Dispatches from Babyville

Mayhem in the A.M.

By Nicole Caccavo Kear

I woke this morning to the sound of my son’s sweet, raspy whisper, “Goo mawning Mommy.” The sun was just peeking up over the buildings and the new spring air blew through the bedroom, making everything fresh and clean. Giovanni nuzzled his head into my cheek and we cuddled close, just like beautiful moms and their perfect babies do in commercials for things like skin cream and instant coffee.

“Ah, motherhood,” I couldn’t help but think, “motherhood is my true calling.”

An hour later, our dreamy Oil of Olay commercial has metamorphosed into a scene from Full Metal Jacket as Giovanni shouts orders an inch from my face like a demented drill sergeant.

“TIN MAN! TIN MAN! TIN MAN!” is the assault.

My mission — whether I choose to accept it or not — is to draw the entire cast of characters from the Wizard of Oz, including minor Munchkins, while I suffer a massive nosebleed. I am pinching my nose with one hand and drawing what I consider to be shockingly life-like characters with the other, all in yellow and orange crayon because its all we have left in the crayon pack.

“No no no, DANCING tin man. Dancing dancing dancing dancing AGAIN! ”

The page in front of me is covered with yellow tin men, all penned by yours truly within the past ten minutes. But even this impressive legion is not enough to satisfy Giovanni.
“Mommy’s nose is bleeding,” I plead, as I heave myself, and my enormous belly chock-full of baby number two, off the ground, “Mommy just needs to get a tissue.”

“NO TISSEEEEWWW!” He smacks the pack of crayons out of my hand, scattering about a dozen orange and yellow crayons across the floor, one of which I am lucky enough to trip over on my way to the box of tissues. I notice that I have blood on my shirt—my only clean maternity shirt—and then I see the clock and realize we are already fifteen minutes late for Giovanni’s pre-preschool.

Just as my uterus treats me to a Braxton Hicks contraction, Giovanni throws himself onto my legs. His face is greasy with snot and he begins a convulsive cough, the precursor to a hysterical gag-and-maybe-even-vomit episode. I think of the pre-preschool just four blocks away, shining like a beacon in the far distance. But my nosebleed is beginning to make me look like Sissy Spacek in Carrie and I still have to put on Giovanni’s shoes and winter gear, not to mention get him out the door, down two flights, into the stroller and across four blocks to school. The odds of getting there before dismissal time in three hours seem slim indeed. Why don’t we live someplace civilized, I think, some city like Minneapolis where you just toss your coatless kid in the mini-van and let him watch a DVD the whole (quiet) way to school? Rather than mobilize, I pick up the phone and call my husband on his cell phone.

“My nose is bleeding and he’s forcing me to draw millions of dancing tin men,” I tell him.

“What?’ David asks, “I can’t hear you.”

“YEWWOH WITCH!” my tormentor shouts, “peeeesse peeessse peeeese peeeese”

“Can’t you see Mommy is BLEEDING?” I shout.

I have cast off from the dock of good Mommydom and now am adrift in an ocean of unfit parenting. The gurus whose parenting books line my shelves would be aghast. They would use this episode as the “before” section in one of their chapters.
My yelling has, predictably, made things worse. Now I have not only refused my dictator, I have frightened him.

“MOOOOMMMMY!” he wails, climbing on top of me.

“You’re bleeding?” David yells, “What’s the matter with you? I can’t hear anything.”

“No talkin’ Mommy,” Giovanni begs, “Nooooo TALKIN’!” Then he grabs the phone and tosses it to the floor and the battery pops out and I think that I will suffer a severe nose hemorrhage for sure and my landlord will have to break down the door to see what the hubbub is about and then Giovanni will force him to draw the scarecrow and tin man and witch and Dorothy, all of them in yellow and orange. This actually makes me feel better.
So I take a deep breath, shove a piece of tissue up my nostril and give Giovanni a hug. He amps up the sobbing, to show me that it’s what he wanted all along, he just loves his mother so much the only cure he needs is a hug and why couldn’t I see that from the start? He rubs snot all over my recently-laundered, now-bloody maternity shirt.

“Kiss Mommy, Kiss!” he pleads piteously, and slobbers all over my face.

“I wuv ew Mommy” he murmurs, snuggling into me and giving his in-utero sister a few not-so-accidental kicks in the process.
I am the best mother in the world and he is an angel again, just like that.

“Mommy?’ he asks sweetly, “Yewwoh tin man peese?” And from my supine position on the floor I reach for the yellow stub and start drawing an oval for the head.

“Tank ew, tank ew, tank ew, tank ew,” he laughs delightedly, still crying, and whining and laughing.

And this is how my husband finds us when he walks through the front door a minute later.

“What are you doing here?” I ask, “Why aren’t you at work?”
His look assures me that a nose hemorrhage is a picnic compared to the punishment he feels like exacting.
“I turned around and came home,” he says, panting, “You said you were bleeding and then the phone went dead! What are you DOING?”

This cracks Giovanni up, I mean, big time. He starts to guffaw, a cracker-jack explosion of laughter like wrapping paper getting crinkled into balls.

“Dooooo-INGGGGG!” he repeats, doubling over. I start to laugh. David is not laughing. Then mid-guffaw, Giovanni farts and David is laughing too. The tissue pops out of my nostril. My nose has stopped bleeding. We are never going to make it to pre-preschool. We are blissfully happy again.