Mommy Terror Alerts

Image: Office of Homeland Security

This has been a busy and stressful month, and I figured rather than continue to blindly subject my loved ones to my (seemingly random) rages, I should help millions of families and develop a Mommy Terror Alert System. It’s for your own protection.

Terror Alert Threat Level 1: Mommy gets very fidgety. Foot tapping, inability to sit still (well, if she were ever allowed to sit still), etc. Mommy makes lists in this phase. Long, impossible-to-accomplish lists.

Level 2: Mommy eats. Constantly. She is actually unable to stop herself. It may be salty, it may be sweet, but if she is seen shoveling snacks into her pie hole, keep your distance.

Level 3: Mommy stops eating. While less obvious, she is far more dangerous than overeating Mommy.

Level 4: Mommy frets over world peace and missing socks simultaneously. This may also be referred to as “intense overreaction.” May manifest as Mommy stomping through the house ranting about how nobody in this place helps her clean — and before you know it she is losing her mind over how you’re going to pay for college since obviously she’s going to have to quit her job to stay home and pick up everyone’s stupid JUNK AND OH BY THE WAY I GUESS I’LL BE A SHORT-ORDER COOK WHILE I’M AT IT! THERE ARE STARVING CHILDREN, YOU KNOW! This stage is extremely dangerous, as one wrong look from a loved one can push her over into…

Level 5: Crying. While insisting everything is fine.

Use Caution: While Mommy may progress through the stages in an orderly fashion, in times of extreme crisis–like a child refusing to sleep after Mommy has just done five back-to-back loads of laundry and has two hours of work to get done and there’s no bread for sandwiches tomorrow–she may skip levels.

What you can do: Uh, how about don’t piss her off. But if you must piss her off, you can help lower the terror alert level by A) Agreeing with her no matter what she says, and B) cleaning. Seriously, people, make your beds and mommy might just avoid a mental breakdown for one more day.

If You Say I’m Not Thankful, I’ll Eat You Alive

I’m thankful that my child loves me so much that she feels a physical need for me when she is under the weather. I truly love [really, not even being sarcastic] holding her in her bed while she tries to fall asleep. I do. Even if she did, mere hours before, show me this picture–made at school in full view of teachers and maybe other parents–titled: Mommy When She is Angry.

I’m thankful that my child has the dexterity to make my angry mouth look like a hairy, smelly, evil death trap. And I’m thankful that even though I unfortunately have a penchant for biting the heads off newborn puppies, I also obviously have fantastic hair.

Tumbling Toward Bribery

I cried in gymnastics class. Just a little, but I hadn’t expected a tumbling class for kids who still do the pee-pee dance to make me feel like such a failure as a parent.

I’ll back up. For a while now, Sally and I have been going what we are now referring to as the “baby” gymnastics class. This is a class for 24- to 30-month-olds. Their tiny little butts bulge from diapers, they tumble around like carefree Gumby dolls, and when they all line up, Sally can use their heads as armrests.

Sally is a more than a year older than these kids. When she jumps of the foam steps to swing from a parallel bar, her feet drag on the ground. She’s always been a bit more on the…intellectual side, though, so this class was a legitimate challenge at first. But she needs to move on. Plus, and perhaps more importantly, this class requires the parent to participate with the child, and if I have to Army-crawl across across a room one more time I’m going to cry. Again.

So we go to the “big girl” class. Where parents do not have to walk like crabs but rather watch the kids, which is what lazy, aging, overweight parents are supposed to do, damn it. I digress. Class starts, and the teacher–who knows Sally is a freakazoid cautious child–grabs her by the wrist and drags her around the circle where the other children are happily jogging. Sally explodes into tears as she dangles from the teacher’s grasp and I begin to wonder if she might decide to chew her own arm off rather than be subjected to this immersion torture. They sit down to stretch and the Mr. and I beam too-big smiles while giving a rousing thumbs up. No dice. She wrangles away from the teacher and makes a mad dash past the normal children to bury her head in my lap.

We spend the next 10 minutes trying to convince, bribe, even physically push her out onto the blue mats with not a sliver of success. Then I just sit, watching other people’s children bear crawl, which is not as interesting as you might think, and my eyes well up because I am now sure I’ll have to go on her honeymoon with her so that she won’t be afraid. “That’s it! We’re going. You’re obviously a baby and can’t do this.” And like a lunatic, I drag her, crying now about leaving, past the parents and outside. Mr. Embee is steeling himself for the duel-female sobfest he is about to endure.

Normal parents might have stopped there. We are not normal. We decided we would go back every week and make her watch class until she realized how much fun she was missing and conquered her insane separation anxiety.

Oh, and I decided to bribe her.

The deal: Do class like a big girl, and Mommy will paint your nails. No seriously, this is a WAY big-girl reward. The child has wanted her nails painted since she could speak, which was roughly two weeks before birth, and I’ve never let her. “Do you have blue nail polish?” “No but you can pick any of the colors I do have.” SOLD.

Watching Sally start Class No. 2 might as well have been watching her jump out of a plane. She was scared to death, but…[close eyes, run blindly in style of Braveheart] FOR LOVE OF NAIL POLISH!!!! And she was in.

Further proof a manicure can solve any problem.