I used to pride myself on not being on of those mothers. You know the ones. The ones that won’t let you go until they’ve shown you all of their phone photo album which contains an endless stream of identical photographs of their offspring. The ones who can talk for a solid half hour about what Juliet did in her potty last week. Those mothers who will derail all and any kind of conversational topic you might want to bring up in order to tell you – in devastatingly lengthy detail – about their recent experience with their new pediatric dermatologist. Or worst of all, those mothers who will sing full stanzas of Barney songs, at top volume… out in public. I haven’t yet started to sing kid’s tunes in public, but I fear I am not far off. Something happened to me recently regarding motherhood and I’m not sure what it was. Maybe I just finally woke up after being in two years of survival mode/shock after my ex husband walked off with a twenty four year old blonde (I mention that she was 24 and a blonde a lot don’t I) and realized what an awesome kid I’ve got.
Whatever has happened, the result is that I’m finding myself turning into one of those mothers. And seeing as none of my friends or colleagues have kids I’m probably annoying the crap out of everyone. They probably thought, with relief, that I was ‘cool.’ I was the one mom they knew who hadn’t become obsessed with her child’s bowel movements. But now I am beginning to see why parents hang out mostly just with other parents. No one else can stand to be around us as we continually clap trap on about how divinely cute and interesting our children are. BB does a good job of listening to my continual clucking. In fact he even joins in and makes good points of his own: ‘Look how his language has developed this week – there are now three more unintelligible sounds he’s making! Look how he almost didn’t drop the ball just then!’ He always agrees with me wholeheartedly when I tell him how adorable Finn is. He even bought a parenting book about toddlers in order to read up on the whole thing! Who knows maybe the real reason mummyhood has suddenly become a bundle of fun is because I have someone to share it with. Whatever the reason, even though these days I’ve become a bore, I am a very happy bore.
