Tuesday, June 26, 2007

Multimedia Mommy, or, Get Out of My Inbox with your Totspam!

I know I said I wouldn't get personal on this site. But I received the following email. From an acquaintance. Let me repeat that: she is not my friend; she is a playground acquaintance. And if she were my friend, she would no longer be after this:

This September, we found out, we will be giving XXX the gift of a SISTER!!!!!!!!!!! :) This little, EXTREMELY active girl inside of me looked PERFECT on the advanced ultrasound yesterday!!! The doc said her heart looked "weepingly" beautiful.....and everything was in place where it should be! :) He used technical terms for everything......but all in all she was good to go! :)
No, this is not a joke. You have just met Crabtown's own Multimedia Mommy. People, how could I have given her my email address? I do not know. I don't recall her asking for it. But sweet Jesus, I evidently gave it, and I have been paying for it ever since.

Everyone has an MM in their midst, albeit probably not one as cracked as ours. A Multimedia Mommy is the mom who, with her constant need for others to adore her spawn as much as she does, has annoyed us all since time immemorial. But the digital revolution has only made her more dreadful and given her new platforms on which to perform her parental braggery.

Some sample offenses:

1. Multimedia Mommy shows you—and everyone else she barely knows—her 6-week sonogram.

MM, here's a rule of thumb: if you have to point out the anatomy to me ("see, this looks like the head but it's actually the yolk sac!"), chances are I'm not going to find your fetus enchanting. And while we're on the subject, don't show me the 5-month sono either. I know you're excited it's a girl and that the heart is "weepingly perfect" as you quoted in your email by way of your astonishingly creepily enthusiastic sonographer (what the frock?) but to me your snap shows nothing more than a dinosaur. Okay, maybe a seahorse.

Also, ahem, unless they are your best pals, your sister, or your mom, especially don't show your sonograms to other moms. We are not interested. Some of us weren't even interested in our own dinosaur.

And then there's that whole gender-exam bit of the sono...To that MM who's having a boy: no, I can't see the penis. I still can't find the head. Oh, here it is. No, sorry, that's the yolk sac! So no, I guess I don't see the penis. And I'm not sure I need to. Strange though it may seem, I really prefer my penises to be fully grown rather than the in-utero sort of mini-prong. I mean, I just prefer to see them in the flesh, as it were. Rather than in a grainy black and white pic. That somehow just seems…a bit…off.

2. MM sends you a mountain of "freshbaby" jpegs one second after she has given birth to it.

Freshbaby, of course being a baby who has not yet been cleaned up post childbirth and who confronts you at 7am in full hi-res meconium-tinted glory, before you have had your first sip of coffee.

3. Once the tot is born, MM spams out bi-weekly links to her kid's Flickr album.

Make that you AND THE PEDIATRICIAN too. Yes. I am not joking. Our MM has her pediatrician on these massmails. One just has to wonder, is she on crack? Pix of your kid for the pediatrician? Lady, it's bad enough for the doc to have to see our tots in the flesh once a year. The monthly photo reminders she might just be able to live without. Adorable though they surely are.

Look, MM, we sympathize. We all have to sit on our hands not to force the whole world to look through our monstrously gigantic photo albums. But we know that even if everyone should want to look at every shot of Supertot, it's still good to at least pretend to respect other people's time and EDIT THE DAMN COLLECTION. Or just do a small sampling of Supertot in jpeg form. And, in that case, there's that handy button in iPhoto that helps you minimize the jpeg size.

As for the note begging us all to hold on "because MORE photos will be downloaded later tonight" – that part I thank you for. I was getting worried. I mean I just couldn't get enough of a close-up gander of tiny XXX on the beige helix slide in that first roll. But, thank God, we have another roll coming later tonight.

MMs everywhere: Please. Put the technology away. I know you have something really special to send me. But your babyspam is crushing my inbox.

12 comments:

Anonymous said...

I once had a work acquaintance (only had maybe three phone/email conversations TOTAL with the guy prior) send me a lovely photo of his child halfway born...

By C-section.

Inky Ink Inc. said...

I know of what you speak. I've known people who have had to change email addresses, move to other towns, have plastic surgery, go into the witness protection program to escape the grasping tentacles of the spam-mad mommy. It is not a pretty thing.

Anonymous said...

snicker, snicker.

Someone else out there has the same name as me and so I get her email a LOT. I once got pictures of someone getting proposed too. I get her work emails all the time too. Totally strange.

Thankfully only my family sends me pictures of their kids and I have no problem deleting some of them without ever opening them.

Anonymous said...

Sweet suffering mother of god! Just give me her address, and I'll kill her.

Doc's Girl said...

*shaking head* Amazing that this is her SECOND child... I wonder how she was when she had her first... I bet it was worse. *shudder*

Anonymous said...

Crabmommy, you are such a gift. As my motherhood journey takes me into toddler hell, i am so blessed to have your blog. My tot remains PERFECT even when he's growling like a rabid dog, scratching off his face and flailing himself into sharp corners during a WEEPINGLY BEAUTIFUL tantrum. Did I mention what a fucking gift you are?

Karen Stead Baigrie said...

what about a doctor who refers to the 100th baby heart he has seen in a sonogram that week as "weepingly" beautiful. all too strange.

Anonymous said...

I have a few people I need to send this post to. But they probably wouldn't see themselves in it anyway.

Oh well, at least there's comfort in knowing there are other Inboxes out there that are filled with this stuff too!

Jane, P&B Girls

Anonymous said...

I think the doc was screwing with her because he knew she was coo coo for coco puffs.

I'm imagining him and the other docs in the doctors' lounge (kind of like the teachers' lounge), ripping drunk, bragging how they used "weepingly beautiful" and "the perfection of God's own hand" on their needy patients.

Anonymous said...

I think I have BEEN an MM...now I have three kids and I just don't care!!!!

*giggle*

Seriously, we all get a little excited at FIRST, but there's a limit. If I HAPPEN to snap a really good picture of the girls, I will send it out to the family and friends that are likely to actually CARE. NOT EVERYONE..and not usually the ones that also have small children. They already think THEIR kids are cute, right?

crabmommy said...

Look, peeps, I have to say in my crabocrite way: it's not like I've not sent out jpeg-laden emails of our miracle to fam and friends. But I always obey the rules: scale down and consider carefully your recipients. Crabhub, on the other hand, has been known to lob more than a few snaps of the child to basically everyone in his address book. He's been the Multimedia Daddy, at least when it comes to the offenses of numerous jpeggery. But I have worked on him and I think he has definitely improved. Or lost interest. Or is too tired. or all of the above.

Anonymous said...

I love this. I once went to a playgroup-- an entire hellish story in itself-- and ended up on their mass-email list.

I had more "Baby kayla is going to be a big sister" emails than I'd like to admit.

And sometimes, I did want to email her back and say she looked fat.

@ Apples on a stick: I once received an email from a Very Christian Woman describing the Very Christian Sex she and her husband were having. Why she would share this with a random stranger is beyond me.

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