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Clubnapped Mommy: Too Tired to Party!

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A friend asked my childhood besties on my 37th birthday, “What’s the wildest thing she has ever done?”, and I saw them stumble for an answer. They didn’t have one! I’ve always been above average when it comes to my “fun-to-be-around” score but I have never done anything that would qualify as wild in my life.

There was that one time in undergrad in Appleton, Wisconsin when I had my first drink, and we laughed all night- but I also refused to leave my friend, Michelle’s room, as she sensibly coached me through my first night ever of drinking (at 19!!! Eek!) So my actions were as wild as the sound of the town where I was doing them- sensible and civilized.

The other time was when I went back to visit friends in the same college, and drank so much I fell off the bar stool, but then we stepped out of the bar and the brutal winter air in one of the coolest places in the world smacked me back into my senses, and I was sober as gobar!*

The only time that things may have gotten a bit out of hand for me is when I forced my friends to have ‘bhaang’ with me at a Holi party, and the panwala gave us some nasty shit so I was left knocked out, throwing up, hallucinating, believing I had died, and my soul was moving through a tunnel of white noise for hours. It also left me partially delusional till 6 months after, questioning whether our dreaming state was really our true state of being rather than our waking selves.

Okay- so the bhaang incident was pretty wild but not voluntarily so because I had signed up for a ‘cute’ experience of hours of unstoppable laughter, and that’s it! The madness ensued due to a dishonest panwalla.

Which brings me back to the question that in a world of FOMO* and YOLO*, I feel like a sore thumb, especially after having had a child. My limit pre and post baby has been two glasses of wine, but one day, after drinking just that much, I almost fell off the bed with my infant in my arms. It’s a different thing that the intoxication had nothing to do with it (even I can’t get drunk on two glasses) but exhaustion was to blame: a baby who woke up every hour to feed! But after that day, I swore off alcohol. And that’s when I got MORE boring!

So 4 years into being a teetotaler, I find myself at my sociable best in the day, when I’m hanging out with other mommies as we giggle about the crazy milk mustaches our kids made at breakfast but as soon as I’m out in the drinking world with the night crawlers (taken kicking and screaming every Saturday night by the husband), I feel like a wallflower straight out of one of Jane Austen’s novels.

I realize how I’m unable to carry on an interesting conversation with these fascinating creatures as they get increasingly wilder as P.M. turns into A.M., while I mentally calculate how many hours I have left before the baby wakes up. As the clock gets closer to 1, I get more restless, unable to laugh at the deteriorating humor and when my husband starts suggesting that we go to a second location, I’m ready to scream like a kidnapped victim. After all Oprah always says, “Never let the kidnapper take you to the second location because if you do, there’s very little chance of ever getting back alive”. The same applies to me when club-hopping- I refuse to be clubnapped.

I feel awkward and boring (and oh-so-bored) in this heart of darkness but with a party-animal for a husband, I must venture into these spaces with wild beasts. My only hope is that every once in a while, I find a little sanctuary here, where mistakenly we land up at a place filled with retro music, peach schnapps shots doing the rounds (instead of flaming Jaegerbombs or whatever these young people drink now), enough of seats for everyone (without having to pay a lac for a table), music at comfortable decibels and 40 plusses like me, tapping their walkers as they groove to Vanilla Ice.

Nice, nice, baby!

*Gobar- Cow Dung
*FOMO- Fear of Missing Out
*YOLO- You Only Live Once

No Fight: Confessions of a Tired Mommy

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I scream, “No..don’t drink that” as my only born slurps the water from her bathtub. “BabyA, that water is not for drinking. Yuck! Look at that! There’s a dead spider in it.”

She is unphased by my drama. She takes a bored look at the mangled spider floating, and bends down to start slurping the soapy water making its way down the drain; licking it like the kitty cats she so admires. She doesn’t even hear me shouting any more.

As an expectant mom, you assume that the time when you start losing control will be around the teenage years, or maybe the Tweens for this generation, but somewhere you believe that you will have a say till then. The truth is that every day I feel powerless in front of my tiny toddler.

Now don’t go mommy-judging me: of course she gets time out when she tries hitting me or does something completely unacceptable, but for all the things that hang in between the segregated realms of wrong and right; for the behavioral patterns that lurk in limbo land, I find myself not-in-control in front of my three year old.

I have never been overly fond of children, except the home-grown variety, and that’s why I had a thousand and one opinions on other people’s upbringing and their progeny. That was until I had BabyA, and since then, God has made me eat my words over and over again.

I used to find some kids extremely rude, like the kind who didn’t greet uncles and aunties “hello” and “ta-ta” or the variety who had nervous breakdowns if someone so much as smiled (at their cuteness), crying, “Why is she laughing at me?” I was sure my kid was going to be nothing like that! I would set her straight if she even tried!

But my kid is exactly like that. She never greets anyone that she doesn’t meet more than once-a-week and when she was younger, would flip out when people smiled in her presence as she would suspiciously shriek, “Why are you/they laughing?”

These are extremely uncomfortable situations for me as I was brought up by a dad who wasn’t fascist about anything but the “5 golden words” of politeness (and doing “chap chap” while eating but that’s a whole other story). So I grew up to be an extremely polite person. I thought that I could discipline my child into being polite, or doing things that I viewed as important (albeit not integral) to one’s character. Short answer: not possible! It’s a classic case of no longer being able to control the (little) monster you created.

And as a parent, you start realizing that you don’t have the fight in you to battle everything. Most of the time, you’re just too damn tired to disagree:
“Mamma, can I jump hard on your tummy and booboos alternatively and pretend you’re a horsie?”
“Ok.”
“Mamma, can I blow germ-infested spit bubbles into your milkshake?”
“Go ahead”
“Mamma, can I walk all over you wearing Mami’s 9 inch heels?”
“Be my guest!”

I’m going down! After all, I got no fight!