my name is mommy

pascale is four and is cheating on valentin, the parisian boy, son of pascal, her namesake. we have had an arranged marriage plan that is crumbling before my eyes. she professes to be in love with alexander who reports they are going to have a son named moses and a daughter named oceana.

pascale thinks she is from egypt. obsessed with pharoahs and is constantly putting dolls in baskets and setting them adrift. she is funny, hilarious in fact, with a temper that could burn a house down. she has transformed all of her barbies into egyptians by putting black permanent marker on their eyes. she draws gold bracelets on her arms with crayola lemon markers.

her pre-school class picture was taken today. pascale showed up to school with kohl eyeliner and a large green circle between her eyes. an emerald she said and gave me a withering look. did you know that it’s your class photo today honey? of course, she replies. she is the eygptian queen. sigh. however, this is more palatable than the moses phase where she shrieked out the front window, let my people go, much to the chagrin of both dog walkers and neighbours alike. i briefly question my decision of enrolling her in a jewish school simply because the thought of not seeing her throughout the day was unbearable. she’ll likely grow up and write a book about it, torturing me in my old age.

why is life so busy? i can't believe myself when i thought i was busy in my twenties. what a joke. i stay up way too late, in an attempt to carve out some adult time for myself and then struggle through the day half asleep. it's the details that make me nuts. groceries, some weird virus that pascale has, the earthworm i am to produce for her worm day at school, the daily dinners i have to create that have no seasoning whatsoever, the constant picking up toys and tiny bits of toys...as well as the normal adult stuff, bills, insurance, car repairs and so on. it seems like a giant treadmill. I don’t remember my parents being this insane. maybe I am too old to be a parent, should have started at twenty when I instead was on a bus somewhere listening to neil young and trying to find myself.

i oscillate between thinking i want to never work again, and needing a wife, not a husband. even a roll in the hay with no chance of commitment is seeming alarmingly inviting. my last date waxed his eyebrows. (waxing is a foreign ritual that puzzles me.) additionally upsetting was the fact i couldn’t stop wondering whether acrylic or gel nails were more cost efficient whenever i was with him.

whatever, there is no sex. i am in the prime of my life, i want to hit the odd film and boink. have breakfast, boink. read the paper alone, then nap. IS THAT SO MUCH TO ASK FOR????

ahem.

sorry. i’m back.

or, as my handsome eco-warrior-and-vegan friend suggested, 'to be waited on hand and foot by a well oiled man who speaks fluent magyar or one of the indigenous languages of papua new guinea and who studied tantric massage (but doesn’t even mention it, because that would be annoying). he just does it, wordlessly...o.k. maybe a few words in one of the mystic languages he speaks, and even though i don’t understand what he says, it sounds good, and he knows how to cook quick simple things that are well spiced and so on...'

then again, the benefits of being a single parent are threefold:

1) i get uninterrupted, unfettered sleep once a week while pixie is at her dad’s.
2) i am free of the emotional heaviness that accompanies relationships.
3) i was doing all of this work even when I was in a relationship so what the hell.

even so, the weeks of work and mothering and watching my own emotional bank account go into overdraft have me occasionally longing to go to sleep for a week and wake up in a forest.

my life is the living version of the william tell overture. was up last night until 3:30 trying various tricks to calm my hormone riddled body and overactive mind into sleep. tried to give myself a back rub the way david, the impossibly sweet set designer used to, with little success.

as a gift to myself i got fake-o nails put on and now am struggling to type. highly annoying but my hands look like barbra streisand’s. on the way home from the spa was happily oblivious to the fuming drivers and sat in the traffic jam smiling stupidly at my nails, admiring them from every angle.

i feel very grown up.