Motherhood and the Loss of Identity, Inappropriateness, and Impulsivity

You know all those things they don’t tell you about becoming a parent until it’s too late? The necessary self-editing has been the most jarring one for me.

Here’s an experiment that will communicate this parenting struggle:

Take a couple of your favorite rated R movies and then edit them down to be appropriate for a five year old to watch. Remove any inappropriate language, references, topics, and actions so that you would feel completely comfortable allowing an eager and interested child to view it.

The edited film would likely be disjointed, incomplete, and dull.

That’s how I feel many days as a mom. 

I have long been an inappropriate person. I am the person who says things out loud that make people either burst out in laughter or eyes bug out of their head in shock. The only thing that matters to me about my attire is that I don’t look like everyone else. I curse in business meetings or when casually chatting with the cashier at the store.

As I’ve gotten older, I feel no obligation or instinct to blend in or follow the expectations of a group or setting. In fact, when pushed or encouraged to do either, I am apt to turn up the volume, feeling provoked by my own Aries rebellion. While there are instances where I have dialed myself down out of respect for the situation or the audience (usually my elders), I tend to minimize my time in those environments.

But then one day I woke up and realized that motherhood had locked me into place where I was going to have to tighten it up and mind my P’s and Q’s. Not for an afternoon, or a weekend, but for years.

Babies and toddlers didn’t infringe on my personality. But now that I have children that can understand, are always listening, are eager to regurgitate, and worse – are able to read – my whole being feels like a video that is constantly buffering.

Omg, can I live?! is an expression that scrolls through my mind or passes my lips on a regular basis. And the answer is no, no you cannot.

If there are other adults in the room, it seems I can never get out a full thought without having to stop and edit myself down to such a bland, sterile version that it doesn’t even feel worth saying.

In making a playlist for the pool and beach this summer, I became indignant by my limitations because no, there are not clean versions of 2Pac, Bone Thugs, or Eminem. And try as they might, I don’t think Kidz Bop was ever able to tackle a version of WAP.

I recently saw the cutest acrylic tray of a Barbie smoking a joint. But guess what? You can’t have cool shit like that in your house when you have kids. And that’s on top on not being able to have nice shit. No cool shit. No nice shit.

Car rides longer than 30 minutes are excruciating to me unless I have a podcast or talk radio to distract me. But you can’t listen to Howard Stern talk about who’s going to bang Ronnie the Limo driver’s wife first when he dies, devour the latest Britney Spears details with the Toxic podcast, laugh out loud listening to Jeff Lewis talk about functional alcoholism, or lose yourself in an unsolved murder investigation with two sets of young ears strapped into booster seats in the back.

After finding my daughter flipping thru the pages of a homework assignment from my therapist as if it were a Scholastic magazine, I’ve had to stash personal journals and notebooks with creative writing prompts behind a lock and key as if they are porn.

I usually have the Real Housewives on while I’m cooking or folding laundry. Almost invariably, my otherwise occupied daughter will become drawn to the room and to the screen, unable to look away. (Just as Bravo and Andy Cohen intended.) I’m then forced to turn it off and do my mundane task undistracted.

Most nights, I start to attempt to have a conversation with my husband in partial morse code, only to get frustrated by the lack of translation. Once the kids are finally in bed, we’re too exhausted to care to pick it back up. “I’ll talk to you in ten years,” I say.

Living with young kids who still care to listen to what you say and do feels a lot like I’m Whoopi Goldberg in Sister Act – and no one is buying that Delores Van Cartier is Sister Mary Clarence. There are some days that my inner rebel feels so suffocated that I want to take off the roof on my Jeep, throw on a shirt that says FUCK OFF, light up a huge joint, blast Lil Kim from the speakers, and peel out of this mother fucker.

People who know me well have long asked me how I am surviving living in a super lily-white suburban town in the south. The area can be comical, but it hasn’t prevented me from being me. No, that type of restriction is reserved for my own home. Because as irritating and imprisoning as it feels, my kids are the only two people on earth that I give a flying fuck what they think of me.

And I’m resigned to let those little fuckers cramp my style. For a few more years at least.