Screw the environment

There was a time when I had a relatively clean car and took pride in my personal appearance and the state of my home and our impact on the world. We recycled everything, used rags and dish towels instead of paper towels, only ran the dishwasher when we had a full load, ate organic and limited meals out, adhered to high hygienic standards, kept a neat house and were on time to each and every event in our lives. Enter Baby Number Two.

Yesterday I watched Madelena, sitting on the dirty ground in the school parking lot, reaching into my car to pull out various items and drop them on the ground: a three-day old Peet's cup, a string cheese wrapper, stale and desiccated Cheerios, a dried up pen, two used tissues and some dirty, sandy socks. And I realized that I had, despite all efforts and self-directed promises, become the mom who drove That Car. As I looked down at my dog-hair covered yoga pants, dubiously matched socks and now dirty child, I was torn between total abandon and a desire to run home and change into something that actually has contact with my body and had been cleaned recently.

No one plans on becoming the woman on Aisle 4 in the pajama pants and unwashed hair at 10am. No one says that "someday I will subsist on the food left on my child's plate, possible pre-masticated, and food eaten in the car on the way to school pick up." No one dreams of only being able to refer to themselves in the third person and by the name "Mama" instead of the one they once used in professional, dating and social life. At no point did any self-respecting woman decide that bathing was optional and that every-other-day showering and shining was more than good enough. Yet here I am, and I am not alone.

I look around me at the grocery store and see similarly dressed and harried women, wearing their husband's shirts and worn Gap shorts — a look that was cute and sassy on a decade-younger body but now has a whiff of desperation and an odd but unmistakable resemblance to a crazy aunt from Livermore...the same woman who dresses up by wearing bedazzled Keds with her pink sweat suit. I meet moms at Peet's who wax poetic about hair clips that enable them to get up and not bother with a brush, let alone a shampoo. We sit outside on the benches feeding our children bits of boiled egg and bananas, enjoying the respite from the ever-present, sticky high chair and the same wall we face three times a day as we feed our precious children who seem to have all the manners of a drunken, elderly monkey.

Whenever possible at home I use paper plates and napkins and towels so that I can immediately discard of the 14th meal of the week that was eaten or rejected and in either case smashed between small fingers and into hair. I run the dishwasher nightly, regardless of load, to avoid hand washing bottles and sippy cups and lunch box inserts. I do loads of laundry daily, sometimes the same load twice because it was forgotten overnight and now smells like the San Francisco Bay at low tide. I drive to the store at least twice a day for emergency refills on soy milk, fresh bananas, pears and other foodstuffs that need to be on hand for the most demanding eater in the house. I have given up on environmentalism, the wearing of fitted clothing, make up or matching socks. I no longer read the paper, tap into TMZ.com every hour or even check my email on a regular basis. I have given up on being part of the solution to global warming and instead am more concerned with the consistency and frequency of poop, naps and bottles. And I would not change a thing. Except my underwear, and only because clean underwear is the last shred of dignity to which I cling.