Emma's Mixtape

This is Bianca, my oldest friend in New York, who is forever going round having babies. Okay, this is only her second. Her first, Miles, is just learning to talk (in French, Spanish and English, naturally) and I love hearing them go back and forth with each other because, living in LA, I so miss east coast accents. Example (mother and child playing with a toy):

Miles: "Gimme!"
Bianca: "FUH-gedda-boud-it!"

With her black hair, braids,rose and red lips, Bianca may look like Frida Kahlo, but, I swear she sounds like James Gandolfini.

(I want to know: when you become a mum, do you automatically get mom-skillz or do you work for them? I stayed with a girlfriend whose cat had a right old feel of my eyelids in the night, and I was too sleepy to push it off the bed. In the morning my left eye was totally bloodshot and swollen. Everybody said "Rinse with saline", "Go to the doctor", "Use droplets from Wholefoods" and Bianca was the one who said "Rinse that motherfucker with water and do not stop until I tell you" - like I said: Tony Soprano. Anyway, it worked. Completely. Just lots and lots of water. That was a pretty boring story, but I am genuinely interested about whether your wisdom hormones morph with child birth, because we surely did do some really dumb things when we met ten years ago).