Do I owe you an email? Are you patiently (or not so patiently) waiting for me to return your call? Did you send some wonderful present for my kids and are starting to wonder if it ever even made it to my house? Did I forget your birthday? Are you thinking that I might have fallen off the face of the earth? Do not worry! You are not alone!
So I was at the park with Molly and Lars and our girls the other day, and I was pissing and moaning and bitching about how exhausted I am – how much I have on my plate right now – how I am totally behind on everything because it’s Baby/Work/Baby/Work day in and out. And Molly (or was it Lars?) kind of cocked her eyebrow at me and said (and I’m paraphrasing here) “Oh, Boo fucking Hoo. Poor Maia has such a miserable life taking care of her beautiful, funny baby girl, and working at her exciting up and coming Hollywood career. I feel so sorry for you!”
And it was a good reality check. Because that’s where I’ve been – taking care of my totally delightful daughter (and she is ridiculously, unimaginably delightful) and my funny, moody, sweet pre-teenage eight year old son, and maybe saying hi to my beleaguered husband as I pass him the baby and bolt for my desk so I can do another rewrite, or get on the phone with Y and our manager (Yes! We found the perfect manager. We are in manager love. We might buy a little management house, with a management picket fence and have management babies with him) and agent and talk about the deal they are hammering out for our first script (which – because things take AGES (or overnight) to happen in Hollywood – I still can’t go into details about just yet). So, yes, I don’t have time to wipe my ass – but should I really be complaining that my life is too full of good things? That’s kind of stupid of me, right?
So – the last few weeks have been me and the baby pretty much all day, - and when I say me and the baby – I mean, me and the baby no more than an inch away from me for 99 percent of the time. I’m either carrying her, she’s in my lap, or I am being led around by her hand or I am sitting right next to her. Or sometimes she does a little independent play- and that’s how I can tell she’s going to need a diaper change in a few moments. Anyway, then Ryan gets off work (either here or in NYC) and I toss Fang Fang at him the minute he walks in the door, and run run run like a little bunny to sit on our big and (usually unmade) bed and tap tap tap away into Rom/Com land. And then Ryan, good man that he is, feeds and bathes the baby and gets her (by some mystical combination of magical daddy tricks, the baby backpack, and Stevie Wonder) to go to sleep, and then brings her up to the bed, where she is tucked in next to me while I continue to tap tap tap deep into the night until I am ready to pass out on my keyboard, then I take a shower. Then I go to sleep.
My garden? She is overrun with weeds. My sex life? She is…erm…in hibernation (it’s not that I’m not willing – it’s just that we have these rhinoceroses all over the house – baby, boy, even our dog – putting out the fire whenever the slightest spark seems to be glowing. It’s like, “MOM AND DAD ARE HUGGING! QUICK, QUICK, QUICK – COME BETWEEN THEM! INSIST ON BEING PART OF THE HUG! WAKE UP AND CRY!!! LOUDER!!! THREATEN TO BITE THEM IN THE BUTT (that’s the dog)! END THE CONTACT BY ANY MEANS NECESSARY!”). I haven’t cooked a meal for anyone (like, a grown up, real meal. I cook for the kids every single night. Two. Separate. Meals. Mainly because Spike is picky and I don’t want Fang Fang to be limited to the ten or so things he will eat) in months. I haven’t read a book (though I have been reading scripts- which is something, I suppose). I barely see my friends. I saw one movie – and that was a professional necessity – a VIP actress starred in it and I needed to be able to say that I saw it and loved it (and I did - both saw and loved) for the sake of our next project. And I saw the movie all alone – hustling in and out of that movie theater like my ass was on fire. Ryan stayed home with the kids (yes, yes, Ryan is a super saint – no food, no sex, lots of dirty diapers – and I get to see the movies. But I will make it up to him. I sweeeear.). I don’t shave my legs very often (I take a lot of minute long showers with the baby on the other side of the shower curtain, peering mistily through and beating on the plastic partition with her hands as her mama hastens to rinse the soap out of her eyes). I keep forgetting that restaurants and toddlers combined create the seventh circle of hell and optimistically taking the kids out to eat, only to find myself, thirty minutes later, begging for our barely eaten food to be wrapped so we can hightail it out of there before the baby knocks over another glass of water or spits another half chewed bite of whatever onto the floor. Everywhere I walk there is the flotsam and jetsam of little toddler toys crunching under my feet. The dog needs her toenails trimmed. The boy needs a haircut. My heels are cracking, I’m probably growing hair out of all sorts of places Gentlewomen should not sprout hair, and every shirt I wear is covered in something white, red and/or pink and wet within twenty minutes of being put on my body. Things are generally falling to pieces around me.
On the other hand? People keep telling me that I look great. That my skin is glowing, that I have lost weight (you try lugging around an cute little extra 22 pounds 24-7 and see how fast the baby holding diet works!) that I seem to be radiating some amazing aroma of happiness and satisfaction. The girl is growing in leaps and bounds, things are looking awfully good in Hollywood, the boy seems happier with his little sister every day, and Ryan is still doing the dishes – much to his dismay. So something must be going right. I guess being overwhelmed and busy is somehow healthier for me than having a lot of time on my hands to read novels and sleep late and drink chai lattes . Ha ha! Remember those days?
So, don’t take it personally if I haven’t returned your call. Know that I still love you. That I’m thinking of you. Wishing we had time to sit down for a nice, long, chat. And if you wait long enough, I will undoubtedly reemerge – probably with a baby attached to my hip and a script in one hand. But there are much worse fates than that.
