"I Am"

By Jen Wilson Lloyd

I am 'supposed' to be exercising, but I feel like I just took a shower and I never know where the next one is coming from. My twin two-year-olds are napping, thrown into a deep somnambulism by the air conditioning after I walked them through an entire zoo this morning. It was a plan born of the sole intention of achieving this very peace and quiet. So now, triumphant, I am checking my email and eating Thai peanut sauce with a spoon. The latter is a habit taken up in lieu of any Bangkok market vendors set up outside on my absurdly white bread suburban street. I used to live in the city, and I used to eat a diet made up predominantly of Thai take-out, sushi, goat cheese and wine. Now I eat the crusts left over from peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. I had once actually believed that you could convince your kids to eat crusts; that people were indulgent in cutting them off and so children developed these wild habits of avoidance. Now I know better. You can as well force a two-year-old to eat something they are set against as talk a cat into water.

I became a cat owner when I moved in with my husband. I never felt much affinity for cats, and whiel this one is as good a cat as you can find, I often find myself treating him with my own dose of reserve. I pet him, because he meyowls and tells me to, but it is usually with some resentment. Being a mother has made me bad with plants, and detatched from many animals I used to care deeply about at first sight. I am hoping this is a temporary state based on a depletion of energies and that once my children get older I will again be the warm pet adopting woman vegetarian I started out as. For now I am a mom who wears black and plans trips to Mexico to be taken as soon as school starts for them in 2011. I can only hope the world will not expire a year later as everyone is predicting. But that would excuse my lack of hours spent on a recumbant bike, I suppose.

Jennifer Wilson is a Pennsylvania-based writer, and the mother of twins. Check out her website and other writing at: www.jennifermwilson.com