sleep, abbr.
a picture is worth a thousand words
for any of you hoping to find a man to have children with, let me give you the most important advice you will ever get. stop wasting time with the bullshit questions i asked when auditioning potential mates: “what do you do for a living” “are you a batterer” “do you have any STDs” “do you have a criminal record” “what is your parenting philosophy” “how many kids do you want” “your place or mine”?
none of that matters. there is only one question that you need to bother asking when seeking the father of your children, it’s the ONLY one that matters: “How old were you when you started sleeping through the night?”
my husband hid this critical information from me date after date, year after year. it wasn’t until the twins had three full months of terrorizing me from 9pm till 6a under their belt that i called my mother in law near tears from the exhaustion. it was then that she revealed the source of all that was evil.
“Oh yeah, don’t I know it. Gil was four years old before he slept through the night.”
……………….come again?
FOUR YEARS old!!!! i bred with a man who didn’t fall asleep and stay asleep for more than two or three consecutive hours until he was FOUR YEARS OLD! i honestly would rather her have told me his real name isn’t even gil and he has another family living in argentina no one knows about. if i had learned this information when i delivered the twins i would have left them at the hospital.
now let me say that looking back there were signs. red flags, if you will. since i started having slumber parties with him i quickly learned he only required three hours of sleep a night to be an energized, fully functional human being. i must have been blinded by love to not think this was anything to be concerned about. to miss all the signs. i figured as long as he wasn’t waking me up what did i care?
since this betrayal my eyes have been much more open. i would have thought since he was always up all night anyway, that when the twins arrived he would welcome having nighttime companions and readily take over the night shifts. however, i’m finding it suspicious that since the twins were born he suddenly requires a full 8 hour stay in dreamland in order to carry out his work day. how did he manipulate me, someone who should be tested for chronic fatigue syndrome, into doing the night shift every freaking night (minus a few that he took over when i’d gotten to the raging-bitch-making-everyone-miserable point) while he snores away in the guest room? i’ll tell you how. because i’m the mom and apparently that means a night-shift time card came with my c-section scar.
it’s just as well because when gil has one bad night with the twins he becomes the walking dead for a week. he then starts to spew venom at me for not doing “my job” so that now he’s too tired to do his. when he refers to raising our children as MY job i know it’s only a matter of time before i’m starring in my very own episode of “snapped”.
and this brings me to now. nine months of nightly torture. one baby wakes and decides he wants to tell me all about his short dream in gibberish for 30 minutes before he falls back asleep. 45 minutes later another baby wakes screaming, about what i don’t know. gas drops, tylenol, and a pacifier later and he’s back down. 45 minutes after that baby 1 wakes again crying for food, when i refuse to feed him in the middle of the night he continues to cry waking baby 2 up and they have a beautiful duet for the next several hours that would make your skin crawl. finally i feed the little bastards babies around 4 while giving them the same bleary eyed lecture about how they are 9 months old, in the 92nd percentile, and eat more during the day than a football team so they don’t need food at night! they laugh at me. finish their bottles and fall asleep. until 5:30. then they are up jumping in their cribs, giggling, ready to start our day. “and so it goes and so it goes and i’m the only one who knows”.
i’ve listened to mothers, i’ve read the books, i’ve tried EV UH RE THING. this is who they are. they are freakishly happy, healthy, and energetic on 5 minutes of sleep so i’ve accepted this is what our life will be like. it is in their dna so i don’t fault them. i fault their father. they can blame him when they are never invited to sleepovers because no one’s mother is going to want a creepy little boy up all night cooking in her kitchen.
during the 30 seconds of sleep i get each night i have a reoccurring dream. i dream of a better day when i have a narcoleptic little girl just like mommy…..
so to wrap up, when you’re in a beautiful restaurant looking across the table into the eyes of a man you are falling in love with and ask him The Question, unless he says anything under 6 weeks (in which case verify with his mother) RUN. and stick him with the check for wasting your time.
for those of you future mothers who, like me, failed to see this bigger picture and already married a freak of the night, there is only one way to save yourself. adopt.
god be with you.
lauren’s choice
we landed back in florida tonight to find the airline lost one of our car seats. i was searching my imagination for all kinds of creative ways to get both babies home safely (and legally) when southwest offered to loan us their vile, crusty car seat from 1986.
“Thanks!”
deciding which kid to sacrifice to the seat wasn’t nearly as sophie’s choice as it seems.
i readily offered up colt. sorry buddy, but i begged you to sleep in this morning…..
served
we fly to nyc with the twins tomorrow. me, the nanny, and the husband. the nanny and i will carry the babies, the husband will carry everything else.
i’ve been mentally preparing for this flight for the past week. the last time i flew with the boys they were 3 months old and actually enjoyed being held. this time around i anticipate a great deal of screaming, kicking, and escaping down the aisle.
and that’s just me and the nanny. i can’t even imagine what the babies are gonna be like…..
my husband’s experience will likely be a bit different since he took the liberty of bumping himself up to first class. he graciously offered to come back and ‘check on us’ after he gets through with his dinner.
i really hope he enjoys his serving of divorce papers for dessert.
hugs & kisses
thank you for reading and supporting my blog! my site stats really surprise me, especially considering i haven’t written as frequently as most bloggers. i’ll try to give you more to read! an extra special thank you to those of you who comment, subscribe, and spread the word about diaperbaggage.com.
your encouragement means a lot to me!
♥ Lauren
mrs. mommy-dolittle
i’m not exactly what one would call a wife. i just never saw the point or had any interest in being one. i’ve never told gil this but the day i met him i knew i’d just met the most important person in my life. i didn’t know what that meant at the time but it didn’t take me long to realize (warning: this oozes with cheese) he’s home to me. (i know, i puked in my mouth too). it’s true though. he knows me almost as well as i know myself and after eons of therapy i consider myself to be a professional self-discoverer. i’m 1000% myself with him and he loves and accepts me anyway. so when i decided i wanted to be a mother and he said he wouldn’t procreate with me unless we were married, i found myself saying fiiiinnnee. and here we are. husband and “wife”.
let it be known i don’t even meet the minimum basic requirements of a wife. my version of clean is slightly less detailed than my husbands and when i say i don’t cook what i mean is i don’t even know where the cooking equipment IS. but since my family would probably like to eat once in a while what’s a domestic invalid to do?
hire a wife on craigslist.
so i did.
i found a smoking hot, 28 year old to be the ceo of our home. my children were my first proof that god exists and she is the second. she does the grocery shopping, cooks gourmet meals complete with hors d’oeuvres. she’s thrown dinner parties for our friends, does the baby shopping, clothes shopping, baby proofing, organizes every square inch of our house, and takes my car for oil changes. i came home the other day to find her drilling a hole in the wall to secure wall straps to the tv so it would never be able to fall on the babies. there is seriously nothing she can’t do perfectly AND WITH A SMILE ON HER FACE so no, she’s not a trafficking slave. although it does feel illegal to have her. as far as i’m concerned it is slave labor. i told her when i interviewed her i could not think of a worse job and no matter what we pay her it’ll never be close to what she deserves.
this is why housewives don’t get paid for their work; no one can afford them.
The Smoking Hot New Wife actually seems to take pride in excelling in all these tasks so as far as i’m concerned she’s insane. regardless, every household in the world should come with one of her. she’s a younger version of my mother-in-law who is 156 highly capable people all combined into one super human.
my sons are intoxicated by her. she walks into the room and they stare, grinning at her like creepy little drunks. my husband certainly has a lot less to bitch about now. he doesn’t care who is cooking, cleaning and doing his laundry just so long as it’s not him. and thanks to craigslist, and my being strangely secure in our marriage, he has someone younger, hotter, and thinner than me doing it for him. the skids are happy cause fruit by the foot is no longer the only option at our dinner table. and i’m ecstatic because everyone’s off my back so i can concentrate on my nanny job.
do i feel ashamed, intimidated, insecure, and threatened over this beautiful woman who runs my home, cares for my husband, and nourishes my children far better than i ever could? do i feel resentful that she does everything that i am “supposed” to do as a wife and much better?
(well, there’s one wifely duty she isn’t doing. to my knowledge. but if she is she’s probably doing that better too and i’ll bet she’s even able to do it without staring at the baby monitor the whole time……..bitch).
i’ve done a great deal of soul searching and the honest answers to my questions are NO. ABSOLUTELY NOT! all i feel is freaking grateful we were able to hire this Smoking Hot New Wife to do all the crap i suck at and have no interest in. i find no shame in being replaced by this younger, hotter, better version. i am only regretful i didn’t go craigslist shopping five years ago when i moved in with gil. would have exempt us from italian-german wars 1, 2, 6 & 8. .
our recent dilemma is that our New Wife is threatening to divorce us with talk of cutting back her hours to “pursue other interests”. how could she imagine the grass could be any greener than here at Shawshank? i said when we hired her that it wouldn’t be long before she came to work with a chisel and started shopping on ebay for a rita hayworth poster. hmm i’ll bet she was really drilling her escape route in the wall that day until i came home unexpectedly!
we’ve lost whatever limited ability we had to function as a family without her, so i’m thinking we gotta get creative here in order to keep her from leaving us. i wonder if it will help her understand the depth of how much we need her if i tape this lyric to the dishwasher: “if she ever tries to fucking leave again ima tie her to the bed and set this house on fire”. “today i don’t feel like doing anything, i just wanna lay in my bed. don’t feel like picking up the phone so leave a message at the tone cause today i swear i’m not doing anything. nothing at all. nothing at all. nothing at all.” 05 The Lazy Song
anxIety
ever since i created life all i seem to think about is death.
when i was pregnant i had panic attacks before every ultrasound because i’d convinced myself one or both babies were probably dead. i could never wrap my mind around the idea that they were going to come out. somehow, through my whole pregnancy, it didn’t really sink in that at the end of the vagina (or in my case, operating table) a person would appear. let alone two. i never read one word or learned one thing to do with the babies once they were born.i spent the entire 36 weeks and 2 days preparing for the upcoming week of the pregnancy. that seemed like more than enough to study. i had to learn the many different reasons for the many different types of fluids coming out of my body. i had to worry about twin to twin transfusion syndrome. had to google every possible sign of premature labor. and let’s not forget the endless hours of kegel exercises i was instructed to do by everyone from the doctor to the ice cream man (i admit i only did about 4 and thank goodness cause what a waste of time all that vagina squeezing would have been given i ended up with a csection).
it’s really a wonder how anyone works while pregnant with all the required squeezing and googling….
i told myself to stay focused on how to keep the babies safe while they were inside me and i’d worry about how to keep them safe on the outside if we ever got that far .
i’ve spent most of my life as a human contradiction so it came as no surprise to anyone that although i didn’t believe these babies were ever gonna hatch, that didn’t stop me from the most obsessive nesting my family & friends have ever seen. i had my entire hospital bag packed when i was 16 weeks pregnant. it sat by my bedroom door month after month until one day my husband needed the suitcase for a trip and dumped out all of my neatly organized birthing equipment. i threw my most hormonal tantrum to date. i even installed the car seats right after the baby shower and drove around with them empty for two months. gil found it necessary to tell me how creepy he found this every day and refused to ride in my car.
i remember waking him one night when i was 6.5 months pregnant because the high chairs were not assembled yet and i was starting to panic. he sleepily muttered something about babies not even using high chairs till they are 6 months old and if i continued to be psychotic he’s sleeping in a hotel.
i’d like it to be known that this is not me. was not me. i had never been THIS person. i’d never been obsessive compulsive or anal retentive about a single thing. in fact if we were voting on personality types i’d have been voted ‘least likely to give a shit’.
before i got pregnant i can’t remember a time anything kept me up at night. i always slept like a baby (THAT’S the oxymoron of the year!). looking back, this nesting hyper-drive must have been my way of telling myself i would psychologically be prepared for motherhood as long as every detail of my home was. and it did help.
for me motherhood is extremely out of character. i’m one of the most selfish people i know so this whole putting- someone- elses- needs- before- my-own thing is to say the least totally unnatural and very very terrible. i am also organizationally challenged so to be sure i am the mother my sons need me to be i go overboard. i would now be voted ‘best person to know in the event of a natural disaster’.
my diaper bag is stocked like nothing you’ve ever seen. i have sunscreen, wardrobe changes, a lifetime supply of wipes in ziplock baggies, 240 diapers, infant tylenol, teething rings, baby food, bottles, cases of formula, blankets, fire extinguishers, the how to survive a volcano eruption handbook, and you get my point. the stroller with the two boys in it weighs less than the diaper bag. but i need it that way. i need to know i’m prepared for the explosive diarrhea in the middle of the mall, for the chance we get stuck in stand still traffic for two days and the kids need food, for this gi gAN TIC responsibility.
since the boys recently began crawling our house is looking as loaded as the diaper bag with the endless amount of gates, locks, and padding. no one in the house can figure out how to use a toilet anymore but at least we’ve made it thru another day with no casualties!
even though we live in fort knox and have a nanny so there is aways an extra set of eyes on the boys, we still have a potential near death moment every freaking day. i really don’t know what’s wrong with jett. colt seems accident prone which you can’t fault him for, but jett really seeks this shit out. he will find the one item in the entire house that could cause him to spontaneously combust and he will crawl toward it with more ambition than i’ve ever had for anything. if you prevent him from getting it he obsesses and looks at you with hate in his eyes for saving his life. self-destructive nature….no idea where he gets that from…..
so yeah, every day i’m terrified i’m going to drop the ball and something’s going to kill them. so again, i go overboard. i put my hand on their chests 4 times a night to make sure they are breathing which is probably the reason they’re still waking up all night long at 9 months. the boys have three pediatricians, a GI specialist, an allergists, an acupuncturist and a masseuse. very rarely does a week go by without a visit to at least two of them. my husband and skids call me the “munchausen mom” but i believe that’s a misdiagnosis. i don’t take them to doctors for attention, i take them to so they can assure me they are healthy and fine and that i haven’t done some terrible damage to them, yet. and i can exhale. for a moment. but just a moment. cause once i learn they are okay i start to fear i am not. am i terminal and don’t know it? will i die soon and not see my kids grow up? will today be the last day i kiss them? what are they going to do without their mother? since i’ve had kids i find the pressure to stay alive overwhelming!
my husband thinks i need a therapist on speed dial and a shipment of zanax fed-exed every day. as the days go on, however, i’m starting to think he’s the crazy one along with people like him who have several children and with each one become more relaxed. i don’t think it is what everyone claims it to be-that you get more seasoned with each one and the neurosis of being a first time parent wear off and by the fourth kid you just strap him to the roof of the car and off you go. it is clear to me that your mind must just shut off at a certain point. your emotions must have to shut down somewhat or how could you survive? if with every child you went through anxiety like this every moment of every day how could you function? no one would have more than one kid. so you must have to stop “caring” to a point. it’s got to be as if a self protective shield goes up when another baby is on the way that says ‘fuck it. what will be will be. i gotta get some freakin sleep’.
it’s not an accident there is an I in the middle of anxIety. there I am surrounded by all this fear. but i am not alone. i am squishing two other people in there with me. so as i see it i can get on some sort of horse tranquilizer, or be prepared to attend a lot of family counseling sessions with two very angry men (make that three) pointing fingers at me.
the moral of this parenting story is that there is no way not to screw up. i can go down the safe path of baby proofing their lives and keeping them healthy but it will likely result in two highly neurotic men who wear bubble wrap to work.
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