Miscellaneous B We are beginning to emerge from the Cold of Doom.

The McKenna Children's Museum is worth the trip from Austin. Or San Marcos. Or San Antonio. Or possibly anywhere.

Kim Moldofsky has a review of Inconsolable in the current Chicago Parent.

This mood shit is still hard.

On the bright side, Baldo is unshakably confident in the powers of Samuel L. Jackson:
"Look!" he yelled from the drive-through at CVS, where I was picking up my Klonopin. "Snakes on a Plane is at the Alamo Drafthouse. I want to see it."

"Uh huh," I said. "Say, do you think it's scary?"

"Nah."

"Even if the snakes pop out and bite people?"

"Samuel L. Jackson will stop them in no time at all!"

"Sounds like you really believe in Samuel L. Jackson."

"Yeah. I believe in his powers."

new! I just want what every blandly liberal, apologetic thirtysomething mother wants: a hot, strapping green turtle with a white convertible, a dry sense of humor, and Canadian citizenship to father my children and live with me in an ivy-covered dome on a wooded country road.

Hey, it's my new column.

It's my birthday! I'm about to have to wake up everyone in the house! It's my birthday! Wake up wake up wake up!

Oh, sure. The one day of the year when *I* want to get up at 7:00, nobody's into it.

Happy birthday, Aunt Kristin

Forbes: "Bitch, clean my house!" Best rebuttal yet, from Gawker.

At the bottom of the page there's a jump to a counterpoint by Elizabeth Corcoran, a "career girl" in the magazine's Silicon Valley bureau who has the Forbes cover story this month and has been married for 18 years.

A Mommy Story also takes it on: Maybe instead of crafting a list of reasons not to marry a career woman, Forbes should write an article warning career women how to spot and avoid sexist, spineless, controlling men who are actually looking for a servant and not a partner in marriage. Yeah, baby!

Don't call it a comeback. I've been here for years. When surviving depression it is useful to consider Tony "The Ant" Spilotro, the inspiration for Joe Pesci's character in Casino:

No matter how big a guy might be, Nicky would take him on. You beat Nicky with fists, he comes back with a bat. You beat him with a knife, he comes back with a gun. And you beat him with a gun, you better kill him, because he'll keep comin' back and back until one of you is dead.

You have to be a tenacious motherfucker. You're going to get slammed, and you're going to have to get back up anyway.

Overheard via drowning with kids: "When the chicks in the Lifetime Movies-of-the-Week go to the doc and get their meds, life gets perfect in about four minutes before the last commercial set." (Kathy Snead Williams)

We, on the other hand, have to keep comin' back and back until one of us is dead.

I took Baldo to the doctor with me yesterday. I had to. As his consolation prize we went in the morning to Inflatable Wonderland, which is located in the Mall from Hell. Inflatable Wonderland was a real sanity-tester. It was the perfect laboratory challenge: full of loud, rambunctious, and shoeless children climbing all over each other and wiping their noses, like any other indoor play area in Texas in August. You're thankful for what you can get, but it jangles the nerves to have this sudden density of children and mothers, especially since some of the mothers have that postpartum wall-eyed quality I know I'm still waiting to outgrow, as well. Did I mention it was half-price admission day and 103 degrees outside?

But Inflatable Wonderland? Great fucking time. We met Baldo's BFF Little K., and the two of them skipped off arm-in-arm, like the Robust and Hardy Children we've always known they could be. Baldo has not historically been a fan of moonwalks or anything inflatable. We tried to get him on onesuch at the Violet Crown Festival, and he clamped his hands over his ears and fell into a passive-resistance stance upon hearing the air compressor. But the four-year-old is a bolder creature than before. Less like a toddler, more like Tony "The Ant" Spilotro.

Then it was on to the doctor's office. Baldo sat on the floor in the exam room reading August's issue of Highlights. I tried to teach him the word "sphygmomanometer," and he wasn't into that. We had a matter-of-fact visit with the doctor, and like so many other times before I left the office vaguely optimistic but arrived home feeling as if not much had changed. I get a dose tweak.

It's now out on the table in our family that we're dealing with mental illness. I try to remember to emphasize the right part of that sentence: dealing with. We're coming back with a bat for it. We are not passive.

Every kid sees his or her parents struggle with something. Nobody is able to make a perfect, well-adjusted life for their family. If you can at least teach your kid decent ways of coping, that's landmark. You are helping to create a resilient, compassionate human being who will apply his coping skills to his own problems.

It's bigger than JonBenet Colorado police arrest a suspect in the Juarez murders.

Please excuse Marrit from motherhood today I don't know what to say except that I feel almost exactly like this. So I'm not going to reinvent the wheel here.

I have been slowly seeping into this pit of despair and anxiety.
Check.

I've had panic attacks and days on end of anxiety and crushing depression that ebbs and flows.
Uh-huh.

I have been less of a parent, more of a dazed and confused supervisor. I have thought that it would be easier to just not be here.
I hear that.

The thought of being this kind of mother tears my heart out.
Absolutely.

For the past, oh, 48 hours I have been a Crying Person. I've cried my way through dropoff and pickup, through a visit from Sheila, through grocery shopping, through work, through the night, through the day. I've cried at the post office, through writing e-mails to friends, through cooking supper. I'm fucking exhausted.

I think it's time to go back to the doctor.

The last time I got a scrip for a new drug (Lexapro, my sixth AD in six years) I had to write down all my symptoms, my LMP, all that stuff, and hand it over to the doctor, smiling and crying, while Baldo capered around the exam room talking about construction equipment. The doctor diagnosed and prescribed me with a series of yes-or-no questions I could answer without scaring my kid. I have to try to keep everything secret, which is of course a total joke, but you still have to try, right? The irony of motherhood: You can't talk about being crazy in the doctor's office, but you can write about it in view of the whole world.

Then my doctor told me to pray.

Now there is talk of treatment-resistant depression. Y'all heard of this? The ADs don't work, so you try Vagus Nerve Stimulation (VNS), Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS), anticonvulsants like Lamictal and Tegretol. Anybody tried any of that? Oh, and there's always ECT.

There's nothing quite like the feeling that you're causing your child pain just by existing. You're trying as hard as you possibly can to keep yourself together, but you keep falling apart--and he's right there watching you, right there saying, "I'll do this puzzle to cheer you up!"

At the coffee place When you work at home with a four-year-old who has had no preschool for a month, you get to the point of wanting to fling yourself out into traffic. But you can't do that; you're on deadline. Still there are only so many nights you can work until 2:00 a.m. after everyone's in bed and then get up at 6:30 and play a pretend game of "Lifeguards in the Pool" while dispensing Clifford Crunch cereal and positive discipline and playful parenting.

Finally I get a morning "off" at the coffee place, where I have to transcribe three interviews and write an article.

I forgot my power cable.

She's a Title IX out of XX! (via Salon) Wow. Sports Illustrated sure takes women athletes seriously, don't they?

Did you guys know that when she's not golfing, Natalie Gulbis poses in her kitchen with crockery, looking like she's had a transorbital lobotomy? She puts an empty skillet on the stove, changes her clothes, and somehow winds up with a little golf course cake! So THAT's how you make one of those things. Here, I'd been using the oven and then frosting the cake once it cooled and leaving on the same clothes I put on that morning. Silly me.

Mommy Dreariest Marion Winik has a great write-up of Brett Paesal's Mommies Who Drink in the LA Times.

Look, I hate to sound like a broken record, but I would point out (as Marion does) that there are motherhood books out there in the world not about "purse parties, plastic surgery, celebrity yoga classes, movie star sightings and a belief in the life-changing possibilities of a good haircut." That's a whole lifestyle, and I'm not knocking it; what I recommend instead is: choice. If that's your thing, rock the fuck on with it.

However, if you simply don't feel like reading a dishy, splashy Desperate Housewivesy motherhood book, you can find those too. You'll just have to work harder because those authors have never appeared on Six Feet Under or Mr. Show. (Publishers love authors who have.)

Look, I just went to a conference in which women bloggers--especially those "mommybloggers" David Hochman loves so well--were seriously courted by boffo advertisers like GM and Trojan and Johnson's. The power is shifting to the people*, and pretty soon mothers REALLY won't need a celebrity platform to talk in print about their experiences of life. I'm looking forward to that day. I want different kinds of mothers to get into the spotlight besides shopaholic party moms. I have no personal objection to shopaholic party moms (I'm a Savers shopaholic) but it's time to quit hogging the conch. Publishers: Please get that memo. The audiences are out there. Trust me. We've already been Slacker Moms with Three-Martini Playdates, and it's time to start talking about what's next.



*But is it real power? Shit, I don't know. It's as much power as talent has relative to a publisher in print markets. Who knows? Maybe the big advertisers want dishy, splashy shopaholic writing, too. All the better for passive branding.

in Versed veritas Baldo's tooth extraction is complete.

Dr. Dentist dispensed Versed in a suspension of grape Kool-Aid. Baldo went into his Harry Dean Stanton mode, then finally relaxed back into the chair to watch Larry Boy. Oh, yes. Larry Boy--the superhero skein of Veggie Tales. Veggie Tales was never on my wish list as a parent, but it came to us through Baldo's BFF--and his parents are screaming atheists, so make of all this what you will. The kid likes Larry Boy because he has toilet plungers for ears and is a kinder, gentler superhero. And you know, I would have juggled poodles to make this dental visit easier.

So there you have it.

Dr. Dentist was impressed by Baldo's ability to "read while drunk." He comes by that skill honestly.

And now...! I give to you my BlogHer story. Which makes me the last person in the world to comment about BlogHer. It's a print thing.