Is there anyone else who hates motherhood as much as I do, I mean, with the exception of the crack whore who finds herself in the family way? These days I find the only way I can truly enjoy my son is through pictures. Pictures are such great things, aren’t they? I mean, the experience could have been something awful, but a few cheerful moments captured on film is all we need to manufacture a whole new reality, a whole new false memory that gives us pleasant thoughts about the event after we’ve gotten over the trauma of it. We don’t usually photograph the child thrashing on the ground in a grand mal tantrum. We’re too busy trying to avoid the flailing appendages. Besides, who wants that in their photo album? No, we want the cute, albeit phony, pose that shows our child grinning from ear to ear, even if we had to launch a thousand threats to get that “precious moment.”
The Hawaii Experiment (as it has come to be known) was honestly a truly horrendous exercise in human torture, but I look back at the pictures, and I’m awash with all these warm fuzzy feelings of sentimentality, actually dreaming about when we can return. Yes, the memories are still there of our first night with Vaughn scream-whining in the bathtub for literally hours (well, not all the time in the bathtub), begging us to go back home, the echoes amplified by the bathroom acoustics and traveling up and down the hallway of the hotel for our fellow lodgers’ listening pleasure. And that was the FIRST day. We were there for 6 days and (lest us not forget) NIGHTS and MORNINGS. But the pictures. Ah, the pictures. Set a little James Blunt to the slideshow and you’ve got yourself a truly beautifully fabricated memory of warm sun (it was overcast the majority of the time, with side dishes of rain), water frolicking (until it literally made me seasick), and joyful faces (which the next minute had brows furrowed [mine] or scrunched up ready to launch into one of many whinefests [Vaughn’s]). *sigh* Memories.
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