This Little Mommy Stayed Home A Novel

by Wilde, Samantha

• ISBN13: 9780385342667
• ISBN10: 0385342667
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2009-06-23
• Publisher: Bantam

Summary

The Mother of all Motherhood novels. In this riotously funny, ruefully honest, and irresistibly warmhearted debut, Samantha Wilde writes about one new mother who discovers the wonders and terrors of motherhoodone hilarious crisis at a time. For new moms, potential moms-to-be, and anyone who just wants to (wisely) live the experience vicariously... New mom Joy McGuire hasn't changed her sweatpants since her baby was born. Of course she's crazy about her newborn son; it's her distracted, work-obsessed husband and his impossible mother she can't stand. Joy turns to her own mom for support, but she's too busy planning her fourth wedding to a suspicious self-help guru. Sure, Joy's a woman on the brink, but it's nothing a little sleep, sanity, and chocolate can't fix. Until her old college boyfriend shows up at their ten-year reunion. The one she was still in love with when she married her husband. It must be the lack of sleep, because Joy is starting to think she might have ended up with the wrong man. Not to mention she's obsessed with her sexy yoga instructor, who might just be interested in her. Joy used to be single, skinny, and able to speak in complete sentences, but who is she now? As she's trying to figure that out, her husband goes missing.... Frank, bawdy, and full of keenly self-aware observations, this novel tells the story of one new mother, three men, one marriage, and the baby love that keeps us up at night

Author Biography

A graduate of Smith College and Yale Divinity School, Samantha Wilde is a yoga teacher and a minister. The mother of two born within twenty months of eachother, she lives in Belchertown, Massachusetts, where she uses nap times to work on her next novel for Bantam Dell.

Excerpts

Chapter One


I KEEP SLIPPING UP AND SAYING POSTMORTEM WHEN I mean postpartum. I’m two weeks postmortem now, so I guess I shouldn’t expect more of myself. It’s like my hormones are playing Pac- Man with my brain cells—eating them, one by one. But is that really the worst thing in the world? Not by a long shot. The worst thing in the world is the feeling I have every time I sit on the toilet. If I reach down I can feel my perineum dangling just above the water line. (If you don’t know what your perineum is, lucky you. There are some body parts better left to obscurity.) The doctor who stitched me up didn’t mince words: “There,” she said, completing her work. “Now it looks like a vagina again.”

 What a relief, then, that it looks like a vagina and not, say, like an Australian sheepdog or a jar of moldy marmalade. I should be so grateful! I hadn’t realized I could have walked out of the hospital with an etching of one of the presidents between my legs, like at Mount Rushmore. Or maybe it was more like Alice Cooper or another scary rock star way past his prime. What’s black and blue with hair all over? Or maybe it wasn’t black and blue from my son’s overeager exit. Maybe it could have still made it into a book of feminist art, still looking like a pink orchid, just perhaps a new long- petaled variety? I’ll never know what that doctor knew. Shucks. 

At any rate, I’d imagine a vagina is a good thing for a vagina to look like. I haven’t personally looked at it lately. I’m trying to medicate its existence away with the hard-core drugs the hospital gave me (Ibuprofen). I have a friend who did theOur Bodies Ourselvesknow- yourself- better- labialook- squat over a mirror at one week postmortem, and I don’t think she ever recovered. She said it looked crooked, misplaced, like her vaginal lips had migrated to her inner thigh. It was funnier than theVagina Monologues,she told me, except she didn’t have the heart to appreciate it, since, after all, it washervagina giving the monologue like a fat old man with a lisp—not really the character you’d want your vagina to play in the show, if given the chance. 

My husband hasn’t bothered to check out the netherlands either. I would venture to guess he hasn’t bothered to check out anything during his free time besides his Xbox and whatever large- breasted woman he can find on local cable. I don’t mean anything against him. He can’t help it, he’d rather be at work. I just mean to say: I CAN’T STAND HIM. 

Am I screaming? I shouldn’t do that. I’ll wake the baby. Oh, God, I love that baby. I guess I only have so much love in my heart. There’s no more room for anyone else anymore. Which is a surprise, since my breasts and my chest have all expanded so radically I could develop a new career in a carnival sideshow. My husband, the master of making lemonade out of—well, melons—took advantage of the moment of what is called engorgement and took pictures of my breasts. That’s the time when your milk first comes in and each breast weighs more than the baby doubled. Hey! I guess my husband hasnoticed me since “the great event.” Or parts of me, anyhow. I love having a new baby. No, really, as much as it sounds like I don’t, I do. It beats every other job I’ve had: shelving books in the library (college), catering (postcollege) and, my most recent, real adult- job, freelance editing (something to do with my English degree). Motherhood&rsqu

---

Excerpted from This Little Mommy Stayed Home by Samantha Wilde
All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.