Confessions of a stay at home drama queen

Maybe Jason is right.

Maybe I just have way too much time on my hands to just... think. I've always thought of myself as an analytical person, and I would be ashamed of myself if I weren't candidly honest that YES I have always thought way too much, analyzed far too often, and scrutinized the details of my life for as long as I can remember.

Exhibit A would be the collection of ten journals paging through my life since second grade when all I could account for was recess flirting episodes with Jordan. Exhibit B would be the dozen parenting books I've accumulated over the past three years that I don't think my mom acquired in 30 years of raising me and my brother. I guess my hyperanalytical tendencies also reveal my English major in college when I was down right expected to pick everything apart into deep thought.

So what is it this time?

Embarrassingly enough, again it is the damn vampire saga that has its grips on me. Was. Yes, Twilight, books one through four. Over the summer I submersed myself in the writings out of pure curiosity, and was engaged enough to read it at a painstakingly fast pace that emptied my ibprofen bottle to aleviate headaches resulted from reading four-hundred pages a day.

Why then? Why now? I'm addicted to what some have noted as girl porn. Hilarious, right?

Well allow this romance novel phene to elaborate. I was halfway through the third novel this past week when I found myself stealing time away from the kids stacking blocks or going-to-school-to-visit-daddy pretend play so I could return to Edward Cullen's monologues to Bella Swan declaring his chivalrous idealizations.

"You see, Bella, I was always that boy. In my world, I was already a man. I wasn't looking for love-- no, I was far too eager to be a soldier for that; I thought nothing but the idealized glory of the war that they were selling prospective draftees then-- but if I had found... I was going to say if I had found someone, but that won't do. If i had found you, there isn't a doubt in my mind how I would have proceeded. I was that boy who would have-- as soon as I discovered that you were what I was looking for-- gotten down on one knee and endeavored to secure your hand. I would have wanted you for eternity, even when the word didn't have quite the same connotations."

Sigh. Reading this completely fictitious literature from an idyllic character such as Edward Cullen left me phening for more. A modern day Romeo. While reading through this my stepdaughter made mention, as she did this summer, that she and her friends didn't want to date in high school unless the guy was a glimmer of Edward. I was stunned for a moment and absorbed her thought. Edward is the quintessential romantic man comprised of countless alluring attributes so hey, why not pass up the normal warped high school boy until Mr. Edward comes along? Perhaps she had a point.

On the other hand is there a self destructing prophecy here? Are young women deluding themselves with "something with no literary or artistic value other than to stimulate desire” which is what pornography simply is according to the Webster’s dictionary definition? Except the difference here is women are being misled by female escapism, vicariously seeking a romantic fairy tale of our own when in reality fairy tales are fictional. Purely. Are women setting themselves up for failure searching for a new standard of the ideal man?

I'd be lying if I said I wan't stunned by the idea of Edward. I am certainly not alone [as you sit there shaking your head at the computer screen in disagreement]. Really-- there are Facebook pages devoted to people who have unrealistic expections of relationships now as a result of becoming addicted to Twilight [I write that as if FB is quantifying anything]! I mean, this is female escapism on a completely different level, and it's one thing to obscure my own mind with hopes that Jason would one day recite lines of Romeo and Juliet as easily as he normally would recount the first five plays of Penn State's last football game. But he is not Edward and he would not watch R&J with me nor have the knowledge to whisper the lines to me like Edward, a la New Moon. And that's okay... because Jason is a real live man and most men I know don't suck blood either, so I'm fine with that.

I'm not proclaiming chivalry is dead but I am trying to reign in my thoughts a bit about the reality of expectations in relationships, and maybe trying to unveil them to my stepdaughter too.

Okay maybe more to myself.

Just as soon as I finish Breaking Dawn.

Oh, to be 14. Or pregnant. Just not both. Or either really.

I don't know why it is that when you become pregnant for the first time that suddenly any tiny tid bit of personal information regarding the little peanut growing in your uterus becomes public domain.

Cart blanche on Twenty Questions? Can you really see yourself asking a woman in the grocery store, who is by no means pregnant, how much weight she's gained in the past forty weeks? Put a prosthetic belly under her shirt and suddenly the gloves come off.

No, I am totally not with-child. Not in the least. I'm loving the idea of sporting a bikini for the summer even if it does invite questions like, "Aren't you, like, Justine's stepmom?" Teenager for "Are you stoned out of your mind? Where do you get off thinking you can wear anything besides a moo moo to the pool? Enter motherhood, exit mid-drift revealing clothing."

Over the past few days I've exchanged conversations with people who were thinking of becoming pregnant, and so were curious about my two-fold journey down that lane. How much weight did I pack on? How did I manage to get my little darlings to sleep through the night without having to stuff a pillow over their face? Did I swell up like a balloon at the end of my pregnancy? What kind of birth did I have? Did I tear? Drugs, did I use them? [Yes, quite heavily as a matter of fact.]

But I think it's the most absurd yet equally amazing thing that pregnancy and kids can truly tear down the walls of ambiguity, and break out the sentiments of brutal honesty. When you enter into pregnancy, you become a part of this secret society of motherhood where you realize you all go through similar journeys to bear children, your hearts bleed the same as you experience heartache together, and likewise can totally relate to the necessity of scrutinizing your child's poop for about the first four years from infancy to toddler. Unbelievable.

Then I sit next to one of these grown up babies at the pool yesterday. A clan of teenagers, in fact. Something I fear and loathe my boys to become. Worse yet: something my boys will like.

As the valley girl clique readied to sunbathe beside me, I stumbled through Sense & Sensibility, while one of the five vixens bared her bikini body for all the rest to see. I didn't look up. Their squeals pierced my ears and made me burn my eyes deeper into Austen's novel even though I cannot get past the nineteenth century lingo.

"OOOOOOOooohmigod. Seeeery-us-leeeee, your boobs look huge!"
Eh, what?

"I know, right? Aren't they uuuuh-may-zing?!"

Then I revert in my mind back to the cart blanche mode, that I also inherited since having children. And I realize that she's not pregnant and so I can't ask her a brutally honest question like, "Sweetheart, if you only knew where your leopard print bikini, 32DD boobs, navel ring, and naivete are going to take you in life you would be so inclined to keep your nose in the books instead of the help wanted ads for the adult film industry, right?"

No, no. She's something far different than a pregnant woman. She's a teenager, and unfortunately she's quite the opposite. Her demeanor invites all the questions like the former, but she however is more cunning and will deliver no answer.