guys walking around New York all the time in Birkenstocks or Jesus sandals, and while I thought it was so hot in 300, they were ancient Spartans, not modern cosmopolites.
Chinese restaurant people who swear there is no MSG
Liars! They lie. I always say, “No MSG,” which I think somehow translates to “extra MSG.” I know this because my fingers swell into kielbasa-size snausages and the only rings that would fit me are Hula-Hoops.
Self-proclaimed oenophiles
Sorry, but I don’t care about the tannins. Go see Sideways and knock yourself out at some wino circle jerk, but it’s so snobby when people take the wine list and say, “Allow me—I’m a real oenophile.” If it’s red and comes from Château Screwcap or even a fucking box, give me an IV drip and I’ll polish that shit off. Your three-hundred-dollar bottle is wasted on me.
Southern women in Manhattan
Okay, now, I have friends living all over the South. I have some southern friends living here in New York, as well. But even they will admit there is a particular breed that moves here and is hell-bent on climbing the social ranks. And unlike brash New Yorkers, who wear all their aggression or ambition on their sleeves, these dames all have big smiles and bake for Brick Church or join charity boards but can be the most gossipy backbiting “ladies” you have ever seen! It’s all sugary smiles but schadenfreudey news of affairs and whose apartment was twenty mill, or whose kid was rejected by eight schools. Oh, their little blond boys are all in smocked overalls, girls’ T-strap shoes, and Little Lord Fauntleroy velvet jackets, but they are, BTdubs, the first ones to punch your kid in the face.
People in the audience at the Oscars who clap harder for some dead people than other dead people
Guys, that’s so mean! I know, I loved Robin Williams so much, too, but that old-timey gaffer was a person, too! Heartbreaking.
People who don’t clean up their mess of empty sugar packets and spilled skim at Starbucks
Bitch, pick up your shit. It’s just rude! I am the custodian of my local Starbucks, cleaning up those soggy straw wrappers and stray stirrers. Fuck, people!
Weaklings who put their fingers in their earholes when an ambulance drives by
I’m sorry but it’s just not that loud! Sure, it can be jarring, but buck up, it’s not earsplitting, you pussies!
Women who get wet from Michael Bublé’s voice
Okay, I heard that there was even one who claimed that she had an orgasm with no other stimulation than the sound of his croon. Now, if I had been present when this woman said this, I would have done an actual eighth-grader bullshit sneeze in her face, but it’s simply hearsay. The man who melts hearts and jizzes champagne could never even slightly dampen my Calvins, so I just find it hard to believe. To each her own…
I swear it was nearly 99 degrees in New York during the last months of my first pregnancy. My swollen feet were the size of the Intrepid, with pig-in-a-blanket toes shoved into tragic flip-flops. My skinny single friends were all having sexy, balmy summers, dancing on tables at Sunset Beach on Shelter Island or at Bungalow 8 in New York City. I was a beached whale, sans the crowd of Greenpeace supporters that beached whales usually garner (and sans the beach; I stayed in the city).
Throughout my pregnancy I’d seen the Bugaboo-pushing mommy clique crossing Fifth Avenue in stilettos. They had clearly all “bonded in Lamaze,” or preggo yoga or while ordering custom crib linens and bumpers. They chatted about “wheels up” time for NetJets to Aspen and/or how “the traffic is such a bitch to Teterboro.” I watched them carefully during my first pregnancy. I found this preened pack interesting, but I couldn’t relate.
When I got close to the gaggle on occasion, they freaked me the fuck out. Once, one of them asked when I was scheduling an elective C-section. Uh…what? Three other knocked-up ladies confronted me in a semicircle when they heard about my barbaric plan to give birth via vag like a coconut-cracking savage. “You absolutely must get a cesarean. It’s all planned and you get a blowout and mani and it’s just slice ’n’ dice!” Like everything else on the Upper East Side, it seemed that giving birth was a matter of “staffing up” and getting the “right” people, proces
s, and look. After all, you want to look fierce in that postsurgery selfie.
“Believe me,” said another, leaning in conspiratorially, “your husband will thank you for going C. Mine sure did,” with a my-vagina-is-tighter-than-yours-you-debased-mammal wink.
Newsflash: Peer pressure works. At my next appointment I asked my gyno about the possibility. She shut the discussion down right away, saying she only did emergency C-sections, unlike some of her colleagues, the “society” OBs who would literally cut around a Duke basketball game or a trip to Eden Rock. I shared how some women I knew reacted as if delivering through the birth canal was like standing in a forest and shitting out your baby like a caveperson. My gyno laughed and told me to get used to that kind of attitude. She predicted I’d hear many such judgments for the next twenty years. Of course, she was right. The mommy clique hated the name Sadie and thought it was “too old lady” (I prefer “Ellis Island chic”). Later I would get opinions about how and how long to nurse, how to swaddle, how to babyproof, how to get my baby walking earlier, how to guarantee a Mozart, an Einstein, the works. Much later there was the mom who told me she thought it was “wildly inappropriate” that I brought my twelve-year-old to the Broadway show Hedwig and the Angry Inch, which is about a transgender woman. I told her it was really just about love and being yourself. I got a snort and an eye roll in reply. And once a girl teased Sadie for not having a country house or stables, and her mother emailed me, furious after Sadie replied, “I don’t care, I hate horses anyway.”
Early on, I was vulnerable to this shit because I was a first-time preggo. And also because I had the worst case of placenta brain in history. I felt like a complete pointy-capped dunce, so was open to “advice.” I was scatterbrained and forgetful. I’d walk into a room and forget what I went in for, like my great-grandma. And I was supersensitive.
And the judgyness didn’t stop with pregnancy and childbirth, which, by the way, was in a supply closet filled with latex gloves piled to the ceiling. It was fucking Ecuador. My gyno said it was the worst birth boom she’d seen in her career: The halls were filled with screaming, laboring women and there was a two-hour wait for epidurals. I wanted to write an article called “Don’t Have a Baby in July,” because the new moron residents turn over and blindly prick you seven times before finding a vein, but also it’s jam-packed, ’cause when it starts to get colder in November, everybody bangs. Hence summer baby boom.
I eventually got morphine and was judged for that, which would only be the beginning. Little did I know, I would be a walking, talking target for unsolicited advice from strangers in cafés about my kid not having enough layers, having too many layers, how to hold her, that she shouldn’t be eating that, etc.
When Sadie began walking, I signed up for a baby activity class, not knowing a soul. When I first wheeled in with my shitty stroller, I felt like it was middle school all over again, with people looking each other over and, worse, looking each other’s kids over. I smiled and was friendly but felt oddly shy, even though I’m the least shy person on the planet. But I didn’t have a wingman and clearly didn’t have all the proper gear or lingo or locavore green-eco-sustainable-organic baby snacks.
The teacher came in and sat down cross-legged and asked everyone to sit in a circle. Sadie was running around and I patted the floor next to me and said, “Sadie, sweetie, can you come sit down Indian-style?”
Vinyl record scratch. It wasn’t even crickets, it was gasps.
My eyes met those of two horrified-looking ladies, who were whispering and looking at me. “What?” I asked, nervous.
“Um, no, it’s fine, I mean, it’s just—no one says Indian-style anymore. You’re supposed to say crisscross applesauce.”
Oh.
This sounds melodramatic, but because of: (a) extreme sleep deprivation, and (b) the Godfather day of my period which made my bedsheet look like a Law & Order crime scene with police tape around the four posts, I was fighting back tears. I smiled and did the class with a lump in my throat, but inside I wanted to scream and cry. Fucking crisscross applesauce! Are you fucking kidding me?! I hated these people. They all dressed the same: white skinny jeans and Tory Burch flats. They all bought the same gourmonster ten-dollars-a-serving baby food and they all had the same boring conversations about The Help (their staff, not the book). I loathed these moms. I was an outcast. What to do?
Well, the answer was: Write about it. My husband encouraged me to jot down the ridick encounters I regaled him with, and it helped and was fun. I started thinking about writing a novel about my situation and kept notes on the shit I was seeing daily. All those notes became Momzillas, a novel about a loner mom, Hannah, in New York City. Hannah was originally from a red state but was me through and through. The book wound up being published in fourteen languages and NBC bought the adaptation rights. I was euphoric—I imagined a future in which I could comfort women all over who also felt the same way.
Of course, Ivy and Fletch followed Sadie and I continued taking notes—because the lambasting didn’t stop. I hated breastfeeding. I nursed Sadie and it killed, complete with bleeding nips, so I threw in the burp cloth after I almost burned down the house sterilizing the Frankenstein pump in a boiled-down pot of water. All three kids are fine, by the way. But you’d think I’d killed an endangered animal the way the mommy clique judged me.
“How is the nursing coming?” one momzilla asked.
“Oh, I’m bottle-feeding, actually,” I said.
She looked at me the way a ninety-three-year-old looks at an ATM.
Her response: “Shame on you.”
Normally I would have a million retorts from “It’s really none of your goddamn business” to “Stop about the immunities, it’s not like I’m living in the fucking Congo!” but instead I muttered something about different strokes, turned the corner to Seventy-fourth Street, and burst into tears. There’s something so weirdo and entitled about people who just barrel-ass in with their two cents—I wanted to build a fortress around my family out of all the piles of copper pennies people chucked my way and shield them from the white noise of every idiot, staffed-up socialite who considered herself an expert in parenting my children.
Years passed and I still hadn’t really found my mom posse. Five to seven P.M. with little kids and no close friends makes a girl lonely. And makes her drink. I know this sounds alcoholicky, but I couldn’t’ve gotten through those early years without my vino. I cracked the Pinot Noir at 4:59 on many an occasion. I rarely poured a second glass, but I practically shook as I removed the cork until I could guzzle that first one. These days, I have friends who are always up for a tots ’n’ tonic—kiddie dinner for the small fries and Bellinis for us—but I didn’t have that kind of company in the lonely diaper days when I craved that company the most.
Momzillas, the show, never got made, and I realized from watching network television that even if it had, it never would’ve had the chutzpah and soul I’d’ve wanted. I wrote more novels and then eventually wound up writing an essay collection to try to give voice to some of those same issues. It was called Sometimes I Feel Like a Nut and it really crystallized what would become the voice of the TV show I wanted to make one day.
When I met with the fabulous Andy Cohen and my personal goddess Lara Spotts at Bravo, we were exploring television ideas, because they thought I could be a good fit for one of their reality shows. I was flattered but made it clear that I could never tolerate a camera up my sphincter or peeking into my marriage and kids’ lives—I wanted to write! I pitched a morning show called Wake the Fuck Up, which was essentially a late-night-show format but on in the morning, when moms were awake to watch it. They politely passed, as they don’t have morning programming like that, but wanted to keep discussing how we could work together.
I sent them both Momzillas and Nut and asked if, gee, since NBC and Bravo are part of the same conglomerate family, couldn’t they just kinda reach over and take my book back and make that? I’ve since learned a lot about corp
orate red tape and, alas, it just doesn’t work like that. Over time and a really collaborative development process, we made the pilot for what is now the show I love to work on.
My hope for Odd Mom Out was and is to make people—not just moms!—guffaw by holding up a mirror to one contingent of the mom population, the epicenter for extreme parenting, where toddlers learn Mandarin ’cause their Goldman Sachs daddies say it’s “the wave of the future” and people hire different consultants for walking, talking, peeing, pooing, and proper pencil grip. Most people in America are keeping up with the Joneses, but New Yorkers are keeping up with the Rockefellers. And we can’t! Because even wealthy people here can feel middle class compared with those whose wealth was created by recent economic booms. Recently I saw north of twenty Escalades outside a school near me—with a drop-off and pickup fashion show worthy of a catwalk. Yes, I dress up compared to most people in America every day because I wear skirts or dresses and heels instead of pants and sneakers. (But, in fairness, stilettos feel like sneakers to me, like those Easy Spirit commercials with nuns playing basketball.) Nevertheless, at the preschool in my all-black Club Monaco and Trash and Vaudeville motorcycle jacket, I often felt like everyone else was so perfectly preened and polished and that the dismissal catwalk was sponsored by Mercedes-Benz.
My daughter Ivy once asked me, “Mom, why are you the only mom at school without red bottoms on your shoes?” I didn’t know whether to be proud she was observant or horrified that she somehow gleaned Louboutin’s status by osmosis. But whether it’s winning hockey tournaments or making the cheerleading squad—the yardstick from state to state may shift—the stress of fierce competition seems universal. When Momzillas came out, I was amazed how many letters I got from midwestern, southern, and Pacific northwestern states, saying that despite the change of metropolitan scenery and shifting metric of aspiration, it was the same exact thing. Mothers-in-law from hell are the rule and not the exception, social climbers abound, and money talks. Odd Mom Out seems to have hit a similar nerve. I like to think that it’ll help people see outside the judgmental forces and flush them out of their consciousness, grab the kiddies, blare some Hedwig, and dance on top of all those unsolicited opinions.