Sometimes we moms make mistakes. We do little things like forget to give our kids their lunch money, or we leave the house without replenishing our travel baby wipes. Other times we do worse things, like lose our shit and spew a string of obscenities in our child’s direction, or forget to buckle our infants into their car seats. Those infractions land us in the motherhood hall of shame. I recently visited that hall when, in an egregious mom fail, I essentially drunk dialed my son’s baby book.
I’d had a couple of drinks while hanging out by the pool one recent Sunday afternoon, then a couple more at dinner, and decided to keep-on-keeping on after everyone else went to bed. I ended up fully hammered and feeling the need to express my love – because that’s what I do when I’m all liquored up. This time, I pulled out my kids’ baby journals.
The entry, which is the written equivalent of a slurring drunk lady talking to a mortified child, is about how fat my oldest son was when he was a baby, which I attributed to drinking my breast milk for the first year of his life. I’m sure he’ll enjoy reading that one day. What kid doesn’t want to think about the fact that he once regularly suckled milk from his mother’s nipples?
Then, the sloppy rant goes into my theory about how fat babies become smart kids because all that fat (assuming it’s from breast milk or a good fat source) is good for the brain. So, in a roundabout way I was trying to say he’s smart, but sober me would’ve worded it differently. And legibly.
The thing is, I started keeping his baby journal really early. Literally when I was waiting for the results of a home pregnancy test. I was hoping I was not pregnant, but my boobs hurt a lot on and my period was being disconcertingly elusive, so I was pretty sure the pull-out method had finally failed me. I chronicled my fear of what may lie ahead while awaiting the test results, and then about the two pink lines that affirmed my intuition. I logged my entire pregnancy in that journal, and told the harrowing story of his birth. It’s a cool and rare thing for a person to have, which is why I suck for debauching it.
Still, maybe it’s not as bad as the time the tooth fairy got all drunk with her husband and ended up having hopefully quiet sex to the new D’angelo record and forgot to deliver that dollar to my son.
Hm, maybe there is a central theme to these mom fails.
Either way, from now on, I will try to avoid sharing my inebriated verbal affections with those who are not actually linking arms with me as we hoist our beers. No drunk baby book journaling, no drunk facebooking, no drunk dialing. If I simply must share the illuminations brought on by four-too-many cocktails, I’ll just write meaningless silly shit on Twitter, where I’m virtually anonymous anyway. A gal’s gotta have some kind of outlet. Or, I could just do the right thing and go to bed. Or not drink anymore. Pfft.
Amy Beeman is a mom, a wife, and a writer, not necessarily in that order. She loves soup and tacos and floating on her back in the Gulf of Mexico, even though her totally rational fear of sharks is a persistent dick. She doesn’t know how to walk in high heels, because flip-flops. Her Master’s Degree is in Journalism and Media Studies and her B.A. is in Creative Writing, but mostly she’s stuck in her kitchen. She is a humor columnist at cltampa.com and has been published on Salon.com and in Bust Magazine. To read more of her stuff check out www.amybeeman.com or become her twitter bestie at https://twitter.com/beeman_amy.
