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MOM
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CULTURE:
Army of Darkness
by Marrit
Ingman
I’m just going to go out on a limb and say something here. Raising children is a lot like fighting zombies.
I should point out immediately that despite their similarities children and zombies are to be dealt with differently. For zombies you need a shotgun and a flamethrower. Don’t use these things on your children. For children are the zombies you don’t kill—you feed them and raise them to a state of full personhood while they try to eat your brain.
In their weakest nascent state they eat from your body and befoul you with their vomit and waste. Their bodies are floppy and the bones of their skull aren’t quite fused yet. But we love them and put tiny caps on them, funny T-shirts sometimes. Everybody takes turns holding the newborn zombies, walking them around if they get fussy. The zombies’ muscle systems begin to mature. They sprout a set of primary teeth, which they use to bite their peers, pet animals, and parents unless retrained. Soon the zombie will indicate his or her preferences clearly and begin developing spoken language. The zombie will mix socially with other zombies and engage in parallel play.
As the zombies age, they attain a more clearly human aspect. In most cases their projectile vomiting and self-befouling ceases. They develop empathy for others and can perform simple tasks around the house. As their emotions become more complex, the zombies might reciprocate a parent’s displays of fondness, or they might call the parent an oblique but insulting epithet, such as “stupid toxic waste” or “a moth with nothing to eat,” and refuse to leave the family garage.
The zombie transforms into a proto-adult during a painful and humiliating process known as puberty. The zombies attain secondary sex characteristics and outgrow shoes rapidly. They may attempt to learn foreign languages, and many join social clubs. Pubescent zombies can be persuaded to maintain their own hygiene; some zombies, indeed, display a particular aptitude for fashion. By this age the zombies move about freely, except in areas where a curfew exists.
Maybe it sounds like an unloving comparison, or at least an insulting one, but think again: We all entered the world as zombies, and as zombies we’re going back out. In between, we struggle to survive each other. That’s what humanity is all about. Zombies.
When parents have a child, they have contributed one more body to a global zombie onslaught. Don’t panic. A global zombie onslaught isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It sure makes a movie better. The trick is managing the outbreak by keeping yourself human while your zombie or zombies transform. The future of the world rests in the small, clenched, and sometimes flung fists of your zombies. Just don’t panic.
(continued at right)
Sometimes that’s what it takes to get people
through the day. Fighting a zombie onslaught is serious business. If you are
actively working to make a difference in the lives of children, you are
fighting a zombie onslaught. If you spend a majority of your day in the
company of one or more zombies, you ought to maybe get a little sticker or
something, like you do after you voted. “I Fought the Zombie Onslaught!”
You could put it on your diaper bag or your teacher name tag or whatnot. And
if you really wanted to, you might adopt a Buffy-like persona to keep your
imagination active. You might let yourself be a little more badass, because
you know motherhood is a lot less like Desperate Housewives and a lot more
like Army of Darkness (they
got the campy part right, at least).
Having children changed the way I saw
the scene in which Bruce Campbell’s shattered reflection in the broken
mirror turns into several little miniature versions of him that come to life
and torment him. Was this absurd male birth scene some kind of Lacanian
feminism? Many times I’d imagine myself as Ash, poked in the eyes and
prodded, while playing with my toddler, my tiny and at times malicious
mirror-image. Some afternoons I was certain I’d split into good and evil
halves if a certain fire truck drove in my hair one more time. Those are the
days you just get through.
It’s also important to intermingle your zombie
with other zombies. If you can herd them, the zombie-onslaught burden is
better shared, perceptibly reduced. See if you can get the talkative
four-year-old zombies together, for example. They will amuse each other, and
the survivors can take a minute to get squared. Check the boards on the
windows. Count your blueberries. Steal some propane tanks. Maybe have a
montage of it all.
“Of course you need a village to raise a
child,” I heard my own mother say recently in conversation. “You have to
outnumber them.”
You do what survivors do: you band together. Take
over a hardware store if you can. Board the windows so zombies don’t crash
through them. (As soon as my son was old enough to scoot toward the picture
window in our living room, he was trying to crash it). See to the injured and
get everybody fed. Make sure nobody’s going mental, nobody’s going to
make a run for it, nobody’s going to do anything dumb. Everybody’s cool?
Good. What have we got then? Two slings, a bottle of gripe water, The Magic
School Bus Plants a Seed, size 3 unbleached diapers and an old one in the bag
that might be a size 2. Everybody protect the lactating mothers. And don’t
spill the Veggie Booty. That’s the last of the bag.
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About the Author:
Marrit Ingman is a freelance writer, film critic,
occasional educator, and constant mother. She is a
frequent contributor to the Austin Chronicle, and her
writing on popular culture has also appeared in Brain, Child, Fertile
Ground, Alternet.org, Clamor, and Venus. Her first book,
Inconsolable: How I Threw My
Mental Health out with the Diapers, describes her
experience with postpartum depression and was
published in 2005 by Seal Press.
