Almost Perfect

We are two and a half weeks away from the tween’s bat mitzvah. It is almost crunch time, which makes me think of tacos. Mmm, tacos sound good, and appropriate too, because the theme for the bat mitzvah is a Mexican fiesta, the most Jewish party idea ever. We were able to find THE PERFECT DRESS, which honestly is a story for another day, but trust me, it’s exactly what a bat mitzvah should wear for her own fiesta. PERFECT it is, except it needed to be hemmed, so maybe not entirely PERFECT, but damn near close.

Then we had to find shoes to go with THE PERFECT DRESS, which we needed in order to get it hemmed. For those of you who don’t have to get things hemmed, and fuck you if you are one of those, you have to have the shoes you plan to wear with the pants or dress so you know where the hem should be. If you don’t believe me, look at women with boots. You can always tell a woman who knows about hems from where the hem of her pants hits the shoe of the boot. If the pants are tucked into the boot, she is very familiar with hems.

We had the shoes, we had THE PERFECT DRESS, so off we went to the alterations shop. We didn’t just go to any old shop; we went to our friend SS’s mother’s shop. SS is one of my husband’s dearest friends, the fool who introduced us, and an honorary uncle to my children. While he no longer lives in our town, his mother still does, and she has owned an alterations shop since forever. SS had given his mom a heads up to expect us, so when we arrived, she quickly grabbed her bowl of pins and instructed the tween to change into THE PERFECT DRESS.

The tween emerged from the dressing room, a vision with a dragging hem. SS’s mother quickly got her to stand before the three paneled mirror as she knelt on the floor in front of her and eyeballed the right length and fold of the hemline.  After a few pins, she stood back to check the dress length, which was, of course, PERFECT. She sat down on the floor again and began to pin around the dress, taking into account the train, having the tween turn a bit at a time while she worked.

As she pinned, SS’s mother asked all the small talky questions to catch up from last we had seen each other:  how the girls were, their ages, how my husband’s business is doing, even the health of my ailing mother in law. Then she asked my least favorite question, “Do you work?”

I hate that question. The answer is always wrong somehow.  I do work, I work very hard. I just don’t earn a paycheck. People don’t want to know that. They want to know if you have a job. You either have a job or you don’t. Being a wife and mother is a lot of work, but the pay is shit, and nobody counts that as a job, except maybe for other stay at home moms. I volunteer too, but volunteering doesn’t count because you do it for free. The longer I stood there not knowing what to say, the more awkward I became.

“No,” I finally said. “No, I don’t work. Outside of the home. I don’t work outside of caring for my family.”

“So you don’t work?” she asked me again.

“No,” I said quietly. She stopped pinning and looked up at me.

“Good,” she said.

Around this time, a short, round man came into the shop, carrying two pairs of jeans. He wanted to get the inseams measured, which I found odd since most men’s jeans have the measurements right on the labels. He figured if she just measured the pants, she could cut off a couple of inches and he would be saved from the standing in the mirror and getting his little stubby legs pinned.  SS’s mom had him sit and wait while she finished working on the hem of the tween’s dress.

“She looks very pretty,” the man said as he sat down. “It must be prom season.”

It was late December. No amount of being polite would make this prom season.

“Thank you. But not quite. It’s for her bat mitzvah,” I said.

The man said nothing, which meant he didn’t know what a bat mitzvah is or he doesn’t like Jews, or, possibly, he had nothing left to say. SS’s mother finished pinning the hem and stood up.

“Quick question,” I asked her. “What about this?” I pointed to the tween’s chest, where the dress hung empty.

“I have just the thing,” she said and went behind the counter. She came back with two push up bra inserts, which she proceeded to shove down the tween’s dress. She arranged them just so, by both plunging one hand into the bust area while squeezing it into place from the outside of the dress with the other hand. All this took place in front of the man sitting with his pile of denim. I waited for the tween to start crying.

“Don’t mind me,” he said, sensing how uncomfortable my daughter was. “I can close my eyes.”

After a few more manipulations, SS’s mother asked how we thought it looked. The tween and I agreed it improved the lines of the dress, and she took out a few more pins to secure the inserts in place.

“Perfect,” the fat man declared.

“It is,” I agreed. “That’s why we call it THE PERFECT DRESS.”

I helped the tween back to the dressing room, and unzipped the back of the gown and undid the other strap.

“That was so embarrassing,” she whispered. “She stuck her hands right down the front of my dress, and that man sat and watched it all.”

I took the dress from her and hung it on the hanger.

“Today,” I said to her,” you are a woman.”

When the Party's Over

Look around your house. Are the decorations still up? Are they starting to look sad and lonely, now that the presents have all been opened? Are you tired of eating the candy out of your stocking? What about the cookies that were fresh five days ago, but now taste slightly stale, just like a few days after Christmas feels?  Are the winter blues kicking in, even though winter isn’t even ten days old yet?

Here in the Southeast, we are having quite the rainy Christmas season. We didn’t get a white Christmas, but we did get a wet one. The sky is grey, the temperatures are in the damp fifties, and all of it makes for some pretty significant seasonal affective disorder. The only light most of us are getting is the glare from the television or from the screen in a darkened movie theater, which is only as good as the movie itself and only lasts as long as it takes for you to find your car in the parking lot.

Near my Christmas tree, with the skirt bunched up and wrinkled like an old drunk whore’s, are a few piles of Christmas gifts. They are loved and appreciated but they have yet to find a home. I bet you have those piles too, don’t you? Presents that are adored, but not necessarily easy to put away. The reason, inevitably, is that there is no room for more stuff. You needed new socks and underwear, but you didn’t clean out the dresser drawer because for some reason you can’t seem to part with the old ones. And it seems wasteful, doesn’t it, to just throw the stuff away, but does anyone really want your old underwear, with the faulty elastic or just the tiniest of holes? Are the socks that are worn thin on the heels something that should be added to the donation pile?

I asked a local charity that question once, as a volunteer helped me unload the back of my SUV. I felt guilty at the shoddy quality of some of my donated items, which are easier left quickly outside a donation site so no one can see that the pile of unattended shit was yours. She assured me that all donations are welcome, and that if the items are more than gently used, they could still fetch a decent price by the pound, making every donation one of value. I still don’t believe it. I contend that donating your old corn chip smelling sneakers constitutes cruel and unusual punishment, not for you, obviously, but for the unlucky Goodwill employee who has to sort through them and the other nasty things you dropped off in exchange for your tax deductible form, minus your old crusty socks and underwear that you were too lazy to take out of the drawer and put in a pile.
So the sky is grey, the tree is sad, the presents are sitting unused, the cookies are stale, and yes, you are sick of everyone that lives in the house. You have all attempted to get along for the past week, probably because you are still afraid of a phone call to Santa, even though you stopped believing in him about thirty years ago. Sure, you and the rest of the immediate family have bickered and snapped at each other, but you’ve made a concerted effort to keep it to a minimum so that you can enjoy the holidays. As my now twelve year old used to say back when she was in preschool, I’ve used up all my good. Now I, and I bet the rest of you, am tired of making the effort to get along. I don’t want to look at my family’s faces anymore, certainly not with those shitty expressions. Absence makes the heart grow fonder.

The holidays are over, unless you count New Year’s Eve, which I don’t. Why is that even a holiday? It’s just the changing of a calendar year, so there is really no need to celebrate it. Why not move that waste of a holiday to a month that really needs it, like August. Trust me, New Year’s Eve would be much more fun in the middle of summer. You would feel better in that fancy dress because you aren’t full of stuffing and cookies, and it would make sense to be wearing it strapless because it isn’t thirty fucking degrees outside.

Tired of shopping yet? Yeah, me too. I know there are good deals to be had, but I don’t want to fight the traffic or the return lines. The joy and friendliness that made all the shopping a joy last week has been replaced with nastiness, impatience, and frustration as whatever items forgotten on your wish list are nowhere to be found, along with the gift receipts you needed to return your blender and really ugly sweater.

Men, listen up. Don’t buy your wife a blender, ever. Not even if she asks for one. A blender is never a gift for your wife. And don’t even think of getting a vacuum, unless you want your testicles sucked up through the HEPA filter.

You have eaten more in the past week than you thought humanly possible, am I right? Well, guess what, someone still has to make dinner, and that someone is probably you. No one wants any more ham or turkey. Those leftover mashed potatoes? Just toss them. The cranberry sauce too, because if you don’t do it now, you will find it next thanksgiving in the back of the fridge.  In my house, no one has provided input on what to make for dinner, but they have provided plenty of negative feedback on the options I have suggested. I have decided on soup. It’s cold and rainy, and I don’t care if anyone eats it. They can fight over the last two stale chocolate chip cookies for all I care.

I just wanted you to know that you are not alone. You are not suffering from depression. You don’t need to talk to somebody or make an appointment with your doctor. You are suffering from late December. We all are, so stop thinking you are so fucking special.

Abandon All Hope, Ye Who Enter Here

I need to stop watching American Horror Story. It’s fucking with my mind.

I didn’t even know this show existed until late last summer, when my then fourteen year old daughter, E, started talking about the upcoming season. She had spent the summer Netflix binging on past seasons in her bedroom, unbeknownst to her father and me, and fools that we are, we figured it was on television and therefore couldn’t be that bad. Chalk that up to a big parenting fail.

She was very excited about the season that started this fall, Freak Show, and decided that it could become our new show to watch together. Normally, we stick to such classy reality television shows as Here Comes Honey Boo Boo and Gypsy Sisters, so for me to get hooked on a drama is really out of character. I am not one to watch regular television programming. It seems like too much of an investment of my time that could be better spent reading books from the library or looking for cat videos online. E loved the show, though, and I love E, and therefore I was willing to give it a go.

Do you know anything about the show? If you watch it, you see my point about the mind fuck. If you don’t, then here is a brief explanation. I’m not very worried about spoiling the show for you because if you aren’t familiar with it yet, chances are pretty good you won’t ever watch it, and good for you.

Every season has a different  disturbing theme and different characters but mostly the same actors. I started with the current season, which is the fourth. It’s called Freak Show, and that’s what it is, an old fashioned side show based in Jupiter, Florida, in the 1950’s. Pin heads, dwarves, giants, deformities, tattoos, hermaphrodites. If you can think of a sideshow freak, chances are, it’s in this season. This show has a little something for everyone. There’s romance, smoking, drinking, and sex, lots of sex, normal sex, deviant sex, violent sex, sexy violence, violent violence, and murder with some torture and dismemberment just for a little something extra.  The language is foul, and there is a naked butt at least once an episode. In short, it’s the perfect show to watch with your teenager.

Also, there is an evil clown. His name is Twisty. He is the reason people are scared of clowns.

E and I watch the show in the dark because it makes it scarier and also we can pretend we aren’t watching the sex scenes together. The sex and violence are gratuitous and help distract you from the holes in the plot and weak character development. Every time an episode is over, I feel a little wrong for having watched it, even more so for having watched it with my child, my sweet, innocent child. None of it can be healthy.

Some time in the last month or so, she thought it would also be a good idea to watch an old season to see how amazing the show used to be, as the current season doesn't seem to be up to the standards of past seasons. Honestly, keeping up that level of quality sex and extreme violence year after year isn’t as easy as it sounds. We started with the second season, Asylum, which is set in a Catholic run mental institution in the 1960’s. That season involved some alien abduction, demonic possession, rape, polygamy, and necrophilia. Oh, and evil nuns and a Nazi doctor who continued the medical experiments he started in the concentration camps. This was all in addition to the sex and freaky sex and violence and murder and naked butts.

We would sometimes watch two or three episodes at a time, in the dark. This show cannot be healthy, and Netflix binging on it is just not a good idea.

After we finished that season, we went back to the first one, Murder House. That season is the one that actually scared me. The other two that I’ve seen are warped and twisted and horrible and creepy, but that first season is downright frightening because it has ghosts too. Murder, sex, rape, latex masks, Columbine style school violence, a girl with Down’s syndrome, hit and run car accidents, a deformed boy hiding in the attic, accidental suicide, and death by a fireplace poker shoved up an ass. I couldn’t stop watching it, not because I liked it, but because I had to. I was almost scared not to. I would watch the show and have nightmares for a few days.

At this point, season three, Coven, is now on Netflix, and we are all caught up on season four, which has a brief hiatus until mid-January. I don’t want to get started on the third season because it’s the holidays, and it just doesn’t seem right to watch so much deviance during such a joyful time of year. Plus, I have way too much to do, and generally after an episode, I have to sit sort of catatonically for a little while until the weird feeling subsides. Ain’t nobody got time for that.

If you watch American Horror Story, you either have a high tolerance for the macabre or no soul. I don’t know which applies to my daughter and me, but everything about that damn show is wrong, just wrong. And the more you watch, the more you get desensitized to its twistedness, like cutting off an animal head and sewing it on a baby body is, you know, kind of okay. I still am not sure if it is worse than Honey Boo Boo or Gypsy Sisters, because those are almost real people.

If you haven’t started the show yet, I recommend you don’t unless you need another reason to feel badly about yourself and everyone else. You can get that same feeling from watching the news, but it has way less sex. And naked butts.

Gimme a Break

We are only a couple of days away from winter break, and I don’t know who is happier about it, me or my daughters.

Even five years ago, I wouldn’t have felt that way. Having my two girls home from school added the responsibility of activity director to my already ridiculous list of jobs. Not only did I cook and clean for them, but I had to entertain them too, or at least help them entertain themselves. It was fucking exhausting, all the arranging of playdates and planning of outings and baking of sugar cookies, which to this day I won’t eat if decorated by a child. Are their hands ever really clean?

Now that my babies are teenagers, they don’t require that level of interaction, but when they do, it’s more on their own terms and generally in small doses. Plus, they like to sleep, a lot, and I can go to the gym and be fairly comfortable they won’t set the house on fire or beat each other to death with Barbies. They can make their own hot chocolate and grilled cheese sandwiches. They know how to turn on the Blu-Ray player, and they are tall enough to reach it. In short, I don’t mind having them around.

They really need this break from school, and I really need the break from them bitching about school. I am not one to bash teachers. Teachers do a thankless job with no supplies for no money, and a lot of people discount what they do as not being real work. I value them, I appreciate them, and I support them. Well, most of them. The few bad ones, and it seems there is always at least one a year, those are the ones from which we all need a break. They are making my kids crazy, and my kids are making me crazy, and for two weeks, we get to stop the insanity.

My older daughter’s arch nemesis is her biology teacher. This is a woman who thinks she is cool because she wears palazzo pants and kicky little heels and slutty librarian glasses. She likes to use technology, Edmodo and homework assignments by text, because she thinks it makes her innovative. What she doesn’t like to do is be fair or grade work. She thinks if she tells one of her classes a detail about an assignment that the other three classes will somehow magically know the information as well, and if they don’t, well, that’s their problem. She likes to say that a lot: that’s your problem. She’s right, too. When she assigns projects the night before but doesn’t give them a rubric, when she decides to cancel the science fair work after the kids have already written a preliminary experiment, when she gives them an entire chapter on genetics to outline the night before she quizzes them on it, having never once covered the material herself, having never taught fucking genetics to a whole honors class of teenagers who actually want to be taught, it is their problem. So yes, we would all like a winter break from that bullshit.

My other daughter was blessed this year with not one but two of “those” teachers. She would like a break from the science teacher who prefers to cover DNA sequencing with a SpongeBob handout and teaches the parts of a microscope with a worksheet instead of a, you know, an actual microscope. She would also like a break from the social studies teacher who makes all the girls put their purses in a bin at the front of the room, who stands at the door with her hand out for assignments before the students are allowed to enter, who won’t let a student stand near her desk if she smells perfume or the kid accidentally coughed. This social studies teacher, who has already had them write a paragraph long definition of over three hundred vocabulary works, who makes them outline in great detail the entire textbook, then takes away points when the kids mess up their roman numerals since none of them ever learned how to actually do a technically accurate outline, this one we could stand a break from. I’m happy that my kid learning how to outline; what I mind is that she was somehow supposed to know it without ever being taught. Don’t you think if you want middle school students to format the homework in a certain way, you might give them a little clue on how to do it?

Every night, my children engage in a bitch fest that rivals the most disgruntled workers, bitching about how unreasonable some of their teachers are. They have a minimum of two to three hours of homework every night, and weekly group projects that they always somehow get stuck doing on their own. They are overwhelmed, and I don’t blame them. The homework they have assigned ranges from busywork to independent learning, which might benefit them in some ways, but on the other hand, aren’t they supposed to be teaching?

I realize that learning to deal with difficult people is a life skill that every student, nay, every person, must try to master. We all have had a horrible boss at some point, and we had to find a way to do what they wanted without going postal. Kids seem to have it worse because they have the potential to have up to six bad bosses at a time, each with their own unreasonable demands and narcissistic tendencies that young adults really don’t know how to navigate.  

For two weeks, I won’t have to listen to anyone bitch about the horrible Ms. Crotch Rot Douchebag and the crazy ass ho Mrs. Fuckface. If we are truly #blessed, we might even make it through the vacation without a project or paper, no ancient Greek epic poems to buy (hello, this is public school; why am I buying books??) and memorize, no cells to diagram or current events to debate. Just hot cocoa, sleeping in, presents, and fighting with each other, something we just haven’t had enough time to do.

It’s going to be a fabulous fortnight.

Bah, Humbug

Right now the cat is hiding under the covers, and I want to join him. I’m sure he was just looking for a nice, quiet place to sleep, but me, I want to hide from this day. It’s not that bad things are happening; on the contrary, it’s a day full of possibility and options. The problem is that I don’t want to do any of them. I just want to pretend I am the cat. Of the limited feelings I think he might express, being overwhelmed is not one of them.

Next week is the beginning of Chanukah, in less than two weeks is Christmas, and in my house, we celebrate both. Chanukah wasn’t such a big deal when my daughters were younger because their expectations and wants were smaller. A different colored dreidel, maybe a coloring book or a bag of gelt, and they were happy. It was mostly about unwrapping a gift and having something new. It didn’t matter so much what that something new was.

Now, as teenagers, they don’t exactly want a new coloring book. They each have a collection of dreidels, and they realize that gelt is shit chocolate and not really worth the calories. Finding something small for eight nights is not only more difficult, but it also cuts into my stocking stuffer options. Believe it or not, there are only so many tubes of lip gloss a teenaged girl wants. Candy is frowned upon because it makes girls fat, according to girls who eat it anyway and then bitch about looking fat, even though they are far from it. If I could find bags of gelt that were quality chocolate and came with a free counseling session, I would have it made.

The cat just sighed. I can hear him smacking his cat lips from under the covers.

Christmas shopping for my daughters presents its own set of challenges. I have two very different kids with two incredibly different lists. The older teen is very brand conscious, except none of the brands she wants can be found at our local mall or Target. Honestly, half of what she wants isn’t even found in our country. The Internet has made her wish list grow even more specific and difficult, and everything sold out the week of Thanksgiving.

The other one doesn’t really want anything, but if pressed to make a list, hers would include, in no particular order, a llama, a puppy, and a laptop, which even she admits she doesn’t really need. My challenge is how to make it fair. The fleece pullover the older one wants costs about three times as much as the sweater the younger one wants. So does she get three sweaters, or should the other one only get a third of her pullover?

The answer is that math doesn’t exist under the covers with the cat.

My husband and I are on the second year of not giving each other gifts, opting instead of home renovations. Last year, I wanted a new gas cooktop, which meant new counters and a new sink too. I have no regrets. I can buy myself clothes or a massage, but not having to clean grout on a tile countertop is the gift that keeps giving. Just kidding; you don’t think I actually cleaned the grout on my nasty tile countertop, did you?  I knew one year we would replace it.

So last year, we redid the kitchen, only we never finished it. We never made a decision on lighting, which was more than just replacing a fixture. It involved adding ceiling cans and under counter LED strips and rewiring the whole room and dimmer switches. With all of that, here was no point in tiling the backsplash until the electrical work was done. Which meant for the last year, I have been looking at unfinished sheet rock walls, when I could see them, because the whole room is so damn dark I have been cooking by flashlight.

So in the other room, after waiting a year to find one, is a good electrician, along with his father, who may or may not have tuberculosis.  He has removed all stuff from under the cabinets. He has run wires in the crawlspace. He has mounted under cabinet lighting and installed dimmer switches. While he did all that, his father stood around and coughed a bunch.

Then it was time to install the ceiling cans, and so he cut giant holes in the ceiling while his father coughed on the dust which has now settled all over my hardwood floors. And surprise, there was a second ceiling, like a secret panel, like the builder made a few calculation errors, and now what should have been a few hours of electrical work is turning into at least a long weekend of no access to my kitchen. And the best part is electricians don’t patch ceilings; they just put holes in them, while their fathers stand around and cough.

I am pretty sure if I crawl under the covers, the cat will leave, and I would rather hide with him than alone. Also, it doesn’t really count as hiding it looks like a boulder is under the comforter. Maybe I should hide with a glass of wine and a Xanax instead, under the actual bed. I bet no one would look for me there. I just know that I can't deal with what is happening in my kitchen, my children's lists, the holidays, anymore for today. I just want to be like the cat and hide.

Keep It in Your Pants

Remember when people used to experience things, back before there were cell phones? When you went to a concert, you held up your lighter as a sign of respect. If you were at the movies, you watched the film with the people you went with and ate your popcorn and slurped your Slurpee. When you went to dinner, you conversed with your family while you waited for your food to be served, hoping your little ones would be entertained enough with some crayons and free bread until the meal arrived. If you went to the theater, you watched the performers, letting the magic of live entertainment enthrall you. Back in the day, you were present in the moment.

Nowadays, our society has lost its manners along with its attention span. I am guilty of it too, of being too distracted with my phone to notice what is happening around me. We recently had a few people over for dinner, and after the meal was over, we all retired to the living room to chat and drink and watch football. I immediately pulled out my phone to see what I had missed during the meal, and after I had made my app rounds, I looked up and noticed that six out of the eight of us on the couch were doing the exact same thing. We were all happy to be together, as far as I could tell, and yet there we were, isolating ourselves by looking into the palms of our hands instead of one another.

While it’s both irritating and embarrassing to be that person with the phone, at least I know when to put the damn thing away. A few weeks ago, I went to our local theater twice in the same week. The first time was with my husband. We had tickets to see a Broadway musical that was on a national tour. The tickets were pricey, and the crowd was appropriate and well-mannered enough to wait until intermission to do the obligatory phone check. After all, we all paid a pretty penny for those seats. Plus, I am pretty sure they gave the standard no videotaping/no flash photography pre-show warning. Other than the sea of screens in a fifteen minute window, I didn’t see a single phone out during the performance, and frankly, I was impressed.

Compare that to the show I went to two nights later. It was the national tour of So You Think You Can Dance, and I along with my friend, EL, and my daughter, S, were pretty excited to see the finalists from the television show on which we were all hooked during the summer. This was a very different crowd, a lot of young women, a few young men, and even some families with girls around my daughter’s age who were also big fans of the show. Unlike the Broadway musical, this show did not ban the use of cell phones during the performance, so a whole bunch of people figured that meant they could do whatever the hell they wanted.

The two ladies next to us decided that instead of watching the show with their eyes, they would observe it entirely through their phone screens while taping almost every performance. They were not subtle at all; in fact, one of them insisted on using her flash the entire time, lighting up about four people in the row in front of her in an otherwise darkened theater. I am sure she was not the only person who was that brazen in her filming efforts, but she was the only one near me, and it took all the self-control I had not to knock the goddamn phone out of her hand hard enough to send it careening over the edge of the balcony to the floor below. Her like-minded theater companion not only had the biggest phone I have ever seen this side of a tablet, but she was also wearing one of those douchey Samsung smart watches.  Either she worked at Best Buy or she had to have the latest device, and the bigger the better. She too felt the need to record every performance and view it through her phone instead of actually watching the show.  

I just don’t get it. Why watch it on your phone when you can look up and see it right in front of you? Also, how many times did they plan on watching it again? It was a good show, but it wasn’t that good. I didn’t feel like I needed to see it again. Hell, I already saw most of it when it was on television. After a while, all those dance performances start to look the same. I can’t imagine sharing what I had taped with anyone else. I can barely get people to watch the funny videos I post on Facebook. Why would I force them to watch what is, in essence, someone else’s dance recital?

The ladies next to us reminded me of people who videotape fireworks. There’s another annoying thing that people do that I just don’t understand. If you have seen one firework show, you have seen them all. Things shoot up in the air, there is a loud boom, and an array of colorful sparks fall to the ground. Little children, dogs, and veterans are scared, teenagers are bored, and parents are already angry with the traffic. Who wants to see all of that again? Hey, kids, let’s watch July fourth of 2007 after dinner tonight! That was a great year.

Those two women on one side of us were hardly the only offenders. Throughout the audience, phones were held high, aglow with discourteous bootlegging. I am sure surrounding each phone was a small group of irritated patrons who also wanted to smash things. The only person who I saw that was using his phone in a completely considerate yet rude fashion was the man to EL’s left. He was at the show, along with his overly enthusiastic wife and two teenage daughters, and obviously, that whole night at the theater was not his idea. He was an interesting fellow, bald and probably in his forties, yet dressed in a very urban, youthful, almost hip way, with nice skinny jeans, expensive leather lace up boots, sweater vest, fitted dress shirt, and even a felt fedora and overcoat.  The hat was the most important part of his outfit.

The minute the theater dimmed the lights, he placed the hat on his lap, then his phone inside his hat, and there, under the cover of his felt hipness, he texted like a fiend. He checked up on news. He updated Facebook. He answered email. For the entire show, he crossed and uncrossed his legs, trying to stay comfortable while keeping himself totally occupied on his barely hat hidden iPhone. It was the most polite inconsiderate thing I had ever seen.

Don’t get me wrong, his behavior was distracting, but damn, I admired his technique. I also was more than a little curious about what demanded so much of his attention inside of that hat. I caught myself several times glancing across EL to see what he was doing. I am sure he started by texting someone how much he didn’t want to be there. I imagined it continued to some pretty heavy flirting. I mean, he was lost in that fedora, and if you could tune out the weird inappropriate howling and loud music and horribly positioned stage lights that were frequently blinding, it had to be some good shit.

My point is, put away the phone. If you can live without it while you sleep, you can manage a couple of hours at the movies or the forty-five minutes it takes you to eat a meal. None of us is the president; nothing is so urgent in our world that it can’t wait a little bit longer to be addressed. You can always answers your texts when you go to the bathroom, the way God and Steve Jobs intended.

Up and at 'Em

I woke up this morning to one of worst sounds that can disturb slumber: retching. It was about four in the morning, which tends to be when I sleep the lightest, and even in my sleep-hazy mind, I knew the sound of puking. It was a cat, not a child, which was better than it could have been, I suppose. On the other hand, my children are old enough to know to run to the bathroom or a trashcan if the urge to vomit seizes them. The cats do not know where to aim, and so, no matter where they heave, it’s as bad a spot as any.

So I was awakened at four in the morning. I recognized the sound, and I knew it was coming from somewhere in my bedroom. I had a couple of options. I could jump out of the bed, grab the heaving animal, and throw it in the tub or the hardwoods in the hallway, or I could turn on the lights and scare it enough to spew. I knew my husband would be even less pleased than I to wake up to the combination of cat puke and sudden overhead lighting. Plus, he is still upset the cats aren’t dogs.

I also knew that the longer I waited to make a decision, the less likely I would need to.  Also, the longer the heaving continued, the less familiar it sounded. I sat up and looked around the floor, but couldn’t see a dark figure hunched over on the floor in my line of vision. The damn cat was hiding under something.

I knew it wasn’t the usual puker. Every family has one member who is the puker, and in my house, it’s my cat, Yoko. She is almost all black and has long hair, not Persian long, but long enough to clog the drain that is her cat throat about once a month. I buy this disgusting smelling paste from the vet called Laxatone which is supposed to help her pass her hair balls, but she hates it even more than I do. There is blood loss every time I attempt to use it, and so I tend to conveniently forget until, say, she hacks up a hairball. She’s nine, so that makes roughly 108 hairball vomit episodes I’ve had to clean up over the course of her lifetime. It seems a small price to pay for the pleasure of her company.

The other cat, Moshe, is a short haired tuxedo with a vacant stare and a surprisingly docile personality. He also has the ability to eat like a billy goat and not throw up often, which adds to his overall charm. I don’t mean the eating part, because that’s annoying as shit, but generally speaking, he keeps down whatever he ingests. I was surprised to wake up to the sound of him heaving since, really, it is never him. Even when he gags he manages to keep it down. He would make a terrible bulimic.

What really sucks is that I totally understood why he was puking. Moshe has a serious problem with Christmas. While Yoko is content to sleep on the tree skirt in a modern Normal Rockwell kind of way, Moshe prefers to eat Christmas. He chews on the light cords. He eats ribbons off of presents. He snacks on fragrant potpourri. And he feasts on his favorite, ornaments.

Moshe has developed a rather strong fondness for ornaments. He likes the glittery thread from which they dangle. He is a fan of the soft batting filled Santas and snowmen. He especially likes sequins and beads, and he will even chew a bit on the wire hooks we use to hang the decorations. He has also discovered that the stronger branches on the lower part of the tree work well as a ladder to work his way higher up to the more delicate and special ornaments that we have learned to hang out of his reach. I kid you not; he has actually made a series of steps out of the branches, kind of like a spiral staircase. And at fifteen pounds, he is not able to nimbly float up the tree; I am fully expecting to find the whole thing on its side one morning because of him.

This year, he also discovered the hand crocheted garland that my older daughter made a few years ago. He has already chewed it into several pieces, which look lovely hanging around the tree, like clumps of intestine. He had to work hard at it, so there are many cat saliva thickened spots which add a special touch that says homemade. I doubt my daughter even remembers how to crochet anymore, so it’s not like she is going to make another one any time soon.

After some midnight snacking on the holiday décor, Moshe clearly needed some Pepto. And so instead of drinking a bunch of water and sitting up for a few hours, he heaved and hunched and puked on my bedroom floor, before I could find him. While everyone else was waking up to the sound of their alarms or the smell of breakfast cooking, I was on my knees in the dark with the Woolite pet stain remover and a wad of paper towels, crawling under the bed and looking under the chaise lounges until I found the three, yes, three places where he succeeded in clearing his digestive system.

Here’s my question: what do dogs do for Christmas? Do they eat ornaments off the tree? Do they try to climb it and knock it over? Do they find the cranberry cheesecake cooling on the counter and take delicate nibbles off the top? The truth is, I am a little scared there is going to be a puppy on Christmas morning, and I just need to know what I am in for. At least the presence of a puppy would scare the cats away from the tree and all its many delicacies.

I am going to add carpet cleaning to my Christmas list.

Dawn of the Twelve Blogs of Christmas: It's the Thought That Counts

Can you believe it’s December 1? I mean, sure, the calendar says so, but seriously? I can’t even with December. It’s fifteen days until Hanukah. It’s twenty four days until Christmas. And it’s forty-six days until my daughter’s bat mitzvah. You would think just those three things should be enough to make my head spin. But on top of all of that stuff, all that planning and shopping and cooking and trying to please and unrealistic expectations and inevitable disappoint and all the other emotions, I give myself another big task every December. Yes, people, it’s time for The Twelve Blogs of Christmas. None of these posts will be rehashed, edited, or photo shopped into something new. Twelve original posts, stories, anecdotes, vignettes, lists, or whatever I can muster up from my overtaxed mind. I can’t promise length, excellence, poignancy, or hilarity, but I can promise twelve.

So here we go.

On Saturday night, a friend came over with her two kids. She was going squirrely over the Thanksgiving in her own home after banning one more hour of video games and realizing that meant they would turn to her or against each other for entertainment. We decided on take out Italian and board games, which is really brilliant combination that I highly recommend after a couple of days of Thanksgiving food and football. Luckily we had a game they had never played before, and after we figured out a rhythm, everyone seemed to loosen up and relax.

My friend came to my house after dragging her kids around the mall, in an effort to get out and away from screen time. Her children are a delight, and even after a few too many days of together time, they still were pleasant and polite and engaging, which cannot be said of many eleven and thirteen year olds. Her thirteen year old son, who actually talks to adults other than his parents, made the mistake of mentioning that even after a trip to the mall, he had not gotten a gift for his girlfriend and had no ideas of what to get her.

The whole concept fascinated me, so I had to ask lots of follow up questions. It went down like this:

Me: Wait, you have a girlfriend? You are, what, thirteen now, right?

Boy: Yes.

Me: Can I ask you a personal question?

This is the part where I really shouldn’t ask a personal question. I should just keep my thoughts to myself, inside my head, instead of letting them out there to haunt and disturb others. It’s that filter thing that I lack.

Boy: Um, sure. I guess.

Me: What do you do with your girlfriend?

Boy: (silence)

Me: I don’t mean do, but, like, you don’t exactly go on dates, obviously. I mean, you’re thirteen. It’s not like you are picking her up and taking her to dinner and a movie and then back to her place. So what do you do? Do you talk on the phone? Do you walk her to class? Text? Snapchat? What constitutes a boyfriend-girlfriend relationship in middle school? I am genuinely curious.

My friend sat quietly. Either she didn’t know how to stop my interrogation of her son, or she really wanted to know as well.

Boy: I don’t know. We don’t really do much. I don’t have any classes with her, so I don’t walk with her. Sometimes I see her at the end of the day, in the car pool line.

Boy’s sister: Twice a week! He can talk to her twice a week.

Boy: The rest of the time she is really busy, and then she has to do family stuff on the weekends. So we don’t really talk all that much.

Me: Do you live in the same neighborhood?

Boy: No.

Me: Okay, this is fascinating. So you have this girlfriend, whom you only really see or talk to for a few minutes twice a week. And you don’t live near each other, and you don’t have any classes together. How exactly did you hook up with her?

I hoped that hook up meant something different in eighth grade.

Boy: Well, basically a girl who is friends with my girlfriend came up to me and asked me if I liked the girl who is my girlfriend, and I said sure I guess, and so now she is my girlfriend.

I am pretty sure that is how all relationships begin.

Me: So what’s the problem?

Boy: Well, I don’t know what to get her.

Me: What’s wrong with a piece of crappy jewelry and a stuffed animal? Isn’t that the standard? That was the standard back in the day. Every kiss begins with K.

Boy: Huh?

His mother chimed in: What about a box of chocolates?

Me: Ooh yeah, Whitman’s Sampler from the CVS!!

We both started to laugh. The kids just looked at us.

Me: No, wait, I got it…get her a Lifesavers book!

Boy: What’s that?

Me: It’s a fake box that looks like a book, and it’s filled with rolls of Lifesavers, but only the nasty flavors.

Boy: Can we just go back to the game now?

I don’t know what he is going to get this girlfriend of his, but chances are, she will be disappointed anyway. And then in a week, they might break up because they don’t spend enough time together. Just like every other relationship.

I was impressed by him, though. He indulged me throughout the whole conversation, and didn’t even seem embarrassed or perturbed that I was clearly making fun of the whole girlfriend situation, albeit not in a malicious way. It’s what I do. I enjoy the humor of the situation. And that thirteen year old boy handled it like a pro.

She’s a lucky girl.

Marketing 101

The tween is actively looking for work. Unlike her sister, who has been perfecting her role as a sloth and does in fact think money grows on trees, S has been thinking of ways to earn some money. She resolved to drum up some babysitting gigs, and asked if I would help her.

Yesterday, she pulled out her babysitting manual (yes, she is that anal, and yes, I know where she gets it from) and went to work creating a strategy. She spent a few hours last night working on a resume, which is not the easiest thing to do when you are twelve, or forty-five, for that matter.  I might hire her to work on mine, if I wasn’t so busy harvesting the money off the trees and providing a good sloth role model for my teen. She took another hour to make a flyer, adding way too much clip art, which is how you know a twelve year old girl made it.

After creating her marketing materials, S wanted to hand them out today. I told her I thought it would be better to walk the neighborhood to look for her target demographic then just sticking them in everyone’s mailbox. The truth is, we live in a maturing neighborhood, one without too many young children, and I didn’t think all the teens and adults and potential sex offenders needed my daughter’s email and phone number. I felt it would be more effective to walk instead of driving so we could pay attention to each house and how to tell what families might actually need a baby sitter. Also, we only printed twenty flyers in color, and I wasn’t about to waste them on people who don’t even have children.

We started out with a stack of flyers and began walking away from the house. I decided our walk could be a teaching opportunity, building on what she already learned yesterday with her desktop publishing. “Tell me what you are looking for.” I said to her as we walked.

“Houses with swing sets or toys in the yard,” S said.

“That’s a good place to start,” I said. “Check cars too, for stickers. Look for activities or preschool magnets. High school stickers let you know that family doesn’t need a babysitter.”

We saw a few houses with swing sets and those little pink jeeps that are all the rage in the under-five category. She opened those mailboxes and stuck in a flyer.

“These people are probably out of town. See that stack of mail?” I said to her. I tried to eyeball the post, looking for Pottery Barn Kids or Hearthsong catalogs, but decided actually going through the mail might be some sort of violation of federal law.

We walked on, and S noticed that a few houses had a bunch of SUV’s with monogrammed stickers parked outside.

“Those are probably teenagers, because they have girly stickers and aren’t in a garage,” she said.

“Good. And see that house? How long do you think they have been out of town?” I pointed to one with a pile of newspapers in the driveway.

“Hmm, looks like four days,” she said.

“I think you’re right. Don’t forget to look inside open garages, too, for clues. Look for small bikes or toys or those plastic cars.”

We continued to walk, and our observation of the houses intensified.

“Those people are doing some holiday shopping. See all the boxes on the front step?” S pointed out a house with lots of packages. “And those people look like they really enjoy boating. They even have a couple of tubes on top of their boat. Ooh, and those people must have just moved in. All those boxes.” She was really getting into it now.

As we walked along, it occurred to me that I didn’t just help S figure out where to leave her babysitting flyers. I taught her how to case the neighborhood. We knew who had young kids and whose were older. We knew which houses were vacant. We knew who was out of town and who had company. We knew who left their garage doors open and who had dogs and cats. It’s pretty amazing how much you can learn about your neighbors just by paying attention during a little stroll around the block.

“Well, if you don’t get any calls to babysit, at least you learned how to find potential houses to rob. So there’s that,” I said to her.

We stopped in front of our own house to examine a large hunk of dead tree trunk that must have fallen over some time over the past few weeks.  We don’t spend much time checking out our own front yard, so it was kind of curious to see a hollowed out tree lying across it.

“No one would stop to rob us,” S said. “Our yard is a mess. Look at it. Half a tree trunk. Leaves everywhere, and dead bushes that need to be dug up. And the grass is a weird beige color, and it isn’t even winter yet.  Clearly we don’t have enough money to hire someone to clean up this crap.”

“Very observant of you,” I said.

By the time we walked inside, S had received her first response to her ad. It was from a man who wanted her to dog sit over the holidays. Nowhere on the ad did she mention anything about pet sitting, and since she isn’t really all that comfortable or experienced with dogs, she told him no. I was proud of her for knowing her limitations.

If she doesn’t get any more calls, we might have to take another walk around. Only next time, we will be looking for unlocked cars and lots of store bags or shipping boxes. Maybe we can practice hotwiring some golf carts or something. Or maybe I can just pay her to clean up the dead tree trunk and rake the leaves and spare her a life of crime.

Anyway, if you are looking for a babysitter, just let me know. She’s Red Cross certified, and she knows where you live.

Ages and Stages

I spent the weekend alone with my fifteen year old daughter, and I have to say, I am exhausted. You know how when your kid is two or three and they have meltdowns and you don’t know why? Well, a teenager is just a larger two year old with a better vocabulary and the ability to use a toilet independently. The rest is pretty damn near the same. Let me illustrate for you.

Music. Your two year old wants to hear the same song over and over. I don’t know what the song is right now, but back when my teenager was two, it was pretty much anything by the Wiggles. I tried to throw in some Raffi or Disney soundtracks to stop my mind from melting, which backfired on me (“Boom Boom Ain’t It Great to Be Crazy?” No, it isn’t) but for the most part, it was a whole lot of “Fruit Salad (Yummy Yummy)” over and over again. The words still haunt me.

For our weekend together, we listened to Lana Del Ray and Alt-J, the Arctic Monkeys and Glass Animals. Then, for variety, we listened to more Lana Del Ray. My daughter described it as Ke$ha with more depressing music, which I do not consider to be a good sales pitch. I realize all rock and pop music has been about sex and drugs forever, but seriously, does every song have to be about sex and drugs? It’s not even sex or drugs. It’s sex and drugs, together. I had a long conversation with her about sex and drugs. Lana Del Ray played in the background.

Food. Do you fight with your two year old over eating breakfast? At least your two year old wakes up at breakfast time. My teen and I were at the beach for two nights, which meant we really only had one full day. She slept until 10:30, and that was with me waking her up every half hour, starting at 8:00, because she didn’t want to sleep away the day. But she also didn’t want to eat breakfast because she had big goals for the other meals.

Lunch was to be at her favorite sushi restaurant, which is the only place in the whole state where she will eat sushi, the place that is a mere four and a half hours from home.   We didn’t eat until two in the afternoon, and that was after a long walk on the beach and hitting her favorite surf shop. I still can’t believe I didn’t black out while driving the car.

And dinner? Well, here’s a fun one. She couldn’t decide where she wanted to eat dinner because she was too hungry. I drove for twenty minutes and named over fifty restaurants, all of which she vetoed. When she finally made a decision, a seafood restaurant we love, she ordered a bowl of French onion soup and a salad that comes with pecans and blue cheese crumbles and strawberries. She refused to eat the soup because she couldn’t figure out the melted cheese on top, and then she picked around the salad to just eat the nuts and berries and blue cheese crumbles out of the salad.  Where was the seafood, I ask you?

After eating less than a squirrel in the back yard, she declared herself full and wanted to know why it took so long to get our bill. Then, on the way back to our room, we had to stop at the grocery store so she could get a box of Drumsticks, those artificial tasting “chocolate” covered “ice cream” cones. She ate three of them before we even sat down to watch television.

Television. Yes, even television is a battle with a teenager, much as it is with a two year old. If you turn off the television, both will pitch a fit. And if you leave it on, well, forget all hopes of watching anything you want. While you parents of two year olds are watching Jake the Pirate and Mickey Mouse House or Club or wherever Mickey hangs out, the teen prefers a darker mix of programming. After the dinner and the ice cream, we hunkered down on the couch for a Netflix marathon of American Horror Story intermixed with episodes of Bob’s Burgers, just for a break from the sex and suspense. It doesn’t seem like the healthiest combination, but honestly, she saw all the seasons of American Horror Story on the iPad in her bedroom last summer before I figured out what she was doing up there. I wrongly assumed she was just touching herself inappropriately, but instead she was desensitizing herself to sex and violence by binge watching serial killers and weird sex. Oh well; chalk that one up to a big fat parenting fail.

Clothing. You know how you fight with your two year old over clothing?  Put on your shoes. Wear a jacket. No, you can’t wear your pajamas in public. Yeah, well, that is the same fight I had every time we left the condo. The teen thinks if she wears what she slept in while out in public, it’s almost the same as staying in bed. Granted, she does sleep in a sports bra and sweats, but still, at some point, those articles of clothing could stand to be washed. And when it’s freezing on the beach, a hat isn’t a bad idea. Or a jacket. Or sunglasses and sunscreen. Has she learned nothing at all about the weather and dressing appropriately in the past fifteen years? If she has, she certainly doesn’t want me to know it.

Bedtime. I know you are tired of fighting over bedtime with your two year old. Sometimes your little one is sleepy and admits it, but the rest of the time, your child will do anything to stay up late, even if you can’t handle a minute more. My daughter is the same way, except we aren’t having the fight at eight o clock; we are having it at eleven. I could tell her to go to bed five times between ten and eleven, but I will still be the first one asleep. While the two year old needs one more story or another stuffed animal or a drink of water, the teen needs to put on acne medicine or pluck one more stray eyebrow hair or just five more minutes of television, until the next commercial. I fell asleep before any of that was over. I have no idea what time she actually conked out, but it does make a little more sense why I can’t get her up in the morning.

 Yes, I don’t have to change diapers. I don’t have tantrums over taking away a toy or offering something other than macaroni and cheese for dinner. I don’t have to fret about biting or hitting at school. But I do have to buy overnight pads and argue over getting enough protein, dairy, and vegetables and obsess about cyberbullying and sexting, so I suppose it’s a wash.

I remember when my teen was a two year old. People would tell me that parenting doesn’t get easier, it just gets different. I don’t know; it seems pretty similar to me. It is definitely less physically demanding, but the emotional toll is greater. And the concerns are on a different level. I don’t worry if she will ever sleep through the night, and if she does, with a dry pull up. What I agonize about is things like peer pressure and drug use and inexperienced drivers and sexual assault and where is she going to go to college and how am I going to afford that.

Which makes me wonder…will I ever sleep through the night?

On the Contrary

When my teenager, E, was a toddler, she used to like to play a game we called “dis or dis?” Basically, she would carry a random object in each hand, walk up to someone, and say, “You want dis or dis?” while holding out each hand. The player would indicate which object was preferred, and E would thrust out her other hand and shriek, “No, you want dis!” She could play it for hours, and no matter how many different choices you made, they were always the wrong ones.

Today is E’s fifteenth birthday, and she still plays a version of her favorite childhood game. This morning’s edition involved E’s desire to dress up for Cowboy/Farmer/Redneck day at school. I don’t which was the actual theme, because E changed it every time she asked for help in finding appropriate accessories.

Her high school is celebrating spirit week, and E has mixed feelings about the whole thing. She wants to participate, since there is incentive to do so, usually in the form of extra credit points. But it comes at a cost, the potential to embarrass oneself. The school has a special event every night, special lunch food at the cafeteria sponsored by a variety of local restaurants, and even cupcakes and cookies for sale, made by a bunch of Pinterest loving teachers.  Money is collected in many of the classes, all for some sort of charity donation that E has yet to tell us. Also, every day has a dress-up theme, and while a bunch of kids really get into it, E prefers a more understated approach.

So this is how the game went today:

E (over breakfast, this morning, a half hour before she has to leave for school): Mom, I need some cowboy clothes for school today.

Me (still cooking her special birthday breakfast of turkey bacon and pumpkin spice-vanilla French toast): Sure, I can dig something out for you in a minute.

After breakfast was ready, I went to the guest room closet, the black hole of all things without a permanent home. Mostly it stores things like extra blankets and pillows, old Halloween costumes, gift boxes, and even the few stuffed animals and yearbooks I saved from my childhood bedroom. It also contains a few things that belonged to my late grandfather, Pop-pop.

Pop-pop fancied himself a cowboy. He didn’t grow up on a farm, he didn’t own a ranch; he was just a Jew from Baltimore who worked in sales. At some point in his adult life, however, he decided even if he wasn’t from the Old West, he could still look like it. He began wearing only western wear, which he continued until he passed away. Cowboy boots, tooled leather belts, scarf ties, pearly snapped shirts, and always a stiff cowboy hat, felt in the winter, straw in the summer.  He kept a horse at his friend’s house in Chicago when he moved nearby, and he loved to ride, more than anything else, except maybe a tall Jack Daniels and a nice pair of knockers. When he died, he left behind that collection of hats and belts and boots, and my sisters and I each kept a couple for ourselves, either to wear, or just because they were his.

At 7:30 this morning, I was in that closet, digging through the boxes until I found some belts and two pairs of boots, both snakeskin, one cordovan, the other a flashy red and black. I brought the boots out to show E.

Me: Look what I found!

E: I can’t wear those.

Me: Why not? Pops had small feet.

E: I will just wear my new boots.

Me: But your new boots aren’t Western.

E: Well, they still look like riding boots. Close enough. Anyway, I have boots. I really just need a hat.

Me: Why didn’t you say so?

I walked back to the guest room and continued to dig through the closet until I found a slightly crushed square Stetson box. Inside was a lightly stained grey felt hat and a pale straw hat with a dent in it. Pop-pop would have been really pissed at the condition of his hats.

I took the hats into the kitchen where E was sopping up the rest of the maple syrup with the last bite of French toast.

Me: Winter or summer?

E: Um, those are big.

Me: Of course they’re big. They’re real cowboy hats, not those fake things they sell at Target.

E: I can’t wear hats to school.

Me: Then why did you send me in the other room to look for a hat if you can’t even wear it?

E: I hoped you had one with a string around it that I could just hang on my back.

Me: Cowboy hats don’t have strings on them.  I found some belts too. I can go get those for you.

I rushed back to the closet, grabbed the handful of scarf ties and belts I found, and brought them back to the kitchen.

Me: What about these?

E: I don’t wear belts. Don’t worry about it.

Me: I am not worried about it, but I literally just produced an entire Western outfit for you, at your request, and you don’t want any of it.

E: I guess I’m just not comfortable wearing a dead man’s clothes.

Me:  It’s not like he died in these actual clothes!

E: It creeps me out. But thanks for trying.

I put everything back in the guest room, on the floor, since I am pretty sure it will take hours for me to Jenga that closet back together. Then I went upstairs to my other daughter’s bedroom. In her closet, from an old camp costume, was a small straw cowboy hat with a neck string. I took it into E’s bedroom and handed it to her.

E: Thanks, Mom. It’s perfect.

Me: Next time you want something exact, like a cowboy hat with a neck string, do me a favor and tell me. It would save me a lot of time and frustration.

She has managed to take her favorite childhood game and turn it into a more complex and narcissistic teenaged version.  And she is the master.

Happy birthday to my first born, my sweet baby girl. I know she isn’t reading this yet, but one day she will, and hopefully she will see the humor and joy and love she brings me every day, in her own special way. She is worth all of it.

Trick or Treat

I don’t care how old my kids get, I still love Halloween. It’s the only holiday that is just for fun, and the expectations are always met. No gifts to buy, no giant meal to make and then overeat. You don’t have to get together with your extended family and justify the choices you made in life.  If you drink too much, that’s on you and not your overbearing mother and emotionally distant father. Just costumes and candy. What’s not to like?

My daughters are in middle and high school now. They don’t wear costumes to school. They don’t have class parties with healthy nut-free treats. One of them isn’t even going trick or treating this year, much to my disappointment. Even though I don’t think fourteen is too old, she does. I decided I would put them in a holiday mood by making them a special Halloween breakfast. Maybe if they started the day with some Halloween fun, it would last throughout the day.

For the majority of their lives, my daughters ate frozen waffles or cold cereal for breakfast. They were never the eggs and bacon types, and who has time for French toast and pancakes on a school day? It turns out that, lately, I do. Now that they can get themselves ready and dressed and put on their own make up and shoes, I find myself with a little free time in the mornings. So between the time I make sure they are awake, which is never, to the time we rush out the door to drive to school, I cook a hot breakfast based on each of their personal preferences. Lately, they have been enjoying a Waffle House experience right here at home. Eggs cooked to order, turkey bacon or sausage, an assortment of fresh berries or other organic fruit to garnish the plate. Seriously, it’s getting all kinds of nuts around here.

I decided to go with pancakes this morning. I saw a sweet little idea on Pinterest for pancake spider webs, and thought, hell, that looks easy. It’s not like I am making pancake portraiture like that stay at home dad/engineer who is making all the talk show rounds. Just a little pancake batter X and some lines to make web spokes. No big deal.

No big deal if you have a squirt bottle. If you don’t, like me, well, there is no way you are making an X or spokes or anything other than blobs. I tried a small ladle, but no matter how thin I poured the batter, those pancakes looked like a mess of fat sticks. Instead of spider webs, my children had 2D rats’ nest pancakes. They cooked unevenly, and even the addition of pumpkin pie spice for flavor was not able to overcompensate for the poor visual presentation.

My daughters went with politeness this morning, begging off any extra pancakes because they were sooo full. Which meant I had a half a batch of batter and no takers. I decided to switch designs and continued cooking. This time, I went with a sort of free form ghost shape, like a lopsided ghost from Pac Man.

Again, my design did not meet my expectations. The heads of the ghosts ended up wider than the bodies, except for the base of the ghost, which was sort of broad and almost bumpy.  In short, the ghosts looked like penises.  Pretty scary, I’d say, but not in the way I intended.

The teen noticed right away, and refused to eat any. The tween, who is as wholesome as Laura Ingalls, had no idea they might be anything other than the ghosts I claimed, but was too full of failed cobwebs to have one.

My husband drifted into the kitchen around this point.

“Hey honey, wants some pancakes?” I said sweetly. The teen choked on her disgusting green machine juice she has every morning. I don't know how she drinks that cup of algae. What is wrong with a good old American glass of OJ?

“Nah,” he said. “I’ll just have oatmeal, like I do every day.” I am sure he didn't mean for that to sound like a hardship, but then again, he did not yet have a cup of coffee.

“Come on, they're fresh, and I hate for them to go to waste.”

He agreed to vary his morning routine. I set a plate full of pancake cocks in front of him and asked one of the girls to pass him the syrup. I almost said something, but from somewhere, a filter surfaced and kept my mouth shut. My teen gave me the look, the look that a mother is supposed to give, no the other way around. My husband, oblivious to the unspoken conversation that took place in front of him, ate up happily.

After I cleaned up, I went upstairs to find my phone and texted the teen. “I just served your father a plate of dicks.” She replied, “OMG.” She also refused to take any pictures for me.

I certainly hope the mummy hot dogs turn out better tonight.

Take No Crap

My husband and I have been having a heated debate about the merits of getting a dog. We are not fast decision makers, so the debate has been both active and spirited for months now, and we seem no closer to a resolution. On one side is my husband. Let’s call that the pro-puppy side. He loathes the cats and hamster that currently reside with us and feels the time has come for a real pet, the kind that hops in the car with you, eager to join you no matter the destination. He has visions of a dog with a bandana around its neck, running along the hiking trail ahead of him or perhaps chasing a ball into the breaking waves of the Atlantic Ocean.

I am on the other side. I don’t want to call it the anti-puppy side, because seriously, who is anti-puppy? I am more against the part where I am the one who will have to do the majority of the bad stuff that goes along with having a puppy. After all, I am not the one working outside of the home. I do most of the domestic responsibilities, and I try not to complain too much about it, certainly not any more than any other person would complain about his or her job. I just know that I don’t want to take on the brunt of the puppy maintenance.

When I look at a puppy, I look beyond the seemingly smiling face and floppy tails and too big paws, to what a puppy really is, a fur shedding energetic vehicle of destruction. Puppies don’t know how to shit and piss in the yard or while walking because they haven’t been trained yet, and someone is going to have to do the training, now, aren’t they? Even then, puppies, like young children, are going to have accidents, most likely on the Turkish rug. Who’s going to clean that up? Yep, the one who doesn’t work outside the home.

You know how babies put everything in their mouths? Puppies do it too, but they are even worse than babies because they are much more mobile. “The dog ate my homework” exists as an excuse because dogs actually eat homework. Some dogs even eat the home. I have a friend whose dog ate the couch when they went out for the day. A couch. Who eats a couch? After a couch is eaten, it will need to be digested and passed as fecal matter, most likely on the Turkish rug. Do you see the pattern here?

Then there are the vet appointments. The person who doesn’t work outside the home will have to schedule these visits and then take the puppy. What if the puppy gets car sick? What if the puppy who goes on to eat the couch has worms? Do you know what happens when a dog is dewormed? Those worms have to go somewhere, and generally it is two exits, not waiting. This will either happen in the car on the way home, or more likely, on the Turkish rug.

Or just maybe, the puppy won’t be able to go at all. Another one of my friends is the grandmother to an adorable yellow lab. Her daughter, who is off at college and thus is the best candidate to make a ten to twelve year commitment to another life, got the puppy. She picked it out because it was adorable, in the face. She neglected somehow to check it out from all angles, having fallen in love at first sight. She brought the pup home, and immediately it began getting sick all over the house.

My friend took her daughter and grand puppy to the vet’s office, where they discovered the terrible truth about their perfect little puppy. Upon examination, the vet discovered that the puppy didn’t have an asshole. Without being able to take a proper crap, the dog was getting sicker and sicker. I don’t know all the details about how this particular issue was resolved, but my understanding is that an anal orifice was somehow MacGyvered and the dog is now able to have a proper bowel movement. However, because of the tenuous nature of the aperture, a human must wipe the dog after every dump to ensure infection doesn’t develop. The puppy is growing normally and has a lot of love to give. It just can’t take care of its own asshole.

I relayed this story to my husband as part of my debate. He countered with my obsession with animal assholes. He’s right; I have a thing about dog buttholes. I don’t like to look at them. I prefer a breed with a low hanging tail, or at the least, a fur color similar to that of the asshole. Some dogs, like German Shepherds, have an upright tail and underneath, a sort of tan fur patch with a dark asshole in the center, a third eye if you will. I don’t want to look at that all the time. According to my husband, the first thing I would inspect on a new puppy is the butthole, making sure it met my strict pet asshole specifications, which means that I would never select an asshole-less puppy. I have to agree, he has a point about that.

Let’s go back to a moment to the two cats and the hamster. The hamster lives in a cage, where it also shits. I don’t have to go looking for a smell or clean a stain on the carpet. It chews, but I can throw a little twig in the bottom of the cage, so my shoes and furniture are safe. I can hold it, and when I am through, I can put it back in the cage with the shit and the sticks. The two cats were both kittens when we got them. Have you ever trained a kitten to use a litter box? It’s pretty easy. You put the kitten in the litter box. It hops out. You put it back in. It digs around a little, then it might pee or poop, and, if you are lucky, it will bury it under more litter. Repeat that a few times, like two or three, and presto, the kitten is litter trained.

 I just don’t believe that puppies are going to be that easy. Not only do you have to train them to poop when taking a walk, you have to train them to walk. And until that happens, if it ever does, there is going to be a whole lot of piss and shit in the house, probably on the Turkish rug. Ain’t nobody got time for that, especially not the two who go to school or the one who goes to work in an office.

It’s not that I am anti-puppy.  I love puppies. It’s that I am anti-shit. I don’t want to pick it up, still warm, with my plastic bag covered hand. I don’t want to scour the yard for smelly landmines before my friend’s kids play back there. And I sure don’t want to spend the next year or so scrubbing stains out of the carpet (or the Turkish rug.) I have a feeling I will be spending more time doing that than I will romping on the beach or hiking on a mountain with man’s best friend. For now, I am perfectly content with the animals I already have. I am used to their style of waste management. I can tolerate it. I rarely have to inspect assholes or wipe them, and even more rarely do I find the occasional misplaced turd, which is downright tiny compared to the massive human sized dumps of the larger dog breeds.

So for now, the debate goes on, unresolved, until I get some sort of reassurance or, better yet, a written contract expressing the rest of the family members’ commitment to feces removal and general puppy maintenance. I do enough of the crap around here. I really don’t any more actual crap. Especially not on my Turkish rug.

Just Say No

Do you remember that after school special starring HelenHunt, the one where she takes angel dust and jumps through a plate glass window at the high school? Well, I accidentally did the same thing to my cat.

Yoko is my nine year old kitty, a sort of almost long haired black cat with one stubborn white spot under her chin, which makes her seem less evil. She is smart in a creepy sort of way.  She is the one who taught herself to pee in the toilet by watching the humans in the house. She knows how to open several different door knobs. I’m convinced if she had thumbs, she would have already figured out how to murder us all and drive my car to Mexico.

One thing about Yoko that really worries me, other than the part where I shouldn’t trust her motives, is that she is underweight. She began losing weight about four years ago, but over the past year she has leveled out to a delicate almost eight pounds. For a few years, we, meaning the vet and I, were concerned that something was wrong with her. Not so concerned that we put her through expensive and ultimately unnecessary tests, but concerned enough that she had to go to regular weigh-in appointments like a newborn baby.  Now her weight is stable, if just below normal, and we are opting to continue with a wait and see approach. No one relishes the idea of doing bloodwork on a cat that makes doing bloodwork on humans her life’s calling.

It isn’t that she doesn’t eat. It’s that she doesn’t eat much. She is always first at the food bowl, but just nibbles daintily on a few little morsels, leaving the rest for my other cat, the one with the appetite of a starving goat, to swoop in and shove the rest in face like it’s the last meal he will ever eat. By the time she decides she is hungry again, she is left with a bowl of little bits of premasticated food that dropped out of the other cat’s mouth. It’s the cat equivalent of back wash, and I don’t blame her for not wanting to partake in that for snack.

I started buying her a variety of wet foods, hoping that would stimulate her appetite. I know it’s not as healthy as the dry kind, but seriously, Yoko is a bit of a bitch. I don’t know if I can handle her having a prolonged old age, it’s it a tradeoff I am willing to make. I decided to feed her the wet food when the pig cat was sleeping so she would be able to finish a meal undisturbed. Unfortunately, she has proven herself to be as finicky about wet food as she is about people.  Even the one brand she has agreed to sample will remain untouched depending on her mood, sitting on its paper towel, waiting for the constantly hungry cat to wake up and discover its aroma.

Yoko spends a good portion of every day standing in the kitchen near the paper towel holder, waiting for someone to come along and rip off a sheet. That is her cue to start caterwauling, as she believes that with every paper towel comes the promise of that precious wet food. I now have to sneak paper towels because of the constant screaming of food she won’t even eat.

I came up with what I thought was a great idea. One thing Yoko does like to eat is catnip. When I sprinkle dried catnip on the rug, she does exactly what she is supposed to do; she rolls around in it and licks it and her eyes get all dilated and she seems pretty relaxed, although maybe not exactly chill. I thought, hmm, what better way to stimulate her appetite than to sprinkle some of her catnip directly in the food bowl? She would smell is heady scent and then gorge herself before slinking away to somewhere secluded to sleep it off.

I’ll be the first to admit I was wrong. Yes, she loved the food. She buried her face in that bowl like she was going downtown. I don’t know if she ate more because I didn’t stick around to see how she responded. Instead, I went to my bathroom to get ready for the day. I was in there putting on my makeup when my older daughter, E, started screaming.

“Mom! Mooommmm!”

I generally ignore the first few bellows of Mom. If I rush right in, how will they ever learn to solve their own problems? I continued to apply my mascara.

“Moommm! Help! Mom! Yoko!”

Ok, now I had a clue. Yoko was probably threatening E in a menacing manner. Or more likely, E was annoying the shit out of Yoko, and Yoko was ready to retaliate. I dug around in my makeup bin for my lip gloss.

“Mom! Oh my god, Mom!” and there was a blood curdling scream, followed by a horrible thud.

I assumed E had fallen down the stairs and ran from my bathroom to find out what happened.  I found E at the top of the stairs, sobbing hysterically, her back sliding down the wall, until she sort of crumpled into a pile on the floor.

“What is going on? Are you ok?” I was genuinely concerned. I looked at her face and arms for bloody claw marks but didn’t see any.

“It’s Yoko. She fell, oh God, she fell from the bannister. Is she dead?” I could barely understand what she said, since it was all in gasping sobs.

I walked over to the top of the stairs and looked down. No cat.

“I think she is ok,” I said. “Why don’t you try to calm down and I’ll go see if I can find her.”

I ran down the stairs and looked around. No Yoko. She wasn’t in the front room. Not the hall way. Not the kitchen. I finally found her loafing under the dining room table, looking pissed off, like normal. I picked her up and moved all her limbs. As usual, she hated being touched.

I trotted back up the stairs to where E was still sitting on the hallway floor.

“She’s fine. Seriously.  What happened anyway?”

E tried to catch her breath. “It was horrible. I came up the stairs and she jumped right in front of me, on the banister. I thought she was going to attack me. She looked so wild. And I called for you but you didn’t come. And I called you again and that’s when it happened.”

“What happened?”

“She fell. She kind of jumped backwards, and she thought she could hold on. But she couldn’t. She just couldn’t. She clawed at the railing on her way down. It was the most horrible thing I have ever seen. She just fell, right in front of me.  I stared into her eyes as she fell. It’s the worst thing I ever saw, that fear. I thought she died.” E isn’t dramatic at all.

It wasn’t the first time Yoko had jumped atop the bannister, but it was the first time she ever freaked out and fell to the first floor. And I knew why.

“E,” I said. “I think it’s my fault. I kind of put catnip all over her food.”

“Wait, what? You got the cat high? Why would you do that?” She stopped crying.

“I thought it would make her eat more,” I said.

“So you thought if you put catnip all over her bowl, she would have the munchies? Good one, Mom.”

“I didn’t think she would try to fly. I just thought she would eat a little more. I guess I won’t do that again.”

“I guess not, Mom. I guess not.”