Two glasses at my feet.
The one on the left is a small wine glass full of water. Every 20 seconds, I immerse my left thumb in it, or my left thumb starts throbbing and generally making itself the center of my universe in a bad, bad way. I burned it bad (yeah, badly, whatever, I’m a bad girl tonight, bad grammar, bad motherhood, bad thoughts) just a little while ago on the lid of a pot—a lid I had left right on top of a burner, a burner I left on by mistake. Electric stove, electric pain.
The glass by my right foot is a tall one full of beer. I rarely drink beer these days, although I admit I did have some this weekend—at an almost-fancy restaurant with a fancy name—a fancy beer in a fancy glass with elephants on it. Delirium Tremens was the auspiciously named beer. The restaurant was a place where they give you a glass that matches your beer. The blonde waitress with the recklessly smudged eyeliner did not find this as amusing as I did. She looked like she had seen it all and could go home after her shift and have dirty athletic sex on the radiator with her Euro-boyfriend if she wanted to. Or not. Her eyes had the bored look of someone who has too many options.
I am not that person. I was perhaps not ever that person, although I must admit it is an attractive look, in a rumpled, distant sort of way.
Tonight it is bad beer with bad dinner (which tonight was my duty: Insta-Soup with Ring-Os, three raw carrots for each daughter, some milk in plastic purple cups). My Hungarian host mother was right to worry (back in 1993) that I would never cook well enough to attract a husband. I eventually got one, a husband, but I can’t figure out how to keep his children well-fed, which I think is a problem, even if he glosses over it and acts like it will all turn out all right in the end.
My thumb hurts. It really, really hurts. I don’t know how to put my children to bed right now without taking my thumb out of the cool water. But that is what is expected of me, no?
Good mothers smile as they take their crispy throbbing thumbs out of cool water to attend to their children. They suck it up, they smile through what hurts and what confuses them. They don’t wish for fairy godmothers to put their kids to bed, so they can climb into bed three hours early like they wish so much they could. I want to be left alone with my thumb and my thoughts tonight, but there are small warring princesses that need me to negotiate a truce so that teeth can be brushed.
This is what the books don’t tell you. They tell you of the right Boppies and the right nursing gliders and the right cloth diapers and the right slings, but they don’t speak of this, of what is not always right. They do not speak of jangled nerves and frazzled souls and wandering minds. They say only that motherhood is a gift, a blessed gift. There is no margin for ungratefulness. No room for error, no room for wishing again for plain personhood.
My younger daughter just threw my pink fuzzy gloves at the floor lamp and at my face one too many times, so I took my thumb out of the water, only to deposit her, screaming, in her crib, with her Pull-Up still crammed full of poo. I am tired and just want to be left alone. No one talks of this, not without disclaimers: Oh, but it’s worth it! It’s the hardest job you’ll ever love! You won’t be able to imagine how you ever got on without them! There’s a time and place for disclaimers, but they’re not welcome here, not tonight. The evening is really just beginning, for me, and for the millions of other mothers who just want to be left alone to hear their own thoughts.
Or…well…are there millions? Or, dear God, maybe only thousands? I want someone to kiss my thumb and put me to bed right now. It’s not nice, it’s not mature, but it’s the way it is.
I must go do what I have to do, and maybe we can find a book to read together that will keep the princesses’ truce in effect until their eyes close, but I doubt it. I smell tantrums in the air (mine included). I want to be 18 again and starting starting starting it all, and then I want to be 21 and restarting it all, and then I want to take my stupid shirt off in that photograph and show off that white bikini with the hibiscus flowers. I would stamp my feet like the H-bomb right now, but I need to dip my thumb again, and foot-stamping will not get me any closer to that sexy, bored Euro-waitress look I’m hankering for.
The water has gotten too warm. My thumb hurts. It’s all my thumb speaking, I’m sure.
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