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  His phone buzzed. He looked down at it while still embracing me. He grimaced.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Today I get to design a label for pumpkin-scented tampons,” he said, with a terrified stare.

  “I didn’t realize I could experience fall vaginally.”

  He ran over to Violet and playfully showered her head with kisses as she giggled. I wished I could be the dad. I poured him a to-go mug of fresh coffee and shoved a kid’s energy bar in his hand. I never intended to be a doting housewife, but it seemed to be an unadvertised side effect of being a stay-at-home mom.

  As I stood in the doorway watching him sit in the car and scroll for the perfect drive-to-work music, I couldn’t help but wonder what it must feel like to have all that autonomy. If the giant smile on his face every day as he backed out of the garage was any indicator, it was fucking paradise.

  He rolled down his window, Snoop Dogg’s nasally voice wafting from the car. He cranked it for effect. The high-pitched synthesizer and heavy beat took me back again to when we were young together, when our only real responsibility was acquiring a giant burrito at some point in the day or night.

  “This is for you. Hang in there, A.B.,” he yelled out the window of his Prius. He cranked the music even louder, bobbing his head like a white man in a Prius.

  “Only twelve more hours to go,” I said, giving him a slow and sarcastic thumbs up, and then I pressed the garage door button to guillotine his flaunting of freedoms.

  CHAPTER THREE

  All Roads Suck Balls

  Something I couldn’t shake, but never knew how to accurately verbalize to Aaron, was my quiet resentment about his daily life having changed very little since we had the kids, whereas mine was now unrecognizable. Parenthood had exacted something from me that it hadn’t exacted from him—not even close. His morning routine, his leaving the house, his job, his luxury of coming home late if needed, his weekend surfing, all looked nearly the same as it did before the kids. I, on the other hand, was filling my days with wiping ass, bleaching vomit, feeling shame about conventional fruit, and generally serving as everyone else’s snack bitch and more—a far cry from my past duties as owner of a handmade clothing line.

  Our inequality and my jealousy of Aaron’s balanced life made me feel like a dick because I chose to be a stay-at-home mom. No one forced me. We both agreed that we wanted to raise our own kids. Sure, that choice was made blindly, and “we” really meant me, but I had made my bed and now had to lie in it. Ironically, I never got to literally lie in my bed anymore. And I also hated Aaron’s face some days because he reaped all the perks of parenthood with-out having to do the heavy lifting of it. Also, his nipples didn’t resemble chewed gum.

  The next task of the day that wasted my college degree was grocery shopping—that is, after clothing a small, angry person. There is no on-the-job training that prepares one for the task of wrestling a shirt and pants onto a person who is running. Working with the severely mentally ill was the closest thing, but caretakers were legally allowed to use tranquilizers. The only tranquilizer I had was an essential oil called “Serenity,” and Violet’s room reeked of it.

  My dad, Wayne, who always had a story on the tip of his tongue about his three favorite things—snakes, Harleys, and the Florida panhandle—had once told me a tale wherein a swampy, backwoods town had a local anaconda they were trying to capture because it kept eating people. The town’s solution? Sew incredibly thick jean material together and create a giant tube that they would try to catch the snake in. That was the whole plan. But they saw it out and the snake did, in fact, find its way into the denim tube—and this is the part that I especially remember—the snake thrashed inside that jean tube in such a violent way that the town’s people weren’t sure if this anaconda was about to burst the seams open and eat all of them. That visual is what I thought of every time I tried to put pants on a bucking Violet.

  But today, I won the war on pants. She stood up from the fracas wearing her hot pink leggings with puffy diaper butt and soft grey smock dress covered with smiling rainbows. I was sweating.

  The necessary supplies for leaving the house with Violet included a smattering of snacks in containers that couldn’t be dumped out, sippy cups that couldn’t spill (which were none), copious amounts of hand sanitizer, animal figures that would be immediately dropped on the backseat floor, and of course, cloth grocery bags, which were going to save the Earth at the expense of the sanity of mothers everywhere.

  I hauled Violet and her provisions into the garage, making sure to leave the big garage door down until she was strapped down in her car seat. A strategy existed for every task with her. I knew that an open garage door plus an unrestrained toddler meant the high likelihood of a Benny Hill–style wild goose chase down the street. These were the things Aaron did not know, because he didn’t have to.

  With Violet shackled into her seat, the tranquil island that was the driver’s seat of the minivan welcomed me. I closed my eyes and let my head fall back against the squishy headrest, taking my first break of the day.

  “I needs ‘Baby Shark’ song!”

  There was never silence. Or stillness. Why hadn’t minivan manufacturers added glass partitions yet, like in limos? They’d rolled out the in-car vacuum, so why not double down on what us parents really want—silent children at the push of a button?

  The peppy beats of a shark family rave flooded in. It was either that or the sound of screeches and sobs, and my entire parenting philosophy basically hinged on limiting both of those things so that I didn’t actually lose it. What was I like unstifled? I was scared to open the floodgates because I wasn’t sure I could close them.

  The manicured flowers and shrubs of the Southern California suburbs ushered the local minivans of moms and their youngest spawn to and from morning errands. This time of day was called “before nap.” I was not a So-Cal native, but Aaron was. After college in the landlocked Midwest, where we met, he couldn’t fight the siren song beckoning him back to the ocean. So I obliged, knowing that there were worse places to live, but I didn’t quite fit in with the women around me who seemed so fixated on fancy handbags and eyelash extensions. I wore very little make-up, mostly because a small person was usually screaming at me while I got ready each morning. But when I was bestowed a moment at the mirror, one coat of mascara was my upgrade of choice. Eyeliner occurred maybe twice a year.

  We parked at the grocery store and the shark jam ceased, finally.

  “Noooooo!”

  My neck stiffened at the sound of resistance. And then my phone dinged. A text message from my own mother.

  How are my perfect grandchildren? Perhaps we can FaceTime later?

  My mom’s given name was Donna, but she always felt it too ordinary, a mismatch with her self-proclaimed “crackerjack” personality. She turned the whole picking what you want to be called as a grandmother thing into an entire name reset and insisted that all of us, including myself, Aaron, and the kids, call her Marnie. My whole life she wrote with a straight-edged ruler to make sure her letters looked impeccable. Her eccentricity was not new. So I called my mom Marnie. And Aaron and I laughed our asses off about it when we weren’t rolling our eyes.

  Here’s your perfect granddaughter.

  I pressed the video record button, capturing Violet’s raging perfection for her—seat kicking and all.

  Oh that’s not my granddaughter. Must be someone else!

  In addition to being quirky as hell and using ill-fitting emojis, Marnie was in Grandma denial. She had never uttered an unkind word about either of her grandkids, and pretended that any challenges the children presented for me were either not happening or misunderstandings on my part. And despite seeing live footage of my struggle, she always brushed it off—a form of gaslighting I had experienced forever.

  In sixth-grade music class, after we’d blown the shit out of “Hot Cross Buns” on the recorders and my teacher was going around collecting them, he would frequently dr
op one in front of me, bend down to get it, and linger. This only happened on the days I wore a skirt. His moist stare made me feel sick and ashamed, and when I told Marnie, she barely looked up from her newspaper.

  “But Mom, it never happens when I wear pants.”

  “That’s a big allegation, young lady. Mr. Dane’s never been anything but nice to you,” she said, retreating back behind the six-foot paper.

  The rest of that year, I wore only pants. It never happened again.

  My independent streak as a “young lady,” coupled with Marnie’s unwillingness either to believe me or to be bothered by my emotional needs, didn’t make for an intimate mother-daughter relationship. But despite that crater in our bond, she had always shown up for me in the most practical sense. After babies, when she came from Florida to visit us, she would clean my entire house, order in dinner every night, and pay for summer camp, swimming lessons, or whatever else the kids were into. It was hard to argue with that, so I learned to be grateful, while also trying to ignore the other more primal ways I longed to be loved by own mother.

  I lacked the will necessary to formulate a text response that could cut to the heart of thirty-plus years of mother-daughter baggage, so Marnie got what she wanted.

  Yep, everything’s just great. At the store now.

  Wonderful! Keep checking those to-do’s off your list!

  Positive attitude + productivity = Marnie nirvana.

  I skeptically eyed the lines of carts at the entrance of the grocery store, as did the other approaching mom. Which cart handle didn’t have the latest stomach flu virus? One couldn’t know, so we kept our heads down and played grocery-store Russian roulette.

  I had a clear plan of what I needed to get and where, without having to backtrack at all. Marnie’s efficient DNA was coursing through my veins, after all.

  “Mama, I have dat?” Violet pointed toward an array of bright bell peppers.

  “No, Violet. You don’t like those.”

  “I waaaaant one,” she whined. And then the crying started up again. I paused. My child was begging for a vegetable, and experts did say it can take a few consistent tries to get them to like new things. Never mind that this happened every single time we went to the store.

  “Which color do you want?”

  “Lell-low!”

  Violet put her lips up to the yellow bell pepper, exploring the waxy smoothness, and then sunk her tiny shark teeth into it. “Is ickee,” she said, frowning and dropping the pepper straight to the damn floor. I picked up the yellow carcass and put it in the cart, just like I did every week.

  Once we’d hit nap time (the marker of midday), and Violet was behind a closed door and caged in her crib, my nervous system finally dared to let its guard down and unwind. If days ended right here, I could totally be an award-winning, sane mother. The second half of the day always tried its best to eviscerate me.

  My stomach growled. Apparently eating my resentment and a half-banana three hours ago hadn’t been sufficient. Weird.

  My lips had barely touched a spoonful of fried-rice leftovers when Violet’s voice wailed over the baby monitor. I wanted to sink all of our money into a study about how children intuitively knew the exact moment in which their mother was about to sustain herself with food. This had to be the seventh sense. I pounded as much rice as I could before she went apeshit up there. Even though I was a second-time mother and had been through the naptime wringer once before, Elliot and Violet’s six-year age gap had caused some sort of a reset and everything felt just as intense and unruly the second time around. I thought I would know how to tweak things to get it right this time, but I still felt powerless.

  The booms started. It was Violet throttling the wall from inside her crib. “MA-MA, I NEEEEEEEDS YOU!”

  There I was in that familiar corner of motherhood where all the choices that lay before you suck balls, and your job is to weigh which one sucks the least, and then do that thing. What to Expect When You’re Expecting needs an appendix called “Making Sacrifices: Say Goodbye to Meals.”

  Violet jumped at the sound of her door opening. And then came the wafting smell of shit.

  “Apparently, you had to poop,” I pointed out, pushing the blackout curtains aside and sliding the window open for fresh air. The brightness caused her to squint and flop down into a civilization of stuffed animals that had overtaken her crib. It was like a deranged Noah’s Ark in there. Kitties with giant eyeballs, a freaky half-giraffe/half-zebra fellow, and a stuffed dog named “Big Fuffy,” who was the size of a large piece of luggage. And a purple blanket aptly named “Purple Blanket.”

  Suddenly, the distinct smell of poop in the raw—not inside a diaper—hit me like a wall. Any non-parent would back up and walk away, but like a bloodhound, I instinctually started sniffing the entire area to find out where the awfulness had escaped the diaper and how far it had spread. The first logical place to search was Violet’s fingers, which smelled so strongly that I dry heaved loudly.

  “I go poop, Mama,” she softly said, matter-of-factly.

  “Violet, please don’t put your hands in your diaper again.”

  But it was all pointless. I wouldn’t be walking away from this situation with a firm, shit-filled handshake and promise that she wouldn’t do it again. In fact, she probably would do it again, immediately. I set her in the running bathtub and added infinite squirts of all-natural bubble bath that didn’t quite feel strong enough. Did OxyClean make a bubble bath?

  “Will you sing the shark song for me?” I asked Violet, who happily nodded yes. This was a trick I’d learned when Elliot was small that let me walk away from the tub for a quick moment. If your toddler is singing in the bathtub, they aren’t drowning.

  She began.

  I bolted back into her room for five seconds and stripped the sheets off the crib at lightning speed. I wrapped everything in the assaulted sheet and set it by the stairs to take down with me after her bath. It sat there like a festering wound, but like always, I turned my attention to Violet, who was singing and delighting in her bubble bath instead of her nap. All I wanted to do was eat, but I sat down on the bathroom stool in front of the tub. Even prisoners get three meals a day, for Christ’s sake. My weary eyes connected with Violet’s brilliant ones. They were the exact same color as mine—deep brown in the center, surrounded by hazel and a ring of blue on the outer edge. They looked like planets.

  “Mama, you da best.”

  I wanted to say, “You are the literal worst right now. Why can’t you just go to sleep and not touch your own feces?” But instead, I said, “Aw girl, you’re da best.”

  I dumped two gallons of soap on a washcloth and scrubbed her fingers vigorously. She kept resisting, trying to move to the other side of the tub. She broke free and lowered down into a squat. I knew exactly what was happening.

  “Violet, wait!”

  I lunged to pick her up, but it was already too late. I cupped my hands in the water and caught the brown log because of parental auto-pilot, but then immediately wondered why I’d caught it. How did that actually help things? There were still poop flakes in the water and now my hands were septic. Violet splashed around. Her mouth dropped below the water, and opened.

  “Imma whale!” she gurgled as poop water lapped in.

  I felt my neck tighten as if it were made of guitar strings, and the back of my eyes throb. Why was caretaking so urgent and never-ending like this? And why did it make me nearly snap? What was wrong with me? Motherhood and mental illness looked far too similar. Also, why didn’t I work in a nice office doing straightforward tasks for someone who was potty-trained?

  My bed, my most favorite place in the world, teased me from across the hall. I longed to get in it and throw the covers over my head. Aaron and I referred to it as my “nest.” On exceptionally taxing days, I would text Aaron with just the word, “nest.” He would then know that I had been pummeled by the day and was in my safe place. He also knew that no boners were allowed in the nest.

>   But instead of holing up, I used my last shred of energy to lift a questionably clean Violet out of the infested waters and dove headfirst into the “after nap” part of the day —on a technicality, and running on fumes.

  Every day went something like this—a few truly lovely parenting moments overshadowed by difficulty. I wished I could get used to it like other moms seemed to, but I never could. Instead, I silently interrogated myself. What am I doing wrong that makes it feel so hard? I love my kids, so why isn’t that love enough to soften the sharp edges of motherhood? Do I need professional help?

  The glowing babysitter (aka TV) showed up for me, like always, and played Storybots for a finally calm Violet. I stood at the kitchen sink before a mountain of brightly colored IKEA kid cups and bowls. Instead of overlooking a big wooden swing set, vegetable garden, or a treehouse, my kitchen-sink window looked directly at the side of my neighbor’s close house, specifically where they kept their trash cans. My childhood home had a huge grassy yard, perfect for doing cartwheels across, and I hated that our tiny concrete patio couldn’t even hold a modest birthday party. Size-wise, this house was just adequate for the four of us—minimalistic, as I liked to skew it—and it had a warmth that made it cozy rather than noticeably small. Or so I hoped. The kitchen, dining area, and family room all flowed into each other. Being alone downstairs was nearly impossible, except if you escaped into the warm garage.

  “Mama, I needs snacky,” Violet called from the couch.

  “You could have blueberries, or crackers, or an orange, or applesauce . . .” I hated myself for listing snack options like a waitress listing specials, but yet I continued.

  “I needs bluebees.”

  I fetched and then handed Violet a bright plastic bowl full of blueberries. They were organic, so there was no shame.

  She rejected it. “I needs yogurt,” she whined, flopping sideways on the couch.

  “But you asked me for blueberries.” I was firm.

  Offended, Violet raised her bitch-slapping hand and sent the bowl flying in the air before my frayed reflexes could stop it. The blue balls hit the floor and radiated toward all edges of the room, a larger version of the Oxi-Clean grains from the morning.