The sound of my own voice...

...is, on paper, rather a nice thing to me, and this new blog will give me another venue for my bleatings about life as a mom. As a grass-is-greener kind of mom (who often envies her babe-less pals) and a glass-is-really-very-close-to-empty sort of gal, it is only natural for me to complain at length about momhood, even though I have a most excellent tot by any standards and a darned good hubby too.

But that is not the point. The point is to mewl as much as poss about being a mother so that I can keep myself from losing it completely. I have a giant wad of info on my computer in a folder labeled All Things Baby and I've been planning to turn the mush into bloggishness for a long time. Plans to put on here: the blackly humorous, the uncomfortable, the taboo tidbits and bits o'wisdom gleaned from being a self-absorbed 35-year-old who got knocked up 2 years ago, and has spent the time since then slavishly devoted to a bounteous infant who -- deliciousness notwithstanding -- has totally derailed my career and prevented me from buying fetching frocks for the foreseeable future.

Example of glass-almost-empty sort of mindset: A few years ago, my dream was to find a swell and rampantly appealing on all fronts man, mate with him and produce a spawn. All happened. After innumerable misfirings and datings of the wrong sort (alcoholic carpenters and schizophrenic actors always come to mind), I finally met the man on the subway in New York City, went out with him for a year and half, and promptly got knocked up. Even though the baby was unplanned, said swell and rampantly appealing on all fronts man (seriously, the best possible guy) ponied up the support, physical, emotional, financial. We got married: I had a fetching frock; we had a party involving marzipan and cherry blossoms and friends...

We have it blissfully bloody lucky and obviously I know it. So why am I constructing a blog entirely devoted to bitching? Because it is in my nature to crane my neck during such moments and wonder what is on the other side of the abyss that is new parenthood. The lack of money, time; the plethora of tedious moments that in fact comprise an equal if not bulk portion of motherhood...these lead my mind off in wandering directions, making me eager to dish dirt and get a sour taste in the mouth. All that sticky sweetness, the insufferable candy-floss cloud that collects around moms, moms individually, moms in groups, nobody says anything really outrageous (at least not here where we live, a vale of wealth and health and optimism).

Gawd!

OK, so I promise to be posting and uploading funny sorts of carping, not pure carping for carping's sake, thought hat in itself is surely a worthy enterprise too --carping for the sake of it. A good whine so energizing.

Right. Got to finish. Not always so long-winded. Let's go to bullets:

--will be ranting about so-called hip ironic parents (see that new web site Babble) and their bloody bent-birch plywood modernist bassinets. I envy and loathe you. If I had had a bloody David Netto-furnished baby room and a Stokke high chair, god only knows how happy I could have been as a new mother...Stay tuned.
--will be ranting about my incredible laziness and refusal to take my child to swimming lessons. Screw swimming. Why is everyone obsessed with swimming in this town. Swimming babies and your mothers leave me alone!
--will be posting not merely useless complaints but also useFUL lists. Many handy tips and helpful lists of things such as the best baby presents. A prefview: screw the Haba spinning top and the Tiny Love Gym and the hipster Ugly Doll felt dog-thing. Give the gifts that every mom can really use: for instance a box of the sorts of things infants really like to play with --Ajaxy sponge, a tampon, an Oxo salad spinner!
--will be posting a piece about how I nearly went mad last winter when I was a fulltime mom, and how I saved myself (and my child) from myself by enlisting the help of -- who else! -- some trusty Mormons, who know a thing or two about offspring. (All in good time.)
--last: an admission -- I DO have a stash of cute comments uttered by my unbearably cute little muffin of a 2-yr-old and I may resort to using a few of them on this blog every now and then if things cant dangerously close to a Brooke-Shieldsy-sort of angle. If I do use adorable comments to round out the bitterness of the blog, I promise that the comments will be entirely original, 100% funny, and devoid of dull or precocious or manipulated sentiment.

Hope someone is out there. (I am not sure if I have the guts to tell my friends about this site...afraid it will censor me). So IF someone is out there --

--Keep complaining!

-Crabmommy