Monthly Archives: March 2012

Mommy’s Hierarchy of Needs

Mommy's Hiearchy of Needs

This post has been sitting my draft folder since November. I started it back when I was in the throes of debilitating sleep deprivation. I never finished it because I couldn’t seem to come to a coherent point which I’m sure had a lot to do with the debilitating sleep deprivation. Now, with considerably more sleep and four months of hindsight, I think I can finish it.

Back when I started the original version, my son was three months old. He was waking up every night around midnight and crying for a minimum of two hours. My husband was sleeping in the guest bedroom and I was waking up at 7am every morning to take care of our two children. At 2am the next morning, I would finally get to put my head on a pillow again until someone started crying. I was out-of-my-mind tired every. single. day. I started writing this post in an attempt to understand why I felt so crazy all the time. The name Maslow kept creeping into my consciousness.

Original Post:

I first heard of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs Theory in health class my sophomore year of high school. My teacher was a stout, burly man with one of those hard stomach’s like the base of a kettle drum. He was also the wrestling coach and walked with a crooked, bow-legged, wrestler’s limps up and down the aisles peering over your shoulder during tests.  His style of instruction was intimidating and declarative as in, “You can still get pregnant even if the girl is currently menstruating don’t you know, kids?!” Then he sneered at you with a knowing look while you fidgeted in your plastic chair. Informative, but also slightly traumatizing. The next time I would come across Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs Theory would be in one of my psychology courses in college. It has always stuck with me, but since those years I haven’t had a need for it… that is, until now.

Right now in my life it seems everyone needs something from me every second of my day. I find myself constantly evaluating which needs are priorities and which can wait. For example, at this very moment it is 12:17am. I am sitting on my bed in the dark listening to my three-month-old son make those grunting, infant sounds in his half-sleep state. I’m debating. Should I go in there and rock his crib in futility? (Because it never gets him back to sleep, it just speeds up the waking process.) Or should I continue to write this post? Should I attempt (again in futility) to get some sleep myself? Or is my need to write more important than his (or mine for that matter) need to sleep? Sometimes it feels like it is, but Maslow would disagree.

Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs is a theory in psychology pertaining to Human Growth and Development. Maslow came up with this theory by studying what he called, “exemplary people” like Albert Einstein and Eleanore Roosevelt. His goal was to uncover the principles behind basic human motivations and to better understand why people will seek out certain experiences in their respective environments.

The bottom of the pyramid represents our everyday basic needs; air, food, water, sleep, pooping… you know, the necessities. You will notice that it also lists “sex” in that category. At this point there is no need to remind you that Maslow was a man.

Our first and foremost motivations have to do with survival and security; when those needs are sufficiently met, we are then motivated to seek out different needs like love and self-esteem. When all of those needs are met, we get to the top of the pyramid, the pinnacle of human development and what we’re all ultimately seeking which is self-actualization. Self-actualization is defined as having as sense of right and wrong, acceptance of facts, lack of judgement and expressing creativity. I would extrapolate on that definition and suggest that it also means finding a sense of purpose and meaning in one’s life.

I have to admit, it isn’t the prioritizing of other people’s needs that inspired me to contemplate Maslow’s theory. Believe me, the little people in this house are doing just fiiiiine. It is ME who is lacking many of my basic needs right now and this has me asking what is really important and what can wait.

Having a baby strips your life down to its most basic elements in an instant. All those layers of hard-won self-esteem, accomplishments and the loving relationship you built with your spouse; they all exit the building along with your placenta. Days after birthing that precious baby you are literally and figuratively back to the lowest rungs of the human growth ladder. You are a shadow of your former self, begging and pleading for basic necessities like sleep, food, water and elimination. (Because pooping after a vaginal birth is something no one ever tells you about, but should NOT go without its fair share of warnings! Why didn’t you teach us that Mr. Health Teacher?)

It’s also an extreme rollercoaster ride. In the seconds it takes that doctor to place that baby on your chest, like a lightening bolt you understand with a fierce profundity the meaning of your life. If there was ever a moment at the pinnacle of human growth, it is the moment you look into your child’s eyes for the very first time. In the days (sometimes hours) that follow that moment, you begin to free fall like rain through a gutter back down the ladder of human growth until you are a milky puddle on the floor begging for someone to bring you a sandwich and give you five minutes of sleep. (And I can say for certain Mr. Maslow, that sex is NOT a basic need. For goodness sakes man what were you thinking? Really?! Sex = to breathing?!)

That steep slide down the slope of human motivations will make you nauseous at the very least, and crazy for SURE.

In those long early days (and nights) you spend most of your time on that lowest rung, usually literally lying on the floor in need of everything while simultaneously giving everything. Weeks go by like that. Then, there might be a few days when you are fed, watered and yet still exhausted, but all you want to do is cry on the phone to one of my friends because you desperately need someone to love you and it sure ain’t coming from this baby.  At some point, maybe months down the road, you look in the mirror again. It’s the first time you’ve seen the natural shape of your eyebrows since college not to mention the natural color of your hair. You think maybe you should do something about those things because your self-esteem took a serious punch around the third trimester.

Somewhere around six months postpartum you start to recognize yourself again, not just physically, but mentally. You start to see signs of the woman who thought about more than the color and consistency of her baby’s poop. You start to want to be that woman again; to use your brain for more than just calculating the time it will take you to make a grocery run as opposed to the next scheduled nap. Maslow says it’s the highest rung of the human needs and motivational pyramid, the self-actualizing part that yearns to be creative, to think and give meaning to your life.

Updated Part:

And this is why I couldn’t finish this post. As I was sitting in bed after midnight, clearly lacking one of my most basic needs for sleep, I was still writing–still attempting to be creative–still creating meaning in my life in the face of pure exhaustion. Now, months and many more hours of consolidated sleep later, I can write the conclusion to this post because I can see the flaw in Maslow’s Theory (and not just the sex part).

Maslow might have studied Einstein, but he didn’t studied Mommies, and we all know that mommies are capable of building pyramids in the time it takes to nurse a newborn. Don’t get me wrong, we’re not nonhuman, but in the face of our children, we are capable of superhuman things.

One of life’s greatest privileges and pleasures is having a child and there needn’t be a better reason to do so than to give meaning to your life. There is a reason that after WWII there was a boom in child births; people wanted to bring meaning back to a world that had suffered so much loss. Children, and all the unfettered hope they represent, do that best. The irony of this situation is that in the midst of all the physical and emotional energy required to have babies and raise them, meaning is sometimes hardest thing to hold on to. Meaning lives up on the top of that pyramid while you’re stuck down on the floor eating your toddler’s left over mac-n-cheese because it’s in arm’s reach and it doesn’t require you to get up. Crazy, indeed.

As I sit here now, 7 months postpartum, I realize that the reason I felt crazy all that time was because meaning is what I was looking for in the first place and yet was the one thing I couldn’t find due to my lack of significant shut-eye.

So I propose a new Hierarchy of Needs Theory. One just for us Mommies. I think it would look something like this…

Mommy’s Hierarchy of Needs

I included sex because, well, maybe someday. Until then, “You can still get pregnant even if a girl is menstruating breastfeeding don’t you know kids!?” See, informative and traumatizing.

Author Stalker: The Cheryl Strayed Edition

fingerstyping

I’m an Internet author stalker. Almost two years ago when I made the resolution to embark on a writing career I began studying a variety of things; publishing, plot structure, classic literature, principles of fiction– all through the highly reputable University of Google. Someday they will send me an MFA, I just know it. But of all the time I have spent on the Internet reading about writing, the one thing I can never get enough of is author biographies. The minute I come across a lauded book review, moving essay, accoladed author, or hell, even a great blogger, I want to know who they are and how they learned to write like that? It’s a bit of an obsession, really.

My latest crush is Cheryl Strayed. Her memoir, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest, came out this week and the reviews are nothing short of arrestingly, blindingly glowing.

My fingers soon found themselves clicking away on her website to find out who this woman was and what else she had written. I got consumed. So far, I have yet to find an essay of hers that has not moved or inspired me, sometimes to tears. Cheryl’s (we’re on a first-name basis in my head) way with words has gotten me all hot and bothered and not in entirely good ways.

The downside to any obsession is that at some point it makes you feel like shit. It’s kind of a prerequisite for an obsession really, sky-rocketing highs followed by soul-crushing lows.

I was elated to have discovered another kindred writing spirit, a contemporary that spoke to me literally. Maybe we’ll be BFFs someday? I mean, she only lives three hours down the highway in Portland. It’s possible, right? Just as I was mentally planning our next meeting over coffee wherein we would brainstorm about plot structure, theme and the symbolism of geraniums, in came the soul-crushing low.

I discovered her educational, writerly background.

She has an MFA from Syracuse University. Hm? That might be a tad more respectable than my one from Google U. What else? She has always wanted to be a writer, has been writing for years and years and years and has oodles of well-respected writerly friends like Pam Houston, Elizabeth McCracken and Ursula Hegi. Wild, is also her second, critically acclaimed book and among her awards is a Pushcart Prize. The more I read, the more the critically acclaiming, self-bashing, winner of no prizes, voice in my head starts prodding my weak places with a sharp, red, editing pencil.

 ”What were you thinking telling the world that you wanted to be a writer? What’s wrong with you woman? You have a BA in Psychology and Communications from a shitty state school for God’s sake. Who do you think you are? If you think you can spin a story (let alone a sentence) as elegantly as Cheryl Strayed then you are a damned fool. Do you hear me?! A DAMNED FOOL! And now your damned fool mouth went and told the whole world you planned on becoming some kind of writer. Ha! Ha! HA! I bet you can’t wait until you see all those people on Facebook in real life? Won’t that be fun you big-mouthed fool!? Why don’t you just go back to slinging surgical devices? At least you were good at that? And while you’re at it, why don’t you stop talkin’ ’bout spirituality and God like you got somethin’ figured out, you self-righteous foo’.”

Incidently, my inner voice sounds a lot like Mammy from Gone With the Wind.

It’s always difficult to go back and place my pointer fingers on F and J and watch that little line blink at me incessantly when I’m in the throes of an author crush. Everything I write suddenly appears amateurish, immature-ish and overwrought with cliché. I am deflated.

It’s not that I’m trying to imitate Cheryl Strayed because I don’t want to be her. Really, I don’t. I like being me. I just want to know how to use my words to do to other people what her words so profoundly do to me.

Feel stuff.

As I type this, Cheryl Strayed has just finished signing her books at my favorite Indie Bookstore in Seattle, Elliott Bay Books. As she was probably starting her reading this evening in that low-hung ceiling basement to a crowd full of admirers in folding chairs, I was putting my infant son in the bath. As she was standing there in front of a backdrop of a packed bookshelf, wrapping up and answering questions, I was singing “You Are My Sunshine” to my toddler daughter. That’s my life and I love it. I love it so much that it makes me ache when I can’t render it with my words as beautifully as Cheryl Strayed does with hers.

Over the last two years I have found only one cure for the heartaches of my author crushes. It is to put one pointer finger on F and the other on J and precede that blinking line with one word at a time until I fill a line, then a page, and finally, hopefully, a book.

Brought to you by the University of Google.

Communing with Trees

Moss Covered Tree Trunk

I grew up traipsing through the woods. We called them “woods,” my friends and I, but really, they were just a dense strip of trees big enough to hide in when the leaves were full in the summer, and small enough to see to the other side in the winter. I loved those woods with its Maples, Birches and Oaks. The snap of twigs underfoot, the smell of damp dirt and sour, leaf decay, the belly scratches from tree climbing and then watching those same trees turn yellow or orange or red in the Fall;  those were some of my happiest moments as a child.

We created whole worlds in that narrow strip of trees. We built houses, hunted bears, kissed frogs and got poison ivy over and over and over again. I didn’t know it then, but we communed with those trees. We knew which ones could support us and which ones were better to just lie underneath. We knew which branches would keep us dry when it rain and which ones were best for swinging. We etched our names and the names of the boys we loved in those trees. We ate the wild berries and wore some paths right down to the roots. That narrow strip of woods was our playground in the summer and our pathway to our elementary school in the winter. We were as comfortable there as we were in our own homes.

I went for a run today on a wooded trail by our house. My infant son fell asleep in the jogging stroller and I took the opportunity to venture off-road into a clearing under a canopy of towering evergreens. It wasn’t the woods I remember from my youth growing up in the Midwest. Here in the Pacific Northwest, it seems more appropriate to call it a forest. Even when it’s not raining, everything is still wet here. A carpet of Chartreuse moss blankets anything standing still. Ferns sprout out of spongy, moss-covered tree trunks and the ground is thick with fragile, discarded, evergreen  limbs that are covered in lichen. The ground snaps everywhere you step and the dark needles of these trees can hide you anytime of year. I stood there, listening to the sounds of nature and communing with the trees.

This week we are refinancing our home. We’re signing a 30 year, fixed mortgage and in essence making a huge committment to stay put for the long-term. We moved here almost six years ago thinking it would be relatively temporary, but the real estate market changed drastically in that time and well, our plans had to change now that our house is worth much less than what we paid for it.

But I’m okay with it, with all of it. This home is where my children were born and now, most likely, where they will grow up for the forseeable future. (“Foreseeable future”…Ha! Isn’t that a silly phrase?!)

As we’re making this committment to deepen our roots I start to think of all the things my kids will grow up having in this neighborhood including the trail I ran today and that clearing under a canopy of evergreens.

As I stood there I imagined my kids playing there in a few years. I imagined what kinds of worlds they would create among these Firs, Cedars and Cyprus’. Would they have bears in them like mine? I wondered which trees they would climb and sit under and swing from and carve their names into. I imagined that instead of poison ivy Brooke and Brady will come home with sticky tree sap in their hair. My wild berries were red; theirs will be black.

I hope they’ll play here. I hope they’ll feel just as safe and free and at home in this forest as I did in my woods because as a parent I want them to have all the good things I had and more– better even. If this lush forest is any indication, they will.

But more than having a familiar forest to grow up in, I hope more than anything else that they learn to commune with trees…

…and they never stop doing it.

    Featured on BlogHer.com

The Big, Bad, Blog World

publish-button

Sometimes I get overwhelmed by this blogging thing. You may not believe me when I say this, but I pinky swear that I had no idea what I was getting into six months ago when I pressed ’publish’ for the first time. Honest to God. Six months ago I was completely, irreverently, blissfully ignorant of the blogging world and all its many powers to bludgeon my budding writer’s self-esteem.

Sure, I knew about blogs. Who doesn’t know about blogs? I even read a few regularly– as in two, maybe three. I knew there were different types of blogs and that some people even made money from their blogs. But I swear I had NO IDEA how huge this blogging world had become and how much it involved until after I started writing mine. I felt like everyone on the planet suddenly had a blog and (as usual) I was late to this fabulous party everyone was having on the Internet.

A few weeks after I published my first posts I thought that maybe I would look into how to get more traffic and that’s when I found out about this humongous blogosphere par-tay. I clicked on over to a well-known blogging portal, BlogHer were I found over 2000 blogs. Then, I quickly found at least a DOZEN more portals all with thousands more blogs complete with every kitschy title and niche you could imagine. Then, THEN! I discovered the blog world pinnacle, the place where bloggers go to get legitimized, The Huffington Post. Color me ignorant but I had NO CLUE what The Huffington Post was all about until a few months ago.

I sat back from my computer, wide-eyed in a semi-state of disbelief thinking Ohhhhhhh…..EEEEMMM…. GEEEEEE! What. Was. I. Thinking?!

I’m not gonna lie. I panicked a little bit. My competitive drive kicked in at precisely the same moment I couldn’t think of a single THING to write about. The more I stressed, the less I wrote. Naturally, I read other blogs. The more I read, the more I felt defeated before I even began. At least once a day I decided that it’s all been said before and by much more talented people than I so what was the point anyway and I might as well quit, right?!

Then I reminded myself why I started this blog in the first place:

I started this blog to keep me accountable. Although I love writing with a fiery passion deep in my bones, it’s still really hard. When I’m tired and all I want to do is numb my senses with shitty reality TV, this blog keeps me accountable to the craft and I need that.

I started this blog because my ultimate goal is to write books and when that happens, I’m going to need a website with my name on it. It was a little risky and a lot scary using my full name as the url, especially considering the difficult (and in many ways secretive) event that happened with my job. But despite my fears of judgment and ridicule, I used my name as the title anyway because authors of books have real names on their websites and that’s what I want to be…an author. It was an act of manifesting my destiny.

I started this blog because I wanted a place to say the things that tumbled around in my head and heart and I wanted to build a community of people who have similar things tumbling around inside of them. I wanted to build a place for us to meet and talk and give virtual high-fives and maybe even shed a few cyber tears.

I started this blog because I have BIG, BIG dreams and this is but ONE small step in making those dreams come true.

But the MOST important reason I started this blog… is because starting is the hardest thing to do and I believe I can do hard things.

I may only have a handful of people who read these words and that’s okay. I believe they are the right handful, the perfect handful in fact. I don’t know yet how this blog will grow in the future but I know it will. I know because each time I press that blue and white ‘publish’ button, I grow. If you’ve been around for six months you know that I already changed my theme once and my byline, oh, I dunno, SEVEN times? It’s all a work in progress, as am I.

So to those perfect few I say thank you. To those perfect ones yet to come, I say welcome.  So what do you say? Let’s get this party started and get busy making dreams come true! Here we go! I’m pressing it again…..

Human Reflexes

IMAG0548

My toddler daughter is still trying to figure out her baby brother. Most days she gives him a wide berth, eyes him suspiciously and ignores him completely. When he gets close enough to grab her dress or pull her hair she repeats (at a high volume) one of my stock phrases, “He’s doesn’t know!” And, “No! He’s just a baby!” Just recently she has wanted to help with Brady and has even showed signs of unprompted affection.

Brady can sit very well on his own. It’s a skill he learned early due to his wide base (re: a chunky butt). But sometimes when he’s tired or hungry or for no damn reason at all because he’s just a baby and lacks reason, he violently throws himself backward onto the ground. Wherever he sits, we have to put pillows behind him so he doesn’t bang his head in one of these backward dives. Every time he ends up on his back he immediately wants to sit back up again and you can see him straining and flexing his little body trying to get back to sitting. I have to sit him upright at least 20 times a day.

The other day my daughter, Brooke, wanted to sit Brady upright. First, she tried pushing his head from behind at which point I intervened explaining why we don’t do that because, “He’s just a baby!” So then, she tried grabbing his hands and pulling on them. Each time she did he recoiled his arms and resisted. She was getting so frustrated because she couldn’t figure out why he wouldn’t sit up and just like every toddler everywhere she kept saying, “No! I do it!”

Together, we figured out how. We figured out that if you just reach out your hands in front of him, palms up he’ll grab onto them himself and you can easily pull him into sitting position.

And I’ll be damned if that isn’t the truth about every human being, everywhere.

At one point or another we’re all laying there in a position we don’t want to be in straining to get up. If you notice, there are usually plenty of hands pushing our heads and pulling our hands trying to get us up against our will. It isn’t until someone offers one, palm up, without expectation and without force, that we decide we’re ready to move because it’s compassion and non-judgment that inspires us.

I have decided this is how I want to raise my kids. I know they are going to fight me, my daughter fights me everyday and she’s not even three. They are going to say, “No! I do it!” over and over and over again and I’m going to have to sit back, knowing better, and let them. I don’t want to be the force that they resist. Instead, I want to be the open hand they grasp when they’re ready to get up. I believe it’s an ingrained human reflex to want to do it all ourselves, to figure it out, to make sense of our world; it’s how we grow stronger, wiser. But there will always be times when we can’t do it all ourselves and we need help. In those times, we want love and understanding to pull us up again.

It’s hard watching your kids fail or get hurt. I’ve already found it to be one of the hardest things to do as a parent. I also know there will be plenty of things to fight about as they grow older. In the moment when they need help and are ready for it, I don’t want to be the one they resist. I want to be the outstretched, compassionate, open hand they reach for because open hands are so much easier to hold.
IMAG0543

IMAG0547

Hmm? Maybe I’m not giving Brady enough credit? I believe he knows more than we think.

Not a Day Over 34

Makeup Mommy

It’s my birthday. Like many women my age, I lingered in the bathroom mirror just a little longer today. I wrinkled my nose and furrowed my brow while carefully inspecting all the lines that time has given me. As usual, the unconscious, unspoken berating of myself began without me even knowing it. I’ve been doing it for 30 years, it’s a hard habit to break.

I also hardly wear makeup and that didn’t really help the situation. I find that most days its a waste of my time to fix myself up because the only places I go are to the grocery store, the park, Starbucks (and if I’m lucky) to work out. On most days, I look like this:

It seems like a bit of a contradiction for someone who has spent a lot of money and years being vain. I had liposuction when I was 25. My body has always been my biggest issue and the moment I had the means, I went for it. I spent a couple of years working out everyday and no matter what I did, I couldn’t make my hips impossibly narrow. Surgery seemed like a good idea. It was painful and expensive and the benefits were only temporary. Two years later when I stopped working out as much, and instead, just plain worked, the only reminders of my liposuction were tiny little scars.

Two years ago I paid several hundred dollars for Botox and the lash-lengthening medication, Latisse. Again, the Botox was only temporary and after nine months of impossibly long lashes, my eyes wouldn’t stop itching. I had to stop using Latisse and soon my lashes went back to their natural length. Honestly, I could do without the lashes, but I really liked the Botox. I know I would do it regularly if I could afford it and the effects lasted longer than four to six months. The frugal gal in me just can’t justify the expense and also… things are just different now. I guess I’M different now.

You see, I have this little girl and she watches me all day long. In the last couple months her vocabulary has exploded and everday I’m astonished when I hear my words come out of her mouth. I see her imitating me right down to the way I drink my coffee and when I think about the way I silently hate myself, I feel ashamed.

Yes, I berated myself a little this morning, but more importanly, I stopped. Because then I remembered something that has taken me 34 years to figure out; my thoughts have power and what I think, I become. So instead of continuing the self-loathing in my head, I closed my eyes and said all the things to myself that I say to my daughter on a daily basis. I told myself that I was a good girl. I thanked myself for being respectful. I reminded myself that I was smart and most importantly, that I was loved to the moon and back. Then, I went and put on some makeup because I’m not crazy and I know that sometimes you gotta love yourself from the outside, in.

And while I was doing that I was reminded AGAIN, why it’s so important that I continue to love myself everyday in ALL ways.

Because she is watching me so closely.

And she deserves to see a role model that loves herself in all ways, with or without makeup, wrinkles, bulges and all.

Ikea, Disposables and Vaginas

I'm sorry Mommy let you watch cartoons in the car, honey. :-(

I used to watch gynecological surgeries on a daily basis. Sometimes they were in the OR, other times in the doctor’s office. Sometimes the doctors used equipment I was responsible for, on a patient down there. Afterward, I had to make sure it was cleaned properly. Every now and again I looked down at my scrubs or shoe and saw a questionable splatter of something. Whenever that happened, I usually ended up throwing the article of clothing away. That’s the nice thing about disposable scrubs.

And yet, in the course of four years in that line of work watching surgeries and peering inside human cavities, nothing I saw, smelled or touched was as disgusting as the things I’m confronted with on a daily basis at home with an infant and a toddler.

Case study #1: We own two Diaper Genies; one for my 2.5 year old daughter’s room and the other for my infant son’s room. We find that Diaper Genies work well for keeping the room odor-free. However, you have to buy specially made, disposable inserts to hold the diapers and they are $20 for three inserts. Each insert is supposed to hold 240 diapers, but that’s a load of baby sh*t. (Pun intended) They don’t. In practicality, they only hold about 100. As a business model, it’s pretty good. I used to sell disposable devices so I’m familiar with how it works. But for the consumer, which is now me, it kinda sucks. All of this is a non-sequitur is just to explain that we stopped throwing pee-only diapers into the Diaper Genie. After a year we got smart and started throwing only #2′s into the pales. This way, we only have to empty it every two weeks or so and we save on having to buy those stupid disposable inserts.

There is an inherent drawback to this strategy. Two week old, fermented poop smells like the two-week old, rotted roadkill on the side of a Texan highway in the middle of July. Yes, it really is that bad. Over time I’ve gotten rather efficient at emptying these diaper pails so that as little offending odor as possible escapes into the air and thus, my nostrils. Today I emptied both pales. As I walked them out to the trash at arm’s length one bag broke open in the driveway. I’m still retching thinking about it.

Case study #2: My daughter had cereal with strawberries this morning for breakfast. Just keep that in mind.

I’ve been itching to go to Ikea for months. I haven’t had a sufficient enough cause for the trip until we decided that my daughter is finally in need of a “big girl bed.” Ikea is a 30 minute drive from my house. When you get there, the maze through the store is an awe-inspiring adventure for a fanatical organizer like myself and it can take well over an hour to properly complete.  I decided that if I was going to procure any enjoyment from this trip with two kids in tow, I would have to properly sedate the toddler with handheld electronics so before I left the house I downloaded an entire season of Max & Ruby onto my Kindle. That should do it. She saw me doing this and when we got in the car she wanted to watch Max & Ruby RIGHT NOW! Sure thing baby. Here ya go. Quiet trip.

Twenty minutes into the trip I hear her moaning from the backseat. I ask her what’s wrong and she tells me she needs to take a nap “right now.” She says she needs to go to her crib and sleep because she’s sooooo tired. My child hardly takes naps and for her to ask to go to bed when it was barely noon is cause for mental alarm bells. I looked back in the rear view mirror at the precise moment she pukes her breakfast all over herself. Turns out that watching a Kindle while riding in a car isn’t the best idea, after all.

I’m sorry Mommy let you watch cartoons in the car, honey. :-(

Twenty minutes later, and back in my driveway, I have a pukey toddler covered in curdled milk and stomach bile pressed to my chest. It was all I could do to hold in my breakfast. As I turn away to unlock the door I hear, “Mommy, I just ate a strawberry.” Oh Good LORD!

When I went to clean the car seat I discovered, to my HORROR, that underneath that nice, removable, washable cover, were crevices, groves and tiny spaces overflowing with putrified, cottage cheese-like curds. The smell is so thick that it sticks to my nose hairs even now. I think they are suffering from post traumatic stress.

I pulled that thing out into the driveway and began circling it with a spray bottle of all-purpose cleaner in one hand and paper towels in the other. I heard that old-western showdown music in my head. After 5 minutes I just left it there and did what I always do when I don’t want to do something… called my husband at work. I generally feel better knowing that he knows what disgusting things were going on in my day at any given moment.

It’s 9:30pm and I still haven’t cleaned it. Over these hours of procrastination I’ve decided that I’d rather stare down the barrel of a stranger’s vagina any day over this disgusting job. And furthermore, I would seriously pay a sh*t-ton of money for a set of disposable car seats right about now. Seriously.