Mom's Day Out

[For the winner of the weekend hedgehog paraphernalia giveaway, scroll down to the competition post and all will be revealed...]

Once you have a child, you can't imagine what life would be like without them!

That's the kind of line one often hears from parents. And it infuriates me.

Taken literally, yes of course once you’ve had a kid you could never conceive of life going on without them. I mean, really. Duh. Unless you're completely whacked out in some way, the notion of not having your child around is too awful to even contemplate and is something a parent tries never to think about at all.

But when the line is used—as it often is—to explain a "now that I've had kids my life is only just beginning" mindset or a "now that I have children, roses smell sweeter and my life has meaning" mindset, then I feel quite peppery indeed.

When parents say these kinds of things they seem like aliens to me, or culties who have joined some strange new society of pin-headed people, or converts who have suddenly found religion and now everything that existed prior to this event is totally forgotten by dint of the amazing new life they are living. In short, this line makes it sound like everything that came before is simply not worth remembering.

And since I can COMPLETELY AND TOTALLY remember what my life was like prior to having Crabtot and much of it is ABSOLUTELY worth remembering, I'd like to tell the non-breeders (all three of you who come here) that we parents aren't all so completely far gone in Parentland as to not have a clue what we're missing. We don't all suck 100% of the time (just 90% of the time, when we're talking to our kids in goofy voices, telling you things about school districts, and asking you to hold on when you call so we can lecture a small person beside us on why they shouldn't lick their feet).

This weekend for an entire day, as a Mother's Day present that I requested, I had a nostalgic whiff of what it felt like to be myself prior to having a child. I asked Crabhubby for a day to myself: a day in which I did not feel like a mother. Now lest I be struck down by horrified new readers who stumbled upon me in search of freebies and are now being treated —or mistreated—to some appalling and freakily unhealthy-sounding thoughts, here's a message for you. First of all, HI! And welcome! And don't be scared. I'm one of you. I'm a reg'lar loving mother. I do crafts even. Like this tampon wiener. And I adore my spawn to distraction etcetera...read the disclaimer to your right, scrolling down. (I mean, really, when will the obvious just go without saying?) BUT notwithstanding the all-consuming nature of the motherly role, I have not forgotten myself in the quest to take care of someone else. And for better or worse I'm here to talk about it and wallow in my many tiny miseries, expanding and exaggerating them with the grandeur of someone who has never had to till frozen soil for turnips, run through forests for weeks to escape marauding bands of evildoers, or otherwise live through real hard times.

And so I make extraordinarily hard times out of normal slightly tricky experiences, like raising a child. If you don't like this sort of thing, please feel free to visit one of the many blogs out there that traffic in more traditional motherly thoughts and will post pictures of Casey's second-ever Ben & Jerry's double cone, complete with a full 5-paragraph analysis and chronology of the momentous day itself.

So, back to Mother's Day. I walked and walked for hours down the streets of my new home, Crabcity. I shopped in vintage stores without fearing a small person related to me might break some ancient toothpick holder in the shape of a clog. I drank coffee sitting down, for as long as I liked. It was utterly divine. And throughout, I remembered every dang bit of doing this before I had my first and only child. It's been 3.5 years since I had this kind of freedom. And I felt a bit like an East Berliner after they pulled the wall down and people were like, "Hey, Berliner, run off and buy an iPod!" In short, I felt a sense of wonder and amazement. I stopped and smelled the roses. Or rather the mothballs surrounding rose-patterned vintage tea towels. And it was heavenly.

This is the moment in the story where I'm meant to say that the best part of my day was coming home to see my lovely child and husband. But I won't. Because that's not true. Lovely as it was to come home to those sweet faces and the delightful dinner already on the table, the best part of my day was the day itself.

So, just to be clear to the crackpots who like to send angry comments my way from time to time, the point is that no, Dumb-Dumb, I wouldn't rewind my life and be single and lonely and wishing I would meet someone to love and reproduce with and all. I'm not that high on my own company 24-7. To me it's obvious that once one becomes a mother, nothing comes close to that experience in terms of love and human experience. But, being obvious, the joy is extremely dull to write about and utterly irrelevant to any stranger who is my reader.

All of which is a long-winded way of bringing me back to the question of life before spawning: I'm not going to lie to you and tell you all that I can’t remember what life was like when I was without child or that I don't have an inkling what life would be like for those who decide not to have kids. I do remember life sans-enfant and I would like it back. For one day, at least.

Or two. Or seven. Or...

What do you think? Do you ask for time away from your kids? How was your MD? What went down at your crib?