Free Maternity Leave (9781466871533) by Julie Halpern Page A

pick a Melissa McCarthy comedy because if anyone is going to make me forget who I am for a bit, it’s Melissa. Not that I could possibly forget, seeing as I am wearing Sam in his wrap on my chest.
    When we go up to buy the tickets, the kid at the counter actually tells us that no children under six are allowed into R movies.
    â€œHe’s not even a month old. He won’t even be awake,” I argue.
    â€œThat’s our policy.”
    â€œYour policy is to allow six-year-olds into R-rated movies but not babies who can’t even see past my tits?” I berate the youth behind the register.
    â€œUm, thank you.” Zach ushers me away from the whippersnapper and bypasses the human ticket-buying experience by purchasing our tickets from one of the automatic machines. The ticket-ripping boy isn’t as much of a stickler for the “policies” of the theater, and we make it past him without a kerfuffle.
    One box of Dots and sixteen thousand fat pretzel bites with fake cheese later, I am feeling pretty good. Until Sam wakes up and starts crying during the last half hour of the movie. I spend the final scenes bouncing him in the aisle near the door. My thighs are going to be speed-skater thick by the time Sam starts walking.
    31 Days Old
    I am horrid. Someone should come to my house and arrest me and take this baby away to a more suitably loving home environment, because this most definitely is not one. I can’t do this. I don’t want to do this. I don’t know how to do this.
    Sam woke up this morning screaming as usual, and after a night of being woken up five times, so many starts and stops and fails of nursing, two diapers filled with shit, and three outfit changes, I am done. I am over this. I want to leave. To run away. To join the circus. To move to Australia. To change my identity and become a different person who isn’t the awful, ugly, depressed mother I am.
    I screamed at Sam. I screamed at him and about him and on the way to his room and as I threw his diaper on the floor instead of in the diaper pail. I told him he was the worst baby ever. I told him to shut up. I told him he disappointed me, and I wished I didn’t have to be home with him. Even Doogan ran away from me.
    Sam is now back in his crib, screaming and crying probably, but I wouldn’t know because I am in the basement with the monitor off, blasting Slayer on the stereo and vacuuming spots I just vacuumed sixteen times.
    I am a horrible person. I don’t deserve to have a child.
    Later
    The consensus is that I might not be that bad.
    From my mom: “I’m sure I said things to you that weren’t very nice, and you turned out fine. Good enough, at least.”
    From Fern: “Wait until you have another one. Then you can let them say all of the terrible things you wanted to say to each other, kick back with a shot of tequila, and laugh.”
    From Louise: “My four-year-old is a giant turdcake. I can’t get her to leave the house without having to tell her thirty times to go pee, sixty times to wipe, a hundred and fifty times to flush, six thousand times to pull up her pants, and five million times to wash her hands. Don’t even get me started on how many times I have to ask her to put on her shoes. I’m talking instructions for individual feet. Get all your name-calling out while you can. Sam doesn’t know the difference. No one’s sitting in therapy bitching about how their mom yelled at them when they were one month old.
    â€œGive yourself a break.”
    33 Days Old
    Today my mom is taking me shopping for new clothes. I haven’t wanted to leave the house in anything other than yoga pants, since my stomach is deflated enough not to wear maternity clothes, but my prepregnancy clothes don’t fit me yet. We head to the mall.
    â€œWhy are we shopping at a store called Forever 21? I hate to break it to you, dear, but you are no twenty-one-year-old