Exploiting My Baby : A Blog by Teresa Strasser

There is some unwritten statute of limitations on how long one can whine about a crappy childhood, a negligent parent, a few too many chicken pot pies, summers with the grandparents, days spent on Greyhound Busses and with dubious caregivers and creepy neighbors. There is just a moment in an adult’s life when the complaining and sad-sacking about how our parents got divorced, or lost custody, or bailed, or otherwise stank up the joint is just kind of pathetic. Let’s face it, that moment had come and gone for me.

Then I had a child myself, and twinges of pain in that amputated leg known as my relationship with my mother started to send fiery jolts into my nervous system. I thought I would get a do-over (as opposed to my childhood, which was a do-under), but instead I got something unexpected: when my son was around 18 months old, I started to freak out.  Whatever it is that made her look at the job of motherhood the way an angry teenager views a Friday night shift behind the Frialator, whatever she had, maybe I caught it.

This is the day, I would think, driving my toddler to daycare, or swinging him at the park, or slipping a Grover t-shirt over his giant, blond head, this is the day it happens. This is the day I start to suck at this. This is the day I start to hate it. This is the day of reckoning, when I realize that I’ve been judging my mom for not enjoying my company or any part of raising me, but I’m no better. And this is the day the symptoms start manifesting in me. This is the day I realize that while I see other mothers having moments of both great struggle and magical, indescribable delight, I will only experience the former, because there are just some bullets you can’t dodge.

When I started to panic about my ability to be a parent, it wasn’t about physically being there, or providing, it was about something else, it was about the ineffable ability to enjoy my child, because as sure as I won’t forget the phone number of Haystack’s Pizza down the street or the smell of the back of a city bus during Indian summer, or the look of abject boredom on my mom’s face across the dinner table, I won’t forget the feeling of being a tedious wretch, a burden that was ruining everything.

Here’s where having an okay childhood rescues you. Most new moms, I gather, realize early on that the venture isn’t wholly exalted.

They catch on to the reality that normal might mean 17 thrilling, awe-inspiring minutes in a 12-hour day of parenting. Kids can be annoying, they can dawdle, they can cry uncontrollably at what to us in nothing (the green cup is dirty, here’s the yellow one, see you in 27 minutes when you have come back from the brink of insanity). They can be scary, flying off couches and spiking high fevers. They can be, as a matter of course, a bit dull, unless watching the same video of a garbage truck dumping a bin of trash into its hopper repeatedly on YouTube is somehow gratifying for you.

It was about a month into my panic when I turned the ship around. And by the ship I mean my Honda. My son, on the way to daycare, uncharacteristically moaned from his car seat, “Don’t want to go to school.”

We pulled over into the parking lot of an Albertson’s. I stared back at him.

“Want to ride train,” he said. A tear fell onto his puffy coat.

That was the moment, wedged between a meth-head blasting classical music from his station wagon and a Mini-Cooper glinting in the sun, that I became not a women running from a fear that she will fail at parenting, but a woman running toward one simple day at the mall with her baby. And off we went to the indoor mall in Sherman Oaks with the Ladybug train that runs past the chain stores all day long. Phoning daycare to say we wouldn’t make it, cancelling any plans I had for that day, I knew that nothing could make me happier, and in knowing that, I was at least partially free.

If I love being with this boy, even just to share a Wetzel and ride a rickety indoor train for hours, if I love this more than anything else I could possibly imagine doing today, than I can stop worrying. If I had been playing tag with the bogeyman that was “turning into my mother,” this was one very small, yet somehow enormous, “NOT IT.”

No one in my family is sentimental, and I think that’s okay. I don’t have a baby book for my son, I didn’t keep track of when he got his first tooth or tricycle.

That’s why lately, pregnant with my second boy, when I have syrupy thoughts about the baby I can only just now feel moving and kicking, it’s like a million cars turning around in a million parking lots. I love you already, I think, as I rub my hand over my stomach. Sappy. However, when I find myself thinking that this little being is good company already, and enjoying him even now, before he is born, I feel myself turning and turning in the right direction.

In a way, it’s not about my own mother anymore. I may not honor her, specifically, but as I think about that commandment I think the best I can do is to honor motherhood in general, and I can only do that by letting myself get better at it as I go. It’s on me now as it has been for a very long time.

It’s on me to know that sometimes it’s okay to be less than thrilled with the minutiae of motherhood, the ordering of diaper cream online, the scraping of uneaten carrots from an Elmo plate. It’s okay.

As long as there are days, and they will come when I can’t predict them, when my main function in this life is not to drive my babies forward, but to turn them around. If I can find supreme usefulness in sitting on a train to nowhere, just staring at my baby as he stares into the world, just taking him in and letting the smell of his hair and the feel of his chubby hands fall into the pages of the baby book in my mind, I am not just avoiding becoming my mother, I am getting to stop at all the stations she missed.  “All aboard,” says my son to the mall conductor. All aboard.

* Thanks to The Jewish Journal of Los Angeles for running this piece in print. 

I wish I was this sober at my prom.

I’d like to go to my senior prom again, but not be blackout drunk with a 26 year-old date.

For a brief period during which I hosted a basic cable decorating show, I was kind of famous. I wish I could be famous again, without having to emotionally implode from the cognitive dissonance of thinking I was a nobody and the world thinking I was somebody and the compulsive need to prove myself right. If I had it to do over again, I wouldn’t glower at people who shouted my name at airports. I would wave and smile. Like I deserved it.

If I could be pregnant, give birth and care for a baby again — oh wait, I can.

For once, life has given me a do-over. Of all the major life cycle events, the big moments, the passages and transitions, the ceremonies, beginnings and endings, of all the big deals I have screwed up just by being terrified of failing at them, I never get a chance to try again with the full knowledge of how I will look back at it. However, as I sit here four months pregnant with my second child, all I can think is: this pregnancy thing certainly is different when I don’t spend the day Googling “miscarriage causes” or “chromosomal abnormalities of Ashkenazi Jews” or “the dangers of eating soft cheese during pregnancy.”

The kid is just fine, my two year-old. What I couldn’t have predicted is that my love for him would give birth to some kind of ever-multiplying fear monster, that instead of just experiencing him growing in my stomach, or instead of just watching his tiny face sleeping, I would spend most of his early days on a maternal death watch. If he slept for too long, my heart would race, something was wrong. If he had the hiccups, or a rash, or a fever, or a crying fit, I knew the end was coming.

With my first. I don't know why I look smug. I wasn't.

Sorry, this is dark. But I have to admit it. My love for this creature, before he was born and after, made caring for him a perpetual shift on the front lines of a little war I was losing against my own anxiety. Bad things happen. Terrible things happen. Those things still might happen to me, to this new baby, but I can tell you this: I truly don’t think my contemplation of doom either manifests or protects against it.

And another thing. Another thing about the first-born. You don’t know anything about anything. Or at least I didn’t.

Now, I can tell you how a Braxton-Hicks contraction feels as opposed to real labor, I can school you on when to take away a pacifier or how to pack a diaper bag. I already have a pediatrician, I even know the parking drill over there and it won’t panic me. I have a daycare. I have hand-me-downs. I know where to find indoor playgrounds and I can tell you which bookstores and restaurants in Los Feliz have changing tables in the bathroom. I got this.

The first time around, thanks to the omnipresence of www.babycenter.com, I knew exactly how many weeks and days pregnant I was, whether my fetus was the size of a plum or kiwi, whether it had eyebrows or a spleen yet. This time, I lose track. Sometimes, at least until someone offers me a cocktail, I even forget.

The most prominent symptom I had the first time around wasn’t morning sickness or bloating, though I had those, the most pronounced side effect of carrying a baby was acute self-absorption. It’s not that I was self-involved out of some sense of my own importance or awesomeness, I was just so scared something would go wrong that I somehow became convinced, despite lots of evidence to the contrary, no one had ever carried a baby to term before. I was the only pregnant person on the planet, it was all about me, my swelling ankles, my ultrasounds, my need to find a name, my due date, me. The thing about this pregnancy is that I’m finding it almost impossible to focus on myself, on all the bad things that could happen, while caring for a two-year old who needs me to play garbage trucks and spray Oxy-Clean on butter stains.

So, here’s to do-overs. Oh wait, I can’t drink.  Just pass the Camembert.

It had never come to my attention before a certain freckle-faced, scrawny, corduroy-pants-wearing bully named Robin brought it to my attention: I have freakishly small hands. I have hands like a carnie.

I blame the bullies I knew before Robin for being off their game and letting the small hands slide. A bully’s whole raison d’etre is to notice any slightly unusual feature that could be exploited for mockery. Before Robin made it the subject of an impromptu song parody one afternoon in elementary school, I really hadn’t noticed the small hands. Neither had anyone else.

Every day, for maybe a month or two, Robin tormented me with her song.

And I’ll be honest. It was pretty catchy. The other girls would join in. Teresa has small hands, small hands, small hands. You get the idea.

There was no escaping. I could hide my hands in my pockets or behind my back, but that song was No. 1 with a bullet. And with a bully. The other girls, most of them generally pretty harmless, would fall under the cruel spell of the ditty and feel compelled to join in until the song swelled, overtaking the street outside of school, a chorus of curious and silly childhood angst.

This small hands thing is small potatoes compared to some of the bullying explored in the new documentary “Bully.” But for reasons I don’t fully understand, it was only the beginning for me, and the film reminded me of some of those times.

I was bullied that year, most likely because I had skipped ahead a couple of grades and was too emotionally immature to blend well with my peers. I was bullied even after rejoining my own grade level, but mostly on the public busses I took to school. Kids ripped the ribbons from my ponytails, made fun of my off-brand sneakers, pulled my hair, grabbed at my backpack.

In high school, one of only a handful of scholarship kids at a private prep school, I was frequently the subject of toxic rumors, mostly sexual in nature: I was pregnant (I was a virgin). I was a slut (see the former). I made out with some older boy in his car. You name it.

Just as Robin zeroed in on the small hands, sometimes I wonder whether the more sophisticated bullies zeroed in on something harder to see but just as enticing: the unstable home life, the chaotic family, the lack of any sturdy adult figures in my orbit. I was weak and insecure and wanted to fit in so desperately that I always got it just a little bit wrong, like an off-brand shoe, all ugly angles and loud Velcro.

What’s more, it’s not much fun for a bully if they poke you and you don’t bleed. I bled.

In a moment of exemplary parenting that stood out amongst her other mostly tuned-out, mediocre moments, my mom said the thing that would carry me through. These popular kids, she pointed out, they would all grow up to be bores, enjoying their finest hour now, in school. The nerds and geeks and losers, she said, would be interesting and creative. Inventive. They would rule the rest of life.

“Do you think Steven Spielberg was one of the popular kids?” she would ask, staring out the window, tucking her silk kimono around her waist.

It was a decent point. Still, I would have traded the prospect of my future creativity for a pair of real Adidas and some normal-sized hands, but I didn’t have that option.

If it turns out Spielberg was really popular in high school, I never want to find out about it.

Through the magic of social networking, I can track my mom’s predictions. Almost all of the popular kids I knew throughout my school life, including Robin, seem to be leading lives of quiet desperation. Of course, I am, too; mine is just louder, and doesn’t involve middle management or Friday nights at Ruby’s. As for some of the other kids that got picked on with me, it’s almost uncanny. An outcast boy from my fifth-grade class is one of the best-known children’s authors in the world. A pasty-faced girl with giant, red lips and thick glasses left high-school nerdom for a career as an international fashion model. Extreme facial features are terrible if you want a date to the junior prom, but awesome if you want to make a shitload selling cosmetics.

Me? I still have small hands. But they can work a keyboard just fine.

No disrespect to the great Mrs. Roper.

Today, I stopped home to change my outfit before picking up my kid from daycare.

What, because you never know who might snap a photo as I lure my child into his car seat with the whispered promise of a Grover juice box? No one cares. Except now that I’m a parent, I care deeply about lots of things that are totally meaningless. For example, what I wear when I fetch my kid.

It’s not that I want to impress the other moms, or the woman who runs the place, or her assistant. It’s that on some level, I need to impress them.

Or at least that describes the urgency with which I want to stroll in wearing skinny jeans tucked into high heeled brown suede boots with a casual but clearly expensive t-shirt.

It was one thing for me to show up places with a guacamole stain on my sleeve when I was only representing myself. Maybe it was even cute, not Zoey Deschanel in a romantic comedy cute, but I like to think it was close. Now that I’m a mom, for some reason it seems important to look important, or at least like I don’t eat in my car and buy accessories at Claire’s.

Yep, get ready, because this is one of those mom moments triggered by one of those daughter moments. Get cozy, it’s blame mom time!

It may not surprise you that keeping up appearances wasn’t exactly a thing to my mom, and bless her heart for being all free-spirited, but her free spiritedness cost me big time.

My mom wore what she wanted, regardless of the setting. Graduation from Confirmation class at Temple Sherith-Israel, the other moms wore knit separates and wrap dresses, my mom wore something with a batik feel, something Mrs. Roper might have sold at a yard sale after placing it in her “too loud” pile. My mom never shaved her armpits, but always wore sleeveless. Granted, it was San Francisco and the hippie thing was arguably fashionable, but not at Hebrew school.

Part of me wished she would see that, and bend to the obvious notion that all kids want to fit in, and by extension, they would like their parents to blend.

Blending is an important skill I had to teach myself, the way I taught myself table manners and cursive, because counter-culture childhoods kind of skip those stops on the growing up train.

Looks matter. And by that I mean the sideways looks you get when your mom is sporting an exotic beetle sized amethyst brooch to the dentist’s office.

What never fails to surprise me is the pressure I put on myself not to make a single mistake my mom made.

No epiphany about perfectionism or how shallow wardrobe is as an assessment of a person’s character is going to stop me from being aware of my wardrobe choices from now until I’m dropping my son off at his college dorm room (or visiting him in prison, I don’t want to jinx anything). I can’t hide how deeply I want to do better than my own mother, because I’ll be wearing it.

Ironically, I’ll be wearing wrinkle-free and appropriate clothing as I make a bevy of other untold errors in judgment that my son will go out of his way to avoid when it’s his turn. That’s how it is. We over-correct. In doing so, we make all sorts of other gaffes. There’s a closet full of ways to under-achieve, so grab whatever is on the rack. There’s something to fit everyone.

* Thanks to the Jewish Journal of Los Angeles for running this in print.