Ybarbo Alicia - Sh*tty Mom for All Seasons: Half-@ssing It All Year Long

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

Motherhood Is a Multi-Seasonal Affliction

Its one of those awkward life moments.

There you are, standing outside the kindergarten door with the other parents, waving goodbye to your kids. As the children disappear into the building with their turtle-shell backpacks, you suddenly find yourself sucked into a black hole of playground-based mommy nostalgia. Awwwww. Theyre so cute... Theyre so big... I cant believe its already spring... All those baby years... are they really over? SNIFF.

Your eyes are watery too. Damn tree pollen. But you play along because, really, do these sweet, sniffling gals need to know youre not on their sentimental wavelength? You arent sad. You arent emotionally overwhelmed. Secretly, in fact, you are overjoyed. Those baby years are over?... YIPPEEEEE!

You dont cheer out loud, of course. Not until you get back to the car and roll up the windows, at which point you can howl like a drunken sailor, fresh off the boat for Fleet Week. But why shouldnt dropping off your kids with another responsible adultanywhere, reallybe a moment to celebrate? Lets review some basic facts. Who managed to keep them alive during the toddler years, when they were hoisting themselves onto the hot stove to help you cook? You did. Who paid daycare professionals all that money to read them tactile books? You did. Who lost all that sleep when they had rotavirus and had to be rushed to the bathroom every twenty minutes with the runs? Your spouse did that. Cmon. Gross.

But no matter how many kids you have, how many hours you work, or how many mornings you feigned sleep until your husband got up to make them breakfast, the point is the same. Dry those fake pollen tears, Mom. You earned this shit!

Besides, you wont be cheering in your car for long. Allergies come and go with barometric pressure, but parenting is a year-round condition. As your kids go through the school year, you confront new challenges every day. You worry they wont make the right friends, get a spot on the right soccer team, or find their way into the right bathroom, whatever that means in this day and age. The good thing about school is that it has teachers. The whole reason these people are able to fulfill their lifelong dream of teaching kids how to find the right bathroom is that youre dumping kids off100 percent alive, by the wayat the tender age of five. Even so, school isnt quite the mommy vacation its cracked up to be. The kid still expects you to pitch in with folders. Teachers offer an obscene number of opportunities for parental involvement. And if school makes kids smarter, it also makes them hip to your tricks. By the time they hit second grade, you can no longer tell them that homemade cupcakes are a pretend food. Thanks, Cupcake Mom.

As the kids grow and the seasons changewhether its soccer season, camping season, apple picking season, or cold and flu seasonyou still need guidance on important issues. Most of all, you need helpful shortcuts and self-serving rationales. Theres a time and a place for sentimental parenting. But school drop-off is not that time and place, and neither is this book.

* CHAPTER 1 *

Finding Your Lost Kids and Other Practical Spring Break Advice

If you are looking for advice about how to plan a flawless vacation with your kids, the Internet is your spring break G-spot. The World Wide Web is packed with superIFFIC ideas about the perfect towns to visit, the best places to eat with kids, and the hottest apps for jumping lines at the amusement park. Like most exciting things on the Internet, however, these ideas are also dirty fantasies. Theres no such thing as a vacation with kids, and everyone knows that.

But even if you call it a trip, the fact remains that perfect trips with kids are like vaginal orgasms: Good luck with that. Wouldnt spring break travel be easier if we got advice that was less like zesty Internet porn and more like the sex life of a middle-aged married couple? The theme of that spring break trip would be founded on three simple ideas: Lower your expectations. Minimize the surprises. Manage the dysfunction.

PROJECTILE VOMIT IN THE RENTAL CAR

Maybe it was a GI thing he picked up on the plane. Maybe she was playing a video game when the mountain road got unexpectedly curvy. Maybe he was enjoying a box of Whoppers when he discovered that a movie theatersize box of sugarcoated malt balls do not, in fact, go down like water.

Its not their fault. Actually, its your fault. Before kids blow chunks, they almost always try to warn you. They grunt. They groan. They complain of a tummy problem, prompting you to instruct them, Open a window. Real talk, parents. Fresh air? If fresh air cured vomiting, hospitals would have crank-open windows and the Ebola virus wouldnt be that big of a deal. Telling your carsick kids to open the window is roughly as effective as telling them to drink curdled chocolate milk and stare at the hood ornament.

So there you arespeeding to a Mexican airport that you just realized is in a different time zonewhen one of the twins yaks onto his lap, his brothers lap, the back of your head, and the entire backseat. Why? Because kids never puke up a tiny bit. They puke up, like, two gallons. They puke up way more by volume than they have actually eaten in weeks, if not months. For reasons unexplained in the Bible, their puke flies out like Satans spew.

How to fix it. The smell of puke is contagious, so you need to triage this shit. First, slam on the brakes, jump out of the car, and open the puke-side door. Next, strip the clothes off everyone who isnt already naked. Now open your husbands luggage and pull out all the large, absorbent undershirts you can find, unless you stole some towels from the hotel; dont waste time worrying about ethicsthe hotel doesnt want them back now anyway.

After heavy wiping, take hand sanitizer or a water bottle and dump liquid all over the seats and your kids. Dry the seats with dirty socks, underwear, and any stuffed animals your kids may have won at local carnivals. Those toys are probably made out of toxic waste, anyway, and should be buried. When you cant do any more, find a nearby trash can. If theres no trash can nearby, leave the entire pile of puke-soaked fabric by the side of the road. Sorry, volunteer cleanup crew. But this is no time to be a good citizen.

LOST CHILDREN

The second most common spring break experience is the temporary misplacing of ones children. This one is not your fault. What are you gonna dowalk your kid on a leash? If kids were meant to be tethered like farm animals, they would sleep outside in the barn like you asked, without complaint. The problem with unleashing them is that when kids get lost, they go invisible. They disappear like magical wizards. That is because kids have no sense of direction. Or anything else, for that matter. They wander off like airheads with no memory and no plan for the future. And since they are roughly half the size of regular peopleand 98 percent of them are wearing T-shirtsthey cant be easily spotted in a crowd.

How to fix it. For the first five minutes, DONT PANIC. Your child hasnt drowned in the fake waterpark river or been abducted by a serial killer. When kids go MIA, theyre almost always doing something stupid, like hiding inside the whale belly at the playground or standing in front of a store window, staring at the flashing LED lights on a plastic replica of the Statue of Liberty. Spend a few minutes calmly looking around. Hell probably see you and charge over, scratching his head.