* CHAPTER 13 *

How to Feel Nothing When You Dump Them at Grandma’s for the Weekend/Week/Month/Summer/Ever

It should be an easy decision. Your baby is exhausting you, and your mom or mother-in-law wants to help. She’s offered to take care of your baby for as long as you need. A night. A weekend. Whatever you want, honey! You can sleep late … take a shower, uninterrupted … have a date night.

And yet, you can’t.

You have worked so hard for this baby. You suffered through some miscarriages, or you IVFed five times before the egg finally took, or you flew to China and adopted, or you gave up on IVF, decided to adopt, bought a plane ticket to China, and then got pregnant. The point is, your baby is finally here, totally yours, and you feel compelled to spend every possible moment with her.

You don’t know it yet, but you’ve lost your mind.

BABIES WERE DESIGNED TO BE PASSED OFF TO STRANGERS.

A baby is chubby, cute, and helpless. That is precisely so someone will take her from you for five minutes. You’ve become like the hoarder who can’t see that her house is full of mice. You need a reality show to unhinge the baby from your arms. Give her to grandma and draw yourself a nice, hot Epsom salt bath.

YOU ARE NO PRIZE.

Good God woman, look at yourself. Or better yet, rent Sweeney Todd and check out Helena Bonham Carter. Cause that’s you. Ratty hair, crazy eyes, making questionable food choices. Now think of your poor baby. She spends all day staring at you, wondering if this is how she’s going to look when she grows up. Of course she is crying.

Your baby needs to see how rested adults behave. If she goes only by you, she’ll think it’s normal to shout, “I can’t do this anymore!” and storm out of the house to sit in the car and eat cheese.

Knowing you aren’t the only kind of person on Earth gives your baby a ray of hope.

OLD PEOPLE HAVE SOMETHING TO CONTRIBUTE.

Grandparents possess a unique wisdom that comes from being near death. They remember wars, cheap coffee, and your “asshole phase” that started at around age fourteen and hasn’t quite ended. Your mother is eager to share her knowledge, and since you stopped listening to her the day she said you could stand to lose a few pounds, your baby is all she has left. And after being disappointed in you, her expectations are more reasonable. Whatever she did to you will be diluted considerably by the passage of time and arthritis.

GRANDCHILDREN ARE A DO-OVER.

Unfortunately, your mother can’t go back in time and not grab your back fat when you tried on a bikini. That, along with your sister being “the talented one,” is in the books, forever. But your baby is a blank canvas—she’s you, minus the resentment and the memory. And your mom has about thirty years’ worth of emotional paint that’s about to dry out.

Remember: You look like hell. Get some sleep and wash your hair.

Things to Do in Your Own Home While You’re the Only One in It

OK, the baby is gone. You have four days. You may assume you’re supposed to go to a spa or spend lots of money. Well, sure. But for one of those days, Sh*tty Mom prescribes the following: Lead your exact same life, but without the baby and/or kids.

You won’t appreciate how much your kids have altered your life until you blaze through a to-do list, by yourself.

Take a shower.

A long one, with the bathroom door closed. Oooh, look! There’s shampoo in the bottle because your kid didn’t dump it out all at once so that she could make a bubble mountain.

Go grocery shopping.

It’s amazing how quickly you can buy everything you need when you aren’t telling the five-year-old to stop licking the apples, or asking the seven-year-old to find his brother, who you last saw running down the cereal aisle. Take time to look at foreign cheeses, organic spices, and fruit hybrids. Look how quickly you can morph from tired mom into pretentious foodie. Brooklyn, here you come!

Walk to the park.

The same one you take your kid to. But now you can be that strange lady on the bench who reads books without looking up every minute to scan the sandbox. See those moms in high-waist jeans, tennis shoes, and sweatshirts? Most days, that’s what everyone sees when they look at you.

Sobering.

Walk home at an adult’s pace, without carrying a tired three-year-old in one arm and pushing her tricycle with the other. So light, so breezy. This must be the reason people enjoy taking walks.

Make dinner.

Sit where you usually sit, and eat the entire meal, by yourself. How does it feel to keep all the good bites for yourself, no sharing? No insisting that the vegetables be eaten … no making threats that you don’t have the energy to enforce. Just chew, swallow, and relax.

Now you’re ready to party like the wild, single woman that you are for the next six hours. Pull the childproof covers off the electrical outlets. You can do it—there’s nobody in the house who wants to stick a wet finger in there. Then, go to the kitchen, take out a knife and … leave it out on the counter … within the reach of a child … so unsafe, and so close to the bleach that you didn’t put up on a high shelf.

Hell, yeah. You wild girl, you still got it.