Excerpt

I'm getting ready to read at KGB on Thursday. I fleshed out the story of the Drunk Girl in the Bathroom which was on the blog last year which should take about 7 - 8 minutes and then I'm reading a chapter from that book I've been talking about forever.

Here's an excerpt to prove the book is not a figment of my imagination. It's about what I was thinking when Velvet was a tiny baby.

Fortunately, the baby started smiling at me after a few weeks and I finally had moments of tenderness, but it was still like being trapped in the house with someone on acid. He stared at his feet in fascination. He’d be peaceful then start screaming for no apparent reason, completely freaked out by his own stomach growling. Nobody – not the nurses, not the OB/Gyn, not my own mother, my grandmothers, nobody in the books and especially not the other mothers at breastfeeding support group – nobody ever mentioned that it was perfectly normal for a new mother to feel so thoroughly overwhelmed that she might imagine locking the baby in a closet under a few pillows until he stopped crying. So naturally I thought I was the only mother who hated having a baby, and being a grown woman with a nice husband and home, I didn't have a good excuse for giving this baby away like I would have if I were a 16 years old crack whore.

There are lots of things I won't talk about in public because I am afraid people will holler at me. Talking about hating the baby feels just as socially unacceptable, but I have a feeling that lots of people hated it when their kids were infants and will be glad the topic is on the table, although this week at KGB, I'll probably be one of the few people there who is a parent. The audience for Drunken!Careening!Writers! tends to be Gay/Lesbian/Bi Singles. I've seen some straight men there, but the only time I ever got a date from KGB it was with the man who owned the joint which wasn't bad, but it wasn't much either -- most likely because he could be considered sexually ambiguous himself.

Actually, I'm pretty sure some women have mentioned hating the baby in the beginning in recent parenting books or books about women's issues. I'm a woman and I'm a parent, but that's not what the book is about.
As it happens, the book is about sex.
And that's all I'm saying on the internet.