Free Sometimes I Feel Like a Nut by Jill Kargman Page B

commercials. There was one for Volvo where the daughter is at ice-skating class and keeps falling on her tuches and then comes out and Mom has the Volvo running outside with the ass warmer on. Now that’s maternal love! Niagara Falls. I personally raised the stock of the parent company of Kleenex those first months. Especially because of the incessant pressure to nurse when the truth was, I didn’t like it. People adore the symbiosis of mother and child and the bonding, but the truth was I wasn’t breast-fed, and moms and daughters couldn’t be more bonded than I am with my mom. My nips bled, the pumping made me feel like I was hooked up to a Frankenstein machine or, worse, that fat albino’s below-tree-root death machine in The Princess Bride . I hated thinking of my baby as the Six-Fingered Man torturing me, so I bagged after six weeks. “Shame on you!” one beeyotch literally said to me, complete with pointer finger in my face. “You know it makes them smarter .”
    I knew right then and there I had to block out all the sudden advisers. My kid was only two months old and already a battery of people had given me their lists of things I “must do,” from buy special toys we all somehow survived without to use $40 baby moisturizer. It was in this next year that my friends aligned in two camps—the ones who didn’t have kids (my real friends) and the new breed of Supermom whom I met through my daughter. It was from this element that I learned the countless ins and outs of parenting.
Comment: “You give her food from a jar? Oh. We only serve all organic; we boil down a butternut squash from the farmer’s market and puree it, and Allegra and Tabitha devour it!”
Accompanying look: As if I’m filling my kid’s bottle with Coke and feeding her fried dough.
     
Comment: “You cannot use a pacifier at eighteen months. No, no, no, no, no, too old. That’s lazy parenting. It causes speech delays.”
Accompanying look: As if my kid looks like Hannibal Lecter with an enormous sucky mask and will be mute for the rest of her life because of it.
     
Comment: “You must do this playgroup: we have a PhD in child psychology come and we meet at different people’s apartments, and it’s like three or four grand but the babies are so advanced and it’s worth it for the school process.”
Look when I politely decline: Incredulity that a mom could be so uncaring about her child’s brain development.
     
    So I began to notice there was a breed of hypercompetitive type-A mothers whom I dubbed the Momzillas. I had my next book idea. Now I just had to get them to keep talking so I could harvest some material.
    Cake.
    I immersed myself in their scene, listening to diatribes on the choking hazards of nonsliced grapes or the merits of teaching Mandarin at age two. I lived my life gleaning conversational gems I couldn’t have dreamed up for fiction. In fact my editor said I might want to tone down some of the over-the-top scenes and was floored when I informed her that the ones she had singled out were all 100 percent true.
    When I signed up Sadie for our first Mommy and Me class, she was tooling around the room with her diapered bum, unable to sit down. As the teacher walked in, all the other moms quietly assembled in a circle on the floor.
    “Sadie, honey, come here,” I said, tapping the carpet next to me. “Come sit down Indian-style.”
    Gasps.
    Literally no fewer than three bejeweled hands went to their respective throats.
    I felt that seventh-grade tsunami of panic that I was being talked about when I saw two moms whispering while looking at me, i.e., making the international gesture for “We’re talking about you.” But see, it wasn’t middle school, so I looked right back at them with a warm smile and said, “Is something wrong?”
    They looked at each other. One grimaced and the other, caught off guard by my question, pursed her lips and leaned forward.
    “Sorry, it’s just, no one really says that anymore.