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 Dalai Mama Weekly BlogCatherine Newman chronicles life parenting Ben, 8, and Birdy, 5
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December 3, 2007
Still Waiting for the Feature Film
 Ever wonder what Catherine sounds like? Listen to her read this blog entry. A blogger I like to read, Journey Mama, once wrote that she felt like she was living in her own parenting outtakes, and I know just what she means. It's the endless bloopers reel, only just the bloopers reel, and somehow the professionally edited version never comes on. I noticed this when I got to a work event one evening last week and peeled off my coat and was suddenly standing there in just my brown boots and underpants. Okay, I wasn't. But for a split second, I was positive that I hadn't remembered to put on any clothes. I blame the children, who, for the entire time I was getting ready — and by "getting ready" I mean of course pressing myself to the medicine-cabinet mirror in order to dress my adult-onset acne with a special "concealer" that conceals each pimple as a miniature Santa hat — were complimenting me on my outfit. My outfit being men's BVD briefs and the women's prizewinning boobs that once earned a "Pancake Impersonators" trophy, at least in their own proud minds. Ben is that age now where he is so genuinely funny that you can't help egging him on a little — until you suddenly have to snap at him for being too gross and luring you into a totally inappropriate conversation. I would be curious about the filmstrip passing through his mind, except I'm not, because I've seen what it is, and what it is is nethers. "If you had to pick pants and no shirt or shirt and no pants to go out, which would you pick?" he asks me while I'm wiping mascara off of my eyelid with licked toilet paper. "A long shirt?" I hedge, and he says, because he's strict this way, "No. Regular." The truth is that I'd still pick the shirt, but I say, "pants" because this feels like sounder parental advice to me. "What about just undies with a hole cut out in back and your booty sticking out through it?" he wonders next, and I ask, "That or what?" and then add before he can answer, "Actually, this is getting too gross for me." But Birdy weighs in thoughtfully, "Undies with a hole cut out in back," and Ben says, "Me too." When I picture my mother getting ready for an evening out, I see me sitting, fed and nightgowned, on the side of the bathtub while she swept her dark hair into a chignon and patted her nose with a puff of powder and dabbed her elegant wrists with her elegant perfume, the scent of which can still make me weak-kneed with devotion. I do not remember her struggling into her tights in front of me and grunting out the f-word and bending over to dab a hole in the crotch seam with silver nail polish. If there were tweezers, for example, well then those memories have been completely tasered from my mind. Even as I write this, Ben has put Frank Sinatra on at the wrong speed so that the record is spinning crazily around and it sounds like the Chipmunks singing "Fly Me to the Moon," and it feels like the soundtrack of my life. I never seem to be knotting a silk kerchief under my chin or bending gracefully down to listen in my narrow wool skirt. Elegance is as much within my grasp as is an honest answer to the question, "Who farted?" Just last night, as I was lying down with the kids in their bed, I yelled to Michael, "Write down the word 'birdfeeder' somewhere for me!" "Is that because you want to remember to write about the squirrels?" Ben asked before he remembered and cried, "Oh my God — is it so you'll remember to write about how you poured potting soil into it instead of birdseed?" And I laughed and said, "It is." And he said, "But you wouldn't want to write about your mistakes would you?" And I said, "You mean like the time we forgot to put a diaper on you at Grandpa Larry's house and you laid a giant, steaming turd on their stairs?" No. I'm kidding. I said, "Actually, I would." Editor's Note:   
Catherine Newman is the author of the memoir,
Waiting for Birdy: A Year of Frantic Tedium, Neurotic Angst, and the Wild Magic of Growing a Family, available online and in bookstores nationwide. Post a comment
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