I am in the Room of the Forty Macs again.
You would think I would be happier, given the situation.
But I’m not happy, because it snowed this week, and snow always represents the beginning of the end for me.
It snowed, and when my alarm clock shrieked at me to wake the eff up on the morning that it snowed, I could not bear the thought of getting out of bed to start my car twenty minutes early and leave to exercise and do the same things I’ve been doing every day for months now. I couldn’t do it.
So I didn’t.
Which of course meant that I slept in, which is a lovely thing in its own right, except for when it causes the inevitable calculation of how much money I wasted by not going to the gym this morning.
And now I can’t get a cookie at 1:00 because I have no way of rationalizing that I deserve it.
I don’t deserve a cookie.
I don’t deserve anything.
I am a lazy slob who pays for gym memberships that she doesn’t use and wears the clothes she wore the day before in her haste to get to class on time. Also, she sometimes wears those clothes inside out because she can’t be bothered to turn on the glaring bedroom light when she gets dressed in the chill of the unforgiving morning.
On top of my vast worthlessness, I have a new nephew whom I do not get to meet until December, which really sucks because everybody knows that nephews are at their peak during their first few weeks of life. By December, he will be three months old and already programmed not to love his Auntie Mo. He hates me already. I’m a terrible aunt.
Plus, by December he’ll probably be in his ugly stage.
[You know the ugly stage, right? That unfortunate period all babies suffer, even the heart-stoppingly adorable ones. Sometimes it’s caused by bald spots (not enough tummy time, tsk tsk); sometimes it’s caused by a mother who refuses to cut her baby’s shaggy hair in an attempt to cling to the past. Other times, there’s no definitive culprit: it’s just a wee phase of strange-looking ugly babyness. I never grew out of my ugly stage.]
But I digress.
My nephew will be ugly, yet because I am a loving auntie, I will still adore him and munch on his fat little cheeks as often as he will let me. But it won’t matter, because he will be all self-conscious about his weird-looking face by then, and he won’t let me build a relationship because of his poor little insecurities. He will build a wall around his brand new heart—he will shut me out, his only auntie who loves him so much, and it will be all my fault for not forging a relationship with him sooner.
Before the ugly phase.
Because everybody knows that if you don’t get there before the ugly phase, they’ll never really trust you.
Take my advice, friends: don’t miss the ugly phases of infants you love. Even cookies won’t win you over to them then.
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