Cherry.

If you're sitting there wondering if I'm really going to discuss what you're afraid I'm going to, based on the title, the answer is yes, yes I am. Sometimes in life, you stumble back upon people from your past who bring with them memories you've tried to forget/drink away/kill with lots of drugs/talk out with your therapist. Within the last month, I've been remembering my first real boyfriend in high school, J. Ah, young love.

I was a sophomore and J. was a junior when we dated. He was on the football team, drove a Chevy S-10 and could take me to prom, so based on these qualifications alone, I decided not only was he boyfriend material, but he was also the dream boat that I wanted to lose my virginity to. I came to this conclusion, however, while watching Carson Daly announce the newest Backstreet Boys video on TRL and sat in smug satisfaction at the sheer uniqueness of my belly-button piercing, so, you know, good judgment was really all in context.

I lost my virginity to J. in the cab of a Chevy S-10 while Creed was playing on the CD player, under the stars, parked in the middle of nowhere on a Tuesday night in August after a CYO Dance at St. Mike's (because church dances make me hot and bothered, apparently). I had a seat belt thing in my back the entire time and kept hoping we'd finish up in time for me to get home before curfew. It was what it was, and about what you expect for the situation. I gave him my class ring, he gave me his, and while listening to "With Arms Wide Open," we swore we'd spend our lives together.

A few days later we were at the county fair when those damn teen hormones kicked in again. J. had met me at the fair with one of his friends, with whom he had ridden over. He asked the friend if he could borrow the keys to his car, as he wanted to go get his sweatshirt for me, which was in the friend's car. What ensued was us going at it in broad daylight in the backseat of a 1990-nothing Chevy Cavalier at the county fair. I was smitten with this Romeo.

The kink in this hose is that apparently my hymen didn't break on the first go-round. It did, however, on the second. So there was now an unavoidable amount of blood on the backseat of his friend's car.

Like some sort of virginal squid, I'd left the backseat looking like a homicide scene. Which I was unaware of until the entire school knew about it, because said friend told everyone. EV-ER-EEEEE-ONE. So not only did the entire school in my conservative Christian town know I'd had *GASP* sex (SIN!), but they also knew (or believed) I'd lost it in this guy's Cavalier at the county fair and had bled all over everything in sight. It's funny and makes good writing material now (if you have no shame, which I don't), but at the time, it was devastating.

Sometimes, when I think it'd be nice to go back to my roots, I sit, and remind myself that my "roots" are basically two dueling banjos shy of Deliverance.

Though I'd say the fact I could have sex in a Chevy Cavalier, while not a testament to my classiness, does speak volumes for my flexibility.

But had it not been for those initial acts of teenage promiscuity, I wouldn't have embarked on the series of chain events of self-loathing and poor decisions that would eventually lead up to my 22nd birthday, where, drunk out of my mind, I became pregnant with the shamelessly adorable embryo that would become the shamelessly adorable Punky. So I wouldn't change a thing. It's like a slutty version of the Butterfly Effect.

Tired.

I made the rookie toddler parent mistake of walking out of the room for about two minutes yesterday, to deign to do something as absurd as urinate, and came back to the newest page in the long epic novel that is "Holy shit my kid is the antichrist I need an exorcist what the fuck have I gotten myself into?"

She had found a 3/4 full can of Mountain Dew. Was holding it, marveling at its shiny exterior and the sloshy, surely-illegal-to-toddler inside. Looked at me as I entered the room. And what ensued was one of those slow motion moments where you hurl yourself -- slowly, and in futility -- at your child and the can of Mountain Dew while moaning, "Noooooooooooooooooooooo..."

Then she proceeded to look at me, smile, and pour it all over herself.

That's when my world snapped back to regular speed. "WHAT THE HELL, KID?!" I yelled, taking the Mountain Dew away from her. "ARE YOU IN A DAMN RAP VIDEO?"

People joke at the Terrible Two's. And we all laugh and roll our eyes, and we say, "Oh, my kid wasn't as bad as people say they get!" And we act like we don't have bruises up and down our legs from stopping impending doom multiple times a day, or pounds of makeup to cover up the massive dark circles under our eyes. But they're there.

Chapters in this ongoing novel shall be titled as such:

"No, Punk, stop ripping shit off the shelves."

"I said stop beating the dog with the spatula."

"The dog's water dish is not where Mommy's memory card reader and digital camera go." (R.I.P., Memory Card Reader.)

"If you don't stop screaming I swear to GOD I will sell you on CraigsList."

"Why does this room smell like pee?" (And the follow-up question/chapter, "How did you manage to get pee all the way across the room?!")

"Poop on wall is not an appropriate medium for expressing your inner angst."

"Seriously? In your hair?"

"Trying to carry that disproportionately large bucket of water is going to end badly for you, and you're going to have no one to blame but yourself."

"Going Headfirst Down A Slide: Why You Will Regret This Choice"

"Oh really? That's what you think? Yeah? Well BOO-YAH, mandatory naptime, motherfucker!"

"What plane of reality do you live on where this is okay?"

"I recall with a relatively high degree of certainty that I said no."

"Jesus Christ. I've become my mother."

Def Leppard.

One of my strongest, and maybe favorite, memories from my childhood was my mom's music in the car. She was big into the 80's hair bands, and being the late 80's and early 90's, they were still remotely relevant. I could differentiate between Def Leppard, Poison, and White Snake by three, and could sing along to everything from "Once Bitten Twice Shy" to "Every Rose Has Its Thorn" before I was in kindergarten. I still remember the different album covers, as they appeared on the cassette tape cases. My mom would pop in a cassette tape, and we'd sing along happily to the bands that were clearly evidence of her youth.

While I really enjoyed this memory, it wasn't something I necessarily thought of until recently, when I was cruising through traffic with the windows down, blasting Rage Against the Machine (one of my all-time favorite bands) and caught Punky sitting in the backseat, bopping her head along to the music and giggling as I rapped along with Zack de la Roca and air-guitaring along with Tom Morello (one of the best guitarists in the history of rock, IMHO).

I listened to Rage long before Punk -- and driving while blasting it entirely too loud takes me back to a place before Punk, before marriage and Stepford Wifery and my achingly boring, mundane life. Back when I was ME, before How2 and before Mommy. And that's when it struck me: my mom was B. before she was Mom.

While brief, I had an entire lifetime before I became a mother. Like a past life, I was a totally different person; one that sometimes I miss being, one that sometimes I'm glad I've shed. And while Punk can dance and enjoy the music of my past life, she'll probably never know the stories behind it.

She'll never know that before it was just driving music, I sat and debated politics with friends in dorm rooms while "Battle of Los Angeles" blared in the background.

She'll never know that before I danced around the living room with her to The Wiggles, I danced on bars.

She'll never know that before I stayed up late with her when she was colicky, I stayed up late in coffee houses with good friends, talking and laughing about current events, politics, sports, and life.

She'll never know that before I let her draw on me with washable markers, I had two tattoos done to symbolize two different yet significant parts of my life.

She'll never know the life and career I gave up, and the pain I still feel for doing so.

Before sippy cups of apple juice, there were flasks of whiskey.

Before unconditional love for my child, there was the agony of loving someone I couldn't have.

Before I stayed up late, covered in baby vomit and weathering the flu, I stayed up holding back friends' hair while they prayed loudly, and with regurgitated Jager bombs, to the porcelain gods.

She will never know the complete detour that her very existence caused me to quickly and begrudgingly take, or the fact that she quite possibly saved me from myself -- or that I will forever be grateful to her for it.

First.

It's a monumental day in the Casa de la How2. A day that has long been in the making, long in preparation, and much anticipated. May I have silence for a moment while I present:


MOTHER-EFFING PIGTAILS.

Okay. So it's probably not groundbreaking to anyone but me. God knows she is definitely no Gigi in the follicle department. (Yes. Look at that picture. Gigi's a week younger than Punk. Can we all join together in a "No fucking fair!"?). But it has taken 17, yes, SEVENTEEN, months to get to the point that Punky finally had hair long enough to constitute a puny little piggytail.

Considering she spawned from two individuals who each have INCREDIBLE hair -- thick, shiny, strong -- and throughout my pregnancy I had worse heartburn than Pavarotti after an Indian meal, I fully expected her to come out with Rapunzel-length locks. Instead, Punky came out bald as a cue ball. Which made my parents especially nervous since they were concerned she may be a "ginger" like her father.

Okay. Babies are bald. That's expected, I guess. But then what little whisps of hair she DID have, she lost. So then she was like Homer Simpson without his little lines of hair. And it stayed that way. No hair. Zero. None. Til she was like six months old. And now she's been blessed with the rate that my hair grows -- which is, um, not at all -- so it has been an agonizingly long waiting process as I've stared wistfully at the pony-o's and barettes that I had in anticipation of styling my baby daughter's beautiful locks.

Even with the hair finally here, however, the dream was also shattered by the fact that I had to rassle her like a greased pig to get them in. It's okay; I mean, spinal damage heals, right?

New Kids on the Blog List

New on the blog list and my current obsession is The DP Show -- double teaming, slamming, ramming and pumping today's most penetrating issues and never calling them back. Just a good time all around and my guilty pleasure for the part of me that has a penis (I mean hypothetically, not the crotchal part of me) that obsesses over sports. And I don't care what the health clinic at BGSU says, that Matt Pagel is a nice boy.

So unless you like to rape ponies, and especially if you do, you should probably check them out. And subscribe to their iTunes podcast here.

So there you go guys -- I've got the snarky, sarcastic stay-at-home-mom market cornered for you. You're welcome.

Scapegoat.

Thanks to the magic that is Facebook, I'm able to stalk keep in touch with old friends from high school without actually having to talk to them. I've been feeling especially reminiscent lately, and was thinking about the dynamic of the "old gang." Looking back, I think I feel most sorry for Mary*.

Mary was what you would call the group DUFF. For those unfamiliar with the acronym, that would be the Designated Ugly Fat Friend. Every group of high school girls has one. If you don't think your group does or did, guess what, you were the DUFF. Sorry. I was the smart one. Jennifer was the funny one. Kylie was the bitch. Mary was the DUFF.

Remember Piggy from Lord of the Flies? That was Mary. She was large, she was anxious, and she was always paranoid we'd get in trouble. Mainly because we usually did, often with the law, and her mom was the 911 dispatcher in our tiny town, so any trouble we incurred (and then dumped on her), she would be punished way worse than the rest of us. So, being 16, 17 years old, we usually used Mary as the group scapegoat, usually because she was slower than the rest of us and unable to run from the cops and jump fences and not cry when being questioned.

Sometimes you just have to sacrifice the slowest member of the pack, and in our case, it was Mary. And we left her to the wolves pretty frequently.

The most blatant and obvious case of this was one night during a sleepover when we decided it would be funny to go toilet-paper (or TP, if you will) the house of an especially cute guy in our class, we'll call him John. Kylie had a huge crush on John, so when you're 16 and you like a guy, naturally the best way to address this is to throw toilet paper all over every tree in his yard, shaving cream his and his parents' cars, and take a shit on his front doorstep. Well, I didn't particularly like him, also he was my second or third cousin, so I shit on his front doorstep. Whatever, he wasn't my crush.

We couldn't drive yet, so we had Mary's older brother Nick serve as our chauffeur in exchange for beer money and a joint. We piled into Nick's Ford Escort and drove to John's house, where Nick sat in the car while we TP'd the trees, giggling and shushing each other and running around like the idiot 15-year-olds we were.

Then the living room light turned on. We saw a silhouette pass through the living room and knew our shenanigans were being thwarted. So we screamed, because that's what idiot 15-year-olds do, and ran to the car. Mary was the furthest from the car at the time so already had a longer way to run. This proved to be her downfall. That, and the fact that she was morbidly obsese.

It was John's dad. The front door swung open and out he came, in nothing but tighty-whities and tube socks, and came charging out after us into the yard like a madman. (John's dad was also sort of known for being a little imbalanced.) We threw ourselves into the car, screaming in terror because there's a 40-something-year-old man in his underwear chasing us and screaming at us. We screamed at Nick to drive off as Mary was leaping headfirst into the backseat of the car.

Mary only got the top half of her body into the car, and I still remember her grabbing onto me as the car sped off... and John's dad ripped her out of the car. It was sort of like those horror movies, where you see the girl getting pulled under the bed by whatever beast awaits and you just see her fingers desperately grabbing in futility?


Yeah. It was like that.

And we yelled at Nick -- MARY'S BROTHER -- to keep driving as we slammed the door shut.

To this day, I remember watching out the back window as John's dad SHOOK HER, screaming (we later found out), "WHAT ARE YOU DOING?! WHAT IN THE HELL DO YOU THINK YOU'RE DOING?!" and as she was being violently shaken, Mary managed to stammer out, "WHAT...ARE...YOU...DOING?!?!"

John's dad called the police, and then Mary had to wait at John's house for her mom to come pick her up. We left her there to die, more or less -- especially once her mother got ahold of her. In the meantime, Nick took us to the late-night gas station and we got ice cream.

Mary didn't talk to us for a solid week. Mostly because she was on parental-imposed house arrest. "Grounding" never really did justice for the degree of punishment her parents would put her under.

We were assholes back then, sure. But then the year after we graduated, John's dad died of colon cancer, so really, karma won out after all.


* - Names changed to protect... well, basically just for my own amusement, really.

Toddlaerobics.

Sometimes, people read celebrity gossip sites like Perez Hilton (despite the fact that he is a hypocrite and a horrible human being), and sometimes these blogs, so I am told, feature anorexic-looking celebrity moms, who apparently poo-poo the notion that they're anorexic and just say, "I have children! That's how I stay trim! Chasing after them!"

I have never been to such sites, because I am a serious journalist, but I know if I were to go to those sites, and if I stumbled upon such a statement by a celebrity whose personal life I know nothing of... oh, say, Posh Spice, aka Victoria Beckham.... I'd probably have rolled my eyes at them and declared, "What a load of shit. It's coke and anorexia! DUH!"

Yeah. Um. Apparently it's pretty true. Because having a toddler? Fucking exhausting, dude.

I had a brief conversation with another young first-time mom in the Wal-Mart check-out line today, her angelic 6-month-old sitting serenely in the car carrier seat, our conversation broken up every 40 seconds by my child pulling all of the magazines out of the rack. Then, as I bent down to pick everything up, took off running across Wal-Mart like she was being chased by El Chupacabra. Then thrashing angrily as I tried to detain her with my withering, exhausted arms.

I remember when Punky was at that stage. Sitting in her car carrier, batting away at whatever random toy I'd managed to strap onto the handle. Contained. Immobile. And A. and I would watch her and dote on her, and dream of how wonderful and magical it would be once she could walk!

Uhhh... yeah. We were retarded.

It seems like a novel idea til you have to chase your child out of the Chipotle kitchen, when you swear to god you just let go of her hand long enough to get your wallet out of your purse because for the love of christ, kid, mommy just wants a fucking chicken taco OKAY? Not so fun anymore when in the blink of an eye, she tears across the front yard into the street while you're fishing for car keys.

And in a new and super addition to her Mobility, Self-Mutiliation and Death Initiative, she's learned to climb up onto the furniture. Cute and fun when she's on the couch, sipping on her Sippy Cup and watching TV peacefully. Not so much when she figures out how to get onto the glider rocker and then decides to STAND UP. I started up a pool among my friends as to just how soon she'd manage to injure herself with that new trick. I mean, don't get me wrong, I'm actually a pretty attentive parent, but there comes a point where you have to let go and let Darwin.


Congratulations to Kellie, by the way, who won the pool with her Tuesday entry. Glad to see someone can make financial gain on my child's suffering. Really, I'm like a minor-league Kate Gosselin. (Oh no she didn't! Oh I did, I just did.)

Combined, my Plague and Toddler Diet has resulted in almost 20 lbs. lost since early May. I guess I should change the name of the diet, though, so as to not convey the false idea of eating plagues and toddlers. That's just ridiculous. You can't eat a plague.