I Want My Epidural Back

by Karen Alpert

  The second they put him in my arms, he’s immediately my little buddy for life. And I can’t stop kissing his sweet face. And OMG, look at his cute little package!! FYI, it’s little because he’s a baby, not because he isn’t well-hung (I have no idea how hung he is because whenever one of my friends changes her son’s diaper I do an extra good job at averting my eyes because I don’t want anyone to think I’m a perv). And we put him in this adorable Superman shirt and it even has an itty-bitty cape on it. And later I put him in this sweet camouflage onesie. And ooooh, I can’t believe they make teeny-tiny Vans that are like three inches long. Not that babies need shoes, but yes, he kinda needs Vans because they’re too cute for words. Like him.

  Why was I ever scared about having a boy?!! Boys rock!

  DADDY: Zoey, stop leaving the door open. The cat’s gonna get out.

  ZOEY: Yeah, I know. And then we can get a dog.

  ME: Zoey, it’s chilly. You have to wear pants.

  ZOEY: No.

  ME: Yes.

  ZOEY: No.

  ME: Yes. And don’t say no to me.

  ZOEY: Fine, then I’m wearing them like this.

  And she did, all morning long. She showed me. Annnnd everyone else. Awesome.

  Thinking outside the penalty box

  RIDDLE ME THIS, BATMAN. WTF do you do when you’ve given so many timeouts that your kid’s butt has made a permanent impression in the carpet and he couldn’t give a rat’s ass if you put him in a penalty box again? I’ll tell you what you do. You come up with some more creative ways to make him behave. Here’s a little multiple choice quiz to see if you’re thinking outside the box when it comes to punishing your turdmonsters.

  If your kid is throwing a tantrum because apparently you weren’t supposed to unwrap his granola bar for him, you:

  A. Ignore it

  B. Get him a new granola bar that he can unwrap himself

  C. Shove the entire granola bar into your mouth right in front of him and chow down

  THE CORRECT ANSWER IS C.

  If you’ve told your daughter to put her shoes on 9,000 times and she still doesn’t listen, you:

  A. Ask her politely to use her ears

  B. Use a Q-­tip to make sure she doesn’t have major wax buildup

  C. Make her a hat she has to wear the rest of the day

  THE CORRECT ANSWER IS C.

  If your kids refuse to set the table, you:

  A. Roll your eyes and set it yourself

  B. Refuse to serve dinner until they set it and let the dinner get cold

  C. Bring the entire pot of spaghetti and meatballs over to the table and scoop it out straight onto the table in front of each of them and tell them to eat that shit with their hands since they don’t have silverware and that they’re not getting up until they eat every last drop and clean up the mess

  THE CORRECT ANSWER IS C.

  If your kids keep fighting over a toy, you:

  A. Try to teach them to take turns

  B. Take the toy away and say no one gets it

  C. Do this:

  “I told you guys it would break if you didn’t stop fighting over it.”

  THE CORRECT ANSWER IS C.

  If your kid keeps asking for a toy over and over again at the store even though you’ve told her no a thousand times, you:

  A. Explain to her that lots of girls and boys don’t have any toys

  B. Let her buy it with her piggy bank money

  C. Put the toy in your cart and then pick up your phone and call Santa right in front of her and inform him that she’s hit her toy quota and won’t need a delivery this year

  THE CORRECT ANSWER IS C.

  If your kid keeps getting up from the dinner table, you:

  A. Keep yelling at him to sit down

  B. Take his food away even if he’s not done

  C. MAKE him stay seated

  Heyyyy, look at that. Duct tape really does fix anything!

  THE CORRECT ANSWER IS C.

  If your ungrateful family keeps being jerkwads and forgetting to say thank you and basically treats you like a housekeeper, you:

  A. Pour yourself a bottle of vino

  B. Down it

  C. Book a one-way ticket to the Caribbean and say you’re not coming home until they start acting appreciative and the house better be clean when you get back

  THE CORRECT ANSWER IS ALL OF THE ABOVE.

  HOLDEN: But I didn’t want a pink balloon!

  (Pop!)

  ME: There you go. Now you don’t have one.

  One of the worst feelings in the world

  THIS IS THE DAY EVERYTHING CHANGED. The day I lost Zoey.

  The day started out like any other. It was drizzly so we took our kids to this indoor play place where they could climb in this cool tree house thingie while all the parents stood around and watched. Or if your kids are on the older side like ours and you don’t have to worry about them being mowed down by big kids anymore, you stand there and stare at your cell phone and look up when they say, “Mom, look at me!” which only happens about once every .3 seconds.

  Anyways, after an hour or so of looking up every .3 seconds to watch my daughter slide down a slide headfirst or my son stand on one foot (future Olympians in the making), it was time to go. I mean sure, we could have stayed there all day and they’d have been happy, but my stomach was literally about to eat itself because I stupidly thought it would be a good idea to have a healthy smoothie for breakfast instead of my usual four bowls of cereal.

  ME: Can you give the kids a five-minute warning?

  HUBBY: Sure.

  (A few minutes later he came back.)

  HUBBY: Have you seen Zoey?

  ME: No. Did you tell her it’s time to leave?

  HUBBY: I tried to. I can’t find her.

  Now I don’t know about your husband, but if I told my husband to go get some milk and he was literally standing on a dairy farm in front of a big jug of milk with the word MILK written in giant letters on the bottle and the milk could talk and it was saying, “I am the milk your wife wants you to get,” my husband would still come back to me and say, “I can’t find any milk.” So let’s just say I wasn’t really alarmed.

  ME: Did you look for her?

  HUBBY: Yes.

  ME: Like you really looked for her?

  HUBBY: Yes.

  ME: Maybe she’s up there in that tree house section.

  HUBBY: I looked.

  ME: Did you try the ball section?

  HUBBY: She’s not there.

  I mean seriously? Do I have to do everything?

  I started scanning the play area for her purple dress. It’s pretty easy to find because it’s bright magenta and she’s one of the older kids so she’s a bigger surface area now. I walked closer to look in the punching bag area. Not there. I walked down to where the babies play. Zoey lovvvvvves babies. Not there either. I looked in the ball area. Nope. The more places I looked, the more I started to get a pit in my stomach. I started to look in less obvious places. Behind the couches? No. Hiding between the punching bags? Not there.

  Oh my God. What if? No, she has to be somewhere. You just haven’t found her yet. Try not to panic. But I was starting to panic. My hubby was looking for her too and he also looked worried. There was panic in his voice.

  HUBBY: Zoey! Zoey!! ZOEY!!!

  He’s not the one who usually panics. That’s my role. But he was panicking and that made me even more afraid. It’s like when I fly on an airplane and if there’s turbulence and I see a flight attendant looking freaked out, I’m like, oh shit, we’re totally going down. Shit. Shit. Shit. Oh my God, we’ve lost her. I couldn’t believe this was happening. This was that moment in your life that you can look back on and say, that was the moment everything changed.

  I saw a reading area and thought, of course, she loves books, but when I got closer, all I saw was one little blonde girl reading by herself.

  GIRL: She’s not heeeere.

  Like she was straight
out of a horror movie. Oh wait, the bathroom! Yes, I’ll bet she really had to go and went in quickly without telling us so I barged inside and saw another mom in there.

  ME: Have you seen a little girl with a purple dress?

  RANDOM MOM: Nope. (to her kid) How did you get this applesauce all over you?

  KID: I don’t know.

  Agghhhhh, who cares about your stupid applesauce?!! My kid is missing!!!!

  HUBBY: Not in the bathroom?

  ME: Go tell them at the front desk.

  He hesitated.

  ME: NOW!

  It’s time to full-on panic.

  HOLDEN: Mommy?

  I looked down and saw Holden standing there and I suddenly felt terrible for him. What if this is it? What if he’s an only child now? Don’t think that way, don’t think that way, don’t think that way. But I couldn’t help it. I scooped him up and started looking for Zoey again.

  My heart was in my throat and I felt like I should be crying but my eyes were totally dry. It was like I was too scared to cry. I scanned the room again. It had been at least ten minutes now, a long F’ing time when you are looking for a responsible girl in a single room that has no walls where it shouldn’t be hard to find someone. Like there was enough time to think about all sorts of scary shit I’ve seen on Criminal Minds and Law & Order and America’s Most Wanted and James Patterson novels and pretty much any abduction story I’d ever seen before. It was horrifying. One of the people who worked there came up to me looking way too relaxed.

  WORKER: What is your daughter wearing?

  ME: A purple dress. Magenta.

  WORKER: Don’t worry, she didn’t leave here. We watch the door carefully.

  Really? Because you’re standing here with me right now and I can see that no one is at the door.

  ME: Do something!

  WORKER: She’s gotta be somewhere.

  Yeah, in the men’s restroom with a pedophile. Or in a stranger’s car. Or chloroformed and in their trunk. DO SOMETHING NOW!!!!

  I turned away from Miss Nonchalancy and started looking for the two kids Zoey was playing with earlier. The girl in the rainbow shirt and the boy with the iPad. Maybe they would know where she is. I didn’t see them anywhere. I didn’t see their mom either. Oh my God, what if they took her? She wouldn’t go with a stranger but she’s been playing with them the whole time. Maybe she thinks they’re not strangers. Plus, they had an iPad. She would follow anyone with an iPad. And the mother did look a little odd.

  I couldn’t believe this was happening. This couldn’t be happening. What if she’s gone? I can’t even—

  And then suddenly I saw something out of the corner of my eye. I saw something magenta pop out of the bottom of the twisty tube slide. Oh my God, it’s her. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I felt silly for panicking. I felt embarrassed for getting upset with the worker. But can you blame me? Isn’t this how it happens when a child gets kidnapped? The panic is slow. People assume the kid is just hiding, that the parents are panicking for no reason. People don’t take it seriously at first, and then eventually after looking in every nook and cranny, they start to realize that this is real. That a child is missing. Like really missing.

  My hubby got to Zoey first. He wrapped his arms around her and then I saw him talking to her seriously. Turns out she had been sitting inside the middle of the twisty tube slide the whole time. Like smack in the middle of it. Just sitting there. Letting other kids go over her. For like ten minutes. I wanted to kiss her. I wanted to hug her. I wanted to beat the crap out of her. I leaned over and kissed her awkwardly because my hubby was still holding her. And then I told her to never do that again. NEVER. EVER.

  She could see the look in our eyes. How serious we were. How scared we were.

  ZOEY: I’m sorry.

  ME: It’s okay. (deep breath out)

  ZOEY: Phew, Mom. That was a close one.

  Holy crap, kiddo. You have no idea.

  One fish, two fish, red fish, gross fish

  OKAY, SO I FEEL LIKE WHENEVER WE GO ON VACATION, there’s always that one magical moment (of course, once you have kids, it’s sandwiched between 10,000 shitty moments). Like when my hubby and I went on our honeymoon, there was this time our sailboat was surrounded by hundreds of spinner dolphins leaping out of the water all around us. Or the time we went to the Dominican Republic and my masseuse full-on massaged my boobs. It was a couple’s massage and I was dying to yell to my hubby who was lying next to me with his eyes closed, “Look, she’s rubbing my nipples!!!” Or the time we went to Florida and this happened.

  We were walking down the beach with the kiddos when suddenly there was all this bright silver flashing all over the surface of the water. Everyone on the beach literally stopped what they were doing and watched together. “Look, there it is!” And then it stopped, and then it was there again, and then it stopped, and then it was there again, and so on and so on. It took us all about thirty seconds to figure out what we were seeing.

  It was thousands of flying fish (I have no idea what kind of fish they really were, but they looked like they were flying). Over and over again they’d leap out of the water in big groups moving down the shoreline for like 10 minutes straight as everyone stood there mesmerized.

  And then when it was done we all looked down at our feet and realized that something sucky had also happened. A bunch of those fish had jumped wayyyy too close to the shore and when the waves went out, they were left stranded on the beach, dying.

  Wahhh, poor little fishy.

  But hey, I’m a big believer in letting nature take its course and survival of the fittest and all that other Darwin crap, so I’m like, sucks to be you. See ya. And I started to walk away.

  And that’s when I looked up and saw Zoey’s face. She was devastated.

  ZOEY: Mommm, they’re dying.

  ME: I know, honey. It’s sad.

  ZOEY: We have to save them.

  Uhhh, yeahhh, you do that. ’Cause my fingers don’t touch slimy shit from the ocean. Especially when it’s still alive and staring up at me with its little beady eye.

  ME: Go ahead. Toss them back in.

  And that’s when she looked up at me with tears in her eyes and I don’t think in her entire life have I ever seen her look sooooo sad. She couldn’t bring herself to pick it up.

  ZOEY: I can’t do it.

  ME: Yes, you can.

  ZOEY: (sobbing) No, I can’t.

  Well, why would she be able to do it? Here she is watching her mom be a lame-ass chicken shit, so where would she get the courage to do it? If I didn’t touch the fish, I wasn’t just failing as an AROS (Animal Rescue Operation Specialist) (yes, I made that shit up). I was failing as Zoey’s role model. Uggggh.

  Deep breath in. Okay, here goes. Ewwwwwww. As I picked up the slimy fish between my two fingers, I prayed it wouldn’t start flopping around in my hand. And then I ran with it as fast as humanly possible and tossed it back into the ocean.

  ME: Swim, little guy, SWIM!!!!!

  FYI, I didn’t actually say that last part out loud, but if they make this into a Lifetime movie, the actress playing me (Eva Longoria/Kerry Washington/Megan Fox) totally would. But I digress.

  You should have seen Zoey’s face. There really is no word that captures the elation she felt at that moment. But there were still tons of fish all stranded along the beach. And she still hadn’t done anything besides watch me.

  ME: Come on, Zoey. Help me.

  ZOEY: I can’t.

  ME: (I stare straight into her eyes and use my deep James Earl Jones voice.) Yes. You. Can.

  And at that moment, she pulled together as much courage as she could and she slowly leaned down and her fingers touched the fish at her feet. It was fast and there’s no way in hell she would actually pick it up by herself, but she did it. She touched it!!!

  ZOEY: I did it!!!

  ME: You did it! Come on, help me! Hold on to my wrist and you’re saving it too!!

  Kinda sorta.

 
; And together we tossed like ten more fish back into the ocean. And after it was all over, Zoey celebrated touching a fish.

  Before I became a mom, I knew I’d have to make all sorts of sacrifices. I’d have to stop going out as much at night. I’d have to stop listening to rap music in the car. I’d have to watch crappy TV shows (of course, I had no idea HOW bad, cough cough, Caillou). I even knew I’d have to touch totally gross things like poop and blood and vomit. But never did I think that being a good mom would require me to pick up a live fish.

  I guess that’s what being a parent is about. Doing a lot of shit you never knew you’d have to do. And sometimes being a kickass parent isn’t about being proud of your kiddo. Sometimes it’s about being proud of yourself.