Kids these days!

Sometimes I listen to kids these days and think, “Why are you SO dramatic?”  I mean, you’re 22 years old.  Whatever’s happening to you is temporary.  You just learned how to poop in the potty and sing the alphabet song.  Take a deep breath, eat a handful of sourpatch kids, and chill out.  OMG!  You pierced the wrong nostril, and it will be scarred FOREVER!  Your boyfriend just dumped you, and he is DEFINITELY the only person in the entire world who will EVER love you.  I mean, he even bought your dog a sweater and told you your muffin top was sexy.  That is TRUE LOVE!  You absolutely detest your job and, as studies show, you will certainly stay with this company for the next 45 years.  And you picked the WRONG ONE.  YOU IDIOT!!!  Just kill yourself now.

You probably can’t tell from my tone, but I’ve actually been feeling a bit patronizing and condescending about the whole thing. 

I just stumbled upon an old journal while cleaning out my back room.  At the time I wrote this, I was working as a public accountant in Chicago.  Oh, and I happened to be 22.  Each day I dressed in my navy blue suit, put my heels into my bag, slapped on some running shoes, rode the el into the loop, schlepped into the firm, sat at my desk, and waited for someone (please, anyone at all!) to give me something to do.  See, I started the job in September, but they were actually just packing the firm to get ready for tax season.  So I, along with the other ten new-hires, did absolutely nothing all day.  I studied for the CPA exam from 9am to 5 pm for about 3 weeks.  It was just long enough to realize that I hated dressing in a navy blue suit (with nude panty hose!  Gross!  WTH are those for anyway???), throwing on grubby tennies, and riding the el to sit in a cubicle where I then spent the day learning how to pass a test that would enable me to do this FOR THE REST OF MY LIFE.  At the beginning of week 4, I joined the gym next door to the firm and bought a notebook and a multi-track cassette recorder.  That way I could work out a few times a day and spend the rest of the time writing lyrics at my desk.  Then I’d go home at night, compose the music to accompany the lyrics, and record it all.  Sounds like a pretty sweet gig, right? 

Anyway, here’s a random sample of some of the lyrics in the notebook I found:

I watch the time tick by

As I’m locked up this little cage

Doing what they say to earn my measly take-home pay

“Honey, you’re smart. 

Obey directions and dress for the part.”

So I smile through the day

In this façade it’s the part that I play

And now I’m stuck wishing my life away

There’s a massive hole in my body where I once had soul

And I can’t stand that I sold myself, and now I work for the man

I don’t know why

Can’t think of one reason, I said

To keep this body alive

When my spirit is dead.

I’ve got a gun in mouth

Got a knife at my throat

I’ve got all the gas turned on

This is my suicide note.

As you can see, I knew this was a step along the way in the journey to becoming me and nothing at all to get all worked up about.  I also had reasonable feelings about my love life.  I knew that, at 22, it’s all just fun. You get to know a few people, go on exciting dates, and casually enjoy meeting new personalities while blossoming into adulthood. 

Oh, here’s another song I found.  I think it’s about one of the adorable boys I was dating:

Now I want to hit you

I want to kick you

I want to drag your body down

Every bit as far as you’ve managed

To drag my spirit down.

You see,  I was just a sweet, rational 22 year-old girl with a clear perspective about my life.  But kids these days…..Yikes.  Get a grip!

Why I Don't Have More Than 2 Children

Whenever I hear the theme song from The Backyardigans, I have to run to the nearest bathroom for fear that I’ll puke too much to actually be able to swallow it. Because, it’s a sure thing; I’m gonna vomit. I mean, don’t get me wrong.  I absolutely respect Tyrone’s inquisitive nature and try to emulate Uniqua’s adventurous spirit, but just the first four bars of, “Your backyard…,” and I’m running for the John.  

I don’t understand women who say they love being pregnant.  And, what I mean by “I don’t understand” is that I want to punch them in the face.  I mean, I’m not normally violent (Well, not since about 2^nd grade anyway, but just don’t sing about my underpants and various Western European countries and I won’t have to give you a left hook), but if there was a scale of unfairness with 1 being paying for the cable service you have cancelled five months in a row and 10 being my personal you-wake-it-you-take-it sleeping baby rule, women who love pregnancy would be a negative 6,829.  Screw it, they might even warrant a negative 6,830.  Dead serious.

It took me about four years of pregnancy to end up with my two little heartbreakers, and every minute of it was Hell.  People who knew me during that five-year period (It felt at least an extra year longer) don’t even recognize me at all at this point; not even if I’m speaking.  And I have a cartoon voice, so it’s pretty hard to misplace me once I open my mouth.  At one point I was teaching elementary music classes.  I remember putting the trashcan next to my chair, placing my elbows on my knees and my hands on my face and asking (eyes closed), “Who wants to sing their favorite song?”  “Great, Juan.  Let’s all sing ‘Snail Snail.’”  Imagine this in the most mono-toned robot voice possible.  Then we went around the room until all 34 of my five year-olds had gotten a chance to request their favorite song.  If you’re a parent or a teacher, you know exactly which song was requested.  Yep, thirty-four snail lovers.  Well, that’s with the exception of Sarah.  That little one just replied with, “Music Teacher, I need a beer.”  I didn’t care.  Just let me almost sleep and run from the room once every seven minutes to vomit just outside the doorway.  Then there were the days the kids would arrive to music class to find a sign on the door that read, “Extra P.E. day!”  Thanks, coaches.  I’m fairly certain I would have died without you.  I would be curled up moaning in fetal position on the same carpet upon which the kindergarteners had all just wiped their boogers and stomped their muddy feet.  No big deal.  I’m just gonna barf on it anyway. 

One horrid night my husband, who was under strict orders to never eat inside the house and to take a post-meal shower before getting within a mile of our neighborhood, decided it would be okay to cook a frozen pizza since I was already asleep.  After a trip to the E.R., two bags of IV fluids, and extra doses of both Zofran and Reglan, he promised to never eat again.

So where do Tyrone and Uniqua come in?  The summer that Big Boy was 18 months old, and I was pregnant with Little Guy, all I could do was lay out the couch and press the remote.   BB was hooked on The Backyardigans, and to say I was obscenely thankful for his obsession would be an understatement.  Granted, I felt like a complete failure of a mother.  It reminded me of my friend Judy who gave up drinking after being so hung-over that she played fetch with her one year-old and a box of Cheerios for an entire Saturday.    The main two differences were that I could blame my poor mothering on my husband and the naughty things he had apparently done to me, and my hangover lasted A LOT longer.  Anyway, although I’m quite finished reproducing (than you very much), when that show comes on, my head’s straight back into the toilet.

So, if you’ve got a sweet little bun in your oven, and it all feels like unicorns, rainbow, and butterflies are frolicking in your womb, maybe just try to look a teeny tiny bit green and miserable when you see me.  And if you end up with horribly cracked and blistered nipples, I promise not to tell you all about the peacefully transcendent bonding I experienced through the joys of breast feeding.

Yellow-Bellied Motherhood

 “Break my bloody leg!  For God’s sake, just break the f$#king thing!”    This was the desperate plea of one of my twelve companions on our journey to the top of the Franz Josef glacier in New Zealand. I was climbing virtually straight up a glacier, wearing non-insulated cramp-on boots, and carrying an enormous 4-pronged pickaxe.  It hit me that everyone directly above me was carrying these identical lethal weapons and had no more experience than I did. Someone was most likely about to fall, plant a giant steal prong straight through my brain, and knock us all down the glacier like dominos.   I may not have voiced my preferences, but I was certainly game.  Hell yeah.  Break her leg.  Jus trip it off!  Break all of our legs!  Let’s do this thing!  We had a choice of paying $285 each to fly in a chopper to the top of the glacier and explore the caves or $65 to rent these fancy shoes and steal spears and chop out footholds to climb our way to the top. Apparently once the decision was made, it was final. 

 

If ever there was a time I should have released my iron-fisted grip on some green...

So when, at halfway up, our British friend finally freaked out about climbing 80 degrees up sheer ice covered in an inch of flowing water with 200 foot crevasses on either side, her behest for the helicopter to come to the rescue fell on deaf ears.  ”That helicopter is only flying to the middle of the climb if someone’s leg is broken.”  Well, Kiwis are crazy.  I’ve only spent a month in their country, and I mean it in the best way possible, but they’re total whack jobs.  Anyway, knowing that, I figured our guide might just agree to her request and give her a quick kick to the knee-cap.  No such luck.  We somehow managed to hobble our way down, which was actually much more frightening than climbing our way up (perhaps due to the continual screams of terror and begs for major physical damage).  By the time we reached the ground, seven of my toes were black, but no one lost a limb, so I figure we faired well.   From that point on in life, I never took dangerous risks.  I learned my lesson.  I always wore my helmet, never crossed at a red light,, and always put paper down before I sat on any public toilet seat.

Well, I guess there was that one time…

Okay, so there were many times.  For example, when my girlfriends and I got chased to our car after a night out in Uptown Chicago, only to find it had been busted into and robbed.  I decided it was a much better idea to ride the el there in the future.  So the next time, I rode the el there and got mugged while I waited on the platform to catch a ride back at the end of the night.  Well, then I realized what really made the most sense was to ride the el there and then roller blade back home at the end of the night.  So that was my routine moving forward.  I mean, a girl’s got to go to the Green Mill, right?

A few other terrifying examples come to mind, but my mother might read this and getting grounded in your late 30’s is nothing short of humiliating, so I’ll just leave it at that.

Anyway, this all came flooding back yesterday as I was swimming in a near-dry river with my 3 year-old and LOST MY MIND because he was head first approaching a 4-inch waterfall into an 18-inch pool.  “Turn him around so he’s on his bottom!  He’s only used to making that drop feet first!”   Of course he was wearing a life jacket, water shoes, goggles, a hat, and an entire bottle of pediatrician-approved sun block, all of which he had adorned after finishing an organic, locally grown lunch over 30 minutes prior to swimming.

That’s when it hit me.  Motherhood has made me a wussy.  Oh no!  Am I going to raise wussies too?  Will they be those weirdos who spend their lives only making right turns when they drive?  Are they going to invite me as their date to prom?  I feel a panic attack coming on.   What if it’s already too late?  Does anyone know of any sky-diving or crocodile-wrestling summer camps for toddlers? 

Stinky

My best friend sold her car because her cat peed on the backseat.  This urination occurred in July, so she made me drive her everywhere until the weather turned cold in October (I obviously wasn’t living in the south at the time), so she could sell the car to some unsuspecting buyer who wouldn’t know the gravity of their error until the spring when the humidity brought the scent to the surface and made the car once again undriveable for anyone with an even slightly functioning olfactory sense.  See, when we couldn’t clean the smell out of the upholstery, we tried covering it up.  But it just ended up smelling like roses a cat had peed on, vanilla cat piss, cigarettes dipped in cat urine and then smoked, etc.  You get the idea.  I always felt badly for the person who bought that car.  They had no idea their social life was about to come to an abrupt end as soon as the snow thawed the following spring.  I mean, I remember when my mother accidentally locked the cat in my closet for three weeks when we were out of town.  She somehow survived, but she ripped all of the clothes down off my hangers and peed on every single item.  Most of it ended up at Goodwill, but Mom was particularly distressed that my brand-new winter coat was among the ruined items.  After she had it dry cleaned twice, she gifted it to my unsuspecting grandmother.  (I, of course, had refused to get within 10 feet of any of it).   I had a couple of guilty moments where I almost told her, but then I rationalized (as I assumed my mother had) that she would only wear it when visiting us in Illinois (since she lived in Texas where a goose down jacket is about as useful as an umbrella in death valley) and we’d be almost the only people to notice that Grandma smelled like cat piss.  

 

 I hadn’t thought of this for at least 15 years, but all of the sudden it seemed like the perfect (and perhaps only) solution to my problem.

I was attending a graduate class at a university about 40 miles from our home in central Texas.  It was an intensive 3-week course, so class lasted each day from 8:00 am to 4:00 pm.  This was the hottest summer in recent Texas history, and we were hitting 105 or higher every day.   I’d drive the hour to school, park about a half mile from the building where the class was held, attend class, and then melt as I trudged back to my car while carrying my computer and about 6,847 pounds of books and notebooks.  Well, one day I got into my sweltering car and noticed a funky smell.  I looked around and didn’t see anything, so I drove home and forgot about it pretty quickly.  The next morning, I got into my car and noticed a stronger funk.  You know, like particularly pungent camembert or gym shoes some teenaged boy wore without socks to play basketball for a couple of days in the row (those two things smell the same, right?).  Up to this point I haven’t told you what kind of car this is.  It’s a Miata, folks.  Have you ever lost something inside a Miata?  Not possible, right?  I looked under the seats, on the little ledge behind the seat, in the glove box, and….done.  Nada.  What are you gonna do?  I just drove to class and tried to ignore it.

            When I left class that afternoon, it was 107 degrees.  One of my classmates joined me as we walked back to the parking lot.  When we were about 20 parking spaces from our cars (she was parked right next to me), it hit us.  There was a dead body in the parking lot.  OMG, what were we about to discover?   I remembered that funeral home in Ohio that got busted for not really cremating bodies but actually throwing in a creak out back.  Were we about to find a dumpster that served a similar purpose?  We both stopped breathing with our noses and continued toward our cars, shifting our eyes left and right in search of the horror we were surely about to encounter.  Within thirty seconds, it became quite clear that the deceased were being housed in my own car.  Even breathing only through our mouths, there was a barrier about three feet from my car that was almost impossible to breach.  I couldn’t figure it out.  I had searched the entire car (the entire thing just big enough for my purse, myself, my dog, and my Chihuahua) twice! The trunk had little more room than what was taken up by the spare tire, so I never even bothered to use it.  Um, wait…..except 3 nights ago when I went to the grocery store!  Yep, I popped the trunk, and there it was:  an entire raw chicken.  Along with the foul, there were 867,472 flies and twice that many maggots.  Can you smell it?  If you think you can, but you haven’t passed out yet, you can’t.  You just really can’t even begin to imagine the putridity.  Now what the hell was I supposed to do???  I did the only thing I could think of.  I took off my sock, put it on as a glove, picked up the chicken, got in my car, held the chicken out the window, drove until I found a dumpster, and chucked it in.  Then I drove to the nearest car wash and scrubbed the entire INSIDE of my car.  I also removed the carpet from the trunk, threw it in the dumpster at the car wash, and scrubbed the metal trunk.  Did that help?   You would think that would help, right?  Nope, you’d be wrong.  I drove home, in 107 heat, with the top down so I didn’t pass out and kill myself.  Once I got there, I sprinkled the contents of two boxes of baking soda from the fridge into the trunk and onto the seats.  And then I drank about five beers.  Yep, I’m pretty sure it was at least five, because I think it was the fifth that made me think of the Febreeze, so I attacked it with that too.

Did it smell better by morning?  Nope.

When all of that failed to alleviate, or even noticeably diminish, the problem, I suddenly remembered something my husband was always getting onto me about.  “Don’t leave the top down at night!  That cat that always leaves paw prints on the hood will get in and rip up the upholstery or piss on the seats.  You’ll never get that smell out.”  It all came flooding back:  Patricia’s Ford Taurus, Lucy’s piss coat…  Yes, that’s it!  I left the top down, popped the trunk, deposited a nice snuggly blanket, and even threw in a sock full of catnip for good measure.  If you hadn’t quite grasped the intensity of the putrid odor that saturated my car, I hope you now do.  I WANTED it to smell like cat piss instead.   Well, the first night was a big fail, but I was determined to keep it up until I succeeded. 

As it turned out, Walmart had a different plan for my Miata and me.  That next day one of their semi trucks hit and ran me on I-35. Yes, the top was still down because of the stench, and I had no roll bar.  I spun around a few times, hit the retaining wall, flipped upside down, skidded on the top of the windshield until it finally buckled and then skidded on the top of my seat.  Luckily I’m short, so I only skidded on my head the last second.   Although I’m pretty pissed the trucker left me there for dead and Walmart claimed they had no trucks in the area at the time (I was less than 2 miles from a Walmart distribution center and had eye witnesses who also noted it was a Walmart truck), I am ever so grateful to them for allowing me to get rid of my stench-riddled car without having to dupe some unsuspecting soul into the winter purchase of a summer horror.  Thanks, Walmart!

Okay, so this is not my actual car, but it is in fact a smashed Miata.

Ms. Purple Pants

I was standing on the wooden stairs outside of my portable screaming, “Security!” at the top of my lungs, I had to hang tight to the railing, since every time one of the kids threw a desk against the wall, I came really close to losing my balance.  I’m no dummy.  I had learned that technique the first day of school.   Hang tight!  I had also learned that threatening to call the office was more of a dare than a warning.  When I said, “If everyone doesn’t stop yelling and return to your desks when I count to 3,” they heard, “At the count of 3, I want you to scream as loud as you can and throw furniture at me!  If you also throw a pencil at my eye and manage to nail the pupil, I’ll give you twenty bucks!”  What they knew, and I didn’t yet, was that although I had a phone in my portable, they apparently didn’t have one anywhere else in the school.  When I called the secretary, assistant principal, principal, or security office, it would just ring, and ring, and ring.  This was particularly disheartening when, while discussing an eleven year-old student’s failing grade with her mother, she hung up right after informing me that she lived across the street and was coming over right now to “whoop your ass.”  Since I had studied Judo extensively throughout both 1^st and 2^nd grade, and scored a 2^nd place medal in the 56 pound weight class in what I was led to believe (so most assuredly was) the Junior Olympics, I felt confident that I was prepared with a proper response to just such an attack.  I quickly removed my restrictive form-fitting jacket and lunged into action. Of course I mean I lunged straight for the floor, stuffed the jacket under the door to the portable so that no one could peer in through the crack, laid right up against it, closed my eyes and engaged in the deep, diaphragmatic breathing made much more possible now that I was only wearing my cotton-spandex blend t-shirt.   I had two informative conversations the next day.  One:  My grade-level team informed me that situations like this were the reason we were only supposed to make parent phone calls during our weekly team meetings and only if we had one of the security team walkie talkies on us.  Two: that adorable pig-tailed little girl told me her mom said I was a wimp-ass ho and “That’s why I hate this f#$ckin class anyway, bitch!”  When I was deciding what to do about it, I got distracted because I realized that three boys had matches and were trying to light their desks on fire.  They didn’t succeed, but they gave a match to another boy who went to the restroom and set it ablaze.  He was sent to In School Suspension for the rest of that period.  Yep, then he was back.

            I forgot to mention the fact that I was teaching in a portable unit that was shared with another teacher.  It was very much like two classrooms except there was no door between my room and his, so it was actually very much more like one giant classroom.  Oh, and that classroom was located smack dab in the middle of Hell.  So, another hindrance to my teaching geometry, pre-algebra, and (let’s be honest) basic arithmetic, was the horrific, tortuous screaming of my fellow 6^th grade teacher next door. “Shut up!  Open your book!  Don’t light that joint in the room!” I had a few moments of contemplating studying my neighboring teacher’s techniques, but I quickly realized he was having no more success than I was.  Before I had much more time to analyze and perhaps emulate his technique, the desire became obsolete because the stress of the job led him to require a heart transplant operation and he left and never returned.  

            Once that happened, the sub rotation began.  Every day a new substitute teacher rolled in, and every day he or she rolled out by lunchtime.  At that point, I was in charge of 60 plus 6^th grade students at a time.  As you can imagine, it all went very smoothly.  We drank tea (making sure that our pinkies stuck out at just the right angles), and we ate crumpets (with just enough home-made preserve to be tasty but never enough to be obtuse). 

            No substitute EVER  lasted past lunch.  Nope, not a one.  So, every day from noon to 3:00 I was in charge of 60+ 6^th graders who pretty much scared the crap out of me.

            One day, the room next door found a sub who stayed.  Yeah, she even came back after lunch.  Not only did she return, but there was near-silence next door .  Then, she ACTUALLY came back the next day.    What, you ask, happened then???  More silence!  After about two weeks, I couldn’t contain my curiosity.  What was this teacher doing, and why wasn’t I inspiring the same respectful response?  I tip-toed to the edge of the room, hid behind the closet door, and listened.  This is what I heard:  “You talk to your mama like that?  Do you?  Do you?  Well maybe you do.  Here’s what I’m gonna tell you.  If you act like that one more time in my room, I’m not gonna give you a warning and I’m not going to call your mama.  No, I’m gonna go out to my car, get my gun out of the trunk, and pop a cap in your ass.  And that’s the end of that.”

            She stayed the rest of the year.  So did I.  Her side of the room remained silent.  Mine got a little better as we went along.  I was never going to be someone who could scream and yell at or shoot the kids.  If that meant I got furniture thrown at me here and there, that’s just the way it would be.  I focused on trying to get to know the kids individually, listened to their stories when they were willing to share, and tried my damndest to teach a little math along the way. 

One of my students had witnessed a horrific crime when he was 2 and had never spoken since.  One day, at the end of class, he walked up to me and said, “I got a new backpack.”  I responded like it was no big deal but bawled as soon as the kids were gone.  The next day I called on him during class.  “What kind of graph is this?  Samuel?”  It was the first time I’d ever heard that room be silent.  The silence hung there for about half a minute until this little boy responded with, “It’s a line plot.” There were about 3 more seconds of silence and the entire room erupted into cheers and claps.  They had gone all the way through elementary school with Samuel and never heard him utter a word.  Things changed after that.  Even my name changed.  I was no longer “Hey, Miss!”  I was “Ms. Purple Pants.”  My maiden name is Greenslade.  So that went to “Greensleeves”, which turned into “Green Jeans”, and finally “Ms. Purple Pants” stuck.  My classroom was chaos all year, but it was now a good mixture of chaos and respect, and I didn’t have to buy a gun to get there, so that was cool.  Samuel would stay after class every now and then and hang by the door.  I’d have to ask him if he’d like to tell me something and then wait patiently.  Eventually he’d tell me something quick (never looking at me) and then run out of the room with a big smile on his face.  I don’t know why he chose me (my room was the only place he spoke), but that little boy just melted my heart. He also gave me the courage to show up for the rest of the year.

            This is the part where I tell you that every one of those kids aced the state exam at the end of the year and eventually became the world’s most respected team of rocket surgeons while I reconfigured the entire school and was promoted to superintendant of the district a mere two years into my career in education.  In reality, I limped my way through the school year, cried so much that I gave up on mascara entirely, and found a job at a rural school where the kids didn’t scare the crap out of me.  

An Excuse To Get Fat

When I told my 92 year-old grandmother, Lucy, that I was pregnant with Big Boy she said, “Well, don’t use it as an excuse to get fat.”  And that, obviously, totally sucked because it’s the only reason I got knocked up to begin with.  Now that was shot to hell and I was still stuck with morning sickness and non-alcoholic wine (Thanks for trying, but that’s just sad and insulting) for no good reason. 

Now there were definitely two distinctive sides to my grandmother.  Let me explain.  “Lucy, why did you buy a chainsaw for your 90^th birthday?”  “Well, I needed one.  Do you think those limbs are going to trim themselves?  And none of the rest of you were going to buy it for me.”  And here’s another example:  One day, when my brother and I were both toddlers, my mother left us in Lucy’s care for a few hours. When she returned, she found my brother and I (ages 2 and 4) straddling the chimney while we sat on the roof of the two-story house.  Lucy was replacing some shingles and babysitting:  multi-tasking at it’s finest.  Mom was not exactly pleased, and when she expressed her dismay, Lucy said, “Bonnie, don’t be such a titty baby!”  I’ll never forget one morning when our cousin, Brandie joined us at Lucy’s house.  We were all weeding the garden and raking leaves.  Brandie, age 5, said, “Mama Lucy, I didn’t come here to work.  I came here to play.”  Lucy responded with, “I think your mama dropped you off and the wrong house then.  You know where the phone is.  You had better call her and tell her the mistake so she can take you back home.” 

I mean, she may sound a bit terrifying, but she was also wildly inspiring.  I’ll give you two examples that explain why:  When I was 19 years old and living in Champaign Illinois, Lucy showed up unannounced at my apartment and knocked on the door.  She must have been 76 at the time.  I answered the door and said, “Hi Lucy.  What’s going on??”  She said, “Well, there’s not a DAMN thing to do in Texas right now, so I got in the car and figured I’d drive to college.  I’m hungry.  Let’s eat.”  So we went to Bub’s for some pizza, ate Crunch ‘N Munch while we walked home, and then went to sleep.  She left first thing in the morning and drove the 20 hours it took to get back home.  Two years later I announced to my family that I was moving to Australia.  Well, first my mom called and said, “I was invited to attend a conference in Australia.  I wasn’t going to go, but I guess I will.  We can travel together for a few weeks, and then I can leave you there.  Well, when Mom told her what was going down, Lucy replied indignantly, “Well, I am WAITING for my invitation!”  Man, that led to quite a series of events, but my two favorites are theses:  She was so mad the entire trip because, as she put it, “I can’t understand a damn word they’re saying!”  (That reminded me of a trip we took together to the fabric store when I was in middle school. She asked me what color I wanted my shirt to be, and I said, “Red.”  She said, “It’s not ‘red,’ it’s “ray-ud.”  That led to a long debate about how many syllables were in fact in that word and quite a few others.  I digress…She was also mad because we kept finding t-shirts that said, “Melbourne” or “Brisbane” or “Great Barrier Reef.”  She said, “None of my friends know what that is. I just want a bunch of shirts that say, A-U-S-T-R-A-L-I-A with a picture of a kangaroo or a koala bear.”  So while Mom attended inspiring conferences and hiked rain forests with new friends, Lucy and I searched for $6 (No shirt should ever cost more than $6. If it does, you just need to go home and make it yourself) AUSTRALIA shirts (with or without marsupial adornments).

She was obviously tough as nails, so it may sound contradictory, but my grandmother never left the house without her hair done and her “face on.”  And she was beautiful, with or without the fixings, until the day she left us.  She wore just the right make-up to compliment her fair skin and gorgeous blue eyes and made you notice her beauty, rather than her make-up. She always had dyed red hair, and one day I asked her, “Lucy, what color is your hair naturally?”  She replied, “Well, I don’t know.  I’ve been dying it since I was 14, and before that we only had black and white pictures.”  I’ll never forget the day my cousin Jeffrey asked her, “Do old ladies still have to shave their legs, or does the hair just stop growing.”  She PULLED over the car, took off her seat belt, turned around, and replied, “When I am an old lady, I will let you know.”  Yikes.  She used to watch her “stories” every day.  When we were kids and spent the summer with her, we watched them too.  From her commentary, I learned that no woman should dye her hair too dark past a certain age (currently clearing my throat), if you act cheap you look cheap, and it’s never the wrong time of day to wear all of your diamonds. 

Lucy died before my kids were born, and it really makes me sad.  By the time they were this age (1 and 3) she would have had them digging up giant tree roots with pic axes and hoes, mowing the ill neighbors’ lawns, baking vanilla drop cookies, and absolutely dominating every card game of “war” within a hundred-mile radius.

Right after Lucy told me not to get preggo fat, she told me that (at the age of 92) she was going to get knee replacement surgery.  She didn’t know I had any idea what was going on, but my mom had already told me that Lucy had to do some major doctor-shopping to find someone who was willing to perform an elective surgery on a 92 year-old woman with a history of heart disease and heart attacks.  So I asked her why she wanted to do that.  I said, “For God’s sake Lucy, you walk well enough to mow your own lawn with a push mower.  Why do you need surgery?”  She said, “Well, the only reason I can walk is that I’m holding onto that damn mower!”  “Well, why don’t you just use a walker?”  Uh oh.  Wait for it.  Wait for it.  “I will NOT push around a walker like some damned old lady, thank you very much!”  So there you go, tough-as-nails meets the beauty queen.  She made it through the surgery, but she never fully recovered.  Less than three months later she was gone.  It was heartbreaking, but I had never forgotten something she had told my brother and myself years ago.  “If I ever lose my mind and they want to throw me into a home, you just find the biggest cliff you can and roll my wheelchair off the edge as quick as you can.”  In the end, it was another heart attack that got her, and she lived alone in her own home until the day before she died.  There are a million reasons why I wish she were still here, but most of all I want to run naked through her house (in all of my diamonds, of course) screaming, “Hey look, Lucy!  I’m still skinny!”

Fired!

In my last post, I made a point of opening by laying blame on my friend Dominique.  Looking back, I think it was a good jumping off point.   It enabled me to proceed with a clear conscience knowing that my readers understand I am coming from a place of pure innocence and am clearly the heroine.  So, continuing with that theme, I’d like to lay the blame of this latest disaster squarely on the shoulders of my 3 year-old.

I got fired.  Yep, me.  That’s right.  Fired.

I mean, I’ve had at least 6,847 jobs.   I was a  library page (I’ve heard that no one likes a bragger, but I can’t stop myself from revealing that I can rock the hell out of some Dewey Decimal.  I’m throwing that out there.  Bam!  Can you handle it?) , a wing slinger, a barista, a copy machine repair tech, a public accountant (navy blue suit and all), the world’s worst sales associate at Merry Go Round (I actually told teenaged girls with their mothers’ credit cards NOT to buy the pleather pants and fringed bustiers.  Nope, didn’t get fired.), a sandwich maker (I did almost get fired from that one when I cut my hand and had the gall to bleed all over 3 freshly thawed bagels before the owner took me to the local women’s hospital who apparently only deals with childbirth.  Luckily there was a veterinary clinic next door, and they were kind enough to stitch me up and recommend a tetanus shot – presumably to protect me from the knife and not the fact that I just got sewed up at the animal hospital, but what do I know anyway?  I’m no doctor.  Heck, I’m no vet either.), a cigarette girl (My job was going bar to bar handing out free cigarettes, so I went only to the bars with open mics.  I would rollerblade in –oh, didn’t I mention that part of the job?- cut in line to jump on stage and play a few tunes, throw smokes out to the crowd, and then move on to the next venue to be greeted by my fans:  “Cigarette Girl!!!!”  Yes, my mother was so proud.  One particularly lazy night, I changed course and watched a double feature at the Brew N’ View and passed out cigarettes during the intermission.  That ruined that obviously promising career because a man really let me have it about how I was killing people and all of that, so from then on I just picked up cigarettes during the day and stashed them in trash bags under my bed before heading out at night.  I mean, I got paid by the hour, so I obviously still had to go to the bars, right?  Oddly enough, I didn’t have any friends who smoked, so I didn’t know what else to do with them, and my conscience would no longer let me pass them out to unsuspecting victims who assuredly thought they were full of vitamin vapor and dried kale.  Anyway, did Winston fire me?  Nope.), an LSAT, GMAT, and GRE tutor and teacher, a private accountant, a music publishing lackey (I got paid in “smiles” for the first 6 months.  This time it was my dad – who paid for my 300+ hours of college and was now paying my rent- who was super proud), a hostess with the mostess, a private tutor (Whenever the tutoring service got a call for a subject for which they had no tutors, they’d call me.  That’s how I ended up tutoring , among other things for which I have never and will never be qualified, conversational Spanish, the MCAT,  and medieval Icelandic folklore), a public school teacher, heck I even cleaned the kitchen twice a day so I could live for free across the street from a nude beach in Australia (that probably deserves its own post).  I could go on and on, but I will let you know that I was NEVER fired!  Nope, I was never fired until now.

We laugh a lot in my house.  I mean, we don’t just laugh; we guffaw, snort, and convulse.  We also dance.  We dance a lot.  We do NOT dance well.  Good Lord, that is an understatement.  We don’t even dance in any manner that is publicly acceptable.  If anyone saw David and myself dancing somewhere in public, they’d rush to our assistance on the assumption that we were having some kind of synchronized lethal fit.  Anyway, we do those things consistently.  We do not, however clean consistently.  I mean, if you want to have fun, come to our house.  If you want to eat off the floor or sit on something that doesn’t stick to your butt, go somewhere else.  I’m very aware of this deficit, so I hire someone else to clean.  I feel horribly guilty and like a huge failure because of it, but at least it keeps us from contracting communicable diseases within our own home. 

Well, recently I left the house early so that “Sally” (obviously that’s totally her name) could make everything squeaky-clean.  30 minutes later I got a text-essay about how she could no longer keep coming to our house and being miserable and watching all of her hard work be undone each and every time.    I guess I should back up and let you know that Sally had spent several hours over the course of two visits cleaning Big Boy’s red crayon masterpiece off the dining room wall.  I was a bit miffed, but a little less confused when I walked in the door and noticed the GIANT dark blue marker masterpiece now there instead.  “Big Boy, did you do that?”  “Yes, I do!”  “WHY did you do that??” “Cuz Mama wash off my awesome red picture, and blue is my favorite.”  So yeah, Sally fired me.  And it was totally BB’s fault, see?  I wish I could tell you I’m going to be better about cleaning things myself, but I’m not here to lie to you.  So if that’s your thing, you might want to invite us to your place instead (at your own risk, of course).  But if you’re looking for somewhere to laugh until milk comes out of your nose (Yeah, I’d probably clean that one up right away), or if you just want to awkwardly dance next to a giant blue scribbly masterpiece, the door’s open.

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How Much Is Mommy's Cell Phone Really Worth?

First of all, I’m going to have to start by blaming this entire incident on my friend, Dominique.  If it weren’t for her, I wouldn’t have been at Target in the first place.

I’ve come to the realization that I have never had any idea what size bra I’m supposed to be wearing.  In college, I wore a 34D until my roommate, Laura, finally busted out laughing one night after quarter beers at the frat bar and asked me why all of my bras were so baggy.   Being from a family of women with Guinness book worthy breasts, I just couldn’t imagine buying anything smaller than a D.  I honestly hadn’t ever realized I just wasn’t as “blessed” as the rest of my clan.  So, that sent me back to Vicky’s Secret and a C and finally (in my late 20’s finally figuring it out) to a B.  Well, once I nursed babies, I ended up in a 34A, to which my grandmother asked, “Why do you even bother with a bra?  I stopped wearing mine once the dents in my shoulders were 2 inches deep and haven’t looked back since.” I think she and I are having slightly different experiences.  But anyway, I thought, “What the heck?  She’s so right.  Why bother?”  Then my oh-so-subtle girlfriend, Elizabeth, asked me one day, “Heather, are you wearing a bra?” “Nope.”  “Um, are you over the age of 22?”  I’m 39.  I wish a was a strong, feminist hippy, but I guess (in the boob department anyway) I’m still an insecure sorority girl.   

So did I head straight to the store?  Nope, I figured if I’m gonna go, I’m gonna go big!  This is, Texas, isn’t it??  So, I went to the plastic surgeon instead.   I figured I’d have to drop $5k, but I’d have moderate sized boobs just under my chin and warrant a solid sized B bra if, and only if, I chose to wear one for decorative purposes.  Well, it turns out when you start with banana boobs to begin with (thank you College Boyfriend, for the nomenclature), and then shrink from a pretend D all the way down to a real-life A, you are stuck with not the $5k perky package, but instead the $11k lift and “lollipop” scar.  If you don’t know, don’t Google it.  There’s only so much a girl can wrap her head around.  Shnikees.  Anyway, I went straight to the lingerie store and bought the 34 A’s with 8 inches of padding and was feeling pretty proud of myself for the $10,952.87 I had saved until Dominique created that fated post on our local women’s fb page. 

            In the words of Dominique, “The best place to be ‘professionally’ measured for a bra?”  After 27 responses and an informative, yet highly disheartening, blog post, I determined that I am definitely not a 34 A and quite likely a 28D.  The definitive answer could only be found at Petticoat Fair, which is located approximately 42 miles from my house and quite possibly the only store to sell such an absurd size.  Now, this may not sound like a big deal if you don’t have at least two toddlers.  I do.  I have only two, so I hate to complain, but I don’t have any idea how you supermoms with herds even go pee, let alone lingerie shop.  Did I go?  Did I brave it with the boys?  Did I get a sitter to go on this oh-so-vital expedition?  (You’re holding your breath, right?)  Nope.  But I did make a FIRM commitment to make it to Target within the week.  Man, that sounds weak .  It really does.  But I haven’t told you about my 3 year-old cracking his head open, my romantic get-away with the hubby, or all of the crayon I scrubbed off the walls this week.  (Yep, still sounds really pathetic to me too.  Let’s just move on.)

            Let’s get to the day of the disaster.  I teach a 45 minute baby and toddler music class twice a week.  My little guy absolutely loves it, but my big ‘un (3 and  a half) usually needs a good bribe to keep him from throwing himself on the floor in the middle of class and screaming for the ENTIRE 45 minutes.  This may sound shocking, but some mothers aren’t too keen on paying $16 to hear someone else’s toddler scream, “I don’t liiiiiike music class!!!!” for just under an hour.  I know, weird right?  Some people…

            I’ve read the books.  Heck, I was a public school teacher for 9 years.  I know all about positive reinforcement, intrinsic rewards, self-motivation, etc.  So important.  So valuable.  I am a mother now, and I need two 45 minute periods of peace each week.  What does that look like in my new world?  BRIBERY! 

            Well, this week I thought I had it figured out.  I knew I wanted to go to Target.  I also knew that, thanks to Aunt Heather, Big Boy had a new found love (nay, obsession) with fruit roll-ups.  Yes, I bribed my boy to behave during our class so that he would earn some food coloring and high fructose corn syrup.  Did we make it through class without wails of disapproval and screams of torture?  Yes!!!  Yes, we did!  Success!

            You know that, after that enthusiasm and all of those exclamation points, we’re about to head to a dark, dark place, right?  Well, here it goes.

            What did I really want to shop for?  Yep, bras.  Who sells bras AND toddler-bribery-items?  Of course, Target!  I have a couple of more questions for you.  How may fruit roll-ups come in a box?  One?   Nope.  Two?  Not even close.  How many fruit roll-ups do I want my 3 year-old to eat at once?  You know where we’re going here.  Well, first of all, it turns out Target only goes down to a 32.  What’s the biggest cup size they provide for that 32?  B.  That’s right.  I’m looking for a 28D, but I’m in an American big box store, so I’m in the dressing room rocking the only two 32 B bras I can find, when all of the sudden Big Boy finishes his second rainbow striped fruit roll-up and ALL HELL BREAKS LOOSE!  If you’re a parent, you know what this looks like.  He is out of the cart, on the ground, arms and legs flailing, screaming at the top of his lungs, “I want another fruit roll-up!!!” louder than you ever thought was possible.  I put back on my formerly new, but now embarrassingly inappropriately sized 34A and the rest of my clothes, throw Big Boy over my shoulder, push the cart (containing the fruit roll-ups, some peanut butter crackers, 2 squirt guns, and my 18 month-old) with my other arm, and head to the check out.  Obviously the screaming stops immediately.  (If you’re a parent, you realize the gravity of that lie and are snickering as you read).   As Big Boy is screaming for more rainbow-striped HFCS and I am struggling for my credit card while tightening my straight jacket hold on him, I’m putting the roll-up box on the conveyor belt and smiling at the 20 year-old check-out girl who is reminding herself to refill her birth control ASAP.  By the time we make it to the car and I get everyone strapped in, I am black and blue from knees to neck.

            Then what do I notice?  My phone is gone.  I left it somewhere inside the store.  This is when I ask myself the question.  “How much will it cost to replace my phone?”  Because at this point, I don’t think there’s any way I can get myself to unstrap everyone and venture back  into the store.   And the calculations begin.  I’m pretty sure it’s about $700.  Yep, $700 and I’m still sitting in my car debating.  I can drive home right now and they will both be asleep once we get home. Sweet little peaceful angels to gently transfer from car to bed.  Ahhhhhh.  And it will only cost me $700.  Or, I can get them both out again, search the entire Target………..  Big Boy had rolled down his window once I got him into the car and just then my phone starts ringing from inside my empty cart, which is in the cart corral right next to my parking space…..  Save of the century.