Free Momzillas by Jill Kargman Page B

here. It’s too weird. Your mom probably has the house wired to make sure I’m not doing bad things to her angel.”
    He laughed, defeated, and rolled off me. “Fine. Let’s go make pancakes.”
    We lifted Violet from her crib and went downstairs to find Lila and Watts in their wood-paneled den watching
This Week
, as the slate of Sunday news programs was their weekly fix. We had our usual table-pounding, political-discussion-packed brunch (they were die-hard right-wing Republicans, natch), and then we got in the car to come back to New York. Thank God. Pulling out of that driveway always made my heart leap, and the wheels on the pebbly gravel sounded like Mozart in
Shawshank
, a little bit of freedom that paved the way to refilled tanks of hope.

Ten
    The next morning I kissed Josh good-bye at six A.M. and then finally roused my bones to get breakfast ready after eight. On the kitchen table was a cute note from Josh with a postscript of some new porn titles:
Lord of the Cock Rings
,
You’ve Got Tail
,
Doing John Malkovich
, and my fave,
Crocodile Dun-Me
. Smiling, I sat Violet down for our divine feast of Cheerios. I looked at the once-sunny box and thought of how Lila and her junior counterpart Bee and her friends had a no-carbs policy, and said that cereal was forbidden in their homes. In fact, at the lunch the week before, Hallie and Lara were discussing their organic cooking class for mothers about how to prepare healthy meals for their children. I had visions of them whipping me for cracking open the jars of Gerber I had fed Violet during babyhood. Or how about the salty pretzels and Goldfish she inhaled? Eternal sentence to the Shitty Mommy Layer of Hell. To them, a forbidden chicken finger might as well have been a vial of crack.
    Grover came on the screen and Violet started yelping “Gwova! Gwova!” as I fed her the contraband oat-based wheels of sin. Today Grover was flying to Peru to a small village of brick-makers. The hot equatorial sun would bake the children’s concoctions of mud, which was slathered into perfect rectangle-shaped molds and baked dry in a rudimentary outdoor kiln. The purity of the bricks, and the houses they’d build in the village, gave me a calming feeling, which motivated me to get my bathrobed ass dressed to take Violet out. I had signed up, at the behest of Maggie and Bee, for a music class, but it wouldn’t start for a few weeks. To fill the day, I thought I’d hit the Metropolitan Museum with Violet. Perhaps the Met would be a nice cool playground for us, instead of the stressful playground with neighborhoods of benches and alpha-mom gossip.
    After being told today’s program was brought to us by the letter
D
and the number 7, I put Violet in the stroller and walked up to the stunning museum at 1000 Fifth Avenue. I remember hearing the address and thinking it was kind of cool and that probably no one knew it. As Violet stretched her arms to the fountain in front of the museum, saying “Mommy, wata, wata!” I wheeled her in the handicapped entrance and up to the grand main hall. You really realize with an unwieldy stroller and little ramp access how hard it must be to be in a wheelchair. And no one helps us open doors, not even men. So much for chivalry.
    â€œWowie!” exclaimed Violet, visually swallowing the divine space.
    â€œViolet, sweets, this is the Metropolitan Museum, one of the most amazing places in the world. Do you want to go up and see some paintings?”
    â€œYeah! Paintings!” Violet already loved scoping artwork and I’d ask what she saw. In a sea of colors, she’d spy the sun or a face, and her eye seemed to me advanced for a toddler’s. We went upstairs into a gallery of Old Masters. For the first time in New York, I felt mildly at home. The paintings were like old friends welcoming me to the new city and I shuddered with a wave of pure joy. We walked through gallery after gallery,