Not my most flattering photo
I’m not Terry. I’m a befuddled, sleep-deprived, tousled-hair, dried-up, coffee-needing, starving husk of woman whose baby is not taking in nourishing breastmilk all night long, but instead sucking brain cells OUT THROUGH HER NIPPLES.
And I know I’m not the only one facing her morning with barely the ability to brain while giving the cheery, gurgling, bright-faced little baby the hairy eyeball. There are millions of us out there in the world, a veritable army of zombie moms and dads wanting BRAINS, mostly their own. Parents unable to access that trembly grey damp sponge lying dormant in their skull-shaped soap dishes.
Those mornings when you make 10 cups of coffee when there are only 2 coffee drinkers in your family. The mornings when you find yourself yelling things like “You are SO… goddamn cute,” instead of the list of expletives you would like to use when he pulls treasured books from the bookcase and begins gnawing on the covers, little hands wanting to tear tear TEAR the pages like some mad, possessed smiling demon.
And then, in a wisp of addled inspiration, you find yourself at the laptop, staring blankly at the fresh rectangular writing box of your preferred writing program, Notepad++, having almost swallowed a Cliff Bar whole and gulped a 12-oz shooter of orange juice, trying to come up with something witty to say on your updated-thrice-weekly blog. And ending up crying/laughing, head in hands, as the words dangle just out of reach like… dangling unreachable things, and you have to use those inferior words, the ones closer in proximity.
And then your husband, the one who gets to sleep, laughs and says something about irony, and you aren’t sure if it’s fantasy you or real you who punches him in the face.