gloat. intransitive verb 1.) to gaze with malignant satisfaction; to exult maliciously, sometimes also triumphantly, in another’s loss or discomfort;

I am a mean-spirited, catty, malevolent bitch. Seriously. I managed to shock myself today, and my opinion of my moral standing isn’t all that high.

To get an idea of the degree of maliciousness I’m telling you about, think of this: I’m a professional writer (Yes, some people pay me to write. Fancy that.) and yet I had to resort to a thesaurus for the right word to describe the depths of depravity to which I sunk today.

Some of my choices were: abusive, back-biting, belittling, bitchy, calumniatory, calumnious, censorious, contemptuous, contumelious, defamatory, deprecatory, depreciative, depreciatory, derisive, derisory, derogative, derogatory, despiteful, detractory, disparaging, evil, hateful, libelous, malevolent, minimizing, nagging, naggy, peevish, pejorative, petulant, querulous, rancorous, resentful, ridiculing, scandalous, scurrile, scurrilous, shrewish, slanderous, slighting, spiteful, vicious, vilifying, vixenish, vixenly, wicked.

I had a hard time settling for gloating. (Now I’m looking for ways to get contumelious, pejorative or shrewish in a post. Watch this space.)

C’s babysitter—who happens to be our housemate too— is THE BEST. No, really. You think your babysitter is good, but she is not a patch on ours. The lovely, spectacular Adi (or “AH-dee.” as he will surely call her when he can put two syllables together) looks after C way better than I ever could. She teaches him tricks and sings songs to him, and she single-handedly cured him of The Worst Diaper Rash Ever. She even encourages me to go out more so she gets to spend more time with C. Top that!

Adi is a godsend and the only person who loves her more than I do is my son. Sometimes I worry he loves her more than he loves me, especially because I couldn’t blame him if he did.

C and I got home late-ish tonight and he woke up in a foul mood when Adi got him out of the car. He hates falling asleep in one place and waking up in another—and I totally understand how it feels (though it must be extra annoying with no booze involved). Adi took him to his room and tried to put him to bed while I shot the breeze checked Twitter did VERY IMPORTANT grown-up things that had to be done just then.

But he didn’t settle. In fact, he got really really upset.

I read some blogs got a drink waited a reasonable time, but the screaming only got worse. I tip-toed and handed Adi a fresh bottle of formula for C. More screaming. I counted to five. Holler holler. I gave up and walked in to see if there was something I could do, but frankly I did not have a lot of hope: if Adi couldn’t make it better, what chance did I have?

Tentatively, I picked C up.

Amazingly, he stopped crying.

*shock*

“Ha! Lookit that! I picked him up and He. Stopped. Crying. Who’s your mama? Who’s your mama now? He likes me better than you, bitch!! HOW’S THEM APPLES???”

There must be a special circle in Hell for people who “exult maliciously and triumphantly” at their perfect babysitter’s one and only fail—and oooh boy, I have earned myself a box seat in it.

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Tonight, I am really annoyed with myself. How dumb can one person be? Seriously!

I had ONE task for today:

Task: Give C a bath.

(Goodness knows I don’t bathe him often enough!)

Materials: one dirty little kid, one bathtub full of warm water.

Procedure: Get little kid naked, dump little kid in water, scrub the heck out of little kid, get little kid out of bath, towel dry little kid.

Result: one clean little kid.

What could possibly go wrong?

Well…

On the day I left for New York there was a big landslide near where I live. Nasty thing, over 20 dead, many houses lost. Bear with me, this will make sense.

Among the many disruptions caused by this huge catastrophe in our community (and I don’t mean my leaving the country,) the water supply became a tad erratic.

Ms. Lilly reported on this every single day while I was away: “There was no water today, so we took C out for a meal,” “There was no water today, so I washed C’s clothes at my sister’s house,” “There was no water last night, so we couldn’t bathe C till this morning.”

Ms. Lilly was out today for her weekly class, and Adi I was left in charge. Easy peasy! I avoided work ran errands and avoided workgot a lot of wedding planning underway in the morning, then I avoided work added new ads to the blog and avoided workcooked dinner in the afternoon, and suddenly it was time to pick C up from daycare and alas! I hadn’t had a chance to get any paidwork done. Damn, it’s gonna be a late night tonight.

So C gets home, plays a bit, has his dinner, gets all excited about bathtime, and…

…fancy that, there was NO EFFING WATER.

If someone had remembered that the water comes and goes,someone might have filled the tub early and then just heated the water up. But someone was too busy avoiding work to remember her baby’s bath.

I need a kick in the rear. Volunteers, the queue starts here.

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Call the Bad Mom Police. I let my son marinade in his own piss and I am not ashamed to admit it.

OK, maybe a little ashamed. But I had a good excuse.

At least I did the first time it happened.

The first time I let C stew in his own urine was in an airplane over the Atlantic. He kept finding ways to make his diaper leak, and  I had only brought so many changes for the 20-plus-hour flight. So on the third time I cage wrestled the little guy (can airplane loos be any smaller?) and found his onesie had a wet spot, I just dabbed at it with a tissue, put on a fresh diaper, and dressed him again.  Once it dried out you’d never know.

Last night, however? An entirely different kettle of piss.

Sleep has been scarce the past couple of weeks. Between C’s non-stop teething, a cold, a growth spurt, hunger, and Argento-style nightmares (I should have never let him watch those films, but he begged so much!) C has been waking me up pretty much every night between 2 and 3 am for an hour of fun.

Fun fun fun.

Last night C woke me up with the nightly serenade of high-pitched wailing. I stumbled blindly to his cot and discovered two things:

1. He was wet all the way to his shoulders
2. He was still asleep

Suddenly, I had an ancestral vision. The wisdom from many generations had been passed on to me by my grandmother when she came to meet my newborn. Like any modern woman, I completely ignored her sage words until last night, when their truth became blindingly clear. I sprang into action.

Did my grandmother teach me a secret way of changing a baby without waking him up?

Did she tell me how to magically make jammies dry up?

Did she hell.

She said: “When your father was a baby he’d get his jammies wet almost every night. My mother said it was best to leave him like that: he was warm in his wet jammies, and stripping him would only make him catch a chill.”

Thank you, great grandma. I shall honour the family tradition.

And so I wrapped C tight in his two warmest blankies, gave him a kiss and went back to sleep.

I’ll wash everything tomorrow.

No pictures were taken. No one needs to know.

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The world is pretty evenly divided between Those Who Cook and Those Who Wash, and I am firmly in the first category. And while I can make a risotto with the best, it is a fact of life that I have always hated doing dishes. With a passion. I have been known to bargain, cajole, bribe and blackmail to get out of doing dishes.

Yet now I choose to do the dishes instead of playing with my son.

If you invite me to eat at yours I will accept graciously, arrive punctually, bring wine and dessert and C, and be a charming dinner guest who will clean her plate and compliment your walnut-balsamic dressing. And after the meal I’ll breezily say, “Here, why don’t you play with C a while and I’ll do the dishes for you?”

All protestations are futile: I’d rather do a huge load of dishes by hand than look after my baby, and there is no persuading me.”Oh, but I see C all the time, and you get to enjoy him so seldom!” (See what I did there?) Then I’ll grab a fresh glass of red and head to the sink.

Doing dishes is so relaxing, it feels almost like a form of Tai Chi: soap, stack, soap, stack. Rinse, stack, rinse, stack.

The water gurgling makes such a peaceful sound.

My mind wanders off as my hands take care of bowls, cutlery, pans.

“No, really, it’s no problem. I’m happy to do it. Yes, I know I used to loathe doing the dishes. Funny, that.”

Please, feel free to crawl on all fours after my freakishly strong and fast child, remove every potentially unsafe object from his hands/mouth, lift up all 10 kilos of him for a horsey ride (and another, and another, and another) and sing as many silly songs as you can come up with.You’ll be tired before he’s even warmed up.

I’ll just be here quietly with my glass of wine, scrubbing this pan until it shines.

And then I’ll dry everything. By hand.

One. Piece. At. A. Time.

What a lovely meal, thank you so much! Let’s do this again soon!

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Kids nowadays really have it tough. In my time it was a success if babies could walk and talk by the time they started the first grade, but now the poor little creatures are expected to explain the Theory of Relativity in German before being admitted to Kindergarten.

Back when I was an enthusiastic mom-to-be, I signed up to every weekly newsletter offering the latest tips and techniques for turning a drooling crawler into Ivy League material. I was going to do it all: the sensorial stimulation, the language practice (Monday through Wednesday I’d speak to him in English, Thursday and Friday in Spanish, and German over the weekend,) the motor practice i.e. Babercise, the yoga, meditation and tantric diaper changing.

My baby was going to be a Renaissance Baby. Fact.

Then C was born, and I was too busy admiring his sky blues and cleft chin to remember to rub him with cotton, sandpaper and silk, and to let him roll in a tub full of uncooked rice. Yes, that was among the suggested activities. Don’t let me start on all the ways in which it’s wrong.

C is freakishly strong, and any kind of baby workout could only turn him into a Baby Hulk with superhuman chair-banging, hair-tearing, fruit-squashing power. Better not.

And the worst was that his smiles, which are plentiful and frequent, turn me into a babbling mess who cannot say anything other than “Bootiful! Gorgeous! My dahling baby luurve!” So much for bringing him up multilingual.

Ashamed of my lazy ways, I turned to Babycenter for guidance. I would do an activity with him each week to make up for my soppiness. Starting now.

Where’s That Noise?
Appropriate for: 7 to 15 months

Skills developed: Understanding of object permanence, hand-eye coordination
What you’ll need: Several noise-making toys; a dish towel or small blanket

Show your baby a squeaky toy, give it a good noisy squeeze, then cover it with a dish towel or small blanket and let him uncover it. Then cover it again and try making it squeak while it’s still invisible (…) Substitute a toy that rattles, then one that makes a crunching noise or other unusual sound (you can make your own with a ball of waxed paper).

*yawn*

Bo-ring.

This is what I’ll do instead: I’ll run towards C at top speed, lift him up to the ceiling, give him a few belly raspberries, and hang him upside down for a while – increased bloodflow to the brain should make him smarter! After that I’ll plonk him on the nearest cushion, tickle him until he’s breathless, and kiss the bejesus out of him.

My poor boy, he’ll never be admitted in an Oxbridge sandbox.

I won’t crumple a piece of paper under a dish towel for the life of me. I’m such a bad mom.

Oh, and that Baby Einstein won’t know what hit him if we ever meet him.

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I don’t care a whit if I see my baby chewing the doormat, and in fact I often encourage him – it builds his defenses and soothes his teething itch – but even a self-professed bad mom like me doesn’t want people to think I am that careless.

The trick is to seem a good decent mom with the minimum of effort.

Cleanliness may be next to godliness, but godliness has never been a big deal for me. Which is why bathing my baby doesn’t happen nearly as often as some would like, and why my disinfection practices have a lot to do with who is watching.

So if I take C to the supermarket with someone else (say the girls, or a fellow mom) I will ask them to hold C for me while I fetch some Clorox wipes from my handbag and give the cart a good wipe, because “These things are jam-packed with germs. Goodness knows whose hands have been on this! C puts everything into his mouth, so I always carry these *showing wipes with a toothpaste ad smile* to make sure his environment is clean.”

Then I gently slide C into the childseat, toss my hair, and breeze into the store, where I will probably buy locally grown fruit, dark leafy vegetables and some of the mega-expensive 100% pure freshly-squeezed orange juice because “I just can’t live without it!”

But if the trip to the supermarket involves just the two of us, I’ll probably lug C headfirst into the childseat, get me a cold Coke Zero to sip while shopping (What do you mean I’m not allowed to drink it while shopping? I do it all the time and no one has ever stopped me before!) and buy TP, dark chocolate, and a bottle of red.

Clorox wipes? Which Clorox wipes?

C will build fantastic defenses, and the cart handle will be thoroughly sanitised anyway… AFTER he’s done with it.

Dear Next-Irresponsible-Mom-Who-Uses-That-Trolley: you’re welcome.

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