By E. R. Catalano of Zoe vs. the Universe
Today’s moms are grabbing motherhood by the throat, holding a gun to its head, and blasting its brains out all over the playgrounds and strip malls of America.
We know breast is best, infants should sleep on their backs, and to put a tarp down in our tastefully decorated living rooms so when the blood of maternal achievement sprays all over, none of it gets on the ottoman.
We have tea parties with our daughters, where we brew hand-picked loose tea in Spode Jr. teapots and nibble non-GMO cucumber sandwiches sans bread, all while dressed as faithful depictions of characters from Alice in Wonderland in a way that whimsically stabs motherhood right in the face.
We dress our daughters’ hair with ribbons rescued lovingly and repurposed cleverly from Victorian Valentines found at upscale “thrift” stores, photograph our darlings, carefully curate the results on our Instagram feeds, and afterwards sneak up soundlessly behind motherhood and gently garrote it with the silken leftovers until motherhood collapses at our pedicured feet in a lifeless heap.
We wear our babies in Moby Wraps to Moby cover-band concerts in our neighbors’ garages like we’re knocking motherhood over the head, shoving it unconscious into our friend Phil’s Mini Cooper, turning on the ignition, and then closing the garage door so that motherhood slowly asphyxiates from the carbon dioxide.
We spend summer days with our older children, AKA our best buds, weaving matching cabanas from palm fronds in our backyards. Then we go swimming in our wave pools, where we lure motherhood to the deep end, push its head under water, and hold it there until its desperate thrashing ceases.
We are the chosen. We are the mothers of the now. And we are stone-cold murderers.
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About the Author
E. R. Catalano is a writer and mother of one evil mastermind living in Brooklyn, NY. She writes a humor blog at www.zoevstheuniverse.com. She is a contributor to The Bigger Book of Parenting Tweets and the forthcoming Lose the Cape: Never Will I Ever, and her humorous essays have appeared on Scary Mommy, In the Powder Room, Club Mid, BLUNTmoms, and Mamapedia. You can follow her on Twitter at @zoevsuniverse and on Facebook.