Monthly Archives: February 2007

Brit – the new Gloria Steinem?

February 28, 2007

OK, so by now, we’ve all read the TMZ gossip reports that Britney’s doctors are claiming that she does not, in fact, have substance abuse issues but the root of her problems are from postpartum depression. With possibly a little bipolar mixed in. Maybe with a sprinkle of cocaine and meth on top. With a shot of tequila to help it all go down real nice and smooth. 

Seriously kittens. Kitty-Time has felt for a while that if I were Brit’s publicist, I would spin postpartum like the top that never stopped spinning. It’s the mea culpa to get her out of this mess.

Postpartum IS a very real and very serious disease that impacts far too many women.  And we all gasped in horror when little gay Scientologist Tom Cruise lambasted Brooke Shields for taking medicine to help her.

On the flip side, hasn’t her career seen just the resurgence she was looking for since Shields read Cruise the riot act in her NYT published op-ed in July 2005?

Which is my point, Brit’s publicists need to cling onto postpartum like a 29-year old clings onto the last seconds of that decade. Like the President is clinging on to the reasons we went to war. Like Sean P clings to his nanny. Should I keep going?

Sure, we will never know if Brit really has postpartum. But really kittens, haven’t we seen far too much evidence of how much she likey the clubs and the booze and the party scene, all the while having two sweet young babes at home. And yet, her brilliant publicists, in cahoots with the specialists at her rehab center, can weave a tale of a young babe struggling with postpartum and we will forgive her.

We are a country that likes to forgive and look away.

After-all, we turned our heads when the Supreme Court ruled President Bush is the President.

We like mea culpas, we like damsels in distress, we like to see someone come back from rock bottom and try again.

As for postpartum, whether this continues to raise the attention of this serious problem that so many new mothers face, in a positive and constructive way, only time will tell. I never thought Brit could be the new face of an important woman’s issue, but maybe she will be, whether it’s true or not.

And before I leave you today, surely you are on the edge of your seat for a nanny update.  Zen was so February 26th. Anxiety was so February 27th. Peace in the land is so Feb 28th. You got it, kittens, I am like some kind of psycho-path off my meds. I’m Buddhist yoga kitty one day, someone get me an IV filled with Xanax kitty the next day, and Positive Baptist preacher kitty another day.

Today, I have to believe that it will all work out in the end and I will find a nanny quickly and she will be a variation of Mary Poppins, because if I don’t, then I’m clinging on to something as desperately as Joan Rivers is to botox.

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Motherhood

Zen is dead to me

February 27, 2007

I knew the zen from yesterday’s ordeal was slipping through my fingers when I quickly starting pounding glasses of wine last night after we put our darling daughter to bed. They say denial is the first sign of being anti-zen. Yeah…umm…. Not so much on the zen if you are turning to the bottle….that’s what they say anyway.

And then, I knew my zen was yesterday’s news this morning at 3:45am when I awoke with a horrid stomach ache and anxiety rising in my chest…..unable to return to sleep until around 5:30am.

 That’s when it hit me – just like Kitty-Time’s friend, www.selfmademom.net, has blogged about, the nanny breakup is hard on the heart and the mind. But this time, I was broken up with. I didn’t get to break up with her first.

I might have thought I was all big and bad with my Monday morning lecture. But really – I was just spewing around a lot of hot air..and nanny was probably wondering why I don’t brush my teeth before mouthing off on a Monday morning!

Oh no – zen is no longer my middle name….and I was broken up with yesterday.

And really, while I’m not passing notes in Biology class about all the ways she was wrong for us, it seems that this blog is really just the replacement. Isn’t this basically my version of writing it on the wall? Didn’t someone say that life is really just an extension of 7th grade?

While I was up at 3:45am, blaming my husband’s bad dinner and the sauce on my stomach ache, I had plenty of time to muse…and let’s not forget..poke my husband to let him know that I was up and couldn’t sleep and am very anxious. Meanwhile, he uttered something inaudible and continued snoring…again…much to my chagrin.

To yesterday’s point, he is loving and wonderful and supportive, but he can sleep like a baby through all of this because he knows that I will do the leg work to find the next Mary Poppins. Why do husband’s get away with this? They get to show up one day and pick the nanny, sorta like they get to just show up to the hospital and just get a baby. Meanwhile, we do all the heavy lifting.

And so, back to being broken up with. The relationship with the nanny really is like your teen boyfriend. It starts off wonderful. You love one another. You are exploring new territory, you chat in the morning, you laugh about in-laws and husbands. And then time passes and there are days you want to fire her because your baby goes to her before you. The foreplay and flirting – oh that’s over with when that happens. By that point, Kitty’s claws are out, and they are sharpened.

 Then you settle into a routine and things start to get a little too comfortable. You see the areas where she’s slacking, you see where things have gotten a little lax, but it’s a power struggle and ultimately, she holds the upper hand. She knows you need her. And so you look the other way. Meanwhile, each evening you knit-pick all the things she did wrong that day, while your husband pretends to listen, or you call your mom and together you trade secrets of all the nanny’s flaws. You feed off each other. Ain’t life grand?

For me, I knew I had hit rock bottom on the night after her kid puked all over my brand new, velvet 2-day old couches and I found myself calling her that night to assure her everything was OK and not to worry about it and just have a nice vacation. And come back!

When you catch yourself doing these things, you know something has gone awry. You have lost touch with reality. You are over-compensating for the relationship’s flaws.

When my nanny failed to return from a 6-week vacation on-time, with no phone call alerting us to the new arrival date, I went into full-blown panic mode and almost went into cardiac arrest. Again, how did I not see that this relationship was no longer healthy? But what I did do then was mourn the loss of her. I went through the emotions of sadness, anger and fear. She beat me down. So that when she did return late, and rather apologetically, I was over her.

I realized that there was an end to our relationship and that chapter was closing soon.

But I pulled the ultimate dating move. I tried to show her that there was a new sheriff in town, take back my status as boss-man, and redefine our relationship with new rules. Only to find out that she had one for me. She was ready to take it to the final level and just end it.

And so, here I am. Licking my wounds. Really – she broke up with me before I broke up with her.

And I’m left wondering, it was me, not her? What’s wrong with my daughter? Could she really have it better anywhere else? How could she beat me to it?

Will I find another one? A better one? A more reliable nanny? What if no available nannies want us?

Time will tell, kittens, but it’s pretty clear that zen is so dead to me. It’s so February 26th, and panic and anxiety – are so February 27th.

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Motherhood, Nanny

It happened

February 26, 2007

Here we are,  a week away from our one-year anniversary with our nanny, and it happened.  She quit.

And here’s the kicker, I had a whole lecture planned out. She’s missed so much work over the past month because her kid was sick and other things came up, and her cleaning has been sub-par at best, so I had this whole lecture about how things need to change, and what needs to happen, and the weaknesses in the cleaning. All of these difficult things to say that no one likes to say, let alone, what a miserable way to start a Monday morning.

And she let me go on and on.

And when I was finished, she explained that she had to quit because her kids are sick too much and she needs to be home with them.

Why she didn’t stop me from my lecture and end it – I’ll never know.

But at that point, I didn’t have it in me to say anything more, so I told my husband that our nanny is leaving us, put our daughter down for a nap and left for work.

My husband got to then play good cop. I heard him downstairs, telling our nanny how wonderful she’s been and how much we appreciate her and how sad we are to see her go, all the things that my normal self would have said if I hadn’t just finished a stupid lecture on improving things.

I tell you, nannies can be more emotionally draining than children.

Anyway, I am surprisingly calm right now – keeping a zen state – and found myself becoming THAT mother. I called our backup sitter, who, as irony would have it, just agreed on Thursday to watch someone else’s kids full time. I laid it on THICK.

I am pushing her to go back on her word and instead come watch my darling daughter. It was like I was having an out of body experience. I could almost see and hear myself more than I knew these words were coming out of my own mouth. I became that parent stealing someone else’s nanny – and doing it shamelessly.

The thing is, I know it will all work out in the end. We will find a replacement, the person will be good, there will be peace in the land.

But crises with nannies and daycare – they really rock your world. Because the baby is the center of your world and the well being of your child, is the most important thing. So a crisis with the nanny, once again, raises the issue that gnaws and chips away at me every single day – why am I working? Is it really worth it?

And also, my husband is fantastic and helpful and shares watching our daughter with me on days our nanny doesn’t come to work, but we all know who will go through the motions of finding a new nanny and interviewing. Doesn’t it seem that this falls onto the shoulders of the wife and the husband just gets to show up, no matter how helpful and supportive they are? Why is that?

I will keep you posted on how things work out, dear fans. I just don’t have it in me to be funny today.

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Motherhood, Nanny

Hipper Than Thou

February 25, 2007

In today’s NYT, David Brooks includes a hilarious and spot-on oped on “hipster parents”:

http://select.nytimes.com/2007/02/25/opinion/25brooks.html

Even before having a baby, we all know these people, they are cooler than you, they have better clothes than you, they don’t work for “the man,” they upload alternative music on their iPod before you, and they’ve been to the newest, coolest bar before you even knew it broke ground.

That’s right, we all know these people, whether you have a baby or not.

But I agree with Brooks, it is particularly egregious when parents take that attitude and shove it on their kid. You know the parent: they have their baby wear alternative rocker shirts, gasp in horror over Kraft mac-n-cheese (guarantee they ate it as a kid) and would NEVER set foot in a Gymboree store to buy clothes. Their baby is too deep to wear pink, if it’s not a dark and brooding color, it’s not in their baby’s nursery. Anyone thinking of poor Shiloh Jolie-Pitt right about now?

I mean, seriously, people. The hipster baby poops, pukes and drools just like the Elmo-branded Gymboree baby. Babies are equal-opportunity bodily function offenders.

What bothers Kitty-Time about these hipper-than-thou parents is this: they are so painfully insecure, one wonders how they don’t seem to notice it?

But along the way, are they forgetting their baby? What are they going to do when their kid’s first word is “French Fry” and “Wiggles?”

They gonna take their kid to see Elmo Live, along with all the other pastel-wearing Sesame Street branded twerps whose parents all work for the man and love it?

Truth be told, when I come across the kinds of parents who are too cool for Goldfish, I secretly hope they have a JCrew, madras pants wearing, Wall Street Journal reading, Republican on their hands in 20 years.

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Fashion, Motherhood
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