karaoke

January 30, 2012 By

During the week, my husband and I pass each other in the house as if we’re both servants in Downton Abbey. We give commands and trade off duties and bargain.  You give baths and I’ll read bedtime stories. You change the boy’s diaper and I’ll get a hot stone massage.  Okay, so I made that last one up.

But we’re busy folks, raising two kids and working and trying to keep our house free of small cars and doll clothes underfoot.    And we both loathe cockroaches, which means we actually have to do dishes and wipe off the crusty food from my son’s chair after dinner and take out trash.  It’s exhausting.  So this weekend, we sent the kids to grandparents.  I’m thinking great wine and late nights and crunchy tacos at 2 am and lots of rated-R movies.  I’m planning on sleeping late and catching up on laundry and taking a hot bath.

On Saturday afternoon, my husband went outside to mow the lawn and I went whistling inside to do some laundry. No snacks and naps and fits and messes.  No one to unfold my sheets and streak up the glass and whine about eating broccoli.  Freedom at last!  A clean sparkling house!

I went inside and stared at the pile of dirty clothes.  That is so extremely dull.  I walked into the kitchen and looked at a dirty pan in the sink.  Yawn.  I’ll do that later.

So I went upstairs and did what normal, healthy, well-adjusted, people-above-the-age-of-twelve do.   Watched music videos. I was having such a fabulous time downloading lyrics and memorizing songs and watching Adele belt out ballads that I stood up in front of my computer with my iphone as a microphone and busted out a great rendition of “Set Fire to the Rain” in my pajamas.   I lowered it a bit so I didn’t squeak out the high notes.  I felt strong.  Powerful.  I could so totally rock this in a bar somewhere.  Maybe I should record a CD and rat my hair up four inches.

Then I heard the back door open.   I felt like a kid caught with a sugar soda and came crashing back to reality.  I cleared my throat, minimized the screen on my computer, and went rushing downstairs to throw some clean clothes from the dryer onto the bed.  Suddenly I had a sullen look on my face as I started to fold them.  My husband walked in, crazy tired from pruning and mowing and cutting down some cedar and washing off the driveway.  I’m not sure why I felt I needed to hide the karaoke session, except for the fact that I’m a grown woman trying to memorize song lyrics in elastic-wasted yoga pants while he was out there working.

“Whatcha doin?” he asked.

“Oh, just laundry,” I said.  I rolled my eyes like I was bored to death.  I think I sighed a little bit.  Shifted my weight from one foot to the other.

“All afternoon?” he asked.

“Well, you know, that and other stuff.  Boring house stuff.”  Like singing Rolling in the Deep at the top of my lungs.  Dancing.  Eating some leftover Christmas candy.  Putting on lip gloss. Drinking a beer at 3 pm for no apparent reason.

He shrugged as he headed to the shower, probably because the dirty laundry was still piled up high.

When my kids get home, I’ll be thrown back into reality.  We’ll all eat our vegetables and read bedtime stories and change poopy diapers.  But for a moment – just a blip in time – I was young again, with no worries in the world, closing my eyes and getting lost in the music.

Here’s to you, Adele.   You totally rocked my Saturday.

Filed Under: Humor, Motherhood, Music Tagged With: , , ,

lessons in carols

December 30, 2011 By

I love to sing.  I sing in the kitchen and in the car.  I sing as I mop and as I dress.  I dictate instructions to my children in song – sometimes changing the key midstream to see if anyone’s paying attention.  You don’t want me all up-in-your-business singing “you came from my womb, now clean up your room, I’ll fill you with doom if you refuse me,” and don’t think my daughter can’t whip out some do-re-me action on a dime.  That’s hard-core training, people.   I can’t wait until my daughter is in junior high so she can fill up her little journal about how her mother is a total lunatic and is so totally unaware of how annoying she is.  Oh I know, sweetheart.  It’s all part of my master plan of totally family domination.  Breaking down spirits with excessive vibrato.

 

Given my natural affinity for song, however, I was naturally pumped to sing a solo at Christmas eve service. I wore black and had a wonderful pianist and stood in front of my church congregation, candles-a-ready, and began.  I was a bit worried about my lip gloss.  Priorities, you know.  But it all started out fine.  It was calm and serene, and after a moment, people started to smile and close their eyes.  It was a story told long ago, about a child born of Mary. A song of peace and new birth.   About pure hearts and renewed spirits.  A song of –

 

Uh oh.

 

Out of nowhere, I hear a bellowing cry from the back of the church. A man is practically falling over himself to escape from the aisle with a child in his arms.  A child who happens to be my son.  After getting a glimpse of his mother at the front of the church, standing alone with a spotlight on her face, he decides to declare to the people sitting around, and the old-folks home next door, and to the Burger King down the street, that his mother is there. In case they didn’t notice.

 

“Ma MAAAAAAAAA!” he shrieks with delight.  “Hi Mama!  Hi Mama!” He is fervently waving with both hands in the air.  He must think I can’t hear him, although the room is silent except for my voice and you can literally hear fabric rub together when someone crosses their legs.  He bumps the volume up a bit.  “Mamaaa!  Mama SINGGGGG!”  He is thrilled at my existence, even though I just saw him five minutes ago. I can see my husband apologize to someone as he barrels past knees and blazers and candles on his way out the door.

 

I try to remain calm.  If Oleta Adams sang this song in front of thousands, I can surely keep it together as my husband takes my screaming son into the foyer. Where, as it turns out, he sees me again on the video screens and starts with a renewed round of heartfelt hellos and fervent waving.

 

All of a sudden, out of embarrassment or distraction, I lost my place.  I was in the middle of a stanza about finding inner peace when I had a panic attack.  I drew out the note, ran through a mental checklist of oh crap, where’s the coda and I freaking sang that part already and I’m screwed, and my kind accompanist just slowed things down like the whole thing was planned.  I smiled and turned the page, which made no sense since it was the wrong page to begin with.  I’m pretty sure I did some sort of corny hand gesture. Awesome.  My husband will never let me live that one down.

 

I had exactly four beats to make a decision, so I just picked right back up, singing the exact same thing I did before, making up additional words when necessary. My daughter, now parent free, is standing in her beautiful Christmas dress at the back of the church just waving at me.  She is beaming with pride.  She doesn’t know I’m sweating and hoping no one noticed I repeated the entire second verse and praying for the song to end.  It finally did, and I sat down with a solemn heart.  What a waste, I thought.

 

But my family was so proud, and my husband laughed so hard, and when it was all said and done I felt that this is what the Christmas story is all about, anyway.  It’s not calm and morose and black and perfect.  Birth isn’t filled with candles and sweet syrupy lyrics and everyone sitting around in navy blazers.

 

Birth is crying and screaming and pushing and sweating.  It’s seeing a part of God come out in human form in front of you.  Your heart is bursting like a water balloon and you feel surrounded and sustained by pure, unaltered, unabashed joy.  Joy at living.  Joy at this child you created.  Joy at seeing someone you love in front of you, not caring how your reaction looks to the world around you.  Thank God for our son, who reminded me of this. Thank God for Jesus, born screaming out the love of God and not caring who heard it.  And thank God for Mary, who probably thought she was screwing it all up.  But she wasn’t.

And that’s the best lesson of them all.


Filed Under: Humor, Motherhood, Music, Religion Tagged With: , , , ,

Cable is evil. And I love it.

November 8, 2011 By

We are living in a quirky old rental while our house is being remodeled. The original place was a single room built in the 1800s with walls eighteen inches thick.  The owners and their forefathers kept adding onto that one room, with bedrooms and bathrooms popping from one single hallway like a branch sprouting new shoots.  To go from the bedroom to the kitchen for a drink of water requires running shoes, and there are light switches in strange places that, instead of turning on a light, actually fire up a heater or turn on an attic fan.  I still can’t muster up the courage to head down into the basement.  My dad went.  He said it was creepy.  But I can’t imagine a more perfect place.  My children now think of it as “the 1826 house” like we just picked up and moved there.  The landlords live about ten feet away in a house adjoined with a breezeway, and they are lovely people.  I brought the landlady so much pumpkin bread that she finally had to tell me to stop because she has a gluten allergy.

The most perfect thing about our rental is not the fact that it has a dug-out basement or that it’s quite possibly haunted or that almost every room has a different type of flooring.  It’s not the grand piano or the fact that the décor contains a large amount of arrowheads or that one bedroom in the house is actually referred to as “the Africa Room” due to the collection of safari memorabilia. The coolest thing is contained within the confines of a little blue cord.  Cable. I am in awe of this majestic invention of technology that we do not possess in our actual home.

Cable is something strange and foreign to the Hill clan, and we all gather around the television like cave men, pounding upon the box with clubs and beating our chests with glee.  It causes the Hill leaders to lose sleep and feel compelled to watch long Iron Chef marathons.  After all – we have a civic duty to see what the hype is all about regarding drunken women in New Jersey whose names sound like baby blankets.

I have grown so attached to the food network that I’ve become irrationally inspired.  I see the way chefs manage to put together entire meals from wheat flour, peas, and fresh tuna, and I feel that despite my lack of formal training I, too, could whip up a soufflé if my life depended on it in thirty minutes.  Because it’s a temporary living arrangement, we didn’t haul our entire spice rack over to our new pad, so the only two spices that reside in our rental kitchen are cumin and cinnamon.  But as you know, if you watch the food network, this should not be a deterrent. With cinnamon, some black truffles, goat milk, and a Wolf range, dessert is so completely done!

So the other night, when I’m staring into the refrigerator, I see sausage, leftover rice, and remembered we had a can of black beans in the pantry.  That’s it! I can make a killer Mexican Jumbalaya! After all, we have Cumin.  So what if I’m mixing cultures? Chefs do those things all the time, people.  Think Asian fusion.

My husband came home and I mentioned that we would be dining on Mexican Jumbalaya and tamales, along with some Italian beer and Halloween candy for dessert.  Suddenly, I hear myself speaking. I realize cable has rotted my brain.  Who put this menu together, anyway? Later that night, my daughter was speaking into a fake camera that’s located somewhere in the imaginary world she lives in.  She’s telling the people in television land exactly how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, going into painstaking detail for the television audience about how to slather on the jelly without it dripping.  Then she broke for commercials.

When we move back home, we will not have cable. I haven’t read a book in a month, my daughter is now dreaming of being a TV personality, and I’m inundated with thoughts of buying a hybrid car and a Vitamix.  But I will miss cable, that fancy modern invention, broadcast among the arrowheads in our 1826 home.   Rich housewives and fancy chefs will just have to plod on without this household of viewers.  We’re heading back to the dark ages.  To the days of flipping through magazines and checking our email on our iphones.  Reading books and watching NOVA on public television.  Somehow, some way, we’ll muddle through.

Filed Under: Humor, Technology, Television Tagged With: , , , , ,

pee is icky

October 19, 2011 By

I was shocked the other day to discover a little boy in front of a children’s toy store zipping up his pants.  He looked straight into my eyes with a devilish grin like he’d gotten away with something.  As it turns out, he had.  A big dripping mass of urine, to be specific.  It was right there in front of me, soaking into the porous bricks of the strip center wall with the overflow sliding down the side.  It took a while to process.  Did that little boy really just pee on the wall?  Right here in public? Surely he was an orphan, with no mother around.  Most certainly he was left alone, abandoned and neglected, having no comprehension that boys of the world are not supposed to whip out their pee machines in public whilst other innocent citizens are shopping for pink baby doll furniture. But he didn’t have clothes like an orphan, all dirty and ripped with a funny little hat and patched knees.  Everyone knows that orphans walk with a limp, carry a cane, and usually speak with a broken English accent, but all I heard out of this little runt was a giggle.

Okay, so maybe he does has a mother.  He’s just a little brat who used immature judgment and decided a wall was a perfectly natural place to pee.  It’s hard for a little tot to distinguish that peeing freely on camping trips and in secluded backyards might be okay but storefronts, well, not so much. When this mother finds out what her little one was up to, I’ll bet she is downright horrified. . .

“Hurry up,” I heard a voice coming from behind.  It was a woman, standing by a car tapping her fingers on the door, waiting.  Who needed to hurry? What was she waiting for?  The little kid ran over to her car and hopped in.  No.  For the love of bacon, no.  This woman was just standing there?  Waiting for her son to urinate on a brick wall in public? I’m curious just how that conversation went, exactly.

“Uh, mom, I totally gotta pee.”

“Well, let’s see,” horrible mom says.  “We are standing in front of a store with public restrooms.  With urinals and running water. But instead of that, why don’t you just hop on out there and pee on the wall. It’s cool.  Just like the last time I told you to pee outside the dry cleaners.  It’s similar to that, but with more people around. Try not to poop, since that might send us to jail or someone might call CPS and there are all those flies to contend with.  But pee’s totally harmless.  It’s just reconstituted soda pop. We’re in a drought.  It’ll dry.”

“What’s reconstituted mean?” the brat says.

“Just go out there and pee already.  We’re late to the movies.”

I just stood there for a few moments, unable to proceed.  I just kept staring at this mother, and back to the store, and over to the huge pee stain.  It was like the air surrounding me was somehow contaminated with this boy’s urine.  All I could think of was Clorox wipes and dirty hands.  The mother looked down, perhaps due to shame.  Perhaps in anger.  Perhaps she thought I was judgmental or inappropriate for giving her dirty looks.  The truth hurts.

I let out a very quiet, barely audible noise – perhaps incomprehensible to some.  Or, if you listened veeeery carefully, it actually sounded something like “Are you serious?  Are you freaking serious?  Did you just let your kid pee on the wall right there?”  Okay, so most people heard it.  But only if you were really paying rapt attention and happened to be in a five-mile radius and were not on your ipad.  It was subtle, really.  I think I really made an impression.

I went home without doll furniture.  But I did walk away with a new appreciation for toilets.  And hand sanitizer. And a realization that maybe I’m not such a bad mother after all.   I might make instant pudding and not realize I can’t set the inside of a crock pot directly onto a stove burner and not notice my child playing with knives, but at least my son won’t pee in public.

Unless he joins a college fraternity.  Then, we’ll just forget this entire conversation.

Filed Under: Humor, Motherhood Tagged With: , , ,

lucky one

October 10, 2011 By

I remember the marble being such a pretty color, peachy with ribbons of coral running through it.  It was everywhere.  Marble tub.  Marble sink.  Marble floor. “That’s a lot of stinkin marble,” I thought to myself as I was lying there, half-naked, face-down on the floor with a nose that might be broken. I was only sixteen.  When it happened– the familiar burning and surging and cramping in my abdomen– I’d carry pillows with me to the toilet.  I figured that if I passed out, they would break the fall.   It never worked, and I never learned.

Once, after waking up on the floor in a public stall, I simply wiped my face off and headed back to Chemistry class.  My friends in college all freaked out in that dramatic, ohmygodshe’stotallygoingtodie way, as supportive as newly formed friends who share a common dormitory can possibly be.  The doctors never figured out why the pain caused me to pass out.  The neurologist ruled out epilepsy, although according to some probe-strapping test, something was definitely a “bit off” with my brainwaves.  That explains a lot.  But one day, I had a beautiful little girl and I never passed out again.

My life doesn’t exactly follow the odds.  I guess you could say I’m lucky.

▪               Ten years ago, an oncologist told me I had a chunk of melanoma living in my eye socket.  Eye cancer is very rare, as it turns out.  One in a million.  Who knew I’d get to travel to Philadelphia and have surgery in one of America’s oldest cities?  As it turns out, I love cheesesteak and Thomas Jefferson.

▪               When I was in the hospital after the birth of my daughter, first a week and extending to three and then four, undergoing multiple surgeries and stabbing myself with blood-thinner injections, I was told it wasn’t exactly normal.  I tried to put on lipstick to make it all better, but with a four-week-old child at home I’d barely begun to hold, Chanel can only do so much.  Don’t get me wrong – it can do a lot. But there are limits.

▪               Most people don’t pass out after having their wisdom teeth extracted and have CPR performed in the oral surgeon’s office lobby because they had some extreme reaction to Demerol. Lucky for me, they had some sort of anti-Demorol agent locked away someplace they stuck in my arm.  I remember getting to drink juice when I woke up. But then again, I’ve woken up from loads of surgeries, so I might be getting them all confused.

▪               Before the birth of my son, right after the spinal tap was placed and the medicine was slowly crawling through my veins toward the arteries of my heart, it stopped. The monitor would just so naturally flatline, because that’s what luck I have.   But like I arose from the marble floor, so too would my heart begin to beat.  After, of course, the chest compressions, the stabbing of epinephrine, and some other medication that apparently gives you dry mouth.

So it wasn’t all that surprising that our house was struck by lightning.  And instead of killing us or burning our house to the ground, it instead wiped out all our plumbing.  “That’s very rare,” the fireman said.   Yeah.  Welcome to my life.  Things happen to me.  Things that don’t happen to normal people.

I can’t help but think God has some grand scheme behind all of this, like there is some grand point to be made.  In response, I’m actively searching for what that is.  What role I need to play in the universe in return for my good fortune.  I’m open, as they say, to change.

I am truly grateful for the moments in which we are tested.  To see what’s most important.  I am grateful for a faith, true and honest, despite all reason to the contrary.  I am grateful for this body, as battered and broken as my insides might be.  I am grateful that I’m not married to some boring widget of a man, but a man bursting at the seams with heart.  I’m grateful for my children, deep in character and beauty.  I’m grateful that we are living in a rental, with Goodwill furniture and mice in the garage, because we are together. And laughing.  Last night, I fell asleep holding my husband’s hand.  And today, my daughter told me she’d give me hugs and kisses even when love got so sweet it turned rotten.   I’m a lucky, lucky girl.

I think I’m going to buy a lottery ticket.  I’d probably lose.  Just my luck.

Filed Under: Eye, Health, Humor, Religion Tagged With: , , ,

Fire!

October 8, 2011 By

Last Tuesday night, I ate bad frozen pizza.  I rocked my son to sleep.  I trimmed my nails and waited for my husband to get home from work.  All fairly normal things folks do on Tuesdays.  Until I heard a bomb go off over our house, consoled our screaming children, saw my husband rushing inside wearing his suit with a look of terror on his face, and noticed huge billowing flames in our back yard.  Then, after three fire trucks, water leaks, and a night spent at Embassy Suites, I can honestly say it wasn’t a normal Tuesday.  We normally have tacos on Tuesdays.  Life was in all kinds of disarray.

With all the fires in Texas lately, I’ve played the “what would I grab if my house was burning down” game plenty.  You map out in your head the route you’d take.  Grab the computer.  Load up the guns.  Great grandma’s clock will probably not make the cut and that’s just life.  All your stuff falls like cards into some sort of loose priority order. Eventually, you just sigh with the realization that life’s not easily replaceable no matter how you slice it, but you have a pretty good idea of what you’d grab.

Until it actually happens.

The minute I saw our back yard ablaze – lightning had struck our house and back shed and all I could see through the kitchen window was one huge ball of fire – I did what any normal person would do in this situation.  I went to the pantry and started stocking my purse with nutri-grain bars.

Instead of remaining calm, I shrieked at my daughter, who was standing right next to me.  “FIRE!,” I wailed.  “PUT ON YOUR SHOES!”  Balancing on son on my hip, I grabbed a bag and with superhuman strength, loaded it up with crackers and squeezable fruit.  I then filled up a sippy cup with water, threw in some diapers, and if I remember correctly, I think I might have actually dug up some underwear.

If the flames reached the house and burned it down, taking with it all our treasures and family heirlooms, don’t you tell me we wouldn’t have plenty of applesauce and underwear to remind us of our past.   Because we so totally would.

I then grabbed the photo albums and threw them all into a box and set them by the door.  I was set.  At least we would have food, water, diapers, photos, and underwear.  Then, with tears on my face and nutri-grain bars in my purse, I left everything sitting neatly inside the house in one neat pile and went rushing out to the neighbors in some sort of anxious frenzy, my daughter running behind me wearing sparkly sandals.

“There’s a fire!” I yelled as I banged on my neighbor’s door.  “Big!  Big fire!”  I had resorted to caveman speech, apparently, and pointed in the direction of our back yard.  Our neighbors, bless their hearts, are nearing sixty, but they ran out toward our back yard like spry sixteen year-olds, the wife jumping the fence in her housecoat to help my husband fight the flames and her husband (recovering from knee surgery) turning on the water. Only then did I notice that my daughter, who was standing beside me, was sobbing uncontrollably and was holding my son’s diaper bag with white knuckles.  “He might need a diaper,” she said amidst the sobs.  I so love her.

Finally, three fire trucks came and I directed them to the back, all the while convincing my daughter that her daddy did not, in fact, perish in the flames.  Only until she saw him, standing there wearing a sweat-soaked dress shirt, did she believe me and stop hyperventilating.

Eventually the flames were extinguished and we went back inside, allowing firemen to stomp through our home in mud-soaked boots, peering in attics and corners and closets for evidence of secret fire pockets.  We eventually calmed down our exhausted kids and thought the drama was over.  Until such time as we discovered our carpet was a subtropical wetland and things were sloshing where in fact there should be no sloshing.  Hmm.  Slab leaks.  Six of them, from the size of the puddles.  My husband rushed to turn off the water, we navigated the automated maze of the insurance 1-800 number, and at some point a company appeared like Batman with fans and dehumidifiers and water damage information (we just nodded and promised never to turn the fans off).  I put the kids to bed on a mat upstairs and was ready to call it a night.

At midnight or so, my husband came in the room and instructed me to find a hotel.  “But the kids are finally asleep,” I moan.  “Can’t we do that tomorrow?”  He looks at me, his face soaked with sweat, still wearing his suit and nice shoes (now ruined).  He throws up his hands, and it hits me that perhaps now is not a good time for this discussion.  The “we’re a team” mentality is really the way to go in this situation, so I nod in agreement with any single thing that comes out of his mouth. Perhaps he’d like to shower. Perhaps he’d like to go someplace that might not burn up.  Perhaps he’d like to talk in a normal tone of voice instead of screaming over large fans that make our living room sound like an airplane hanger.  Yes, yes, yes to everything.

At 1 am, we loaded up our kids and headed downtown to a hotel.  They were thrilled, and my daughter asked if it’s really true that we got pancakes for breakfast. “It’s really true,” I said.  I heard her mutter something about it being wonderful as she nodded off in the car.

So now, a week out, we’ve had six plumbers give us all different ideas of how to completely re-plumb our house.  They all do agree on one thing, which is “this is a pretty big deal” and “don’t expect an easy fix.”

We are living in our second rental, soon to be third come Tuesday, and I think about our week.  The uncertainty and the contractor decisions and the reality that we are homeless gypsies for a while.   But mostly I think about how lucky we are.  Many people aren’t in the situation we’re in with a home to come home to. We have each other.  We have great insurance.  We have a problem that can be fixed.  But most of all, we have nutri-grain bars.

Life is, indeed, very good.

Filed Under: Embarrassing Moments, Humor, Motherhood, Texas, Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , ,

sparkles

September 26, 2011 By

This weekend, we went out of town for a wedding.  Weddings are bright and happy, filled with love and flowers and sparkles.  Or in my case, poop and overflowing toilets, with oozing wounds and gas.

On the day of the wedding, I had to leave a bridal brunch early since my father-in-law, who just had surgery, needed to head back to the doctor to see if his wound was infected.  There’s no way to make that situation less disgusting.  We were all huddled around in the exam room trying to distract ourselves with models of spines and feet bones so we wouldn’t see the surgical tech digging into his shoulder with a long needle trying to get out all the puss.

And finally, after the wedding vows and songs and exchanging of rings, we reached the reception, whereby my son began a tirade of screaming and thrashing in extreme fatigue.   At that, without even a bite of cake and an untouched plate of food sitting on a table somewhere, I began a thirty-minute drive to take my son and husband’s grandmother home.  My son was passed out cold, but she was in a chatty mood, and went into great detail, bless her heart, about the effect of beans on her digestive system.

The next day, it was back to grandma’s for cornbread and a pot of beans (we’ve covered that! I know the full effects!) and after hours of sitting around in an extremely hot house, it was my son’s nap time.  But the moment I laid him down, I heard a strange rushing-water sound coming from the restroom.  I went to investigate and discovered a bubbling witch’s brew of urine-laden water overflowing from the toilet basin and pouring onto the tile floor.  I screamed as my drugged father-in-law stumbled in like he was woken from the dead.   I told him I needed a plunger.  Like, immediately.  Perhaps some Pine-Sol?  He headed for the garage (what? why is this essential item in the garage?) while I tried sop up the water with towels and bathmats.

The day actually got slightly better when I did my mother-in-law’s laundry.  That should tell you something.

On the seven-hour drive home, the kids did great.  No poopy diapers in the car and no major breakdowns.  But Sunday night, after an exhausting weekend, I looked down after getting my son out of the high chair and saw brown things on the carpet.  It was, in fact, poop.  Literally dangling from his shorts and dropping to the floor below in small little clumps.  I rushed him into the bedroom to change his diaper, whereby he immediately stuck his hands directly into his filthy, half-exposed diaper, squished his fingers around in the contents before I could stop him, and then stared at his crap-covered hands in wonder.  I later had to go around the house like it was an Easter Egg Hunt trying to find poop droplets.  I ended up on my knees scrubbing the kitchen floor until my hands stung from the bleach water.

All in all, a really fabulous weekend.  I love weddings.  Peace and joy and sparkles, after all.

Filed Under: Humor, Motherhood Tagged With: , , ,

Amanda (from Texas)

September 9, 2011 By

Dear Martha Stewart,

Today, my son projectile vomited all over my shirt.  I had to change into a gown at the pediatrician’s office, walking out with a pile of my son’s throw-up still remaining on the little table.  Try getting that out with a stain stick.

Years ago, in your post-prison haze, I took a leave of absence from my job.  I said goodbye to my husband for the summer and jetted off to New York in a vainglorious attempt to work for you.  To impress you.  Befriend you.  After all – it’s ME!  Funny, confident, dancing-in-the-hallways me!  If I could just have a chance to meet you face-to-face, you’d totally agree with my three best friends that I’m fabulous.  We’d toast to our newfound friendship, sewing monograms onto calico pillows while sipping on chai tea.  I’d finally admit that I’m a wretched gardener and we’d have a grand afternoon plotting total world domination.

Okay, so it was reality television.  Not exactly the classiest venue.  But the fifteen folks who joined me in New York were not pond scum, but really successful people, chosen over a million folks to be talking with you about summer bulbs and apricot preserves, vying for a job where we could work with you on a daily basis.  This was my chance.

On day, in the middle of making a wedding cake to be sold at a bridal expo on 5th Avenue, your daughter paid us a visit.  I asked her a question I’d always wondered about.

“What was it like to have a mother like Martha?”

I envisioned parties of grandeur, with sugar cookies piled high with edible flowers and friends dancing around maypoles drinking cucumber water and reciting old nursery rhymes.  Alexis just gave me a flat look and said with hardly a breath that it was hard.  “Once,” she said, “when I was young, I tried to bake her a cake.”  I saw little Alexis running around in my mind in a petticoat, flinging sprinkles around with glee.  “She yelled at me for making the kitchen all sticky.”

Everyone chuckled with nervous laughter, because the reality was too sad to imagine.  We were on television.  5th Avenue, no less!  Let’s not focus on what the woman did years ago.  She’s changed!   So what if her daughter is dressed in black and seems to have a sour attitude, living with the memory that she never could live up to her mother’s standards.  We’re living in New York City.  Street vendors and expensive four-inch heels. Who-hoo!

Now, Martha, let’s be honest.  I didn’t have to meet you personally to realize you’re a big fan of order.  Rationalized numbering.  Labels.  You like steel and grey and windows and white, all clear of clutter and chaos.  You could literally eat on the floor of your office.  Somehow in this imperfect world we live in, you’ve found a way to have perfect rows of cabbage.  I respect that.  The ability to yell at the gardener and demand he remove the one wilted head on the end of the row?  Genius.

But I slowly allowed myself to question the long-standing truth that (1) you would surely think I’m special (2) we would be swapping sweet potato recipes long into the future.   Perhaps you weren’t the person I imagined.  A crack was starting to form in the armor of my Martha-ness.

The thoughts naturally arose – does anything gross happen in your world?  Have you ever accidentally peed in your pants or had to comb lice out of your daughter’s hair or invented a recipe that tasted like goat manure?  Surely once in your life you thought “I’m going to hurl.  I’m totally throwing this out and ordering pizza.”

Weren’t there ever a few moments in life, brief as they might be, that you cupped your hands over your mouth with delight at the beauty of seeing your child try to bake you a cake or make you a valentine or knit you a crooked potholder?  Is there ever a wilted cabbage you just don’t have the heart to pluck?

One morning, we got to have brunch with you in Bedford.  I was so confident you’d finally love me that I casually strolled over to the cappuccino machine in your gigantic kitchen and made small talk about the flower arrangement.

“Want one?” you asked me as the coffee machine hummed and hissed.  I tucked my hair away from my face and nodded.  Just me and a few pals, hanging out at Martha’s.  No biggie.  I was prattling on about how we can’t grow peonies down south, due to the hot weather and all, when I realized by the look in your eyes that you weren’t even listening.

“Are you Amy, from California?” you suddenly asked.

“No,” I stuttered.  “I’m Amanda.  From Texas.”  You briskly walked back in front of the camera to give a lesson on making waffles.  I was hurt and ashamed.  All the while talking of peonies, for goodness sakes.

The moment we left your place, after taking a tour of the greenhouses, hearing about elephant ferns, and watching your brilliant black horses pad around the back 40, we climbed in the car back to our quarters and, suddenly, it was if we didn’t exist.  Just another day in the office.  Just Amy from California.

I suppose the folks we idolize don’t always turn out to be as amazing as we had hoped. There is no pleasing you.  You will always be yelling at the gardener, the sticky child, the producer.  No cabbage or bath towel or applicant will ever be good enough.  I suppose if I get my book published, I won’t be back on your show to promote it, eating those yummy scones and sipping coffee backstage, waiting for hair and makeup.  Which is unfortunate.  Those were really good scones.

I don’t have to be walking along Broadway to feel my lungs fill with fresh air.  I can do that in my own backyard, watching my daughter scoop piles of pebbles into bowls and call it popcorn.  She will come running over to me with messy hands and a popsicle-stained face, showing me a stick that reminds her of a telephone.  My son will someday break a lamp or get motor grease all over my travertine floor and eat so much fried chicken in one setting that he’ll groan with delight, wiping grease on his jeans as he stretches back in his chair.  This is the texture and fabric of life.  It’s not monogrammed.  It’s not in perfect order.  It’s vomit-down-your blouse crazy.

So screw peonies.  I’ll take fields of bluebonnets, swaying in the breeze, my kids on the side of the highway buried in them, squashing the flower heads in their Sunday best.  It’s then, and only then, I realize they have buggers in their noses.

Yours most truly,

Amanda (from Texas)

Filed Under: Humor, Motherhood, Television Tagged With: , , , ,

technology rehab

September 2, 2011 By

When I was growing up, we didn’t have cell phones.  We didn’t have email.  What we did have, located in the smack center of our house on the kitchen wall (adorned with 1970’s fern wallpaper), was a regular home telephone.

It was yellowy-beige with a ten-foot-cord that could be stretched precariously around the corner when privacy dictated.  But there really isn’t any privacy in the center of a kitchen.  Every time my dad came in to make popcorn, he’d just wave and say “tell [random boy I was talking to] hello!  Are you coming in the family room to watch Hunt for Red October?”  Then he’d just grunt and pour himself a soda and I’d be left in utter humiliation.  Then, after I thought the coast was clear, I’d spot my mother doing something very important like ironing linens or peeling grapes next to the door so she could listen in.

Kids now-a-days have it so easy.  Televisions in every room. Cell phones on every belt.  Email and chatting and texting and instant messaging– the amount of unbridled privacy is endless.  It scares me to think what my daughter might be saying someday in the free, bare silence of modern technology.  I can’t snoop around the corner and then just say “What? I was just coming in to get a drink!” if I got busted.  I think I’ll force our family go back to the days of old, where the father sits around each night reading the bible and we all stitch our own dresses out of flour sacks.

It’s amazing how dependant we are on technology.  I’m one to talk. My commute home involves about twenty minutes of cell phone chatter with two minutes of checking my lipstick.  So the other day, when I forgot my phone at home, it was torture.  Torture, I tell you! What the heck was I supposed to do on the drive home– listen to the radio?  The thought of it brought back vague memories of youth.  Days when I made mix tapes and hoped to push the stop button before the DJ broke in and ruined the song’s ending.  In my extreme boredom, I started surfing through the channels.

I tried NPR, but they talking politics. I looked ahead at the string of red taillights and realized there was a wreck on the highway. Great. I couldn’t call home to tell the babysitter I would be late, and there was no way I could stop.  I felt trapped and isolated.  All I had to keep me company was top-forty radio, spiked with loud advertisements about luxury cars, a Joss Stone CD with a scratch, and boring economy talk.  My hands began to shake and I felt sweat forming on my brow.  I was unsure if I could make it.

Relax, I tried to tell myself.  Think.  Pray.  Flex your abdominal muscles or make a mental grocery list.  But after about three minutes, I checked all of these items off the list and was instead punching the radio buttons in a futile belief that something interesting would blare through the speakers.  I was looking at half an hour more.  I looked the car next to me and saw the driver laughing away while talking on his blue tooth. I thought I might need a Zanax.

After being on the road for forty-five minutes with no cell phone and finally landing safely at home, I had an epiphany.  I need technology rehab.  I’m an embarrassment.  I can’t go less than an hour without Tivo, iTunes, cell phones, or texting?  What has become of me?

Maybe it would be nice for the family to have only one phone with a ridiculously long cord. And how wonderful to enjoy the radio again, singing along with the window down —

Hold on a sec.  My cell phone is ringing.  I need to tell my best friend who got fired on Project Runway.  She was in a meeting and her cell phone was out of juice (she forgot her car charger – again!) and she just got home to find her Tivo was set to record a movie and she didn’t catch the show and I didn’t answer her text because I was in the middle of sending my husband a picture of our empty milk carton as a subtle hint to go to the store.  You understand.

Maybe someday, we’ll abandon all this junk and just sit around by the fire reading the bible and sewing.  Or maybe, even better, there’s an app for that.

Filed Under: Career, Embarrassing Moments, Humor, Technology Tagged With: , ,

martha stewart clean

August 31, 2011 By

I never thought I’d say this, but thank you, Martha Stewart.

 

Today, after we returned home from the grocery store with items sitting randomly about the kitchen table, my son grabbed a bottle of bathroom cleaner and waddled off.  I was at the stove cooking asparagus and wondered why my son was so quiet. I went to investigate. As it turned out, he unscrewed the lid and poured the entire bottle of bathroom cleaner on the carpet.  And I had no idea if he drank some.  I immediately called my doctor, who referred me to poison control, and the conversation went something like this:

 

“Hello?” I asked in a panic. “Poison control? I think my son might have ingested some bathroom cleaner. “

 

“Oh no,” a woman said.  I could hear the seriousness in her voice.  “What brand of cleaner was it?”  She was typing something into her computer.  Probably something along the lines of Yet another negligent mother who let her kid drink poison.  Call CPS immediately to have her parental rights revoked.

 

“Martha Stewart Clean,” I said.

 

“Uh huh,” the lady said.  There was a pause.  “I think you’ll be fine.”

 

“But don’t you want to know the active ingredients?” I asked.  I really was hoping I didn’t have to get his stomach pumped, or worry about him being unconscious, or burning a hole though his intestines.  He didn’t seem sick.  He was laughing and pointing to my nose and trying to moo like a cow, but still. 

 

“Yeah sure,” she said as she bit into a sandwich, stuck in some cubical in Dallas.  “If you want.”  What’s wrong with these people?  Aren’t they experts in poison? Don’t they have some advice?

 

“Water, Citric Acid, and plant-based detergent.”

 

“Yeaaah,” the lady said, her mouth full of ham.  “I really wouldn’t worry about it.  That’s harmless.”

 

I wasn’t sure whether the judgment in her voice related to the fact that I am a negligent parent, not noticing that my son walked right past me holding a bottle of detergent, or whether I spent five dollars on a bottle of distilled water with a few drops of citric acid.

 

In any event, this stuff won’t kill your kid if they accidentally drink it, and it managed to create suds when I tried to soak it up from the carpet, so I’m never buying anything else.  I’m a loyal Martha Stewart Clean consumer (when it’s on sale). Or, conversely, maybe I should just pay more attention to my child when they walk by.   The next time, it might be a butcher knife.

Filed Under: Embarrassing Moments, Humor, Motherhood Tagged With: , , , ,

« Previous Page
Next Page »