Subject: Doo-Bwah means never having to say Oom-Fwah

Date: 30 Sep 1998 00:00:00 GMT

From: nospamum@radix.net (Mumthra)

Organization: RadixNet Internet Services

Newsgroups: alt.foot.fat-free

Some days my inability to truly please anyone eventually makes me

surly and sorry for myself and prone to imagine tragic asteroid

strikes with flying rubber snakes and other side effects. Most days,

like today, I just don't give a good goddamn about giving anybody a

reason to feel grateful, which is as it should be. I'm not in the

pleasing business. Duh.

When Sparky asked me to name a number she punched up on my calcluator,

I started to explain decimal places in reverse order. "Well, this part

would be six-hundred and fifty-six, but since it's over here it's

six-hundred and fifty six MILLION..." She told me to just STOP and

tell her how to say the whole number. I surrendered again and admired

the patterns of the numbers her way. No need to push it, it was still

a bit of arithmeticklish enthusiasm.

It would be so easy to completely surrender until my deepest desires

were just to have a soda all my own and talk to my crayons and wonder

why it is that I have no bones in my tongue. Spunky wants to cut her

tongue to find out more about how it works. I told her it would hurt.

She said she doesn't mind, but she's just making conversation, and I

understand that now.

Baby Bo's new hobby is liberating things from the trash can, running

off to protect and admire them until she decides that they are icky

and not worthy of her attention, and then returning them to the

garbage. Since she's teething and just a little testy, I've spent

quite a few intervals just lying on the floor for her so that she can

play with my face. Her mood is always tremendously improved by a

chance to squeeze my nose and cause me to make irate goose noises.

Being a warm squeeze toy is by far the easiest item on my agenda.

It's good to feel my brain smooth out until almost everything is

enjoyable. Even when I inadvertently stabbed my palm with a steak

knife, possibly the clumsiest thing I have ever done with "cutlery", I

had to rejoice that my preference for dull knives finally paid off so

thoroughly that it was only as painful as stabbing myself with the

HANDLE might be.

Likewise, when I spilled half a bowl of cereal on my foot, I was

pleased because it gave me some kind of NEWS to tell the Rev when he

called. I need to be interested in being interesting, after all. It's

important to me to have things to offer in conversation with

grown-ups. I wouldn't feel good about myself if I couldn't say,

"Hello! Today I stabbed my palm and didn't bleed and then I spilt my

cereal all over my foot but the dog ate it so it wasn't anything to

clean up after all and then I ate a cookie because we made some and

they were really yummy because they weren't hot anymore and somebody

put a piece of spaghetti in the dough but I didn't eat that yet

because somebody is going to get the surprise spaghetti cookie that

has the spaghetti in it!!!"

But I can't just slip off into biggest little sister mode. I have to

ease into doing things the hard way.

I have to be ready for schitzophrenia every day. I am the resident

representative deity of womankind, I am to be admired because I know

all my shapes and can spell every word Spunky knows, I am the keeper

of permission slippage and the commandant of legs that are long enough

to reach the gas pedal, and then I am still the worst kind of pain in

the ass. It would be a shame to waste all that worship and fear on

only nagging them to stop acting like children, so on top of all that,

I have to be a pain in the ass that listens and understands things.

While it's pleasant to debate exactly what it might mean when the

character's noses turn blue on "Sailor Moon," I still have to be able

to gauge if that is the appropriate time to say, "Get a job!" or "No,

you cannot have an egg. You broke the last three on the dinosaurs! How

would YOU like it if somebody kept breaking eggs on you? You need to

think about these things!"

After eighteen months of this, I can finally stop worrying about the

onset of personality disintegration. I'm THERE and the really neato

part is that I DON'T MIND A BIT.