Mother Hoodwink

Webster’s defines “hoodwink” as: to deceive by false appearance. This is how I feel I am as a mother. On the surface I look like I have everything under control and for the most part I do. The part I’m being deceitful about is how much work it takes for that to happen. If I can safely say that the baby is still alive at the end of the day, then it’s been a good day. He didn’t swallow anything sharp, he didn’t stick his finger in an electrical socket and he didn’t bust his head open while pulling something off the table. The deception lies in the fact that he almost did all of these things. I’m not the kind of mother that has a busy schedule set up. I don’t know exactly what my child is doing at any given moment. Sometimes he does eat stuff that he shouldn’t. Like leaves that were blown in when the door opened. Or tiny pieces of paper. Or old Cheerios that have been under the couch for a couple of weeks. I know he has to eat stuff like that because I seem to always be pulling those things out of his mouth. So I’m sure I’ve missed a few times. What I’m saying is that I’m not the perfect mother. I’m always told what a great mom I am and how patient I am with the baby. I am the master of deception. I am Mother Hoodwink.

Mother Hoodwink is my fifth blog. I’m hoping this one will be my last. I started blogging in 2002. After dealing with bad hosting sites, mad coworkers and nasty in-laws, I decided that I would attempt this blogging thing one more time. I’m staying mostly anonymous with this site. I could just stop blogging altogether, but I don’t want to. I find it to be therapeutic and a great way to connect with people I would have never had the opportunity to without a blog. Because I want to keep my anonymity, I have nicknames for my husband and son. When asking my husband what his nickname should be he came up with my pet name for him. Since that’s a name I only want to keep between he and I, I turned it down. He then said, “Let’s see… what else do you call me besides Fuck Face?” I decided to go with Dim, which is an acronym for “Dude I Married.” It also makes for a pretty funny name when referring to a husband who isn’t always that sharp. Which I think is every husband. As for my son we always call him Boomba.

Let me fill you in a bit on my story. My husband is in the military. We were fist stationed in New Orleans. Detest doesn’t even begin to express how much we hated it there. While there we lost our first pregnancy when I was five months pregnant. Apparently I had an incompetent cervix. We started trying almost immediately to get pregnant again. After about eight months of trying, we decided to see a fertility specialist. We found out I have PCOS. On our third month of Clomid I got pregnant. We found out the morning we were evacuating for Katrina. Because I was now considered a high risk pregnancy, I needed a high risk OB. There were none practicing in the wake of Katrina. My husband’s superiors allowed us to be transferred to Tennessee. We were ecstatic that we didn’t have to live in New Orleans anymore.

My pregnancy went very well and I had the baby boy I had been dreaming of. He has made me so much happier than I ever anticipated he would.

The whole premise of this blog is to share my stories of new motherhood. I try my best and have enough research and statistics to write a book, but yet I still find myself ignoring what I’ve learned and going with my gut. I have to admit though, sometimes my gut is wrong.