Selfish Mom

I’m a stay-at-home mom in Brooklyn, NY who hasn’t been home much lately due to my other blog, Filming In Brooklyn.

I spend the rest of my time not doing laundry, not washing dishes, and not paying attention to my children. I have no interest in spending all day on the playground, and I don’t believe that my children should be the center of my life. We’re all in this together, but I was here first.

I haven’t quite figured out yet what to do with this blog, or why I’m writing it. I know that I want a place to vent and to write about what’s going on in my life, but I don’t know what’s OK to write about. I don’t want my friends to think that anything they do will end up on my blog. It’s not about that. It’s about me, and how I’m dealing (or not dealing) with things. Of course, sometimes I may have to mention what other people have done in order to show how brilliantly (OK, badly) I handled the situation, but what people outside of my immediate family do will always be tangential to what I’m writing. I’m only out to embarrass myself, my children, and (as often as possible) my husband. Speaking of…

My husband (”The Ass”) is a lawyer who always wanted to be, well, anything else. He still dreams of someday leaving his job to open a business, but between me and the kids and the house, his dreams should be dead soon. He’s stuck where he is, but trust me, there are worse places to be. We fight a lot, but we’re careful not to say things we don’t mean and have somehow lasted for 19 years (we dated for 9 years before we got married; yes, we met young). I give him a lot of crap and take him for granted sometimes, but in general he’s a great guy who is probably too good for me. But ask me tomorrow and I’ll tell you I’m too good for him.

Our son Jake (”Pasta Boy”) is seven, and is hilarious. He can also be bitingly rude and maddening, but deep down he really wants to make people happy. And despite his size and toughness, he’s actually really naive and sweet. He tends to lie about stupid stuff (not washing his hands, telling us he only had one brownie), but is very trustworthy with the big stuff, and very responsible for a kid his age. He fights with his sister whenever possible, but worries about her more than The Ass and me combined.

Our daughter Fiona (”Munchkin”) is four, and she’s the one we worry about. She’s the one who is likely to stack chairs on top of each other to climb onto the counter to get to the giant jar of gummy vitamins, which she insists are candy. She’s the one who may eventually set the house on fire because she thought it would look cool. She’s devilish. She’s also blond and cute as a button, and has a way of smiling at you when she’s caught doing something bad that makes you want to get her an agent, not give her a punishment.

Our house is a character in our lives at the moment. A couple of years ago we sold our nice, plain, boring 2-bedroom condo and bought a 150-year-old brownstone. Our renovation, which should have taken a year tops, is now at two-plus years. We’ve run out of renovation money and are waiting for some to fall from the sky. In the meantime, we’re living on the top two floors of the house, while the bottom two are under renovation and at the moment mostly used for storage. We basically have the crappiest, most expensive duplex apartment in all of Brooklyn.

Someday, I will get organized. Someday, I will lose fifty pounds. Someday, I will become comfortable with who I am and learn to just be myself 24/7. Until then, I’m doing this.