Mamas Gone Wild
- First Appeared in the Oct/Nov Issue of Maniac MagazineThere are two kinds of accidental moms. The first is the girl that gets pregnant and changes their reckless ways for good, like changing their stripper profession for teaching math. The second are those that secretly wanted to have kids but are not very good life planners. These are at least the kind of friends I have anyway. I probably fall into both categories, except I was a nightlife reporter, not a stripper.
After my daughter Lyra burst out of me like a little cone-headed alien escaping her captor I sat on the couch in shock for about a year. In the beginning, she was a tiny thing that was prone to bashing her head against my big boobies in tears. Patrick and I were determined to be all natural and only allow her breast milk; therefore I had to get a breast pump to quill Lyra’s impatient cries.
And because I have all the tact and grace of a circus clown I attracted a lot of attention trying to breast feed in public. In the previous year, I wouldn’t have flinched to expose my girls to admirers, but choking a baby in public with my raspberry-sized nipples was not the least bit sexy. So I stayed at home in my topless garb to keep from embarrassing my infant daughter.
When at six months-old she thought it was hilarious to try to bite my berries off I ended the abuse of my boobies. She responded by mercilessly vomiting on me at the most in opportune moments when we switched to formula. Motherhood is freaking messy.
My delighted audience was my crew of childhood friends who I had watched get pregnant in their early twenties. Missy, Suzanne, and I went to an all-girl Catholic high school in Kentucky so naturally we had a crazy edge. They signed me up for Facebook after I gave birth to Lyra. I had always been too busy for social websites, but sitting at home watching CSI reruns was making me paranoid to walk down the street.
I soon discovered that I didn’t need parenting guidebooks, I just needed Facebook! All of my 200 high school classmates were all there waiting to give me parenting advice since 80 percent of them were seasoned moms. They sent me messages like “Gee, that blows my mind that you are a mom!” Very encouraging.
Missy’s life story was straight out of a hundred different country songs. She was gorgeous, wild and stormy. If you pissed her off she would sod your yard with her daddy’s pick-up truck. She had become a mom right after high school to her boyfriend Billy. Three kids later she had earned a nursing career and still wears a size 3. However, after eighteen years of the same man she was going through married-life crisis.
Suzanne was the girl who introduced me to Edie Brickell and Cat Stevens in art class. She would get in trouble for wearing Birkenstocks to school and on the weekends we would take turns making out with boys in her parents’ Winnebago in the backyard. She got pregnant and married not long after high school as well. When her daughter was thirteen, she was on the verge of a much needed divorce. However, instead of going crazy all over again she went all Jesus and started dating a minister from her mother’s missionary work. Suzanne and her holy man decided to abstain from vaginal intercourse. Little drastic I thought! I started calling him President Clinton.
Back at my ranch, Patrick and I were teetering through parenthood barely able to contain the explosions from either end of our small daughter. When Lyra was eleven months old we took her on a road trip through Germany, Austria, Hungary, and Romania. Sounds luxurious when you consider we were picking up our BMW at the factory to take it for its first road trip. Let’s just say Lyra baptized it every time we started the engine. She has a severe case of motion sickness – good times let me tell you. While in Romania a doctor told me she might have an eating disorder. What already!
It was in September after the crazy European vacation that a Kentucky storm took over my life again in the form of a bourbon bottle that I smuggled into a Russian opera my dad had suckered my sister and me to attend. I came home to a sleeping Romanian and insisted he ravish me. He insisted that it wasn’t a good time of the month for me. “Nonsense, you know nothing about my body!” I slurred at him. A few hours later I sobered up and counted the days from my last period in my slumber. Oh drat, not again.
A couple of weeks later we were in Kentucky for my high school reunion. Missy was split from Billy and had convinced herself that she couldn’t be alone, or rather just needed a man in her life. The man she chose was Billy’s childhood friend Billy. Sound bizarre, well, it’s just Kentucky. Suzanne was sexting her minister while I was entertaining my mother-in-law from Romania that came along for the ride.
At the reunion we all received name tags with our senior pictures on it. Mine read Sarah Lolley Flip (my husband’s last name is actually Filip pronounced Phillip). Truthfully, I was relieved to be married at all. I felt like I was finally normal just to be married with a kid. Meanwhile, Missy was working on severe abandonment of the past eighteen years as her new ‘Billy’ waited in the car outside the event. She disappeared after an hour.
Suzanne and I made our rounds comparing everyone’s new names and faces when at midnight we got a call from Missy that she was holed up with the new Billy at a bar when the old Billy tracked her down. Drama! Suzanne forbade me to go get her and Patrick was convinced I didn’t need another drink because I was pregnant. “No I am not!”
At 3 a.m. I got knock on my hotel door. Missy was doing cartwheels in the hallway. She got a room at the hotel and proceeded to sing “Like a Virgin” at the top of her lungs. She had picked up where she left off literally. We spent the night amusing ourselves with scenarios of what she might have done if she hadn’t become a mom so soon. None of them were realistic because she could only be this crazy blonde bombshell who raised three well behaved kids. We went to bed with her swearing she had never slept with the new Billy. It seems sexting is taking the place of condoms, a better birth control.
Patrick and I haven’t caught onto the practice because upon my return to Pittsburgh I discovered I was indeed pregnant, again. Oh snap!
