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Broke Wife, Big City
When life hands you spoiled milk, make bathtub gin
By Aprill Brandon
Ask any parent what their worst nightmare is and then immediately
cancel any plans you had for the next three days. Because that’s how
long they will take to answer you. Because parents are worried about
everything.
For instance, among my top worst nightmare scenarios are:
A serial killer named Meatclaw kidnaps my children.
My daughter dies of scurvy because all she’ll eat is plain noodles.
My son turns out to be awesome at soccer and all my weekend days have to be spent sober and pretending to like soccer.
My
grandchildren will have to participate in The Hunger Games in the
dystopian future, which they will lose because no one in my family
knows how to shoot an arrow OR how to do a fancy side braid.
I get
cancer and die. My husband, overwhelmed with grief, gets tricked into
marrying my vapid, bimbo nurse Trixie after my funeral and she then
raises my kids to be the kind of humans who genuinely enjoy keeping up
with the Kardashians.
Prohibition comes back and I am arrested for Googling “how to make bathtub gin”.
And none of those things address the daily onslaught of new things we
as parents are told to be afraid of, like haunted YouTube shows that
possess children and studies that prove babies who didn’t learn
Mandarin in utero will never get into college and helicopter parenting
is causing rebellious kindergartners to start snorting pure uncut sugar.
Of course, it’s not all death and delinquency and illicit moonshine
runs. The mundane can be almost as terrifying when you have kids. For
example, at some point on that mental list that every parent has,
probably down around No. 37, is the nightmare of the missing sippy cup.
Oh god, the dreaded missing sippy cup. You know the one I’m talking
about. It’s been on the back of your mind for awhile, the fact that you
can’t remember the last time you saw it. And even though you’ve been
known to struggle with anything above second grade math, you instantly
do some fancy algebra in your head and deduce that there are two in the
dishwasher, one in the cupboard, two they’re currently drinking out of
and one being used as part of a load-bearing wall in the Fortress of
Generic Blocks in the living room.
Which leaves one completely unaccounted for. And after some more fancy
mental calculations, you realize it’s been unaccounted for since
Tuesday. And nope. Not that Tuesday. Last LAST Tuesday.
That’s not even the scariest part. The scariest part is that, unlike
all of the tiny missing socks (which is about 1/3 of the total tiny
sock population) and all those missing pens from the junk drawer, which
I imagine are living blissfully together on some tropical island with
all 12,000 of my missing bobby pins, sippy cups never stay lost. Oh no.
They will mysteriously show up again. Right when their contents have
ripened to their peak of nightmarish horror.
And despite the fact that when you asked your children to help you find
this very same cup two weeks ago and they just did a series of
figure-eights around your legs while repeatedly asking “where did it
go? huh...”, it always, inevitably, reappears in their little hands
when it makes its grand re-entrance, not yours.
Then, when that moment comes, that moment when one of your precious
angels that you spent 36 hours bringing into this world on the sheer
power of creative curse words alone runs up to you with a brightly
painted cup of toxic sludge, a million more horrific questions run
through your mind:
How much spoiled milk can a 30-pound body take before permanent damage occurs?
What strange alchemy must take place to turn apple juice that shade of green?
Or…wait…I think this used to be orange juice?
Does
grape juice ferment into alcohol after so long? And if it does, how
much prison kiddie wine did my child just drink before he alerted me
that he found the missing cup?
How
worried do I need to be about mold, because there are no less than 11
blog posts littering my Facebook feed at any given moment about the
dangers of mold growing in sippy cups?
The good news is that there is hope. More than hope, actually. There is
a foolproof method to never losing another sippy cup again. And that
method is to only let your child drink water from here on out.
A sippy cup full of water has never, ever been lost in the whole, long, sordid history of parenthood.
Can’t get enough of Aprill? Can’t wait until next week?
Check out her website at http://aprillbrandon.com/
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