Introduction: So Your Kid’s a Lemon! (It’s not your fault.)

Years ago, (makes me sound too old)

Some time ago, (makes me sound even older, and also vague)

At some point in my careless, wanton youth (yeah, no.)

Once, I had a pregnancy scare. (Okay, fine, not just once.)

Once that I can remember in particular, I had a pregnancy scare.

This was before I was married, but not before I was with the man I would eventually marry, so the scare wasn’t a panicked, “What am I going to do now this guy is never going to pony up for child support oh no what if the baby gets his funny shaped head?! I’m staring into the void!” kind of a scare, but rather an “Oops! I didn’t realize being on antibiotics made birth control impotent, what a strange time to use the word “impotent,” I’m never going to that dodgy nail bar again” kind of a scare.  I knew that either way we could probably make it work, but I can also admit to a certain amount of concern.

To help lighten the mood, a friend I’d confided in sent a funny email that prompted us to start writing a story, back and forth, about what would happen, in a bizarre, parallel world, if I really was pregnant. (This is what some writers do. It somehow makes things better, to speculate about Worst Case Scenarios, to elevate situations, via prose, to levels of such ridiculousness that hopefully mean of course this is never going actually happen to you. And if it does, at least it didn’t happen in the horrible, bizarro world way you envisioned it might, so it’s win-win. Really!)

In this fictional, could-be world, my baby lived in the closet of my not-yet-husband’s bachelor pad. We called him Little Joey. He was entertained by a mobile my not-yet-husband and his roommate had constructed out of empty beer cans and playing cards with nude models on them. When Little Joey couldn’t sleep, we took him clubbing. In the story, I was frazzled but ridiculously hot (I’d gone home from the hospital in a mini skirt and thigh high boots), and was still finishing my journalism degree (which I was at the time, hence the edginess about the potential pregnancy; no one at J-school had ever brought a baby in a papoose to class. I sensed it would be frowned upon), while waiting tables and reading parenting books between shifts with titles like, “So, Your Kid’s a Lemon. (It’s not your fault!)”  

Oh, those emails made me laugh. The absurd conjecture. The absolute hilarity. The patent ridiculousness of the idea that I would ever be the kind of person to read a parenting book. Ha. Ha. Haaaaa. I was way too hip for that, and also, even at such a tender age, or perhaps because of the tender age, way too self-assured. I was going to be a great mother, when the time came. I wasn’t going to need any book. It would all just come naturally.

In the end, I was relieved to discover I wasn’t pregnant—but the relief also came along with a pang. Maybe you know the one. The one you feel when you’re finally with someone you can envision having a baby with, and you have that first “scare” (funny, isn’t it, how quickly something that was once a “scare” can turn into something that it defines your life to attain?), and it turns out to be nothing. But it could have been something. The crisis has been averted, but there’s a tiny part of you, tinier in some than others, that misses that feeling of “what if”? Because this “what if” is huge. A whole other person. A whole other person you might have been in charge of. (This is the first of many pre-parenting fallacies, by the way, the notion that you are in charge at all.)

Guess what? It turns out I am the type of person to read parenting books, to obsess over tiny details, to feel uncertain a lot of the time about what I’m supposed to be doing, to wonder how it all  happened (aside from the obvious), to feel that I’m inhabiting a grown up role when in so many ways, I feel like I’m still that 23-year-old. This is when I think things like: Better read a parenting book! Maybe an actual adult can tell me what to do.

At this point, I’ve read dozens of the books, and not read dozens of others. (Sometimes, I just leave them on my bedside table. Their very presence, their take-action titles, alternately soothe me and give me pre-bedtime anxiety attacks.) Regardless of whether I’m reading the books or not, there are moments when I feel like a good mother, even a great one (these moments don’t tend to last long and are often punctuated by someone falling off of something and possibly needing medical attention, except I can’t find a good place to put down my wine glass), and other moments when I feel like the worst mother ever. (Someone recently told me that the next time I feel like a bad mother, I should watch Honey Boo Boo. I haven’t worked up the courage.)

 Other days, I feel like something and someone in between.

And, every once in a while, I think of the feckless days of my youth, and the fictitious title of that parenting book comes to mind. So Your Kid’s a Lemon. (It’s not Your fault!) I think about how writing it down, even though it all seemed so silly, somehow made everything feel better. And, more importantly, I think about how writing it down made it all seem funnier. 

So I've finally decided to enter the Parent Blog milieu. Yes, I realize I'm about a decade late to the party, but I have some seriously funny stories to share. The bonus? You just might learn something. I know I did. (And still am.)