No Good Deed Goes Unpunished

In an effort to be an engaged and involved parent, as I have generally been throughout my daughter’s life, I attempted to attend my first PTA meeting today.

It seems, however, that once again the gods were conspiring against me and I didn’t heed the warning signs:

• Torrential rain - Yes, when it’s raining so hard you can barely see 10 feet in front of you, screw the meeting. Pick up your child and go home. Also do not worry that if you don’t attend you will not be “walking the walk” in relation to all the times you bitched about this school having an under-active PTA. Nobody will even notice. Just go home. You can be a martyr some other time.

• When you reach the meeting and nobody can tell you if the 12 piles of papers (I counted) on the sign-in table are for attendees or not, you may want to just hightail it out of there because this is clearly not an organized meeting that will start soon and end expeditiously. If you decide, against your better judgment to stay, do not try to engage the very brusque and unfriendly woman to your left who hints that your older child shouldn’t take up a seat because there are clearly more adults than chairs.

• When your one yr old decides that instead of sitting quietly in your lap he’d rather make a bunch of noise, squirm and kick his shoes off, you should not stay at the meeting that still hasn’t started. No. You should depart because it’s all downhill from that point.

Downhill? Yes. You see, after doing his hooting, squirming and shoe removing routine, your one yr old proceeds to run down the aisle, leaving a faint whiff of something. Could it be…? Why yes! It’s poop! Smart mom that you are, you decide this is a great (and very valid) reason to leave…except you still have to pay for your daughter’s book fair selection.

As you put the squirming boy down to write a check, he runs off and a kindly teacher intercepts him, poopy diaper and all (which she may not yet be aware of), and offers to hold him while you write a check. While you are grateful, all you can think about is the caustic poop he produced the day before, courtesy of his antibiotics for the weird thing on his finger. Fearing a blistery diaper rash, you forgo the nice lady’s offer to hold him so you can partake in the meeting and you finally leave.

When you get to the car to fetch your diaper bag (because you love to learn your lessons the hard way and refuse to bring it with you ever), you decide against finding a bathroom to change the baby’s diaper because it’s too far away. You decide instead to recline the front seat of the momvan and do it right there. While hustling and doing your damnedest to get the evil fiery acid poop off his skin, it starts pouring again and you have no hands free to hold an umbrella. Your back, butt, legs, shoes and the back part of your freshly blow dried hair are getting soaked. Great.

Finally, you finish and you walk around to your door just in time for a truck to come roaring past you on the street. You move quickly but not quickly enough. A big splash of water soaks the front of the momvan along with your legs, feet and leather sandals. You’re now 3/4 soaking wet.

Will you ever learn?

Women vs. Women

A few days ago, someone who shall remain unidentified came by our house for a visit. While she was here, she lamented over recently having to go to a local county office, which happened to be in the same building as other social services such as Medicaid, food stamps, welfare, WIC etc.

Them: “Ugh, it was so disgusting. The people were so GROSS. I just wanted them all to get away from me. Ugh. The nastiest people (Translation: poor people) you’ve ever seen sitting all around me. And this big woman next to me just pulled her enormous boob out and started feeding her baby — RIGHT NEXT TO ME!”

Me: What was she supposed to do? Her baby needs to eat.

Them: Well, I know but it was so big and her dress was torn and…

Me: She can’t help how big her boob is. Why does it matter?

Would it have been okay for a small-breasted woman to publicly feed her baby? Because this isn’t the first time I’ve heard a large-breasted woman be criticized for public breastfeeding.

Them: She was just so nasty. She should have used a little blanket or something, like you used to do…

NOTE: I haven’t done that since my first baby was about two weeks old. The blanket thing got old REAL fast.)

Me: *blink*

This is not someone I want to get into an argument with and no matter how skillfully I would have argued the point that breasts, big or otherwise, are not dirty or gross and do not need to be treated as shameful things, I don’t think it would have mattered so I didn’t. I just brewed over it instead.

Am I being a hypocrite and judging her right back?

Uh…yeah, I guess I am. How could I not?

And as I sit in judgment, so high and mighty, I have questions…

How do we alter an entire culture’s backward social mores and puritanical thinking?

Why are women less offended by being objectified as sexual things than they are by the sight of a woman nursing her baby?

How do you make people, women even, understand and accept that breasts are not naughty body parts that only exist to arouse men or sell beer (or any number of other unrelated products) and that they are actually intended to serve but one function, which is to feed babies. Shocking!

Even more important, how do you get women to stop judging other women so harshly?

Sadly, I’m not sure us women will ever stop looking at each other with such harsh disdain. Other women, in a primitive, instinctual way, are the competition and we seem to be almost hardwired for it.

But Christ on a crutch…will we ever learn to just keep it to ourselves?

Mothering, breastfeeding, body image etc etc etc. There are an endless number of ways for us to throw each other under the bus.

Can we or will we ever learn to just NOT?

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Edited to add: Must be something in the air… Melanie shared a link in the comments to Bitch PhD who has a very interesting post that stems from a somewhat controversial post here by Ann Althouse. They are both very relevant to my post, but in different ways. If you have a moment, go read them. Feel free to come back and share your thoughts.

The Not So Dirty Details

Argghhhhhh ughhhhhurrrrgghhh…

Those are the noises of a woman recovering from an inexplicably bad hangover yesterday morning. See, BFF was in town so she, I and another friend of hers (and now a friend of mine, I hope, since I shared all sorts of TMI in her presence) seized the opportunity to go out and have a few beers. And that’s just what we did.

I had four beers over the course of almost five hours and while that might get me a tad intoxicated, it typically doesn’t cause a crippling hangover. It probably doesn’t help that I had a sore throat and tender glands and had been guzzling Chloraseptic spray all day. I mean I’ve had a sore throat all week and it didn’t keep me from doing all the lame stuff so why should it stop me when I want to have some fun?

What do you mean I should have known better? Bite me. I feel bad enough as it is.

Anyway, I pulled myself up by the bootstraps and cared for the kids as I always do but it was not without great pain and suffering. Fortunately, the huz was able to cut his day short and came home in the mid-afternoon to give me some much-needed relief. And he didn’t even give me any crap. I wuv him.

The upside is that I had a ton o’ fun. Lots of female bonding took place. And I finally confessed to BFF that I have this blog. It only took about three beers. I explained my reasons. She was understanding and though I feel a little nervous about it, I also feel a load has been lifted off my conscience.

However, once I was able to speak freely, I’m sure I blathered on about it to excess. I just wanted to tell her all the good things about blogging and my experiences with it because she’s a great writer and I think she’d get a lot out of it. Gawd, I sound like I’m in some kind of blogger cult. Dork.

So, I know a lot of you keep your blogs a secret from your in-laws or husbands but how many of you keep your blog a secret from your friends? Why haven’t you told them?

PS: There’s a new post up over at Props and Pans. If you shave or wax, you should check it out.

ADDENDUM: I think I found the cause of my apocalyptic hangover. I got my period the next day. Ten-fricken-days-early-goddammit! It all makes sense now.

Never. Drinking. Again.

Friend in town last night.

Too many beers.

Must die now.

How am I Supposed to Know That?

I could write a long post about all the crazy searches I get here but about 90% of them, while sometimes weird, nonsensical or gross, are typically looking for something to do with sex, balls, boobs, muffin tops, KY products and shirtless celebrities. Yup.

So yeah, I’m not even going to bother listing all the humdingers I get in an average week because today…I got the piece de resistance; that which cannot be topped. *cue MC Hammer’s U Can’t Touch This*

(Warning: link above is not work safe!)
How am I supposed to know the answer to THAT? Geez…

And I’m not even on the first three pages of search results. How do these people end up here?