If I had a nanny com on me, I would immediately get fired. I would throw my ass in jail. I would be on the horn with INS so quick it would make your fucking head spin. And I wouldn’t rest until I got myself deported.

Any mom that acts like she doesn’t know what I am talking about is full of shit. It’s our dirty little secret. We are allowed to talk on our phones, surf the web, and do fuck-all while spending time with our children. But if our babysitters dared to neglect our child for one moment, we are likely to put a hit out on their lives.

The other day, my friend Jane and I were taking a walk with our toddlers. Her daughter, Zoe, suddenly got all wiggy in the stroller and started whining, “Mommy out!” Jane basically told her to stop whining since she was almost back at her house. Exactly what I would have done had I been in her shoes.

The whining turned to screaming. The screaming turned to shrieking. The shrieking turned to that nails-down-a-chalkboard screeching that makes you want to jump out a window.

Jane didn’t give in to the tantrum. She let her daughter cry it out in the stroller and stoically marched home, with her red-faced, hyperventilating daughter writhing like a deranged mental patient in a strait-jacket.

When I got home, I had an email from Jane: “Turns out that Zoe had a dirty diaper….that is why she was screaming and wanted to get out of the stroller!”

I replied: “No wonder she was so upset! Who would want to sit in a smushy diaper?”

She responded, “Now I feel like a horrible mom. Are you going to write a post on AngstMom about what an oblivious bitch I am?”

Well, I suppose I could end my story here. Keep the spotlight on my friend for her crime of benign neglect.

But I must confess my own transgression, which occurred when Shane was roughly the same age as Zoe. One morning I awoke to the sound of Shane whining in his crib. It was still very early and he didn’t seem to be too distressed, so I put my ear plugs in and went back to sleep. Over the next 15 minutes or so, the whining got more intense. I finally got my lazy ass out of bed to go get him.

He was covered in vomit.

My child had been barfing in his crib while I was trying to get a few extra minutes of beauty sleep. He could’ve choked on his puke and asphyxiated.

Deport me now.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 12th, 2009 at 12:10 pm and is filed under 1. Angst Mom Essays. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.