In an effort to minimize the naturally occurring damage that will result from having me as a parent, I decided to sign Boogie up for a couple of mommy and me type classes. Yesterday we started a class called “Move and Groove,” which I signed us up for somehow thinking it was appropriate for a six-month-old who can neither move nor groove without being manipulated like a chubby marionette (which, of course, she hates). I thought it was a music class… reading fail FTL.
Before spending an entire hour trying everything I could to keep Boogie from hysterically crying or slurping the snot off of every toy that was placed in front of her, I went into the room and said hello to a few mothers that were sitting near me. You aren’t going to believe this dear readers, or maybe you will because ya’ll are much more intuitive than I am, but not a single one of them responded. If I hadn’t been suffering from the still lingering effects of a hangover from Saturday night I would have believed I was in the Sixth Sense, but with babies and more audio dissonance.
This isn’t the first time I have been completely ignored by the child-rearing types in my new home town. During the annual Halloween Walk I smiled and nodded at a few moms and simply got blank stares in return. (Which I guess is better than them recoiling in horror?) Now, in their defense I may have been smiling and nodding at the same person over, and over, and over again because either a) there is a ginormous family of blonde, waifishly thin mothers with skinny noses, high cheekbones, and fair skin who all are about the same age and happen to have children 2) there is some Stepford shit going on or c) there is one mom who changes clothing every fifteen minutes running around up in here, and I smiled at her way too many times during the Walk. If it turns out the answer is C than I wouldn’t have smiled back at me either.
Last night The Mister asked how our first day of class was, and I tell him it happened again- not a single mom acknowledged my hello… and I even said it out loud this time. The Mister asks, ‘Were they all older then you?’ I’m all ‘Yeah’, and he is all ‘There you go.’ Something called me away from the conversation so I wasn’t able to ask him the two key questions that all of you are pondering now, ‘What the hell does that mean?’ and ‘How the hell would he even know to guess that?’
So pretty much all of the neighbor moms don’t like me, The Mister knows why, I don’t, and I’m not really sure what that says about my parenting skills. And lawd have mercy on my troubled soul, when did I start needing approval from anyone other than my good friends, vodka, and nicotine?
This might have been where things started going wrong... I'm not ashamed to admit it.
