Things I Suck At As A Mom

I really should be working right now, but the current free-for-all/play date going on upstairs has inspired me to write the following list of Things I Suck At As A Mom.

1. Mommies groups. Never joined one that I really fit into. Mostly because I am a Freak Mama, and mundane mamas scare/irritate me.


2. Chit-chat with non-Freak Mamas. Related to item #1. I have very little in common with most non-fandom or non-freak moms, so doing the whole polite talk thing is painfully awkward for me (as I'm sure it must be for them to talk to me).


3. Play dates with children of non-Freak Mamas. I do not relate well to other people's kids at the best of times. Dealing with kids whom I am afraid will contaminate my kids with such anti-Freak ick like "Hannah Montana" or "Bratz" just drives me up the wall.


4. Cooking dinner. Hubster used to do ALL the cooking, because I honestly never learned how. And since I get up at 5AM, my brain usually shuts down around 5PM, which is of course the magic hour at which dinner is expected to be prepared.


5. Packing school lunches. I don't know why I suck at this one. I had to pack my own school lunch for years when I was in school. Somehow, I can't pull it off for the Princess. It may be that many times we don't have what I need on hand to make said lunch (because I also suck at grocery shopping, yet another task the Hubster does). It may be part of the whole "brain shuts down at 5PM" thing. I just can't say.


6. Children's parties. I think kids' birthday parties should be small simple affairs. I don't like renting inflatable bouncy death traps, nor do I like hiring evil clowns/magicians/balloon animal artists. I prefer simple parties at home. However, right now my home has no downstairs bathroom, no patio furniture, no grill, and no linoleum in the foyer. Also no fence, so no way to coral screaming children. Makes it hard to host a simple barbeque in the backyard.


7. House cleaning. I'm too damn busy being Freak Mama and doing my writing/graphic arts thing to get around to this one. And don't even ask about decorating the house. I decorate with dust bunnies, okay? That way all the rooms in the house match!


8. Sleep-overs. I have not yet even attempted to have one at this house. I just can't stand other people's children long enough to force myself to suffer through one. I live in fear of the day I do have to do it.

This list probably doesn't even begin to cover the things I suck at as a mom, but right now I've got small screaming children in the house tearing things apart, so I have to go.

What do you suck at as a parent?

Techno Tuesday - not your mother's "stay-at-home"

Technology and stay-at-home motherhood are subjects near and dear to my heart. As a work-at-home, write-at-home mom, I spend a lot of time online. Blogging, Twitter, e-mail, Firefox... the internet is a huge part of my life.

My own mother was a stay-at-home mom for the first few years of my life. Back then, we lived in a tiny, rural area of Georgia, miles away from any town. Fort Benning, the Army post where my dad was stationed, was about an hour's drive away. We had neighbors, but nobody Mom (the city girl from Philly) felt close too. And my dad? Between his assignment at Fort Benning and the master's degree he was pursuing, he was pretty much gone most of the time. So for two years, it was just Mom and me out in the middle of nowhere.

When I was three, Mom went back to work. She had to. Not for financial reasons but because she was going stir crazy. It's a feeling I understand all too well. When your only companion for weeks on end is a three-year-old who endlessly babbles, throws tantrums, and gets into stuff she shouldn't, you start to feel the walls closing in. My mom had an epiphany the day she ran me to ground, grabbed me by the pony tail, and prepared to nearly smack me into the next decade. She stopped, just in time, and realized that if she continued to stay home with me, it wouldn't be good for either one of us. She had to get out of the house; she had to have adult contact. She had to get a job.

Flash forward thirty-seven years. Now I am the stay-at-home mom, living in a suburb where I rarely ever see the other moms in the neighborhood. Either they work, or their kids are much older than mine and so they've got different schedules, or there's a gap between our personalities that's too wide for me to want to bridge (freaky goth mom here, remember?). Michael frequently works late or is away on business, and my constant companion is...

A babbling, tantrum-throwing, getting-into-stuff-she-shouldn't two-year-old.

I love Pixie, but honest to god, some days she just drives me crazy. Like my mother, when things get too nuts and I'm ready to blow my top at my adorable girl, I realize I need adult contact. Unlike my mother, I have more options. I have Skype, Twitter, e-mail. I can work from home, sending artwork and writing to clients via e-mail. I can give myself a purpose outside of motherhood all from the comfort of my own desktop. I am so plugged in, in fact, that I have not one but three computers in the house, all dedicated to me and they're all plugged into the net. Whether I'm in the bedroom, the office, or the kitchen, a sane (or even just semi-sane) adult is only a mouse click away. It's all I need to keep myself together.

These days, my mom lives out in rural Arkansas, miles away from the nearest town. Still the city girl, still the outsider, she doesn't have any close friends within easy distance. She does have a computer and e-mail, but living in such a rural area limits how much connectivity she has via that medium. She can't even get cell phone reception without getting into her car and driving to the top of the mountain my folks live on. Thus at the age of seventy, she's still working at a grueling job because if she doesn't she knows she'd go nuts.

I wonder myself how I'd fare out in those circumstances. Could I survive long-term without Firefox, Skype, Twitter, or e-mail? Would I eventually run my darling Pixie to ground, ready to murder her because I was too stir crazy to stop myself?

I hope I never have to find out.

Poetry? The Walk

I make no claims to being a poet. This is simply what came to me yesterday as the Pixie and I walked through our neighborhood in the rain.

The Walk

The world is mine today
Empty, abandoned
In the wake of some apocalypse
I must have slept through this morning

Dull little houses line
Oil-slicked streets
Blank windows, locked doors
Sing a requiem
for Suburbia

The ground is black
And bitter as used coffee grounds
The sky is gray
As my mood
Or the hair I found
This morning

One wiry antennae
Sticking straight up
From my skull
Receiving all messages of
Doom and gloom

Doom and gloom
Gloom and doom
Mist wraps around me
A second, clammy coat
My bat black umbrella
Flaps overhead
The leaden sky bleeds acid rain
Forcing all the sugar mamas
To stay inside
And gawk as I shuffle by

They'll melt, they'll melt
My god, they'd melt!
If they ever set foot outside

But I don't have
That concern today
I'm old and sour
As a basket
Of assholes
And the rain, the rain
Fits me like a glove

Doom and gloom
Gloom and doom
The world is mine
The world is grey
And I shuffle through it
A zombie at home

In the damp, in the dead
In the swampy mists
Only one thing seems amiss
One small detail out of place
The little Pixie who dances
At my side

Her tiny pink coat
Is a shocking wound
In all this glorious misery gray
It rips me
Out of my stupor and into
A world where squirrels
Natter and birds
Shriek and shrill and puddles
Wait to be stomped

Splash and dash!
Dash and splash!
She flits around
The little busy buzzy bee
Tearing my world apart

Her high pitched giggle
Like a sword-thrust
To my senses
Simply kills my good bad mood
Like holy water on vampires
I am forced to step out of my
Steaming gothic remains
Into the world of the living
Again


Splash and dash!
Dash and splash!
Look Mama
A bird!
A squirrel!
Another puddle!

The world is hers
Not mine
I hope I can surrender it
With grace

Episode 25 - This Is My Life!

This is mostly an update on work, but...

Yes, this has been my life the last several weeks. Since November, I have struggled to survive the holidays, a convention (9 panels, 1 reading, an all-day author table!!), final edits on my new book Future Perfect, creating the cover art for said book, getting set up to join the "Oh Get A Grip" group blog (read us - we're fun!!), keeping up with the Heat Flash erotica podcast which now airs on Thursdays at 8PM on Radio Dentata (streaming internet radio with teeth!!), clean the house, feed the kids, help the Princess with her homework, potty train Pixie, and somehow find a few moments to have sex with my husband.

Yeah, it's been a little busy.

Things are starting to slow down a bit. I got my last major deadline out the door on Friday. I submitted a short story to Alessia Brio's Coming Together: Al Fresco, and regardless of whether or not I make it into this volume, I highly encourage everyone to buy a copy of any of the Coming Together books (I do have a story in Coming Together: With Pride, if you're interested). Coming Together is a charity anthology and all the proceeds go to the organization of choice for each volume. It's doing good while being bad, and ya gotta love that.

So this week's cartoon is just a glimpse into what's been going on at la casa de Cynical Woman. I'm tired, but things are evening out and I hope to be back on some sort of regular schedule in the next couple of weeks. I'll be at the Farpoint science fiction convention on Valentine's Day weekend, the same weekend as the release of Future Perfect, so I will be gearing up for that, getting promo ready and preparing for the panels I'm on (only six this time, I believe). Otherwise, I'll be turning my attention back to the podcast and this cartoon, putting in a little more time on my two favorite projects for a while. Hopefully, I'll have another cartoon ready within the week. See ya then!