My nervous breakdown

I’m going crazy. I mean it, really. I’m going out of my damned mind.

You see, for the past three days, I’ve been working on a blog entry about this whole mid-life crisis thing, trying to put into words what’s been going through my head. And I can’t get the damned thing written. Cassie keeps jumping around the bedroom, pestering me as I write. Michael is getting ready for work and keeps asking me questions like, what are my plans for lunch? All the while, Sam keeps popping on and off the breast. She’s nursing. She’s done. Nope, she’s nursing again. On second thought, she’s done. But wait, maybe just a few more minutes. Nope, we’re off again. On second thought, let’s beat on mommy’s breast and scream because we want more milk. By the way honey, what are your plans for lunch today? Mommy, I want my Barbie doll. Fix my Barbie now. Helen, did you remember to call the eye doctor? By the way, I’m going to karate class tonight, so you’ll be home alone again with the kids all evening. Mommy, fix my doll! Mommy, I want ponytails. Do my ponytails! We’re eating again, no we’re done. Wait, let’s spit up all over Mommy and blow out our diaper while we’re at it. Mommy mommy mommy mommy mommy mommy mommy mommy mommy mommy mommy mommy–

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaargh! Ah ah ah aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaargh! Pasoidhdfhfojnadpo fifgiupqos8seety lwi454y b-9sdfdhg lksjxhisd sfboai sddfhoa pd8f7 hkl hasdf h@#$@ $*@#@%&@*^%!!!

I’m sorry. I don’t know what came over me. I’m just feeling a little stir crazy today. Don’t know why.

Oh hell with that. I know exactly why. I’m trapped in the damned house scheduling play dates, fixing Barbies and nursing babies all frikkin’ day. It’s no wonder my head feels like it’s going to split in half while my eyeballs pop out of the sockets and I do my best Linda Blair impersonation out on the front lawn. And when the men with the funny white jackets come to take me away, ladies and gentlemen, you’ll know why too.

The whole mommy thing is just driving me up the damned wall right now. I’ve been trying for three days to write about how I want to be an artist and how I crave having a little time each day to sit and draw. But it’s gotten worse than that. As I’ve looked at the problem, I realize it’s a lot bigger than me just wanting to sit and draw. Way bigger than that.

I want to be famous, damn it.

I want to have acheived some massive success with my art, but since I haven’t been doing any serious work on it since I was thirteen, I’m kind of screwed on this point. So what I’d really like to do is turn back the clock, go back to when I was thirteen, give myself a good hard slap and say, “Pick up the stupid pencil and start drawing now! Otherwise, you’re going to wake up one morning when you’re thirty-seven and realize you’ve got two kids, a house to clean and a husband who wants to know what your plans are for lunch, but you don’t have a portfolio or a cool artist job or even a fine arts degree. Hell, you’ll be lucky if you can even find a 2B pencil anywhere in the house!”

Of course, my thirteen-year-old self will more than likely just slap me back and tell me to kiss off. What do thirteen-year-olds know anyway, huh?

I need to do what I did after Cassie was born. Back then, the midlife crisis was writing. I was desperate to write. I had dabbled in it a bit for a few years, but had never really applied myself. Sure, I had a 20,000 word novella sitting on the hard drive, but I couldn’t publish the dang thing (too long for magazines, too short for publishers, at least back then before the advent of e-publishing). I also had two erotic short stories that I’d managed to sell. But that was about it. So at the age of 34, I sat in the glider nursing Cassie and ranted about wanting to write. Fortunately for me, I actually got off my ass and did something about it. I spent the first year of her life writing a truly horrible trashy gay novel (yes, you read that right) in a three-ring binder. I still have it too, all five hundred hand-written pages. I had planned to transcribe the whole thing into the computer, but never could get around to that. Taking care of an infant just kept me a little too busy. But at least I was writing. When Cassie was almost a year old and I had a little more time, I decided to take things a step further. Writing porn in a notebook wasn’t enough. I needed to write complete stories on the computer and get them out where people could see them. That meant finding a writers’ group.

This part was tricky. I needed a group that I could participate in at my own pace. I couldn’t read and critique ten or more stories a week. I could handle one or two. I also couldn’t manage to make any weekly meetings. I was either in karate class in the evenings and on Saturdays and so wouldn’t be available, or else I was home taking care of the baby while Michael went to class and I didn’t even want to think of taking a baby to an hours-long meeting of a writers group. So that meant the writers group had to be online. Finally, I wanted a writers group that would consider reading erotica, because that was one of the things I enjoyed writing (remember, I’d handwritten 500 pages of trashy gay porn at that point).

Well, after a lot of searching on the internet, I found one group that fit the bill – the Erotica Readers And Writers Association. Erotica was the only genre they handled, but I decided that I could handle that starting out. I could branch into science fiction, fantasy and horror later on, once I’d established good work habits and a regular writing schedule.

Two years later, I’m still on the ERWA. In fact, I work for them as a feature editor for the website. I’ve written yet another gay trashy novel, this time on the computer, and I’m actually sending the manuscript out to publishers because guess what? There’s a viable market for that sort of thing these days. As a writer, I’m happy. The work is slow, but steady. I’ve garnered a few publications and a little money over the last two years. And I’m looking at doing bigger and better things in the years to come. I’m set. I know where I’m going with my writing.

Now I just need to do the same thing with my art.

I’ll talk about that tomorrow, maybe. Sam’s finally popped off the breast and is snoozing and Cassie has yet another play date to attend in fifteen minutes. It’s time for the lunatic to go back to being a mommy until the next time she can slip out to play.

What’s It Worth, Really? A Mom’s Nonexistent Paycheck

Time for me to bitch and whine. It’s 9 AM and I am well into the third week of taking care of the kids on my own with minimal help from Michael. That’s not to say he doesn’t want to help, but right now he’s tied up with a paper he’s got to finish writing for a major conference he’s attending in August.

Said conference is being held at Disney World, of course.

There are times when it just doesn’t pay to be a mom. Now is one of them. I’m busting my ass to take care of two kids and the house, while Michael runs off to work every morning to kill himself over this paper. His work is important – it pays the bills to say the least. My work is important – nobody else is going to scrub toilets, change diapers all day, and clean dirty underwear. So why is it that Michael gets to go off to Disney World on his own for a week while I continue to wallow up to my armpits in dirty toilets and poopie drawers?

You can’t pay a mom to do her job. There just isn’t enough money in the world. For the past three weeks, I’ve had to put both kids to bed by myself most nights. It’s not easy convincing a three-year-old to take a bath when you’re walking around with a six-week infant latched onto your breast. I mean come on, I’ve only got two arms.

In an ideal world, Michael would stay home in the evenings to bathe Cassie, read her stories and put her to bed while I sat in my glider nursing a baby who is determined to chew my nipples off. In my dream world, I would bathe Cassie, read the stories and put her to bed while Michael nursed Sam and tried to determine if our health insurance pays for nipple replacement. Not gonna happen though, is it?

What really ticks me off about this is that I do have work to accomplish outside of the kids and the house. I have a story that needs to be written and two drawings in progress. I have a 3D illustration that I’ve been struggling with for weeks now that I’m only finally beginning to make any headway on. And yet, how much time do I get to spend on any of these projects? Almost none. Yesterday I got to spend five minutes writing before Cassie came skipping out of her room declaring that nap time was over and she wanted to play, thus putting a premature end to my plans for the afternoon.

I know one day the kids will be off at school and I’ll have plenty of time to work. Until then, however, I am on unpaid maternity leave. I hope someone somewhere appreciates that fact.

Stay-At-Home Mom Or Stepford Wife – What’s The Difference?

First, the sleep report. Sam slept a little better last night. We bought a co-sleeper bed that fits between Michael and I in our bed, keeping Sam at the head of the bed above the sheets and blankets but still close enough to Mommy for her comfort. In theory. She seemed to enjoy it well enough from 9 PM until 11:30 PM. Unfortunately, I had a bout of insomnia between those hours and nothing would lull me to sleep. Then we hit the midnight feeding and that’s when the trouble started. Sam nursed for half an hour, seemed pretty much asleep, and then screamed for 45 minutes when I tried to set her down in the co-sleeper. I ended up nursing her again for another half an hour, in spite of the pediatrician’s instructions not to do so because Sam has been gorging herself nursing. Sam didn’t puke, but did eventually nurse herself into a coma and at around 2 AM, I finally was able to sleep. Cassie graciously provided a screaming wake-up call at 6:30 AM, so I got four hours of sleep, more or less.

But onto today’s topic. The past week in the Erotica Readers And Writers Association e-mail list, we’ve been having a discussion about Stay-At-Home Moms (SAHMs for short) and whether or not they have real lives. This sprang out of a discussion on romance novels and the recent Harlequin Spice ad which shows a woman reading a romance novel so hot that she has to hold it wearing oven mitts. Personally, I don’t read romances. They annoy me, but that’s beside the point here. The discussion in the writers group focused on 1) whether or not romances in general are a viable form of literature, 2) whether or not they’re really any good to read, and 3) how romance novels seem to be marketed to the average housewife. This led to the topic of housewives, and whether or not those who read romances were living vicariously through books rather than having real lives of their own.

Well you know that started a brush fire. The debate on the value of housewives and SAHMs is an ugly one in any situation, and a lot of misunderstandings about when the topic gets discussed. When it’s being discussed by e-mail, it only gets worse. People on both sides of the debate seemed to misread and misunderstand every sentence. I believe the brush fire is now out, but it made for an interesting day’s reading while I was sitting in the glider nursing Sam (I don’t live vicariously at all, no siree Bob).

All of this got me to thinking about being a housewife and having a life. Can you do both? Can you spend your days cleaning and scrubbing and cooking and wiping running noses and changing diapers and still be a real person? Can you invest all your energy into home, hearth and husband and still be an engaging, interesting individual? It kind of depends, I think.

When I was in the Virginia Tech Science Fiction and Fantasy Club (VTSFFC), we had a running joke about how to tell whether or not club members had a real life. To have a real life you had to a) have a significant other (pets did not count), b) live in your own place rather than at your parents’, and c) have an interest or hobby outside of science fiction and fantasy and have enough income to pursue said interest while still paying for other daily expenses. Sad to say, not too many people in the club had a real life.

I wondered last night if those same standards could be used to determine whether or not a SAHM had a real life. There would have to be modifications of course. Most SAHMs I know are married, so they automatically have significant others. Therefore I’d change the first criteria to having friends of your own. They’d have to be good friends, people you could trust with all your secrets and call up to complain about your husband. The kind of friends that you actually buy a birthday present for, and I mean a real present that you put some thought into, not some generic present that in no way reflects the personality or interests of the person receiving the gift. Basically, I’m talking the kind of friend who would help you hide your husband’s body when you finally snap because he decided he had to repair the molding around the attic entrance at 8 PM on Mother’s Day instead of putting the kids to bed like he promised he would.

The second criterion is also a bit tricky. I mean, we are talking about Stay-At-Home Moms here, with emphasis on the stay at home part. Thus, we already know these women have homes of their own, and some of them spend all day cleaning them and never go out and do anything else but grocery shopping and shuttling the yard apes to soccer practice. So I’d change the second criterion to say “leaves home at least once a week to do something completely non-family related.” Like say, take an art class or hit the spa, or maybe go surfing.

Which brings us to the third criterion – hobbies and other outside interests. This is one criterion I wouldn’t change. To have a real life, I firmly believe SAHMs must have something else going on in their lives beyond kids, cleaning and husbands. You’ve got to have a passion, a love affair with something (not someone, please note) not related to your family. And please, don’t sit there and say “American Idol” is your passion. Unless you’re actually competing on “American Idol” it doesn’t count.

I’ve certainly got my passions – art, writing, and karate. I have to pursue these activities to stay sane. In fact, I’d say I devote as much time to my “outside” interests as I do to my family. It makes me a more interesting person, to say the least.

Now, do I have my own money to afford these pursuits? Depends. SAHMs don’t actually get a steady paycheck, you know. However, some genius once figured that if you calculated what it would cost to pay someone to do all the cooking, cleaning, shopping, and child care that a SAHM does, then said mom ought to receive an annual paycheck of $76,000. Personally, I think that doesn’t even begin to cover the amount of work we do and what it’s worth. However, my husband is a smart man and he understands that ain’t no one happy if Mama ain’t happy, and he has therefore surrendered to me a credit card with carte blanche to spend as I see fit. I try not to use it too often. For certain expenses, mostly business related, I don’t use his money at all. I do make a few bucks from writing and graphics, and I invest that money back into my business. I even make enough to pay for birthday and Christmas presents.

I don’t know how other SAHMs could be making their own money. I certainly feel they do deserve to be paid. They ought to at least feel financially secure. Maybe they could fill criterion number three just by ensuring their significant others have wills made out. That way Mom gets all the dough when her hubby finally bites it. Just as long as no one catches her and her best friend burying the poor SOB out in the backyard (see criterion number one for details).

So take the test and see for yourself, stay-at-home moms. Do you have a real life? No? Well, if you don’t mind then that’s okay I guess. But if you do mind, remember. Everybody dies, but not everybody truly lives.