Stop Dressing Your Six-Year-Old Like a Skank (9 page)

ME
: Uh, okay, I guess.

I have no idea what hit me. Was it because she was so relentlessly cheerful? Was it the thought of being able to jerk a knot in somebody else’s kid for a change?

The next day, I reported for duty at the school cafeteria, where one of the mom-leaders came over and asked if I’d mind reading a book or two in Spanish to the kids.

I’d been hoo-doo’ed by the chipper Midwesterner. Of course they expected me to speak Spanish.

“No hablo español,”
I said weakly.

“Oh, good! You’re fluent!”

Another corralled volunteer looked at me helplessly. “I’ve had six years of French,” she said.

“No problemo,” I assured her. “It’s probably a lot the same. Just substitute a lot of choppy sounds for that jeh-jeh-jeh-joosh stuff the French say. Oh! And be sure to add an
o
to the end of everything. I seem to remember that from high school.”

“Okay-o,” she said gamely.

Once the kids learned to count to twenty in Spanish, it was time to play Spanish Bingo, which is a lot like English Bingo except with a lot less cigarette smoke and black hair dye.

I looked at my watch and realized that we’d been at it for about twelve minutos. What on earth were we going to do for the rest of the hour?

Thank goodness, our fearless leader (“I had to learn Spanish cuz I married me a Mexican”) was on the case. Everyone would learn how to say his or her name in
espanol.

This reminded me of Spanish 1 class when we did the same thing. While I had fantasized that my Spanish name would be exotico, it turned out to be exactly the same as it was in English.

“But I want to be Rosalita or something,” I had whined to the beleaguered teacher.

“Oh, yeah?” she asked. “Well, I wanna be Doris Day, but that ain’t happening either.”

Muy
harsh.

So, I’ve lost some of my slacker mom street cred, but not all of it. A few days after Spanish Club ended for the year, a coven of Supermoms approached me about helping with a new Brownie troop.

“No @##$ way,” I said, feeling the smug surge of power that comes from being such a committed slack-ass. The only Brownies I had any interest in, I told them, came out of a Duncan Hines box.

They skittered away to hassle some other victim, no doubt hissing the whole time about my “lack of commitment” and my “refusal to be a team player” and my “really wide brownie-eating ass.”

Those Supermoms can be real bitches when you think about it.

We could all take a lesson from men, if you ask me. Because no matter how slack a dad is, if he does the least little thing, people gush over him.

When I went on a business trip a while back, everyone marveled at the “good job” my husband did.

Why is that? Is it like seeing a chimpanzee play the clarinet? Sure, it’s possible, but you don’t honestly expect to ever see it in your lifetime.

Or is it like the Arkansas rooster I remember from childhood? The one that could take your dollar bill, punch a cash register, and give you change back? He even had his own
postcard.
Is someone, somewhere, printing a postcard
with a similar apparent freak of nature? The caring daddy who managed to not completely screw up a week of single parenthood?

“Your husband did
such
a good job,” cooed a teacher at our daughter’s elementary school.

“You should have seen how, when he realized it was PE day, he just flew out the door and went home so he could get her tennis shoes!” gushed another. “She’s one lucky little girl!”

A woman whom I don’t even know stopped to tell me that my husband “sure was a great dad while you were gone!”

What was next? A memo from the central office announcing that the school’s name would be changed to honor him?

Again, I ask, Why is it a man performs the minimal task of getting his kid to and from school dressed in anything that’s not Hello Kitty pajamas and he’s all of a sudden frickin’ Keanu dismantling a bomb on a city bus?

Feeling ridiculously guilty, I renounced my slacker mom status temporarily and immediately signed up to take pecan tartlets to the teachers’ tea. Where was my ticker tape parade? Who judged the schoolwide essay contest every year? Who had been class mom for three years in a row? (Okay, y’all know it wasn’t me but it
could
have been.)

Clearly, after a week away, my stock was low. Plus, I’d gotten into a fight with the carpool Nazis that morning.

“We just want it safe for the children,” one hissed at me.

Because I was holding my daughter’s hand and we were
on foot,
I failed to see a threat here. What were we in danger of doing? Taking out a few roly-polys before their time?

“You shouldn’t walk here! You should walk there!” the second carpool Nazi screeched, sounding rather like a hostile Dr. Seuss and pointing to a space approximately two feet away.

Jesus. Give somebody a Day-Glo vest and they think they rule the world.

That night, I told my husband that his favorite slacker-mom had once again gotten it wrong. I’d offended the car-pool volunteers.

“You didn’t?” he fairly shrieked.

“Yeah, so what?”

“I have to
live
with these people,” he moaned.

“Not anymore. Slacker mom’s back on the job now, remember?”

“Oh, yeah,” he said, brightening. “What’s for supper?”

Celebrities

I’m sure that y’all are just as relieved as I am that actress Denise Richards had her baby and it weighed, like, five pounds or some similar celebrity-baby weight.

Our long national nightmare is over. Denise was starting to rival Kate Hudson for the longest gestation. Celebrities announce their pregnancies through their publicists on the morning after conception and thus begins the very long season of photos in the park of them wearing ball caps, their two-hundred-dollar tank tops stretched tight over blossoming tummies.

Celebrities generally don’t give birth to big, fat, standard American babies. They tend to work out during their pregnancies, drinking wheat grass shakes and nibbling on sun-dried particleboard. Then, immediately after the birth,
they hire a full-time personal trainer to whip them back into their prepregnancy weight of roughly ninety-four pounds.

If there was any way they could insert a tiny home gym into the womb and encourage the baby to start working out
now,
they would. (“Hush now, little Artemis. No pain, no gain!”)

Celebrities are not like you and me, my hons. And not just because they eat with their feet. No, no, it’s because they don’t even call babies what they are. They call them
bumps.
An entire cover story in
People
magazine was devoted to showcasing the bumps of Gwyneth Paltrow, Carnie (“Would somebody please tell me again why the hell I had gastric bypass surgery?”) Wilson, and “double bumpers” Marcia Gay Harden and Julia Roberts.

Celebrities also tend to wear skin-tight clothing throughout pregnancy, a look that is, as I have said before, just plain wrong. Yes, we get it, you’re pregnant and you’re fabulous! But we find it hard to relate. Instead of waddling into the IHOP twice a week to order “lemon crepes and keep ‘em comin’“ like those of us out here in the Real World, they are instead stepping up the yogilates sessions with Simone and Rafiki. Makes me want to snap their twiglike celebrity necks like a Cheeto.

Mmmm, Cheetos. Sorry. Where was I?

Oh, yes. Britney Spears. See, here’s the thing about that celebrity mama. Britney is, at heart, just a good ol’ Southern
girl. I’m sure that her rich friends were horrified by her wearing that shirt that said BABY with an arrow, but I thought she was just being fashionably retro. Either that or she wanted to make sure nobody thought it was just some rogue goiter.

God bless Britney for naming her baby Sean Preston, a nice, normal name that sounds like it came straight off
The Young and the Restless,
which is where decent regular folks get their baby names. We don’t name our kids things like Coco or Mosaic or some such, because we know they’d get their ass kicked on the playground. At church.

I also loved Brit for gaining, like, a gazillion pounds while pregnant. Girlfriend ate fried okra and spoonbread and mac and cheese the whole time, and I know that the other L. A. moms must’ve been horrified.

(Note to Britney: If Kevin starts saying you need “to drop some elbees,” remind him that you could lose 140 pounds right quick with the right divorce lawyer. Hell, you’ve done it before. And I don’t want to say Kevin Federline isn’t smart. I mean, just because he believes that Geena Davis is really the president doesn’t mean he’s dumb, does it?)

Britney had a C-section, which is terribly un-celebrity-like.

You know, it’s the celebrity moms-to-be who first popularized the doula movement. Doulas are like uppity midwives; they hate drugs and forceps and anything else truly useful. They are
tres
chic! I’m sure that I will now get very
earnest mail from doulas and their, uh, doulettes, about how I don’t understand the incredible level of support they bring to the birth process. Then again, who cares?

I suppose if I sound bitter, it is because I’ve seen too many photos of Denise with her baby moments after delivery, not a hair out of place, luminescent skin and tastefully understated eye makeup. You want to see what a real woman looks like moments after birth? Watch
A Baby Story
on The Learning Channel: sweat-soaked, bloodshot eyes, doula-less.

And knowing that bump isn’t going any-damned-where for at least a year.

Once baby arrives, celebrities have a new dilemma. What to do with them while mom’s on the set or in the recording studio.

Well, thank goodness for a new whiz-bang video program created just for the celebrity who must be away for many hours at a time. The system allows the celebrity babies to watch a computer screen that plays a slide show of the many faces of the famous mom, accompanied by a caption identifying her as
MOMMY
.

Hollywood moms are crazy about this because it’s tiresome to constantly have to say, “No, no, little Zeitgeist, that’s not Mommy; that’s Nanny. Mommy just got paid many millions of dollars to simulate the devil’s aerobics with Brad Pitt. Isn’t Mommy a-ma-zing?”

Of course, to a six-week-old, the caption on the video might as well say
potato
or
egomaniac,
but let’s not quibble
here. The intention is to make sure that there is no confusion about just who the mommy is.

This way, the procession of starched and background-checked nannies will never be mistaken for the actual birth mother. I should think it might also be helpful to switch the video to have a picture of the nanny with the words
NOT THE MOMMY OT ILLEGAL ALIEN
as Caption.

Speaking of aliens, as I write this, Tom Cruise and Katie “I’m With Crazy” Holmes are expecting a celebrity pod-baby. Yes! The seed has been successfully planted and now is growing and flourishing in the formerly Catholic womb of Ms. Katie.

I say “formerly Catholic” because, as we all know, Tom Cruise is a huge Scientologist, and he likes his women like his coffee, hot and full of beans just like him.

Let’s not sugarcoat this one, hons. I don’t think Tom is the baby daddy. I’m not convinced that he, uh, has it in him, so to speak. My friend Courtney agrees and repeatedly refers to the Cruise kid as “that fake-ass baby.” Well, I didn’t say she was my nice friend.

Tom and Katie are planning a Scientology-approved method of birthing, which consists of “silent contemplation and no drugs.”

Funny thing, I don’t remember childbirth as a time of silent contemplation so much as a time to turn my head all the way around in a perfect 360 spin. Hey, you say
to-mah-to.

Celebrities love Scientology, apparently because they
don’t have any decent Baptist churches out in Hollywood, so they must cling to the teachings of some guy named Ron. Scientologists believe in mind over matter. One of its biggest fans is actress Kirstie Alley. So am I the only one who thinks it’s funny that she finds the gospel according to Jenny Craig much more useful than that of L. Ron Hubbard in shedding all those mind-over-matter pounds?

John Travolta (maybe
he’s
the baby daddy) is a huge Scientologist and his wife, Kelly Preston, is always yammering about her Scientology birthing style.

Scientologists believe that words spoken during birth are recorded in a baby’s subconscious mind and can cause irrational emotions later in life.

Ooops. Do you think the phrase, “You did this to me, you scum-sucking sack of shit” screamed repeatedly over the course of nine hours counts? If so, my bad.

I think it’s hilarious that the only damn time Hollywood celebrities don’t do drugs is when they’re giving birth. What’s wrong with this picture?

Tom Cruise says that you don’t need drugs to birth a baby, because drugs are the evil spawn of the pharmaceutical industry’s marriage to mainstream medicine.