Top Five Signs I've Gone to the Dark Side

Friends, I realized today after perpetrating #5 on my child that I have spent the last week, quite frankly, becoming my mother. I love my mother incredibly and thank god every day that I got to be her child, but I can't say that I ever wanted to hear or see myself doing those things that used to bug me, or that just strike me as scarily "mommish" when I still see myself as a happenin' thirty-something. So, in order that you may share my horror, I present to you, on my penultimate evening in China:

THE TOP FIVE SIGNS I HAVE GONE TO THE DARK SIDE


5. Today I wet a tissue with my saliva and rubbed some dried cereal off my child's face--and then pronounced her cleaner with my spit on her face than with cereal.

4. Upon seeing slightly more "cohesive" poop in her diaper after a week of antibiotics and major runnage, I exclaimed, "Good girl! Nice poopies!" and was actually genuinely happy.

3. Because I was alone in the hotel room with my daughter who freaked if I left her alone, I myself went to the bathroom with the door open with her sitting watching me. You can't teach someone that kind of motherly class, ladies and gentlemen. It just comes to me naturally.

2. I was at a restaurant where she had a teething meltdown; I stood up, rocked her to calm her, and was actually singing along to the muzak, which was "Memory" by Barbra Streisand. Anyone who is not appalled to be seen in a foreign country singing show tunes by Babs in the middle of a restaurant, must obviously be doing it for their child.

And the number one sign I have gone to the Dark Side:

1. To determine, while in a meeting in the hotel lobby, whether she needed her diaper changed, I nonchalantly lifted her up and sniffed her butt.

It's a dangerous, slippery slope, my friends. Today it's butt sniffing and before you know it, it's wearing a June Cleaver apron and making cookies and Tang OJ for all the neighborhood kids. Motherhood: Bad for E, Bad for America. ;)