All the Horrible Girliness

It's strange and isolating to be a gifted kid. Not that I have experienced that; I was isolated by fundamentalism and my own desperate desire to belong, but I've read about the other kind, where you're so smart that most people can't relate to you.

I have experienced it secondhand through my husband, but I'm feeling it much more now, with my son. The Bug hasn't yet written a sonata or won a game of chess, but he's ahead in many physical ways. He never had trouble eating: he latched on to my breast twenty minutes after he flew out the chute; he took to all manner of bottles hungrily; he opened his mouth for the spoon early; he started sprouting teeth at three months and now is working on numbers seven and eight; and within an hour of his introduction to finger foods, he was shoveling little puffy stars into his mouth like a pro. Perhaps because of this, he has grown at an astounding rate, and is wearing 12-18 month clothes at 7.5 months.

Other moms, forcing their children's lips apart with the spoon or fighting for a latch at three in the morning, do not want to hear about these things. At the grocery store or at the park, they'll ask how old he is and their jaws drop when I tell them. "I thought he'd be at least a year old," they say. If they ask about his eating habits, I'm getting good at downplaying it, or at least moaning about how difficult it is to carry him now. If they still look distraught, I mention that he still refuses to sleep through the night.

Taking care of a kid is lonely, often boring work. You get this nice idea in your head of another mom with a kid the same age as yours. You'd have coffee with that mom in her sunny kitchen, talk about the puffy eyes that come with sleeplessness, discuss the finer points of Project Runway or Sex and the City while your kids play together in the living room, quietly, like sweet little mice, then nap together while you and the other mommy sneak a glass of wine.

Celeste is closest, but she has no kids. That isn't really a problem, because The Bug loves to nestle into her chest for hours, and she is one of those people who isn't spooked by babies, which is awesome. Ariana, The Bug's godmother, has a nine-year old boy but she also has a new family and a tough work schedule, so I never see her as often as I'd like.

I scan the mommies at the park. There was a very sweet lesbian couple, though by sweet I mean one was sweet and the other looked at me meanly from the corner of her eye and said nothing as we talked. There have been several Japanese and French mommies, who speak their corresponding languages to their children and smile. There are the Irvine mommies, who have nice dye jobs and wide smiles, and here is where I come closest to a mommy-mommy friendship, but always fall short because I can't figure out how to communicate properly. They use phrases like "age-appropriate" and usually are already in pairs, and even when we converse, we ask all about the other's kids, their ages and names and development, but we never find out one another's names. It's sad. I'm sure these ladies had their own interests and accomplishments before having babies, but there's no semblance of that now.

***

This may or may not be on a completely different note, but here are two things I saw on Sesame Street that made me laugh entirely too hard:

The Cookie Monster ate a Picasso and then said, "Me like it, but me no understand it."

and,

Baby Bear and Telly were writing a book together, but arguing about which direction to go. Baby Bear said, "Surely we can do this together!" Telly replied, "Don't call me Shirley."

posted by Samus @ 7:42 PM