punchdrunkmom

Regarding larvae, my mother-in-law’s Cubist period, and the ubiquitous Box of Your Kid’s Art

We live in a condo filled with things. Lots and lots and lots of things. We have, for example, a set of old, broken, hopelessly rusty and completely unusable golf clubs. We have boxes and boxes of some kind of record that predates the kind of records I had when I was a kid. They’re records from like the 40s, groups with names like The Mulligan Sisters and The Apple Pie Gang. I don’t even know what kind of record player would play them. A gramophone, maybe. We have a painting of a lion Scott’s mother did during her Cubist period. We have a home beer making kit that I got Scott for our anniversary one year, the year that he bought me a Cartier bracelet, which made me feel like a total jerk. Cans of paint, bags of extension cords, the boxes for all of our electronics past and present, bike locks, baby clothes, a P90X that only saw the light of day when I watched part of it while eating half a bag of Oreos.

We have, in other words, no room for anything else.

And so, I have a problem with a growing pile of art. Kai likes to express himself, you see.

Kai comes from a long line of artists, so we encourage this behavior. We revel in it, even. How proud Grandma Barbara would have been! We say. It’s lovely, Monkeyman. And then, well, it sits on our table because we have nowhere to put it.

Today, I was cleaning in advance of the cleaning lady, and came across the following:

 

I sighed and threw it away, only to dig it out of the garbage shortly thereafter. I mean, look how cute! He stayed in the lines! He tried to follow the zigzags in the egg! Sigh again. I know you’re not impressed. But to me it’s like the umbilical cord stump. It connected us. How can I throw it away? Sigh a third time. Shut up. I’m keeping it.

I am sharply aware that a Box of Your Kid’s Art will haunt you and your attic for the rest of your life. I am aware of this because I have a Box of Art at my parents’ that I keep promising to go through and never do. However, on a recent visit, due to the cresting Mississippi River, which was threatening to wash away the detritus of forty-two years of marriage in their storage space, the box was in my parents’ living room when I got there. My dad gave me a glass of wine and bade me to sit down and look through it.

Everything was pasted into albums by year, starting, of course with pre-school.

“Oh, I remember this place,” I said to my dad. “There was a guy who worked there who had a paddle. He would walk up and down the aisles during nap time threatening to beat any of us who weren’t sleeping.”

My dad’s eyebrows shot up. “Really.”

“Oh, yeah. This was the 70s, though. You could totally do that back then.”

“No,” he said, grimly. “No you couldn’t.”

“Hey! Look at this!” I exclaimed, holding up a drawing I’d made of myself napping. “See? You had to nap or you were in big trouble.”

In another album I found an autobiography I’d written in the fourth grade. My hobbies, I’d written in a childish script with circles over the Is, include stamp collecting, gymnastics and horseback riding. The stamp collecting was not strictly true. One summer at my grandma’s house, my cousins and I came upon a stamp collection and divided it up among the three of us. They actually had some experience vis a vis stamps, but I was clueless, feigning interest only because I thought my cousins were cool. You know. For collecting stamps. Anyway, much later, never having so much as looked at them in the intervening years, I took them to a stamp dealer, hoping for a little windfall. The stamp dealer took off his glasses and shoved the stacks of stamps back across the table. “The best way to get value out of these would be to use them as postage,” he said. I never did this, of course, because the stamps had a face value of like half a cent, so it would take 82 of them to send a letter to my fourth grade teacher telling her that I wanted to change my essay from “stamp collecting” to “picking my nose,” which is as productive and almost as lucrative.

The next album had a card made of construction paper with beans glued onto it. The cover read “For Mom.” I opened it and saw another design on the inside that looked like rice. On closer inspection they turned out to be—

“Oh, God!” I yelped. “Dad, are these maggots?”

My father, ever the scientist, looked at the card. “It would appear that a fly laid some eggs there, yes.”

I dropped the card in the box, my skin crawling.

“What are you guys looking at?” my mom called from the next room.

“A card,” I answered her, reaching for my wine. I grinned at my dad. “It’s for you.”

…

A friend of mine recently told me that all of his kids’ artwork has been digitally photographed and thrown away, thereby preserved for all eternity but not taking up anything larger than a megabyte. I like this idea a lot, but, maggots notwithstanding, there was something about those albums that was really sweet. Holding the cards and drawings, feeling the pages crackle with age, the paint dust on my fingers. Even sweeter was that someone had thought enough of them to paste them into albums and save them, like they were worth something.

So Kai will have his own Box of Art.

Maybe thirty years from now, when I make him take it out of my closet, I’ll say, “Sweet boy, I loved each of these drawings. I couldn’t part with a single one. I treasured them because they were a part of you.”

Or maybe I won’t say that.

Maybe, by the presence of the box, he’ll just know.

And maybe I’ll sneak the Apple Pie Gang into the box, just to get it out of my closet.

 

In which the boy renders me speechless

“Beautiful day,” I said to Scott, as the rain splashed on the windshield. We drove past commuters in Wellington boots, carrying umbrellas, heads buried into shoulders. I turned around to look at Kai.

“Beautiful day, Monkeyman.”

“No,” he said.

“No?”

“How about raining?”

I was momentarily speechless.

“Great talking, Monkeyman,” I said.

Kai has been having a language explosion. I noticed this for the first time when we went to the emergency room in St. Paul. He was wearing a pulse-ox monitor in his finger.

“Hey, Doctor,” he said to the nurse. “Take offa my finger.”

The nurse turned around and smiled. “We have to leave it on in case we need to measure your oxygen.”

“Take-a-off.”

“That’s great talking, Monkeyman,” I said to him. And it was! This was a rare moment where a stranger was able to interact with him without my intervention. No echolalia, no jibberish, no quizzical look at me.

We’ve had more and more of those moments.

“Let’s go get some dacaroni [sic] and cheese,” he said several days later. “Elevator.” He meant the elevator that would take us to the California Pizza Kitchen. This was the most words I’d ever heard him string together at one time.

“That’s great talking, Monkeyman!”

And Tuesday. “Kai,” I said. “Give your sister a piece of cantaloupe.”

“Here’s a piece of cantaloupe,” he said, clear as a bell, a five word sentence. Six if you count the contraction as two.

Kai is in the second or third percentile in language development. He has a huge vocabulary, but has trouble putting sentences together. More often, he’ll use just one word in a sentence. “Popcorn?” he’ll say, phrasing the word as a question.

He doesn’t really answer questions. “What did you do today?” is met with silence. How was school? Did you like sledding? Did you have fun at the party? He stares out the window of the car.

He doesn’t ask me questions, either, about the world, about what we’re doing, about the function of an object or about higher concepts such as friendship. I don’t know if he has scary dreams or why he doesn’t like hot dogs, what he thinks about when he smiles to himself.

Lately, though, he’s been talking up a storm.

“Up,” he’ll say as we go up a hill in the car. “Down.”

“I see airplane! In the sky!”

“Be careful, Mommy!” he says, as I merge into traffic.

That’s great talking, Monkeyman,” I say.

On Tuesday night, Kai had a meltdown at bedtime because we wouldn’t let him take my iPhone to bed. He threw himself down on the floor of his room and cried. Scott and I went to the kitchen to watch the Bulls game and wait it out. When he was done he called for me.

“Mommy?”

I went into his room.

 “Bed,” he said.

I picked him up off the floor and put him in bed.

“Clean up,” he said.

“Clean up? Clean up what?” I asked.

He pointed toward the floor where he had been lying. “It’s right there.”

I looked. There was a puddle.

“What happened?” I asked.

“Go potty on the floor.”

I considered the situation for a moment, and then ruffled his hair.

“That’s great talking, Monkeyman,” I said.

And it was.

 

In which the Punchdrunkmom goes to Costco, meets a kindred spirit.

I went to Costco yesterday to get eggs and diapers. I kind of love Costco because it encourages all kinds of bad behavior because it’s a deal! Because it’s Costco! So what if you live in a condo? Why wouldn’t you want a whole side of beef and a thousand ounces of potato chips? A gallon of lotion? 56 razors? 1,056 vitamins? Sure! And somehow, you feel like you’re getting a deal, even though you’ve just spent $200 and there’s like three things in your cart.

But anyway, I was there today. I managed to impulse buy a copy of Tina Fey’s new book, Bossypants (Yay!), a giant, Costco-sized coloring book and several bottles of Malbec with screw tops, conveniently putting less effort in between me and a glass of wine.

I found the eggs, the diapers, a flat of blueberries, some bread, and I got in line behind a woman with two kids in her cart. It was the shortest line, but the longest in all the ways that matter.

The mom looked tired. Not I-just-had-a-baby-tired, which is a giddy kind of sweatpants and sloppy ponytail tired, usually accompanied by a very small baby. She wasn’t one-of-my-kids-was-up-all-night-tired, either. This kind of tired you can tell by the sweatpants and sloppy ponytail, plus a venti Frappuccino and dark smudges under the eyes. This was tired on a whole different plane, like life-tired. Like those kids must be the spawn of Satan tired. Like she hadn’t seen a shower or a tube of moisturizer for days tired. Intervention tired.

I placed the divider thing on the belt and unloaded my cart, and was reading the back cover of Bossypants when I realized that the lady’s young daughter was using the plastic check-out divider thing to beat the living hell out of my bread. I reacted the same way I would if it was Kai, which was probably bad, because Kai is…well, sometimes it’s hard to get his attention.

“Hey!” I shouted. “Stop that.”

The girl went all saucer-eyed at me and the mom gave me a look that said, hey, cut me a break, all right?

Well, no one is more sympathetic than I about a misbehaving child, having two of them myself, of the variety that actually laugh at you when you tell them to stop jumping on Miss Jayne’s leather couch, please. I smiled at her and said, “Hey, I have kids, no big deal.”

She looked too tired to communicate anything back, like the effort of disarming her daughter had cost her whatever she had left to give.

My smile widened painfully. There was so much I wanted to convey. I’m tired, too, I thought. The kids have been sick all week and they’re on spring break, I haven’t had a moment alone in a long, long time, I’ve still got clothes in suitcases even though we’ve been home for like four days, I haven’t washed my hair since Sunday.

“Hey,” the checkout guy said. “Didn’t you use a divider? Whose stuff is this?”

Well, I did use the divider, but never mind. I assessed all the items on the belt and said that they were mine.

As the other mom was walking away, she noticed my diapers were in her cart.

“Excuse me,” she said to the checkout guy. “These aren’t mine.”

“Well,” he replied, “I asked you whose stuff was whose, didn’t I?”

The woman sighed. “What do I have to do?”

The check-out guy pointed. “Go over to that cage and get a refund, I can’t do it here.”

She looked at her kids, who were screaming and wiggling and poking each other, and I saw her shoulders slump and her eyes closed briefly and I knew what she was thinking: I used to have a job that paid me actual money, where I was respected and valued. I used to take a shower every day and blow dry my hair and get manicures and go shoe shopping on my lunch break. I used to go out with my girlfriends and not have to think about the long day ahead full of crying children and the endless loop of Toy Story 2, the one that’s scratched so I have to restart it when I’m trying to make dinner or answer an e-mail or stare into space. I used to wonder why women with children looked like hell, how anyone could leave the house with snot or poop or puke visible on their clothes, why their children wouldn’t just shut up. I used to sleep in on the weekends, and do laundry when it was convenient and never, ever on Christmas Day. I used to shop for clothes in places other than Target and my purse wasn’t covered in something sticky and full of used Kleenex. There was a time when going to the customer service desk didn’t seem like climbing Mount Everest.

She looked at the receipt and then at me.

“You got forty bucks?”

“I do.” I handed it over. She gave me the diapers.

When I got to the car, I realized that she’d also bought my eggs.

I left, vowing that today, no matter what happened, I would find time to take a shower. I also had to get some eggs.

 

The Long Way Home

Prologue

At the sound of Ryan’s cry, I stumbled through the darkness to the crib. This was the second time she’d woken up, and I decided to bring her into bed with me. As we snuggled back down, she whimpered softly, nestled against my shoulder, and threw up—hot baby vomit that soaked my shirt, my hair, my pillow, the sheets. I looked at the clock with an inward groan. 4:13 am. Damn. We had a long drive tomorrow.

12:30

I packed up the car, waved goodbye to my mom and dad, and merged onto 94 East.

12:36

Ryan threw up all over the backseat. I went back to my parents’ house.

1:30

We re-left, re-waved, re-merged onto 94 East.

2:45

I made it to Pigeon Falls before Kai started to do that funny breathing thing again, the thing that sent us to the ER on Friday. Six hours to go in the car—six long , white-knuckled hours with Pukes McGee and Wheezy in the backseat.

4:00

Traffic merged into one lane, and came to a standstill in Castle Rock. Not moving. Not moving with sick children in the car and why are we stopped and we need to get home and why are we STOPPED ON THE HIGHWAY?

4:04

My CD player, which had been playing Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows and kindly keeping my mind occupied on something besides my mounting panic stopped playing and instead displayed the following message: ERROR 4.

5:35

After traffic started to move again, I lost the ability to accelerate and had to pull on to the shoulder.

5:37

I inadvertently corrected my problem when I put the car in “park,” and then in “drive” to see what would happen—turns out I’d knocked the car out of gear trying to find the box of Kix.

6:00

Outside of Madison, the Kix I’d just fed Ryan were vomited in a thick golden stream of whole grain goodness, all down her front, all over the car seat.

At a gas station I wiped her off best I could with some baby wipes, and we were off again, with a vow not to stop until we got home. I used the F word in this vow, loudly, and in front of my children.

6:25

We stopped in Janesville because Ryan wouldn’t stop crying. It occurred to me that she might have a dirty diaper. While I was at it, I changed her outfit. This seemed to make her feel much better. (Here’s your vomit-free clothes, your majesty. Sheesh.)

8:30

Leaving the bags, the trash, the vomity clothes, the Kix, the empty Diet Coke cans and our coats in the car, I yanked the kids free of their car seats and stumbled, bone weary and grateful, into the house.

Kai ran to the bathroom.

 “Whew!” he said, zipping his pants when he was done. “That was a close one.”

Epilogue

“Can I get you anything?” Scott asked me after I’d given Ryan a bath and put her in bed.
“How about a glass of wine?”
“What kind?” he asked.
Stupidest. Question. Ever.
“Large,” I replied.

 

ER on the side of caution

 “Are his lips blue?” I asked my mother.

She regarded my son, sitting in a café, perched ridiculously on a booster seat that made his knees come up to his chest, eating grapes and sipping water from a tiny paper cup meant to contain ketchup.

“Yes,” she said.

Damn.

We were at the Minnesota Zoo. I went to Minnesota with just one stroller, thinking that I’d save some space in the car and that Kai could walk, but Kai insisted on riding in it. In retrospect, if his what-we-don’t-call-asthma-for-some-reason-but-rather-restricted-breathing-for-insurance-purposes was acting up, I sympathize, though at the time I was like, Dude. Please walk. You’re four and I have to schlep your sister around the zoo, and though she’s a peanut, she’s squirmy and heavy after a couple of miles of walking, plus she keeps wanting to get down, and when she’s down, she cries to get picked back up. So I was juuuuuuuuuust about over it when I discovered that Kai’s lips were blue and we were as far from the car is it is physically possible to be at this particular Zoo.

I was like, well, huh. Are his lips blue because it’s cold? Or because he’s been wheezing of and on for weeks and his lungs are kind of bad and he hasn’t wanted to eat and his eyes are kind of smudgy underneath and I’m 450 miles away from my doctor and what if he has pneumonia again or his oxygen is low or whatever?

I decided that we needed to leave, like right now, which we did, but we still had to walk for 30 minutes to reach the car. Ryan was wiggling like an angry bee, the wind icy in our faces (uh, what’s up, April?), making both kids howl with each gust.

“Are you okay, Monkeyman?” I would ask.

“I’m okay,” he would say, hands jammed in his pockets, all blue lips and faraway stares.

Damn.

I took him home and gave him some rescue medication for his not-asthma. His lips turned pink again, but I didn’t like the way he was breathing. So we went to the ER, Kai in the backseat, breath coming in a gasping way that happens after a teenage girl has a really, really good cry. Gasp, breath, breath. I can’t believe Bella picked Edward over Jacob. Gasp.

It turns out I was right, Kai was wheezing. We got some oral steroids to use if things got worse, and before we left he’d managed to recover enough to make me mad about something that eludes me now, which is a sure sign that things are okay. In truth, I was the one who administered all the appropriate care, so the trip wasn’t strictly necessary, but better to be sure.

I’d left my insurance card at home in Chicago. No problem, they said. They asked me my name and address and handed me a business card with the hospital’s phone number on it. Just call us, they said.

“Do I owe you any money before I leave?” I asked.

“No,” the lady said. “Just call us with your insurance information.”

I opened my mouth to point out that I could have given them a completely false identity, that they hadn’t asked for my driver’s license, that they would have no idea if I didn’t have insurance, didn’t plan to call. But by then, I’d given them all my real information, and I do have insurance, so it would be kind of pointless. In Chicago, the intake nurse’s desk is RIGHT NEXT TO a desk where they take your money immediately upon your arrival. It’s a hundred bucks just to sit in the dang waiting room.

As we were leaving, I noticed a sign indicating that the parking garage doesn’t take credit cards, so I stopped by the information desk.

“Can you validate my parking?” I asked.

“Sure, if you’ve been here more than three hours,” the lady replied.

“Is it free if it’s under three hours?” I asked, reasonably.

She gave me a look that indicated she thought I was some sort of rube. “Nothing is ever free,” she said.

I blinked at her.

“The garage takes cash or personal checks.”

WTF? Personal checks? I thought. Now who’s the rube? Where am I? What year is this? No one takes personal checks. Not even the grocery store.

I loaded Kai into the car, and when I got to the booth to pay for parking, the guy just waved me on, and I didn’t have to pay, anyway. I knew a moment of irritation, as I’d had to use the ATM at the hospital, getting charged by the ATM and by my bank in the process, and screw you, parking ramp for not taking my stupid MasterCard like every other freaking establishment, like, everywhere, including parking meters and my dog walker. And at that moment, part of me wished that I’d told the hospital I was Maria Sanchez, that I lived in Vancouver, BC which was nice and sometimes we could see whales from our deck, and here’s a bogus personal check to cover the $3.00 it cost me to park here, which wouldn’t happen if you just took credit cards like they do everywhere else in the universe.

And then, as I waved to the guy to say, “Thanks,” another, larger part of me was just glad that I was going home with my son, whose lips were a lovely shade of pink, and whose breathing, while not totally normal, was clearly easier, and his pulse ox was a robust 99 and though the sky was low and heavy and the wind buffeted the car like waves against the Argo, it was kind of a beautiful day. 

 

Minnesota Nice

I was running down a stretch of trail along the Mississippi river on Tuesday, enjoying some early Spring sunshine while my mom watched the kids. The river is swollen over its banks with the winter thaw, the water swirling and churning, occasionally foamy white in the cross-currents. The trail is lonely, snaking under a tall bridge, past a power plant, an abandoned brewery.

I find myself unnerved when I’m not surrounded by people as I am at home in Chicago. I know that there are people who feel the opposite, that they crave the space and the solitude, but I feel relative safety in numbers, the crush of people that surround me like a blanket. Sure, they may reach into my purse and steal my wallet, but certain crimes of opportunity—murder and dismemberment, say—seem less likely to happen on the bus. Than right here. On this trail. Where no one can hear me scream.

And so there I was, the rhythm of my shoes on the ground the only sound, I realized that this was the perfect place to be murdered by a deranged lunatic drifter.

I could imagine that he might jump from behind a tree and club me, then push my unconscious body down the bluff into the river, where my bloated and lifeless corpse will, well, you get the idea. This was my frame of mind when I came upon the following billboard:

 

 

There are so many things wrong with this billboard, I can’t even begin to tell you, starting with the part about the “new tradition.” Um, what now? Is it like Silly Bandz or quinoa? The hot new thing? Are they trying to create buzz? And why did they buy a billboard? Is it part of a larger media blitz? And who is this Cremation Society?

I googled them later, because, you know. OMG. Apparently, I can become a member of the Cremation Society of Minnesota for $15. This is ponderous all by itself, but the Web site doesn’t tell me what I get for my $15. I’ll bet it’s a lot of creepy junk mail with specialty urns and whatnot.

Anyway, so I was running and thinking about how eerily lonely it was, and I came upon the death billboard, and out of nowhere, a voice said, “Thank you,” about 8 inches from my left ear and I jumped about two feet in the air.

(AAAAAAAHHH! OMG! Thank you for what!? I pictured two drifters behind me with their axes.
“After you," one might say.
“No, no, after YOU.”
“Thank you.”)

It turned out to be another jogger. A woman. And then a cyclist went past me.

“Thank you,” she said. And I realized this was some kind of bizarre trail etiquette.

There’s this thing in Minnesota that the people here call Minnesota Nice. This refers to their unfailing politeness and general civility. It is also not strictly true. Last time I was here, I was at Target and the parking lot was packed with cars. I circled until I found someone who was about to back out of their spot, and I signaled my intent to take it. After the driver left, a Minnesotan in another car came up from the other direction, no signal, nothing, and just took the spot. Now, where I come from that doesn’t happen. It may be a big city, the third largest in the United States, but there are rules that we follow that make it possible for us to coexist in such close quarters with limited resources and I don’t care who you are, even if you’re driving a Mercedes SL AMG and the other driver is in a Yugo with a basketball for a tire, the other driver gets the spot if he calls it with is freaking signal, people. So I let this girl know what happens in Chicago when you don’t follow the rules with some visual and audio cues.

I can only infer that Minnesota Nice applies when Minnesotans are doing something they feel smug about. Composting, say. Or exercise.

And it continued to happen, this signaling, and it scared the crap out of me every time. The worst was a cyclist with a bell. Not a ching-ching bell like on a bicycle, but a ding sound like you might use to signal the end of a meditation session, which you would think would be soothing but it isn’t when you’re otherwise alone on a trail and people keep scaring you and your dad tells you later that there’s a drifter camp right there and who knows how those guys pass the time. In any event, the best way to ensure that I don’t make any sudden movements or stab you in the eye is probably not sneaking up behind me and ringing a damn bell.

On the way home, I ran past a sign that sort of illuminated the experience for me. Apparently, it is the law that you signal audibly when passing someone on the trail. And of course, now I felt bad for passing people and not saying anything. I’m sure it offended the nice Minnesotans to no end, and I pictured them running after me, an angry mob with torches and pitchforks. And I wondered if they would call out to people on the trail as they pursued me.

“Angry mob on your left!”

Feeling Minnesota

“Which underpants do you want, Monkeyman?”

“Green,” he replies.

“I don’t have green. I have Buzz Lightyear, Spongebob and blue.”

“How about green?”

“Sweetie, the green underpants are in Chicago. I have Buzz Lightyear, Spongebob and blue.”

His eyes turn bright blue as they begin to fill with tears. “Green.”

 

“Which jammies do you want? I have football and monsters.”

“Superhero.”

“Oh, honey. Superhero jammies are back in Chicago.”

A fat tear slides down his cheek. He swipes it away as his voice catches.

“Superhero,” he says.

“Lovebug, I’m so sorry.”

On bacon, in sadness

Scott and I had a wedding to go to on Saturday night, so I heaved my body into a pair of Spanx, crammed my toes into a pair of heels, kissed the kids and we launched ourselves into a rare child-free evening.

We were late to the wedding because we are always late to everything. There was some spirited discussion over who was to blame for this, but the nice thing about a wedding is that unless you are the bride or, to a somewhat lesser extent, the groom, no one gives a crap what you do.

The wedding took place at an architectural salvage dealer, a warehouse full of oddments that lent themselves nicely to changing the subject from whose responsibility it was that we were late (hint: not mine) to the series of giant cement columns or the marble baptismal font or the mid-century table lamps or the pair of giant Chinese dragons. The affair was black tie optional, so think raw brick space, candles and glinting sequins. It was quite lovely.

During the dinner, the talk was of the chocolate-covered bacon.  We grabbed some plates and stood in line, and as we approached the buffet, a sign confirmed what we’d heard. “Chocolate-Covered Bacon,” it read in fancy letters, next to a large platter on which said bacon rested, looking delicious. There were only a few pieces left, as everyone who walked past grabbed a handful.

Apparently, the lady behind me in line was into the whole bacon thing, too, and was very concerned that the rapidly diminishing stack would be gone by the time she got there. She left the line to duck behind the table and talk with the server, gesturing toward the nearly-empty platter. The server nodded, and the lady got back in line, though she didn’t look mollified. On the contrary, she looked a little stressed out.

The woman’s anxiety over the bacon was palpable. I could feel it radiating off of her in waves as she discussed her bacon prospects with her husband in line. And indeed, so concerned was she that Scott and I would take all of the bacon for ourselves that when it was our turn at the bacon, before I could make a move, she leaned around me and stretched out an arm and actually took two of the four pieces of bacon on the platter.

Surprised, I turned around to find the woman with chocolate-covered bacon on an otherwise-empty plate, resolutely looking anywhere but at me.

I couldn’t decide if I admired her I’mma-get-mah-bacon attitude or deplored her lack of bacon-related dignity as I delicately placed a single piece of chocolate-covered bacon on my own plate, politely leaving the last piece for Scott, for no matter whether he still thought it was my fault we were late, we’re still living in a society, and unless you’re pregnant or four, it’s unseemly to hoard or snatch food even though it’s bacon and I’m a nursing mom who’s ALWAYS HUNGRY and I WAS there first, bi-otch.

It occurred to me a second later to take all of the shortribs just to teach the woman a lesson, but then they refilled them just as I got there, so it would have been impossible.

Anyway.

We took these pictures at the wedding. See if you can figure out which one is “before.”

 

 

 

Songs of love and tragedy

I was at the playground on Tuesday, pushing Ryan on a swing while I daydreamed about whatever. About dinner or the OT session we had just come from. About how Kai woke up on Friday night and would not go back to sleep at all, literally, and has been kind of a disaster ever since. About what I needed at Target. Anyway, as we were doing our thing, Ryan and I, a mom put her baby in the swing next to ours. She interrupted my reverie when she invited the two babies to wave at each other, obliging me to go, “Ryan! Wave to the baby! Hi, Baby!” in the manner that you do when someone interacts with your baby.

And then the mom started to sing.

Big smile, big gestures, she pushed her baby, all the while singing the Alphabet Song and If You’re Happy and You Know It like she was auditioning for Captain freaking Kangaroo.

I hated her immediately.

I sing to Ryan and to Kai all the time, don’t get me wrong. I have a thousand songs I’ve made up about poopy diapers or naptime or whatever, just to make those transitions easier. They’re not great:

We’ve gotta change your pants.
We’ve gotta change your pants.
We’ve gotta change your pants
‘Cause you pooped in your pants.

But they are distracting and silly. We sing in the car, or we would if Kai wouldn’t scream “STOP SINGING!” It wasn’t the singing I objected to, in other words. It was the simultaneous swing push and sing-a-long.

Isn’t it enough that we go to the park? Do we really have to put on a show while we’re there? For me, just GOING to the park is my pat-myself-on-the-back mothering moment, when I could be on Facebook or at Target or whatever else.

Was she trying to show me up? Trying to make me look bad? Feel bad? Was she deranged? Or did she know something I didn’t? I LOVE THIS! She seemed to be saying. I love my daughter so much that every moment is an opportunity for us to bond and grow! Yaaaaaayyyyyyyyyy!

And what I really hated about her was that for just a fraction of a second, I thought about bursting into song myself. Strangely, though, the song that came to mind first was Blister in the Sun by the Violent Femmes.

ALSO…

I had to take our cat to get put down this week. Okay, top on the list of things you don’t want to do. I had the kids with a sitter, because, you know. Good lord. I packed him up in his carrier, and I don’t think the cat started to get suspicious until I said, “You’ve been a great kitty, JJ.”

He got a little restless in the car. “You’ll be okay,” I crooned automatically, without thinking. Total lie.

It’s a mark of how crazy our lives have become that Scott and I had to search pretty hard in our schedules to find a window of time to put our cat to sleep. I had report card pick-up, an appointment for Ryan at the allergist. Scott had meetings. I had no idea how long it would take, and the last thing I wanted to do was to seem like a jerk for saying, “Uh, hey, can we move things along? It’s report card pick-up day.”

I’ll tell you that I felt like a jerk a few times anyway. The first is when I made the appointment.

“Will you be taking the ashes?” the receptionist asked.

“No,” I said.

Pause, pause. “No problem.”

Damn. Is it wrong not to want the ashes? Then I’d have a box of cat ashes. Where would I put them? How long before Kai knocks them over and I had to drag the shop vac in from the garage, because Scott would be annoyed if I used the Dyson to vacuum something like cat ashes, complaining that we would then have cat ashes in the filter and the hose mechanism, and do they give us an urn or do we just use Tupperware? And we didn’t get Scott’s cat’s ashes, so getting mine would seem—well, unfair. And why did this make me feel guilty, as though I’d bypassed all of the options that indicated I loved the cat, and checked the box marked “Dumpster?”

*    *    *

The vet had assured me the day before that the last thing I wanted to do was be present for the procedure, to be there when they administered the final shot. He said that I didn’t want that to be my last memory of JJ.

The tech, however, informed me that the procedure would be for me to hold the cat as he lay dying.

“I don’t want to do that,” I said. “Dr. Diaz said I didn’t have to do that.”

Pause, pause. “No problem.”

My eyes welled with tears.

“Would you like to pay now?” She asked. “Or shall we bill you?”

*    *    *

I took JJ out of his carrier and scratched his ears. I pulled him into my lap, and he promptly jumped down, never having sat in my lap for a single moment in our 17 years together.

The tech came back into the room, her view of us partially blocked by the examination counter. “Ah. Is he in your lap?” she asked, smiling approvingly.

“No. He’s on the floor,” I said. “That’s where he likes it. On the floor.”

Pause, pause. “No problem.”

*    *    *

Afterward, I sat for a while in the car, collecting myself, trying very hard not to imagine what was happening to my cat inside the vet’s office. When I looked at the clock, I realized I still had my sitter for another 45 minutes. I took a deep, bracing breath, wiped my eyes and put the car in gear.

I went to the store. We were out of hot dogs. 

 

My new status symbol

For reasons I’m at a loss to explain, this family eats craploads of food. Last week, we went through 32 eggs. We ate two entire loaves of bread, which is crazy, since one of us doesn’t eat wheat and one of us is a BABY.  So when the kids got up on Saturday morning and I blearily herded them into the kitchen, I discovered that we were out of everything. Again.

No peanut butter. No Kix. No bananas, no fruit of any kind. I pondered the barren wasteland of my refrigerator, contemplating my options, which seemed to boil down to chocolate frosting and salsa verde. We didn’t even have catfood. (I should probably mention that the catfood thing is unrelated to my search for breakfast for my children.)

I’m at the store all the time. Our monthly food bills are in the four digits, between everyone’s special diets and what with all of us needing to eat. My husband complains about the amount of money I spend.

“It’s food,” I say. “I’m not out there buying Faberge eggs.” And when I really want to get on my high horse, “I make you a delicious dinner every night and I don’t see you complaining.”

So, after teaching my morning class at the gym, I went to the store to buy some staples. Some fruit, some hot dogs. Some popcorn. Both Ryan and Kai love popcorn. Ryan goes into the cupboard and gets a bowl, and hands it to me saying, “dah-dah,” which means popcorn. And sometimes hot dog. It is, of course, highly adorable, and even if 7 a.m. seems too early for popcorn, it’s a whole grain, so WTF, you know?

Anyway, I’m checking out and a man comes up to me an introduces himself as George Lopez (!) and that I’ve been awarded Elite Status (!!) at the grocery store for being one of the to 20% spenders at the chain (!!!). He had a little folder in his hand, and started to explain to me what I’d won.

My initial surprise was quickly replaced by excitement. Elite Status! *emits tiny squeal* What would I win? Would it be like flying first class? Would I get my own checkout line? Get for free everything I could consume before I got to the checkout line? Would I get 10% off everything I bought? Would I earn points toward a cruise? OMG! Did I win a cruise? And shouldn’t there be some kind of balloon shower?

George handed me a black Elite Status card with the store manager’s cell phone number on it. This is his personal phone number, George assured me, with the air of confidentiality I associate with inter-girlfriend gossip. This seemed really sweet, but also really, really strange. When was I going to call him? “Oh, hey, George! What’s up? It’s Megan!  Um, sometimes I go to the store and the bananas are either too yellow or too green. Okay! Byeee!” There are some people whose cell number I’d love to have. Brad Pitt springs to mind. And while I was thinking about Brad Pitt and still trying to figure out when I’d want to call my grocery store manager on his Blackberry, George plunged gamely on with the rest of his presentation.

He told me that sometimes they offer discounts on gas, but not this time because there were “no gas stations around here,” which was an odd thing to say, but what he could offer was a free deli sandwich if I purchased six of them, and a coupon for a two-for-one video rental at the Blockbuster kiosk.

Um…Thanks?

I don’t want to go all cynical on you. It was cool to be recognized for the amount of my husband’s heard earned cash I dump at the store on a regular basis. I recognize all the cashiers by name and they know my kids, who almost always upend an entire box of something I’ve been bribing them with all over the frozen food aisle, and Ryan has started to throw temper tantrums at the checkout line that last until we get home, and they both pester me to ride in the carts that have the plastic car attached, but then climb out all of the time and place things like turtle food in the cart when I’m not looking. But a free seventh sandwich and a copy of “Life as We Know It?” How lame do they think I am?

As I drove home with a car full of food, though, I was just a little excited about my Elite Status, because, hey—Elite Status!—and looking forward to telling Scott about what happened. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that, despite my insistence that my spending is completely normal, apparently I spend more on groceries than 80% of everyone else. Eighty-freaking-percent. And despite George Lopez’s congratulations for being a valued customer, I became increasingly concerned that Scott would find the subtext of this message to be, “Lady, your husband is right, you spend too much God damned money at the store.”

I spent $136 on Saturday, and when I got home, I realized I had forgotten bread. I have to go back. Plus, we’re already out of eggs, fruit, popcorn, lunchmeat and cereal. It’s Monday. Elite Status indeed.