|
|
The views expressed on this page are soley
those of the author and do not
necessarily represent the views of County
News Online
|
 |
Broke Wife, Big City
When life hands
you lemons, make bathtub gin
By Aprill Brandon
Ask any parent what their worst nightmare is and then immediately
cancel any plans you had for the next three days. Because that’s how
long they will take to answer you. Because parents are worried about
everything.
For instance, among my top ten worst nightmare scenarios as a pregnant
mom of a toddler are:
• A serial killer named Meatclaw kidnaps my son
• I go into labor on the day the hospital runs out of epidural
• My son turns out to be awesome at soccer and all my weekends have to
be spent sober and pretending to like soccer
• My grandchildren will have to participate in The Hunger Games in the
dystopian future, which they will lose because no one in my family
knows how to shoot an arrow OR how to do a fancy side braid
• I get cancer and die. My husband, overwhelmed with grief, gets
tricked into marrying my vapid, bimbo nurse Trixie after my funeral and
she then raises my kids to be the kind of humans who genuinely enjoy
keeping up with the Kardashians
• Prohibition comes back and I am arrested for Googling “how to make
bathtub gin”
And none of those things address the daily onslaught of new things we
as parents are told to be afraid of, like haunted mobile apps that
possess children and studies that prove babies who didn’t learn
Mandarin in utero will never get into college and helicopter parenting
causing rebellious kindergartners to start stripping.
Of course, it’s not all death and destruction and illicit moonshine
runs. The mundane can be almost as terrifying when you have kids. For
example, at some point on that mental list that every parent has,
probably down around No. 37, is the infamous nightmare of the missing
sippy cup.
Oh god, the dreaded missing sippy cup. You know the one I’m talking
about. It’s been on the back of your mind for awhile, the fact that you
can’t remember the last time you saw it. And even though you’ve been
known to struggle with anything above second grade math, you instantly
do some fancy algebra in your head and deduce that there are three in
the dishwasher, two in the cupboard, one he’s currently drinking out of
and one being used as a load-bearing wall in his Fortress of Generic
Blocks That Are Not Legos Because He’s Only Two and Mommy Is Cheap.
Which leaves one completely unaccounted for. And after some more fancy
mental calculations, you realize it’s been unaccounted for since
Tuesday. And nope. Not that Tuesday. Last LAST Tuesday.
And that’s not even the scariest part. The scariest part is that,
unlike all of his missing socks (which is about 1/3 of his total sock
population) and all those missing pens from the junk drawer, which I
imagine are living blissfully together on some tropical island with all
12,000 of my missing bobby pins, missing sippy cups never stay lost. Oh
no. They will mysteriously show up again. Right when their contents
have ripened to their peak of nightmarish horror.
And despite the fact that when you asked your child to help you find
this same very cup two weeks ago he just did a series of figure-eights
around your legs while repeatedly asking “where go? where go?”, it
always, inevitably, reappears in their hands when it makes its grand
re-entrance.
And so when that moment comes, that moment your precious angel that you
spent 36 hours creatively cursing and pushing into this world runs up
to you with a brightly painted cup of toxic sludge, a million horrific
questions run through your mind:
How much spoiled milk can a 27-pound body take before death occurs?
What strange alchemy must take place to turn apple juice that shade of
green?
Or…wait…I think this used to be orange juice.
Does grape juice ferment into alcohol after baking for three weeks in
the hot sun? And if it does, how much prison kiddie wine did my kid
just drink before he alerted me that he found the missing cup?
It would be wrong of me to finish the rest of the kiddie wine/fermented
grape juice, right? Even if I’ve had a REALLY hard day?
How worried do I need to be about mold, because there are no less than
11 blog posts littering my Facebook feed at any given moment about the
dangers of mold growing in sippy cups.
The good news is that there is hope. More than hope, actually. There is
a foolproof method to never losing another sippy cup again. And that
method is to only let your child drink water from here on out.
A sippy cup full of water has never, ever been lost in the whole,
long, sordid history of parenthood.
Can’t get enough of Aprill? Can’t wait until next week?
Check out her website at http://aprillbrandon.com/
|
|
|
|
