I am in a meeting tonight for my second-born’s second year of Playschool. As necessary as these sorts of meetings are – and as much as I appreciate the efforts of the lovely ladies who do all the work behind them – they are a pain in my balls. Mostly because I can’t stand to sit still, I guess, unless I am either A. drinking alcohol and conversing, or B. watching something on the television (or C., both together – which is best of all). Even then, I am usually itching to have something in my hands – to rip seams, hand-sew, bead, or knit.
So that’s what I was doing at this meeting – knitting. I knit on the bus ride to the meeting and knit while the multitude of forms were passed out and explained and protocol for handwashing and nosewiping were discussed. I knew I was bordering on being assholian to knit while a meeting was being conducted. But you know, at least I was there (many parents skipped) – and I was listening and occasionally putting aside my work to make eye contact with the speaker(s). And because of that not-wasted hour or so, I’m going to be done with Nels’ hat tonight. So there.
Despite what you might read in shite like Men Are From Mars, … etc., women aren’t all the same. Women vary so much they are like an exotic subspecies of the human race. Women have different temperaments, different drives and desires; taste, look, smell, walk, and rage differently. However one thing that happens almost without fail, to almost every woman who willingly enters motherhood – they become immortalized in love. When my husband came to pick me up at the meeting I glimpsed him with my children in the hall, blinking at all these people they didn’t know, at an hour usually associated with bath and bedtime. A moment later My Boy saw me from across the crowded room, wiggled out of his father’s arms, barreled toward me like a little tank, then grasped me in his strong little (yet pleasingly fat) arms and sighed. His sister joined him clinging to my leg and smiling up at me, “Mommy!” as if they’d both not seen me for days, not two hours.
Motherhood makes you a demigoddess to a very select few. You are their one Goddess and on some innate level they will always think you perfectly unattainable and infinitely desirable.
On to the mundane aspects of keeping wee chilluns alive and kicking, I made this for dinner. Which means I fed my family on $3 worth of meat. Two of them (my family members) are small but can eat their own weight in animal flesh. I am slightly repulsed and scared by this, but even more intimidated at the idea of switching everyone to a vegetarian lifestyle.