Parenting

I’ve lost my nanny.

To full time working moms with kids this translates to the end of time — as in never having enough time for almost everything. Brushing one’s teeth and bathing must now be considered luxuries.

This explains why I’ve missed giving my opinion about various developments:

• Vice Ganda stuffing his hoof in his mouth with his r*pe joke
• Charice transforming from a butterfly into a happy caterpillar
• Pol Medina Jr.’s unceremonious exit from the Inquirer and his near fatal allergic reaction to nuns
• Congressman Benjo Benaldo’s gunshot wound on the chest and that new song playing in the airwaves, Straight Through the Lung

It’s all well and good that I didn’t have the time to write about these incidents. Only Medina would have welcomed being made fun of. If I joked about the other three incidents, I would probably get tomatoes and eggs thrown at me on Facebook. Not a bad way to make omelet really, if I didn’t have to wipe the ingredients off my face first.

So what should the rest of this post be all about now? How about top five mom upgrades I wish I had so I can have more time and energy to write sarcastic humor even without a nanny.

#5. An External Brain – Just like an external hard drive. So I can have enough mental room to swirl ideas for hundreds of web articles while never forgetting immunization schedules, PTA meetings, kids’ school projects (that only parents can really make) and my kids’ names of course.

#4. An Extra Eye – I need one that can extend and retract so I can send it downstairs while I work on my articles upstairs. It should have a nicely arched frowning eyebrow so the kids know it’s time to stop fighting over who gets the last cookie.

#3. Four Arms – I know a mom who can juggle babies and bales of fish while hanging on for dear life inside possessed jeepneys. My arms though, just aren’t as strong. I need an extra two so the two I have now don’t have to go into the intensive care unit.

#2. Lithium Batteries – I need these because all this stress has made me perpetually sleepy. I’m always so sleepy I can sleep anywhere — in jeepneys, restaurants, movie houses, heck, I bet I can even fall asleep in a roller coaster. My husband says if he could paint me black and orange using Photoshop I’d look exactly like Garfield — fat and always sleepy.

#1. Patience on IV Drip – Is this all really going to last 20 more years? If only I can order extra patience as easily as I can order extra rice.

If you’re a busy mom or dad too, what parent upgrades do you wish you had?

RIP peacock. May you rest in peace. (photo source)

Do peacocks die if all their tail feathers get pulled out? I guess not, but I can imagine them dying of shame. I only ask because last month, during the UN Day celebration, I saw a child strut on stage wearing a peacock costume so big it could blot out the sun.

I don’t make fun of other countries’ national costumes, even those so poorly reconstructed they deserve to be petitioned, but I feel I need to throw darts at this one and it’s not just because some departed peacock’s spirit is now weeping over his bare bum.

Because national costumes cost so much, I’d have to sell an arm, a leg and all my internal organs to get a new one made. My daughter was Ms. Panama two years ago so I told her she’d be Ms. Panama this year and every year thereafter until the costume no longer fits.

To my dismay, one parent, who’d been pushing her daughter to compete against mine since last year, made her daughter wear the dearly departed peacock’s feathers and a Panama sash too even if the kid was supposed to be Ms. Costa Rica. Her costume was so big and shiny that not even Ms. Zimbabwe who skinned a chicken for her headdress could hold a candle to her. Of course the judges couldn’t tell the difference between a national costume and a national disaster so she won the contest.

My daughter is no spoil sport and would have been happy for her classmate if she didn’t feel like her country was stolen from her. The offending parent’s story is that she made a mistake and thought it was Costa Rica’s costume she had made.

I didn’t know that if you searched for Costa Rica on Google they’d serve you results for Panama. If that were indeed the case, someone should tell Google they missed Costa Rica by a few kilometers.

Come on, I work online for a living. I use Google everyday and although it’s possible for irrelevant results to show for a search term, there is no way anyone can confuse one country with another unless the searcher has a reading disorder that’d make her read Panama as Costa Rica.

My kid soldiered through the event as if nothing had happened but on the ride home, she put her head on my lap. When she sat back up again, her cheek was wet. Unless my thighs were sweating through my jeans, I’d bet a million feathers those were tears.

I was crushed and for the first time in years, Google couldn’t tell me what to do next. My pal Irene says I should make sashes for every country plus Ms. Lost Atlantis and Ms. Bemuda Triangle sashes and sashes for every known planet, give it to the other girl and declare her the queen of the universe in perpetuity. I suppose though that the insult would be lost on the mother who, if she says she doesn’t even have the sense to use Google properly, probably won’t be able to understand the sarcastic gesture.

I settled instead for a chat with my daughter over chocolate ice cream, explaining to her why winning isn’t worth it if you have to step on others.

Can human kids self-develop too?

After reading Arnel Pineda’s story, I concluded that nearly everyone has abilities they can use to become successful. Even young stars who sing in the key of O (as in Off) have the uncanny ability to send teens into fits of delirium with the judicious introduction of dimples in a chorus. But just when I decided to take a shot at fame and fortune, life throws a wrench into my plans.

My bid for success will have to wait because my two kids and their nanny got food poisoned. Faster than we could sing, “I ate that moldy piece of beef and I liked it,” their bodies attempt to flush out the toxins and then it’s me with a cleaning cloth versus an endless gush of bodily solids, liquids and gases.

I hadn’t seen so many Xs since high school algebra.

It didn’t take long before we had to rush one kid to the hospital for rectal bleeding and severe dehydration. We were required to force both kids to consume so much medication that I hadn’t seen so many Xs (from the Rx) since high school algebra. Since then, my eye bags have begun to grow in layers as if the first layers gave birth to second layers and had grand kids, the third layers.

I now know that being a parent is THE full time job. Everything else from pursuing a career to brushing my teeth must be done on my free time. Even when the kids aren’t sick, it takes so much time, effort, patience and resources to take care of them and raise them right.

In my case, it’s tempting to be a bad parent and resort to shortcut parenting. By that I mean:

*When my daughter asks for help with math problems involving numbers above ten
Response: Go ask your father.

*When my kid asks where babies come from
Response: The FedEx guy just leaves them in doorsteps.

*When my toddler is still having difficulty forming words
Solution: Turn on the TV and let him watch Justice League for hours until he can say Batman flawlessly.

*When the kids fight downstairs while I’m working upstairs
Solution: I scream to the top of my lungs, “What’s going on?” Followed by, “Whatever that is, NO!”

*When kids get frightened by a gigantic prehistoric looking cockroach
Solution: Run to the hills and hope someone else kills it.

I suppose this was what our moms were trying to warn us about when they told us, “Don’t get married and have kids before you’re physically, mentally, emotionally and financially ready.”

But you know how messages get delivered between moms and their grownup children. Somewhere in the space between our mothers’ mouths and our ears, the warning not to have kids unprepared got translated to, “I’ll nag you every single day about this.” So we left and had kids of our own.

Kids aren’t born self-developed like Prony from Bohol. All they come packaged with are extra doses of cuteness, but that kinda helps. Every time things get difficult I see how adorable and cute they are and somehow I lose the heart to go ballistic or use shortcut parenting.

It’s unavoidable. Working moms can try to balance work, family and self to maintain some semblance of sanity but there is no defying the natural limits of time so ultimately priorities have to be made. In the mad daily rush that defines a family woman’s life, family comes first followed by work and then self.

That explains why I often get to comb my hair only once a day and not even properly such that only half of all my strands are in their proper place. The rapidly expanding natural life saver around my torso has also been left so seriously unattended that I’m certain I’ll soon develop enough fat to naturally protect me from the cold. The previously allotted schedules for 100 brush strokes and stomach crunches are now dedicated to my hyper active screaming banshees and to extra gigs to make more money that’s just never enough.

That’s just how it is and I don’t resent it. Besides, there are those moments when circumstances force you to stop. The other night, we had to rush my daughter to the hospital and after all the panic had subsided and she’d been given medication, we were told she still had to be admitted.

In a room with no instant internet connection and no way to chat with clients, time stopped. I didn’t complain. Nobody likes to be in a hospital but staying put with my favorite girl in the world watching Bizaare Foods on cable was the best treat I’d had in weeks.

My six-year old kid has developed a liking for a tween-oriented Sunday show. When I’m not snoring away to recuperate from my endless quest for financial survival (if that quest were equivalent to physical exercise, I’d have washboard abs), I get to watch snippets of the show with her.

It’s a lot like watching a visual scientific exposition of the life, death and multiplication of acne. Every forehead and cheek shot is an insight into the oily bane of adolescents. Other than that, I didn’t think the show had any more biology lessons to teach my daughter.

Yesterday, she asked me if the cute pockets of acne in her favorite show were boyfriends and girlfriends. I missed a beat.

It’s not just the show that taught her the concept of romantic relationships. In our neighborhood, adults already have “pairs” in mind for their kids. In fact, my 2nd child, who still has more gum than teeth, already has his pair. In school, the more astute little kids, just a year out of their diapers and now missing front teeth, already steal kisses.

They start so early.

I never like lying to my girl. When she asks sensitive questions, I like to stick as close to the truth as possible. Of course, I still really wish she’d just ask me about the life cycle of Propionibacterium acnes.

Malls are marvelous inventions of modern society. They’re like the Swiss Army knives of life. You can do almost anything in a mall— shop, eat, work, take a nap while sitting through two hours of Richard Guttierez’s stoned/stony/stone age movie acting. Despite initial objections, Catholics can now also pray in malls in the midst of worldly allures.

One of the more recent additions to mall services are play areas. Now you can drop your kids like bags in a baggage counter and claim them with a numbered card after an hour of shopping. I do that all the time. After all, I only have two arms and two lungs, not enough to lift 30 kilos worth of kids through endless aisles of merchandise.

The all in one play areas are the best options to deposit little people with short attention spans because these places have varieties of diversions to choose from. Specialty play pens with shorter play minutes have been offering good competition though. These are perfect pit stops for parents who just need to make a trip to the loo.

One of the more popular specialty play areas here offers stuffed horseback rides. This one I find a little disturbing. Just like I’ve never really warmed up to masses in malls, there’s just something odd about fake animals in malls.

I’m not over analyzing this. It just feels weird. I was lucky enough to have ridden a real horse as a child. I’m not sure if my kids will ever be able to ride more than stuffed animals. That’s sad.

That poor chap outside of your family circle in his father’s extra large suit, who had the misfortune of being picked for the first rose in your 18th birthday, was not your first dance. Go back many years more and you might be able to dig up suppressed memories of that fateful day when you were led to believe you looked cute in crepe paper, a banana headdress and a polka dot dress. Our minds are wonderful auto organizers so if you’re having a hard time recalling, you’ll find your memories filed in a folder labeled “Embarrassing School Foundation Days”.

My daughter just had her first dance. We were never told there’d be one. The kids were measured for costumes without parents’ consent and the next communication simply gave us the bill. I had the courtesy to ask my daughter what she really wanted to do with her life and she said she wanted to dance instead of getting a PhD in nuclear physics.

I figured she wasn’t being exploited or abused so I let her do the twist with her friends. They danced happily, oblivious to the world around them and even to their flailing, out of step partners. Despite the complete lack of synchronized movement and understanding for what they were doing, the kids managed to draw oohs, ahhs and wows from their captivated blood relations.

The older pupils who were required to dance upwards of the 60s didn’t fail to please their parents as well but the kids themselves looked like they were in mourning. These are the kids trapped between the internal tug of war between childhood and adolescence and who are incapable of busting a convincing groove if a song doesn’t contain “Baby, baby” every ten seconds.

One group dutifully pointed up and down to the tune of the 70s under the watchful eyes of teachers who probably included “grades” in every sentence to the pre dance pep briefing. That group forever redefined the Bee Gees’ “Stayin’ Alive”. Except for those who enjoyed the shiny costumes and the fake sideburns, the rest had the pained, unhappy expressions of kids under raw vegetable diets. I’m sure it got worse for some of them. Young parents under the spell of his royal geekiness Mark Zuckerberg will not fail to populate the web with photos that will forever defy “delete” or “forget”.

Seriously, why do we do this to our children?