This thing. This little white piece of plastic with tiny little green lights on the front of it that go from one little dot as pictured above, to 5 RAGING LIGHTS OF HELL BLARING AT ME AS I TRY TO TAKE A 3 MINUTE SHOWER FOR THE LOVE….
The BABY MONITOR. Our apartment is tiny, so we don’t really even need them, but you know, first time mom and all that. And we CERTAINLY don’t need a video monitor, as the sounds are PLENTY thankyouverymuch.
It’s absolutely the best and the worst invention and I want to angry make out with the person who invented these and then SPANK THEIR STUPID FACE.
It has a little clip on the back of it, lest you get separated for more than 5 seconds from the crying. The crying that I now hear in my sleep, in my car while I’m alone, any time day or night I hear the crying. And a lot of the time, it’s not real. IT IS NOT REAL the crying. It’s just in me. It’s in my head to hear the babies crying all the time. I hear it when I have music blasting or when the TV is super loud, I hear it when there is not a sound, like right now as I sit here writing and both babes are peacefully slumbering on a Sunday morning giving mommy a break. I STILL HEAR THE CRYING. I look right at their faces and their tiny mouths and eyes are closed and they are sleeping and yet, I STILL HEAR THE CRYING. The boy and the girl have two very distinct cries, which were apparent from the moment they were born. People ask us, “can you tell who’s crying?” Absolutely we can. No issue ever in telling who’s crying. Isn’t that amazing? They told me it would happen and it has. And I’m grateful. I miss it when I’m not around them. Is that sick or what?
Back to the monitors. I keep thinking I’m going to hear something awful on the monitor in the middle of the night. Like in horror movies, a whisper or an adult voice coming from the monitor. I always feel safe because we live in an apartment. A building with outside doors and a vestibule that has two big locked doors and THEN 2 flights of stairs and THEN our locks on our apartment door to get in. AND HORROR MOVIES NEVER HAPPEN IN APARTMENTS. Think about it. They rarely happen in big cities. So I feel super safe here. I feel so much safer in the company of people on top of me and below me (what?) than I would if I lived out in the sticks somewhere. I have clearly watched way too many scary movies.
The baby monitor. A cousin of the walkie-talkie, which goes both ways. But you see, when you have babies, it’s a one way street a lot of the time. They surely wouldn’t listen if we were to talk back on the monitor. They would cry right over us and, let’s be honest, probably laugh at us. But the monitor is very much like the one way street of parenthood. They don’t need our shit put on them. We are here to cater to their shit. Literally. We can hear them but they can’t hear us. Or at least they pretend not to. I bet our voices are always in their heads though, just like theirs are always in ours. My parents voices are always in my head and I’m almost 40 years old. I’m grateful for that too. This monitor tells us when our babies need us. If they are anything like me, as they get older they won’t always tell us when they need us. Sometimes we run to tend to them and sometimes we pee first because we know that we won’t have a second in the next hour to do so if we don’t do it right now. PUT YOUR OXYGEN MASK ON FIRST BEFORE TENDING TO THE CHILDREN. Am I right?
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Too Sober For This 