The Worst New Year's Eve Ever

or: i want a man just like dick clark

It’s New Year’s Eve, 1992. I am eight months pregnant with my second child. The first child, Natalie, almost three years old, has a raging fever and sinus infection. My then husband has chosen to take an overnight shift at his job, leaving me home to take care of the sick child on a holiday evening. Holidays are everything to me, and the ringing in of the new year is no exception. I have this idea in my head of a cozy night spent watching Dick Clark usher in 1993, cuddling with our daughter on the couch as we eat hors d'oeuvres and wait for the ball to drop. It has been a tough year for us and it would have meant a lot to me to spend New Year’s Eve together, to say goodbye to 1992 as a couple looking to make 1993 better. Alas.

Instead, I make little snacks for myself and Natalie to eat while we wait for midnight. Of course, there is no way I'll make it to midnight because I'm exhausted, plus the only way to forget that I am so huge that I waddle instead of walk and it takes me about an hour to tie my shoes is to sleep. Forget my daughter. She's on some mixture of antibiotics and cold medicine that knocks her out for hours at a time.

After an hour of coloring and making silly little crafts, I realize I had enough of pretending this is some ideal New Year’s Eve. Natalie is insistent on making a toast at midnight, so when she is otherwise occupied I turn the clock ahead, pretend it's midnight, celebrate the new year with a toast of sparkling grape juice and decided to go cry myself to sleep while thinking about the misery that is my life.

But Natalie has other ideas. She decides that what she really wants to do is to vomit up a pile of medicine, snacks and chocolate milk all over the living room floor. I try not to cry as I attempt to clean up the floor, my very pregnant belly pressing against the rug as I'm on my hands and knees scraping puke from the carpet. Natalie has passed out on the couch. I cry some more. This is not what I envisioned for myself. Not for New Year’s Eve, not for life.

I pick my daughter up while she's sleeping - no small feat for a pregnant woman with sciatica - lay her on her bed and change her out of the vomit-covered pajamas she was wearing. I wash her up and tuck her in and she never flinches, never wakes up even once and I wonder if maybe she's gone into a coma and is suffering from some terrible strain of the flu or a virus that the doctor overlooked, so I stay in her room and make sure her breathing is even and that she responds - even in her sleep - to a small pinch on her arm. She does. I feel bad, but love hurts sometimes, you know?

I go back to the living room and clean up the crafts, thinking it’s just about time to call it an night. I glance at the clock. It's only 8:00. I call my husband at his job to tell him how this night is going but he says he's busy, can't talk and as I go to hang up the phone I hear the sound of a merry party going on in the background and I yell into the receiver I hope you're having fun! I slam the phone down and retreat to the couch to pout and maybe cry some more.

I flip through various rocking and rolling New Year's specials. I'm bored. I'm lonely. I wonder what kind of husband Dick Clark would make. I wonder if his wife gets pissed that he's out every New Year's eve, but then I figure that she's probably in the ABC green room munching on caviar and sipping champagne and saying, Yes I'm Dick Clark's wife in a way only Dick Clark’s wife can. A little smug, I’d guess.

I fall into a light sleep, sitting up with the remote in my hand, and I start to dream about the ghosts of New Year's past, when midnight meant giant swigs of Boones Farm wine that someone stole from their father and a joint passed around with Pink Floyd playing in the background and maybe a stolen kiss, even an attempt to get under my shirt, which I respond to with a kick in the shin. If you're not Dick Clark rockin', don't come knockin'. I think of all the New Year’s Eves I spent at my parents’ house when I was a child, celebrating my dad’s birthday, eating shrimp cocktails, sneaking champagne with my sisters, laughing at the resolutions we make and know we will never keep. There’s no champagne this year, no stolen kisses, no family. Just a sick child and my martyr-complex self.

It is now 10:00 on this miserable New Year's Eve and I decide once again to give up the idea of staying up until midnight. I call my parents to wish them Happy New Year and I sneak in a few well-placed twinges of self-pity, hoping they'll tell me to pack up the kid and come on over to celebrate with them. But my parents have a long-standing tradition - since all of their kids were old enough to be out on their own - that New Year's Eve was their special night and no one was allowed to interfere with it. My father would make steaks and lobster tails and he and my mother would sit in front of the fireplace and sip wine and enjoy the evening alone. We all complied with their wishes because it was our understanding that this was the only night of the year that my father was able to get some from mom. At least that's what he told us.

So I get on the phone and whine and cry and tell them I'm going to bed because I just want this year to end and they wish me a Happy New Year and I hang up with my bottom lip trembling as I try to keep from exploding in the biggest fit of self-pity my family has ever seen.

I put on my pajamas. I settle into bed with Dick Clark and the remote. And then I hear the sound of little feet and they aren't pitter pattering, they are running. Full steam. And they are accompanied by the sound of a three year old girl screaming Moommy! I can't stop the poop! It won't stop! Oh lord.

I get up and catch her just as she's about to slip in whatever she's trailing behind her. Oh, yes. Diarrhea. Bad, bad diarrhea, most likely a result of the antibiotics that I assumed she lost with the vomiting episode. Her pajamas are brown and drooping. It's running down her legs. I scoop her up and run into the bathroom, throw her in the bathtub. It takes about an hour to clean both of us, the kitchen floor and the bathroom. She falls asleep once again on the living floor, I just fall to the floor in tears. Dick Clark stares at me from the tv. Stop your crying, woman! Get up and make the most of what you have! Right.

I go back into the bathroom to wash my face and see that Natalie, who insisted on helping me clean the tub and the floor, threw some of the used baby wipes in the toilet. I flush without thinking. The toilet overflows. And overflows. I try to stop it. I use the plunger to no avail. I call my father. The...toilet...won't...stop! He thinks I've been drinking. He has no idea what I'm talking about and I take his lack of questions as a sign that he doesn't care. I want my sisters to come take care of me. They both have plans. Sorry, you've got to deal with the toilet on your own, sis. There is no way I can convey the misery of my evening to them.

I call the husband while I'm cleaning up the toilet overflow (I finally got the water to stop pouring out) and he asks why I can't take care of anything myself as his work party rages on in the background. I hang up. I cry again.

My mother calls to see how it's going with the toilet. I break out into a long, wailing cry, the kind that Italian grandmothers invoke over the coffins of their husbands.  Nobody loves me! I'm now sobbing and my breath is coming in deep heaves. No...body....loves me! I'm all alone and the toilet won't work and Natalie is losing her dinner from both ends and the baby is kicking me and I smell like poop and vomit and my husband is in New Jersey having the time of his life and I bet Dick Clark would never, ever do this to his wife!

When I'm finally done, my mother heaves a heavy sigh. Fine, come on over. I wrap Natalie in a heavy blanket and we walk across the street to my parents’ house. It's 11:00. I fall asleep at 11:10. I miss Dick Clark ushering in the New Year and when I wake the house is dark and my parent's bedroom is closed so I assume that my dad got his yearly present anyhow, which makes me want to throw up just thinking of it and thinking of throwing up makes me relive the whole sordid evening in my head. I curl up next to my daughter, in the room where I used to sleep back in the day and I wish a whispered new year greeting in her ear. I silently make some resolutions, some that take years to complete, but I do eventually complete them all.

Except for marrying Dick Clark.