I'm baaa-aack.

Click here to access the new and improved My Left Hook available now.

Under construction!

Okay, now before you give up on me, let me explain that my awesome new site is under construction. So if you faithfully followed me to www.mylefthook.com, only to find that site dissipate late last night, please, please stick with me. Issues should be resolved within a day, if not within hours. I promise! I haven't gone away! Really! I even have three (THREE!) blogs in reserve for immediate publication.
peace. tricia

tricia booker's my left hook: looking for me? hmmm?

Click here to access the new and improved My Left Hook available now.

tricia booker's my left hook: Still here?

www.mylefthook.com

Still here?

Have you found my new house yet? I'm at www.mylefthook.com. If you're having trouble finding/viewing my new site, please email me at triciabookerwrites@gmail.com. Hope to see you soon.
tricia

I'm moving!

Thank God I don't need boxes for this move.
I tired of saying the word "blogspot," so I've changed my website address. Hope you'll stop by for a chat.

Come see me at: http://mylefthook.com/

American Girl - It's cool to be homeless!

I have tried to get the Diva interested in American Girl dolls, but have met with little success, primarily because of her loyalty to a funky little doll we affectionately call Baby-Missing-A-Chromosone.
The baby, whose actual name is Cordurory (yes, that’s spelled correctly), was given to her by her Papa six years ago when she was 2, and has been everywhere with us since then. Cordurory has been to Latin America. She has been tye-died purple. She has been left at school for a long sleepless weekend, flung against the wall, and had both her arms sewn back on by kindly Aunt Kay.
One of the Diva’s little friends once begged her mother for a Cordurory doll. “But you have lots of dolls,” the mother said.
The girl said she wanted one like the Diva’s, “all dirty and messy with sticky-up hair.”
Cordurory has a beanbag body and hard plastic arms and legs. She has a cute pink pursed-up cupid mouth, and a nose that looks slightly smashed in. She’s meant to look Asian, but her tiny black eyes appear almost too symmetrical, skinny almond slits a little too close together.
But it’s the hair that really gets you. It’s a thick black mop that sticks straight up and out. It has been washed many times - with Tide, hand soap, dish soap, toothpaste, and Pantene 2-in-1 shampoo. Still, it looks as though it could use a good conditioner.
In the six years that the Diva has been mother to Cordurory, she has received the following American Girl dolls: a Bitty Baby she named Timmy; the historical character with long blonde hair named Elizabeth; and the Bitty Baby twins, a boy and girl whose names have changed a hundred times. All of those dolls currently rest at the bottom of the stuffed animal bin. Naked. Because all of their clothes have gone to Cordurory. Elizabeth even came with a gorgeous real wood canopy bed with satiny blue bed linens. Guess who sleeps there?
Now, I’ve always liked the American Girl doll concept. Give a kid a doll with some sort of historical context, make her read the story, she learns some history and gets a toy to boot.
Addy, for example, has just escaped slavery. Kit and Ruthie are living through the Great Depression. Elizabeth lives during the Revolutionary War period.
And now there’s Gwen. She’s homeless.
That’s right. You can pay $95 plus shipping and handling to acquire Gwen, the homeless American Girl doll.
At least the money goes to a good cause, right? To support programs for homeless children or something? Uh, not so much.
This concept apparently eludes many loyal American Girl customers who have flocked to the company’s defense regarding GwenGate by writing glowing reviews on the website. One woman wrote: Her dress is lovely and so well made. I love the embroidery. Her sandals are so cute and look just like all the little girls wear nowadays. We love the headband as a belt or as a headband.
Seriously? The homeless girl’s dress is embroidered and lovely? It’s white, by the way. It must be vinyl so her mother can hose it down after sleeping on the park bench.
Not everyone is thrilled. Another woman wrote that she wished there were more accessories and outfits for Gwen. But there can’t be! Because she’s homeless! Get it? BWAAA-HAAA-HAAA!
My favorite comment, though, was this: "I bought this doll and was disappointed in her bangs, they are awful short and you can't do anything with them." I’ve never understood why they can’t get good hairdressers at homeless shelters.
So now I’m glad that the Diva has steered away from American Girl dolls, and happily writes long exhausting stories about the adventures of Cordurory, who certainly looks like she’s homeless but in fact lives in a hand-carved canopy bed and despite appearances is very, very clean.
And I hope American Girl rethinks this little Gwen girl. At the very least, make her a bit more realistic. I’m sure those trendy pink flip flop sandals look fabulous. But they're not very practical for the streets. She should probably sell them, actually, and get herself a few accessories. That way she'll really fit in.

He's gay. Or weird. Or weirdly gay. Whatever.

The Pterodactyl wants me to buy him a purse. Obviously he’s gay. Which would explain his fascination with the hair dryer, his weird attachment to anything fuzzy, and his tendency to sing along to Taylor Swift songs. He’s almost five years old and he loves rainbows. Can there possibly be a gayer sign?
No, I’m kidding. He’s totally not gay. He is obsessed with trains, airplanes and volcanoes. He seems to love boobs. Two little girls in his class have crushes on him. He loves to smash his tricycle into things. He pees standing up. He’s as manly as a boy can get.
But....then again, he did ask me some questions about ballet the other day. He likes to put his stuffed animals in the baby stroller and push them around. He loves baking cookies. Now that I think about it, he really likes to smell flowers and take bubble baths and occasionally try on my dress shoes. He’s kind of a crybaby. I better call PFLAG (Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays) tomorrow.
Actually, though, he doesn’t like the color pink. So he can’t be gay.
Okay, you want the truth? The truth is that I don’t care whether my son is gay, or whether any of my children are gay. I particularly don’t care to speculate about my kids’ sexuality when they still believe in Santa Claus and think life’s climaxes are related to fruit roll-ups and the dollar bin at Target.
I’m surprised that not everyone feels that way.
Recently the Diva convinced the babysitter that she was allowed to watch You Tube, and she dug up a Black-Eyed Peas video in which Fergie wears a thong. Now, in all honesty, I find it unlikely that any living breathing thing on earth could watch that video and not feel some sort of twinge of something or other at the sight of Fergie wearing a thong. It really is something to see. So the Pterodactyl exhibited a predictable reaction: he stared and said, “I like her.”
I thought the story was funny and have told it to people. You know what a lot of them have said? “At least you don’t have to worry that he’s gay.”
This statement leaves me a little bit speechless, as I’m unsure whether to say: a. I don’t worry that he’s gay  b. this one small incident does not mean he’s not gay  c. I was slightly aroused. Am I gay? or d. HE IS NOT GAY!! HE LIKES THOMAS THE TANK ENGINE, FOR GOD’S SAKE!!
If he is gay, the biggest bummer will be that he probably will have to move to another state if he wants to get married. I don’t really care who he marries, as long as the person treats him with love and respect and is not a Republican. But I certainly would rather he settle someplace nearby so that when I’m old I can conveniently interfere in his life.
Hot Firefighter Husband feels the same way about all this. His biggest fear, I think, is that his children will not share his pathological obsession with the Boston Red Sox, an ailment that unfortunately crosses gender preference lines.
I like the Red Sox okay, but frankly I’m a little more dedicated to the New Orleans Saints, and I’m trying to pass that on to the kids. For one thing, I’m a Big Easy native. But also, the Saints uniforms are black and gold, with a cutting edge style that will never go out of fashion. Gay people love that kind of thing, n’est-ce pas?

Success or the lack thereof

During a recent dinner, the Diva was prattling on about how her teacher has been asking for parents to volunteer in the classroom.
“So I told her you guys could do it,” she said, “since neither of you have jobs.”
Husband and I looked at each other.
“Honey,” I said. “Your dad is a firefighter.”
“Yeah. But that’s all he does, put out fires.”
We’ve never bragged much about ourselves, but maybe we should start, since our daughter apparently thinks our major life accomplishments involve knowing the words to “Rock Lobster” and being an excellent finder of post-storm worms.
Then last week, I received a notice from the Social Security Administration helpfully advising me of the benefits I’ve earned in my lifetime. It listed my annual income for the past quarter decade.
I was appalled. Let’s just say that if I had been responsible for paying back my college tuition, I might currently be up to the fall break of my sophomore year, not including beer money. (Thanks, Mom and Dad, for the college fund.)
What is success? Obviously it’s in the eyes of the user of the word. But society traditionally defines it as equivalent to making money, at least when it’s used in tandem with a type of career.
“She’s a successful writer,” for example, does not really translate into, “She’s very talented, and the manuscript she has written looks marvelous in the bottom drawer of her dresser where she keeps it.” That’s just an example.
When we decided to adopt the Tyrant, Husband said to me, “If we do it, then this is going to be your thing.” He meant that I would have to push other career goals aside and focus on the raising of our brood, at least temporarily. He wasn’t being sexist. It didn’t make sense for him to quit his stable job to stay home with the kids so that I could start looking for a job, right? Plus I have always thought full-time employment seemed highly overrated.
The ugly truth, I suspect, is that I am afraid of failure, and so I welcomed the opportunity to step down from the high dive and focus on swimming across the pool. Raising a family, I thought, was predictable and doable and impossible to fuck up. For some reason I have not let myself think ahead to the teen years.
Hot Firefighter Husband harbors no such fears. After the Diva came home seven years ago, he had a mid-life crisis and left his long journalism career to become a firefighter. There have been obstacles along the way, but overall the switch has been a remarkable success for all of us, particularly those of us who’ve always had a hankering for men in uniform.
Now that I’m writing again, it feels like I’m inching my way toward some small semblance of success. I would like to think there is some earned money potential in my future, but based on the last 25 years it seems unlikely.
So what is success? I’m a full-time mother working two (very) part-time jobs and blogging. This year I will make enough money to buy a 1998 Buick LeSabre with 108,800 miles, a new TemperPedic mattress or some low-end breast implants. But since we’re living in a house we can barely afford and sending our kids to a pre-school that costs more than community college, I think we’ll spend the money on boosting our supplies of Kraft Macaroni and Cheese, dental floss and bleach, all of which we utilize at an alarming rate, though never at the same time.
I’m trying to redefine success for myself and my family. I want my children to believe that being successful includes being happy and productive, even if the products involved are homemade chicken noodle soup and clean matching socks, but first I have to believe it myself. And if I’m wrong about this and success does indeed relate to how much money you make, then I might as well keep plugging along at trying to change society’s definition. After all, at this point, what have I got to lose?

She's mean and she hits. I want to hit her back.

On the way home from the gym yesterday, the Tyrant yelled from the back of the van, “Mom! Open it!”
I glanced in the rearview mirror and saw she was holding a bag of potato chips. “Mommy’s driving, sweetie,” I said. “I’ll open it when---” THWACK. The bag of chips beaned me in the side of my head.
“Well, here they are,” I said.
So you’re on the edge of your seat reading this, I know. Did I slam on the brakes? Pull over and scream until my throat was sore? Eat the chips myself?
No. First I again took note of my 2-year-old’s remarkable aim. Then I opened the chips and tossed them back to her.
She ate one. “I don’t yike these,” she said. She emptied the bag into the cupholder and took a cereal bar out of her backpack. “Open it!”
“Honey, I’m not going to open any---” THWACK. That aim is something, I tell you.
I opened it and tossed it back to her. “I don’t yike it!” She threw it on the floor. Those of you familiar with my chronic roach problems are probably having an “aha” moment right now.
For a long time the Pterodactyl has been terrorizing the family. His screech contains some sort of sonar that penetrates the brain and he’s irritatingly adept at inventing behavior designed to drive me wild -- emptying a basket of clean folded laundry, scribbling on his sister’s favorite artwork, throwing a pencil at me because I didn’t draw an airplane the way he envisioned it.
But he’ll be five in a couple of months, and he’s becoming ever-so-slightly rational. Last night, after I took away his Blankie and Blue Puppy and Fuzzy Pillow because he called me a mean mom, he calmed down enough to get his treasures back and then asked me sweetly to snuggle with him. “Do you still think I’m a mean mom?” I asked. He pulled my face close to his. “Yes,” he whispered. But I didn’t care because at least he was going to sleep.
It’s the Tyrant who has everybody on the run now. We're all bearing scars from her. The boy has a bloody scratch under his eye. My elbow is bruised. She hits. She throws. She bangs. She scratches. She yells. She tells me to go to Time Out about 12 times a day. She’s crazy cute, and she loves to look at me, raise her eyebrows up and down, nod and smile, like she’s letting me in on her secret. But I don’t know her secret. I just think she’s nuts.
My friend Sahmmy (www.sahmmy.com) was appalled at the driving/potato chips story. “Uh-uh. No you didn’t. You pulled the car over, right? And threw the chips away?”
Sahmmy reasons that if I don’t nip this stuff now, the Tyrant will evolve into full-fledged delinquency by kindergarten. “What are you going to do when she’s 13? If she’s even around when she’s 13,” Sahmmy said. I allowed myself for a brief moment to think of an adolescent Tyrant living under a bridge with an eyebrow ring and a tattoo of a cobra around her leg. Ew.
Husband and I are struggling with the discipline thing right now. Discipline is hard work. I don’t like discipline. I much prefer yelling, evil eye stares and stomping my feet. I like my children to be slightly afraid of me so that they can’t tell that I’m actually afraid of them.
I’m not opposed to pops on the bottom. That’s what we call them, because I think it sounds better than hitting my child on the butt. But I don’t think they work, mainly because they’re not painful enough, and I’m not talking about physical pain because I absolutely would never do anything that caused a child more than a second of slight physical discomfort. No, I’m talking regret here. And think about it. Faced with a choice between, say, getting a flu shot and actually getting the flu, but still having to take care of everyone around you as they themselves get the flu and never actually getting to recover yourself except during the long uncomfortable nights when you’re shivering from the fever, wouldn’t you go for the easy short-lived pain of the injection? I’m just talking hypothetically here.
Anyway, a child psychologist recommended a book that essentially lauds “Time-Outs” as the cure for all bad behavior. It’s a decent-sized paperback, and serves as an excellent nightside coaster. The actual Time-Out philosophy has not worked for several reasons, the main one being that the Tyrant will not stay in Time-Out unless we sit on her, and even then we have to sit on her hands, too, or she’ll leave bloody scratches on our backs. She’s very strong.
Our latest tactic has been to put a hook-and-eye lock on her door so we can lock her in her room for Time-Out. I had been holding the door shut, but I started getting calluses on my hands and they hurt, so I asked Husband to install the hook-and-eyes. So far it’s working, though not necessarily as a deterrent. It’s mostly working as a chance for me to catch my breath, regroup, and say, “my children are adorable. my children are adorable. my children are adorable,” 20 times in a row.
If you don’t, upon spending significant amounts of time with young children, begin to have a better insight into child abuse, you need to have your empathy box refilled. I’m not talking about systemic, chronic abuse. I’m talking about the young woman who snaps in the grocery store parking lot because her 4-year-old unscrewed his sippy cup and dumped orange juice on the baby’s face. And the woman was up all night with the baby and hasn’t eaten anything but Cheez-Its all day. How hard is it for that woman to keep her hands to herself in that brief, maddening moment?
I'm not talking about the zany, hilarious stuff. As I'm writing this, for example, the Tyrant is lining up Dixie cups on the window sill and putting a dollop of bubblegum-flavored toothpaste in each one. I'm okay with that. I'm referring to the bad stuff. The hitting, the defiance, the absolute refusal to do something as simple as not spit chewed-up chicken nugget at the babysitter.
It’s hard. It’s very hard. I’m not Mother-of-the-Year, and I know there have been many times that I’ve handled the discipline thing wrong. But I thank my lucky stars every day that my kids came along after I’d been on this earth for nearly four decades, giving me time to ripen and mellow like that excellent Chardonnay I had the other night. Thank goodness I have the patience, or maturity, or age-induced anger management skills, whatever it is, to keep from harming my children.
It’s true that I want them to be afraid of me -- but not because I would ever harm them. As Sahmmy says, it’s good to keep them a little off-guard. I want them to fear me because I’m just a little nuts. Poor Tyrant. I guess that’s where she gets it.

Today by the numbers

10 -- number of inadvisable food products I’ve consumed today: potato chips, Cheetos, raw brownie batter, Nerds, blue Icee, Mandarin oranges in light syrup, handfuls of Special K with dehydrated red berries, cooked brownies, children’s GummiBear vitamins, and sour IceBreakers.
Discussion: We’re housebound. The Diva still has a fever, Husband is working, so I’m stuck at home with one sickie and two wild animals unable to do anything because of the sickie. I’m trying to placate everyone with junk food feeding frenzies. And I admit it...I’m weak. I cannot stand idly by and nosh on carrots while there are puffy Cheetos to be eaten. Not to mention fresh brownies.
9 -- number of times I’ve logged on to Facebook
Discussion: Now that I’m blogging, I have convinced myself (and Husband!) that maintaining my FaceFriends is an important part of my blogger success. I must keep a presence! I must remind people of my wit! I absolutely must know what everyone is doing at any given time during the day! And frankly, on a day when my most stimulating conversation involves where poop comes from, I just need to feel a little bit popular.
8 -- times the Tyrant has thrown a shoe at someone
Discussion: Okay, this is becoming a problem. The Tyrant has a temper. I’ve mentioned her remarkable aim -- she can bean me in the head with any given object from 10 paces. But shoes are her weapon of choice because there are approximately 98 shoes scattered around the house within easy reach. I’m not sure what to do about it. She won’t stay in timeout, and even taught herself to escape from the belt I have used to keep her there, which I don’t do anymore since it doesn’t work, so I’d appreciate you not calling social services on me. If I take away whatever she’s about to throw, she points her finger at me and screams, “PUH-SSSSSSSHHHHHHHH!” so threateningly that I fully expect to be turned into a wart hog when she’s done.
7 -- number of unsupervised minutes it took for the Tyrant to cover 80 percent of her body in black marker
Discussion: My children have always loved stickers, and then graduated to those temporary tattoos that quickly devolve into thin strands of rubber that won’t come off the skin. In addition, the Diva has always wanted me to give her “something to remember you” before heading off to school. So I started the tradition of using a Sharpie to draw a little heart on the inside of her wrist. I thought it was sweet. This has turned out to be a mistake. She interpreted my little love act to mean that drawing on oneself is good, and one of her favorite games is called “tattoo parlor” and includes a menu of things she can draw with associated prices. The Tyrant likes this game.
6 -- minutes all three children played nicely together with bubbles before someone blew bubbles directly into someone’s face
Discussion: The Pterodactyl plays the copy game. The Tyrant throws the Diva’s eraser into the toilet. The Diva takes her Nintendo and hides under the desk. The Tyrant throws a shoe at her. The Pterodactyl eats the Diva’s Oreos. The Diva cries. The Pterodactyl spits at the Tyrant. The Tyrant throws a shoe at him. He cries. The dog eats the Tyrant’s potato chips. She cries. Bubbles finally make everyone happy. Then....not so much.
5 -- number of “iCarly” episodes we’ve watched
Discussion: To all of you people who actually measure the amount of time your children spend in front of the television, I say, good for you. I don’t. I can’t. I’m one of those people who lives in mortal fear of the cable going out, particularly on housebound days when the temperature outside resembles the surface of the sun. And this “iCarly” show, I must say, I find entertaining. Just tonight, an entirely new episode focused on making fun of celebrity chef Bobby Flay by channeling him through a character named Ricky Flame. It was hilarious! In a this-is-how-I’m-spending-my-Saturday-night kind of way.
4 -- time I anticipated having my first glass of wine
Discussion: In fact it was closer to 6 p.m. because I took the children on a bike ride so we could all breathe some fresh air and I could confine them with seat belts for a little while. The problem with having wine, though, is that while it tastes divine and temporarily lifts my mood, it also exacerbates my fatigue so that my motivation for folding the five baskets of laundry has waned. Fortunately Husband won’t be home until morning so I can just pile everything on his side of the bed.
3 -- number of mysterious items the Pterodactyl has wrapped in aluminum foil and spread around the house
Discussion: There’s really nothing to say about this, except that I’m out of foil.
2 -- piles of poop the dog deposited in the front yard
Discussion: I grew up with dogs and I don’t remember spending half my life picking up poop like I do now. When did this become a daily chore? And like it’s not bad enough to use plastic baggies to grab steaming piles of shit -- when your dog is, like mine, addicted to baby wipes, paper towels, checkbooks, Band-Aids and other paper products, you find yourself pulling stuff out of said dog’s butt so often that it begins to feel like an actual accomplishment. Seriously. It’s disturbing.
1 -- number of times the Tyrant flung herself naked off the countertop while eating brownies and landed on her head.
Discussion: Okay, just so you know, I was RIGHT THERE when this happened, and as she fell I grabbed her ankle and held it securely, so that for a moment she dangled upside down and I thought I had saved her from falling. But she’s freakishly wiry and started bucking like a wild mustang, thereby wriggling from my grip and landing on her head from about a foot or so up. I picked her up and set the timer for five minutes, which is my magic head bump number. If a child who has been bonked on the head cries for less than five minutes, we don’t worry about it. More than five requires action. The Tyrant stopped crying in three minutes. I ate her brownie.

**The exactitude of the above numbers has been approximated. Everything else is factual.

The worst flu symptom

I’m on the mend. The Diva has a fever of 101, headache and a tummy ache, though she claims to have a tummy ache 97 percent of time anyway so it’s hard to tell if that’s a symptom of anything.
At the doctor’s office, she tested negative for the flu, though due to last night’s horrific nosebleed that left the bathroom looking like the aftermath of a machete fight, she couldn’t produce enough quality snot for a good sample.
The nosebleed began soon after the second fever spike. My poor little Diva is accustomed to nosebleeds, unfortunately, and knows what to do, and rarely involves me unless she can’t stop the flow, which happened last night. I settled her in my bed with a couple of towels and helped her squeeze her nostrils. I rested her forehead on my shoulder when her neck got tired. I woke up Hot Firefighter Husband every 10 minutes to consult:
“Honey, we can’t get the bleeding to stop.”
“Huh? What? Just keep squeezing. ZZZZZZZZ.”
Ten minutes.
“Sweetie? Should we try something else? She’s starting to spit up blood.”
“Huh? What? She’ll be fine. ZZZZZZZZZZZ.”
Ten minutes.
Me to the Diva: “Okay, I think it’s slowing down. Just lay here for a minute while I get you some water.”
Husband: “Huh? What? She’s laying down here? Okay. ZZZZZZZZZZZZZ.”
It’s slightly astounding to me that this man, while at work, can insert an IV into someone’s vein five minutes after waking up -- because at home, when he’s in bed asleep, I’m pretty sure that even if the house was burning down, he would need a cup of coffee before getting out of bed.
And for a medical professional, he’s remarkably blase. Yesterday morning, he arrived home from work and saw the Diva in her pajamas, and I told him she had fever. “So....she’s staying home from school?” he asked. Um......yes, Mr. Paramedic, that’s the recommendation of every health organization on the planet right now, that a person with fever avoid all contact with living things.
Anyway, the Diva probably has the flu, despite not passing her flu test. Oink.
When her fever’s raging, she’s freezing and miserable. A little Motrin brings quick relief, and puts her on an ibuprofen high that makes me tempted to send her to school for a little while. Apparently this strain of flu causes 7-year-old girls to develop verbal diarrhea and become infected with inane, unanswerable questions. Or they’re answerable, but complicated. Okay, fine. I just don’t have the patience to answer them. But seriously. 
“Does Miley Cyrus write her own songs?”
“No.”
“Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why doesn’t she write her own songs?”
“I don’t know.”
“Why do you think that?”
“Think what?”
“Why do you think she doesn’t write her own songs?”
“I just don’t.”
“But who writes her songs?”
“Honey, Mommy can’t talk right now. I have to focus.”
“What are you focusing on?”
“I don’t know.”
“But what do you mean, Mommy?”
“Okay, honey, you just have to stop talking for a minute.”
“Mom. That sounds a little like you’re telling me to shut up and it hurts my feelings.”
And so on. Then there’s this, as we’re pulling out of the Smoothie King parking lot: “Mommy, why does that sign say ‘Adam & Eve’ and ‘no one under 18 allowed’?”
“Well. Because it’s a place only for grown-ups.” Thinking -- is it reasonable for an Adam & Eve shop to be right next to a Smoothie King? Was there no dark side street available?
“So Taylor Swift could go there! Right, Mom? Because she’s 19!”
“Right. If she wanted to.”
So Taylor Swift, if you’re out there, please know that at least one little girl who counts herself as one of your biggest fans is happy that, though you’re still not old enough to (legally) have a drink with Kanye West, you are old enough to visit sex toy stores, and in fact she would like to know if you’ve ever been to one.
The flu, I can handle. The accompanying curiosity? It’s killing me.

Sick. Tired. But mostly sick.

It started with a few aches and pains. I thought I was feeling sore from carrying two children a half-mile back from the beach the previous day. (Impressive, yes?)
Day two, I felt a little lethargic. So I gave myself a blast of energy with a high-powered weightlifting session.
That was a mistake. By noon, I had fever. So did Husband. Plus he had a sinus infection and couldn’t breathe, and of course not breathing trumps fever-with-no-other-symptoms.
He rested. I went to the grocery, walked the dog, picked up the Pterodactyl from school, took him to karate, cooked dinner and bathed the kids.
Day three I felt decidedly worse. Day four, the fever broke and a convulsive cough appeared. Day five I went to the doctor. Bronchitis.
So I’ve spent five whole days wishing the hours away, desperate for the moment when the kids were all in bed so I can crawl into bed myself. It’s, for me, the most physically demanding aspect of motherhood -- going through the mommy motions when you know you should be only sleeping, drinking fluids and opening an occasional can of chicken soup.
When I had my hysterectomy a few years ago, I spent one night in the hospital. That next morning after surgery, the doctor came in to check on me. “You can go home as soon as you urinate,” he said.
“I can’t pee!” I nearly shouted. I suppose I said it with a little too much enthusiasm, but I really thought I could use another day of recovery. But then he started talking about sending me home with a catheter, so I focused all my attention on my peeing muscles and went home to “rest” with my 18-month-old son and 4-year-old daughter.
Then, like now, the most painful aspect isn’t really the physical discomfort, although I do think I’ve injured my shoulder coughing. It’s the knowledge that for an extended period of time, I don’t feel capable of being a good mom.
Now, I know you’re thinking -- wait. This is the woman who threatened to rip the legs off her son’s beloved Blue Puppy? She thinks she’s a good mom?
Well, let’s compromise with the fact that I’m the best mom I know how to be. And even on those endless days when the Diva won’t eat anything but bowtie noodles and the Tyrant sticks her stuffed dog’s head in my coffee and the Pterodactyl calls me a poopy weener butt-butt, even on those days we have moments of pure joy and hilarity, when little arms around my neck make all the stale Cheez-Its and laundry worthwhile.
But now, being sick, those moments seem lost and I miss them. I’m exhausted and my chest hurts; I’m short-tempered and in no mood to endure the normal antics of childhood.
The kids sense it, too. The Diva asks me if I’m better approximately every 15 minutes, even when she’s too engrossed in “iCarly” to hear me answer. The Tyrant was sent to the principal’s office. Yes, that’s right, my 2-year-old was sent to the principal’s office, the first of my children to achieve that disciplinary benchmark. She had thrown a block at a kid’s head (Have I mentioned her remarkable aim?), pushed another child, and generally acted like a miscreant all day. She bragged to me about it when she got home.
I don’t miss much about my days pre-mommyhood because though life is very different, I still get freedom in small doses.
Yet here’s something I long for: the luxury of just being sick when I’m sick. I don’t want to act happy to see anybody. I don’t want to talk to someone about a playdate. I don’t want to go over spelling words. I just want to watch television, sleep, and maybe take a bath.
For me, it has been a relatively brief period of low-level misery. Now that I’m on antibiotics, I expect I’ll be back to my pleasantly cynical self soon, interspersing my yelling with affectionate hugs and kisses and making sure my children take gummi bear multi-vitamins in between their Happy Meals.
But I find myself thinking of what it’s like for the mothers with no relief in sight - for the women who suffer chronic illnesses or battle disease while trying to be the familial guiding lights, and often succeeding. I find it astounding, frankly. I’m a healthy, strong woman, but when I think of the pity I gave myself over a little bout of bronchitis, I must tell you: I feel a little bit.....weak.

Okay, she was adopted. But she's not a fish.

On a recent rainy Sunday, Husband was working and the rest of us decided to have a Movie Morning. A Movie Morning is when Mommy can’t think of anything Mother-of-the-Yearish to do, so she decides to bond with the children via the Disney Channel, which requires more effort than you might think.
The movie playing that morning, as described in the on-screen blurb, was about a boy who starts turning into a fish on his 13th birthday. That seemed a bit quirky, but innocuous enough, and it does seem that children transform themselves as they enter the teen years.
Okay, but listen. It turns out the boy was adopted, and his birth mother is a mermaid who abandoned him on a shrimp boat when he was a baby. The shrimp boat captain and his wife found him and raised him. His only remarkable feature was his tremendous propensity for swimming.
Now that he’s 13, his true heritage is beginning to, um, swim to the surface. Every time he touches water, he grows scales and fins. Seriously. This causes him to lose some popularity points at school.
Then he begins to see his “real mom” whenever he happens by the harbor. She is swimming around waiting for him, gracefully flopping her silvery tail. You see, it’s time for him to join her and fully transform into a “merman.”
Eventually his adoptive parents understand that a merman’s got to do what a merman’s got to do, and they let him go. The plan is for him to spend a year with his “real mom” swimming around the ocean. Then, somehow, he’ll be prepared to come back ashore and be part-human again.
The Diva and I were riveted: me out of horror and the Diva, I think, out of sheer perplexity and perhaps some slight concern regarding her love of the water. But I couldn’t turn it off because I was afraid it would be like saying to my adopted daughter WE ARE ABSOLUTELY NOT GOING TO WATCH A MOVIE ABOUT SOME ADOPTED KID.
Now, I’m all for openness and candor when discussing with my children the fact that they were adopted. And thank you, Disney, for helping all of your viewers understand that children who were adopted are so weird and unnatural that they very likely will morph into different species as they age. My children, for example, were hatched underneath the fluorescent lights of an incubator. Our goal is to teach them to fly the coop before they’re 18 so we can avoid paying for college.
Of course my children have birth mothers, and I’m eternally grateful to those women for entrusting me with these gifts of life.
But am I not their real mother? Who feeds them Cheez-Its for breakfast? Who lets them skip brushing their teeth at night? Who taught them the words to “McDonald’s is your kind of place/hamburgers in your face”?
And who will be there when they turn 13? It will be me. I don’t think they’ll grow fins and scales, but if they do, they won’t be swimming out to sea without me. We’ll just move to the Caribbean, I guess, and live on a houseboat and I’ll learn how to SCUBA dive, and together we’ll brave whatever the tide brings in.

What planet are men from?

Do you think men are really from Mars? Because sometimes it seems like they’re from that other planet. You know. Uranus.
What I mean is that.....well, they're a mixed bag.
Take Hot Firefighter Husband, for example. Once, just after we had started.....um....dating.......yeah, that’s it, we were dating......he let himself into my apartment when he knew I was working late and baked me an apple pie. That same year, he went on a trip to San Francisco and brought me home a 2-inch plastic Buddha statue.
It’s been like this ever since, though I write this with some trepidation, knowing that Husband is quite possibly the best thing that ever happened to me other than finally having my uterus removed.
When I left the house this morning, for example, Husband had just gotten off his shift. He was wearing his favorite beat-up shorts, a t-shirt and a backwards baseball cap, and he needed a shave.
And he was preparing to vacuum.
Uh-huh. It was like suburban mom porn, I tell you. I might have been interested in delaying my exit had I not been afraid it would make him lose cleaning momentum.
Husband does not buy me flowers “just because.” His gift-giving abilities -- well, they suck a little bit, as you might have guessed from the Buddha, which I still have. He once gave me a wooden flying pig with removable wings for Christmas.
But my man cleans, and I find that incredibly gratifying, and pretty sexy, too. He can do some pretty amazing things with those Scrubbing Bubbles.
Yet for every totally rockin’ task he completes, there seems to be some sort of payback.
This morning, as I left the house whistling in anticipation of a clean house, he called for me to take the Jeep. So I walked to the Goddamn Yellow Jeep and opened the door, and stuck my shoe into the 3-inch puddle accumulated atop the floorboard. Somebody forgot to put the top up last night.
The Goddamn Yellow Jeep has long been a source of contention. I was very proud that he sold his little Mazda on Craigslist, and looked forward to lowering our car payment. But he came home with the GYJ, which is the color of an irradiated banana and can certainly be seen from space. Though it’s supposedly “almost new,” it has a huge dent in the side and the gear shift is on upside down. Initially, it only had two seat belts in the back. “We have three kids,” I screeched. Really, I can be an irascible shrew at times. In his defense, he did order an extra seat belt online and has since installed it. It’s purple.
The point is, he didn’t think anything of sending me off in a burgeoning thunderstorm driving a flooded Jeep with half a top and the back windows resting unhelpfully in the garage.
The whole porn image dissipated quickly, I can assure you.
He laughed at me for not wanting to take the Jeep, which made me mad, which made him laugh even harder, which....well, you know where this is going. It ended with me taking the Motorized Landfill instead, screaming at him unconvincingly to have a good day and then calling from the road to apologize 10 minutes later. But still, he shouldn’t have left the top down last night.
None of this would be an issue if I hadn’t last week accepted an actual job that requires me to be someplace on time. It’s just one class that I’m teaching at the University of North Florida, but I do have to show up a couple of times a week. I tried to not take this job by explaining that I would have to come straight from my boxing class on Mondays and so would be late as well as sweaty for those classes, but the department head seemed amenable to that.
On the first day of my back-to-back classes, I taught boxing, changed into my street clothes, flew out of the gym parking lot and promptly got stopped for speeding.
I normally consider it a little embarrassing that the Motorized Landfill is plastered with firefighter union paraphernalia. At least there’s no snarky bumper sticker involving firefighters and poles or anything like that.
On this day, however, the deputy appreciated Husband’s service to humanity and gave me a written warning. Husband later asked me to please stop doing things that required him to write thank-you notes to police officers, and I said I would try.
Are men and women different? I never wanted to think so. But now that I’ve been living with a man for going on 20 years, I feel certain our brains are wired differently. What woman would put a dish towel and a bra in the same load of wash? Or forget her mother’s birthday? Or suggest tying her son’s hand behind his back to practice being a lefty pitcher?
The bright side is that I’ve learned to forgive Husband for these deficiencies, and I’ll learn to forgive him for buying the Goddamn Yellow Jeep which he swears will be with us forever.
But I tell you, that house better be pretty fucking clean.

Update: Okay, the house was pretty fucking clean. But listen: guess how many times I had to hear about it?

The boy of my dreams

My little Pterodactyl is an enigmatic soul. At night, snuggled in his bed, he pulls my face to his and locks lips with me. “I love you, Mom,” he says.
That happens often, I should say. Other times, he screeches, “GET ME A BOPPY!” and kicks me in the ribs while I’m trying to say good night.
He loves to stroke his big sister’s hair and tell her how beautiful she looks. He also likes to throw his little sister’s beloved Teddy against the wall. The other day while in Time Out, he leaned over and repeatedly deposited globs of saliva on the floor until there was a puddle. Then he rubbed his fuzzy blanket on his upper lip and fell asleep in the fetal position.
He once, in the middle of the night, flushed his nightlight down the toilet where it lodged so perfectly that I had to replace the whole flipping toilet. Then he proudly woke me up so he could show me what he’d done.
This boy, he is kicking my ass. There are times when I think I might die of love for him, when tears sting my eyes just thinking about his toothy grin and sticky-uppy hair and the way he loves to have his ears cleaned. I also often would feel perfectly justified hanging him on a hook by his shirt collar, if I had a hook strong enough to hold him there.
I’d give anything to rid him of his middle-child syndrome (short of having another child, that is), to restore in him the confidence of his baby years, when he knew our world revolved around him. “I wish (the Tyrant) wasn’t in our family!” he tells me all the time. “I told you we shouldn’t have buyed another baby!”
The Tyrant was already 13 months old when she came home, old enough to act adorable and steal toys and generally steal the spotlight from her 2-year-old brother. He tortured her mercilessly until she grew up enough to fight back. Now she’s almost 3 and he’s 4, and they are like two little magnets spiked with explosives. They can’t stay away from each other, but nearly every contact ends badly.
He tries so hard to love her, he really does. When she wakes up, he’ll gently approach her and touch her hair and say, “Good morning!” in his sweetest voice. But the Tyrant, wary after two years of abuse, usually responds with a quick right hook and a growl, and so hurts my poor little boy’s feelings that he dissolves into big fat tears.
So last night, after the Tyrant had called him WEENER BUTT! WEENER BUTT! WEENER BUTT! for no reason, I pulled him into my lap and whispered, “Let’s go for a bike ride. I want to take you someplace special, just you and me.” Normally he argues about alone time with parents because he’s afraid it means he’s being left out of something. But last night, beleaguered, he agreed.
He rode in the bike carrier behind me and I pedaled through the neighborhood. Within 10 minutes, I pulled over in front of a lake surrounded by tree canopy. Hanging in front of us was an old-fashioned swing, fastened by ropes to a high oak branch.
We had to descend the bank slightly to get on the swing. I pulled him into my lap. I walked backwards as far as I could, then let go, and in a magical swoosh, we soared through the air and peaked over the water. I believed in that moment I felt my boy’s heart flying upward with mine, like together we were lifting ourselves above a world filled with pesky little sisters and cranky mothers and weener butts, and at least for a moment, we became part of the very air beneath us.
We kept swinging. We watched little turtle heads pop up in the lake and waterbugs making circles, and listened to the crickets chirp. I nuzzled his neck with kisses and nibbled his ear, which is one of his most favorite things in the world besides airplanes.
“Mom. It’s peace out here,” he said.
We swung and swung. I got vertigo and felt nauseated. I threw up a little in my mouth, and felt a headache looming. But I could not break this fairy spell, this rare moment when my boy felt, more than learned, the meaning of peace.
“Could you take a picture of us so we can remember this?” he asked.
I didn’t have my camera. Of course I would remember it, I told him. But I knew what he meant. Memories morph into blurry versions of reality, particularly for little children who struggle so hard to understand the complexities of a grown-up world. He’s the one who needed the photo, or some other tangible proof of my love that he could turn to the next time he found himself on the wrong side of trouble.
Finally, the sun started setting and tiny no-see-ums buzzed into our noses and mouths, and he said he was ready to go.
We rode home without talking, but I could feel his contentment. When we walked back into the house, the usual chaos reigned. The Diva had taken a shower with the Tyrant, who was screaming that she had soap in her eyes. The bathroom floor was flooded. It was nearing 9 p.m. and no one seemed interested in going to bed. Husband sat on the couch watching preseason football as though armed robbers had told him he’d be killed if he moved.
The Pterodactyl joined the fray, and within minutes, the three were involved in a fracas worthy of being televised.
But later that night, after the household had settled for the evening and I lay in bed mentally steeling myself for the next day, I thought about the secret swing, my beautiful boy, and the way he looked at me when he crawled into my lap to swing. And I thought about his favorite moment of the excursion, when, as he soared over the grassy slope over the calm clear water, I heard a little noise followed by inexorable giggles and his delighted announcement: “I gassed-ed!”

Me and school supplies and finally, the end of summer

Well, I managed to get the kids back to school. Even the Tyrant is enrolled this year, although it’s only three days a week. Still, for 12 hours each week, I am kid-free, at least until I begin to use the extended day program at the pre-school, which could be as early as next week.
The Back-To-School preparations did not go well, probably because I didn’t begin them until two days before school started. I think I totaled five supply trips, and I’m still missing a red folder and a blue folder with pockets AND hole punch thingies, sheet protectors and a container of sanitizing wipes. I could have bought a small used car for what I’ve spent.
Husband worked the day before, naturally, and sauntered into the school on the first day like Mr. Hands-On New Age Father of the Year. I trailed behind him schlepping the backpacks, unable to stop obsessing about whether I had put a juice box in everyone’s lunch box and if I had accidentally included a peanut-product that would send my daughter’s classmate into anaphelactic shock.
Fortunately everyone was happy to be at school, there were no tears, and as we left the final classroom, Husband and I gave each other high fives and issued joint little whoops of joy. A Father of the Year in front of us turned around and gave us a pointed look. “My wife hates this day,” he said. “She loves spending time with our kids.”
Now, I try not to let these sorts of incidents bother me - you know, these brief moments when other people make you feel like your children should be compensated for merely standing next to you. Coincidentally, something similar had happened the day before when I took my kids to Panera for dinner. As I ordered three chicken noodle soups, feeling actually quite proud that my little children adore eating chicken noodle soup, the Tyrant grabbed a bottle of water and threw it on the floor and the Pterodactyl pulled off my loose-waisted gauchos which I had worn because I felt bloated and the Diva was yelling, “I’ll get all the drinks, Mom!” So I was standing like a middle-aged washed-up hip hop artist with my underwear showing, trying to stash my credit card with one hand while using the other to keep the Tyrant from scratching my eyes out and barking at my kids to stay where I could see them, and the cashier gave me a superior saccharine smile and said, “Have a great evening!” She might as well have screamed at the top of her lungs, “I’M SO FUCKING GLAD I’M NOT YOU!” and started tossing muffin crumbs to my kids.
She was younger and shorter than me, so I threw back my shoulders, looked at her in feigned disbelief, and said, “Seriously?” Then I shook my head, laughed and walked away. And didn’t feel the least bit guilty when my three kids had a combined seven potty emergencies during the 35 minutes we were there.
One of the potty emergencies occurred en masse, as my children have developed some kind of weird simultaneous pooping osmosis. It shouldn’t be an issue at home since we have three toilets, but one of the toilets has a disconnected seat which has led to some awkward instability during business meetings. Consequently, some drama has occurred.
Anyway. Of course I love my kids, and I love spending time with them, particularly when they’re not calling each other “poopy pee-pee weiners” in public but, man, it’s nice to catch my breath every once in a while. And when the father at pre-school made that comment about his wife hating to send her kids back to school, the spirit of Miss Manners hovered over my shoulder and told me to smile and ignore him. But I had a lot of hot air that day, so I blew Miss Manners away, and I said to that man, “I guess she’s just a better mom than me.”

Should she go to Princeton? Or just get her G.E.D....

Husband and I don’t argue much in front of the kids, mainly because it seems silly to add to whatever neurotic tendencies they’ll develop simply by living with me, but also because I’m nearly always right and I don’t want to constantly correct him in front of his children.
But the other night I was so right about something that I had to give him the dagger eyes while speaking to the Diva in a soothing tone through a clenched jaw. It wasn’t pretty.
It started because the Diva was counting up how many years she has until high school. She figured it out - she has 7 years until high school - then added, “and then after high school, I’ll go to college.”
And Husband said, “Right! If you want to go to college.”
At this point I might have blacked out for a minute, but I’m pretty sure my eyes bulged and my hand flew up to my chin to keep my jaw from falling to the kitchen floor.
I used my sweetest, most enthusiastic voice and said, “Of course she’ll go to college!” I turned to the Diva. “Daddy’s just teasing. Right, Daddy?”
Husband looked at me not at all sheepishly. “If she wants to,” he said.
Then the conversation devolved into a ridiculous “uh-huh” vs. “nuh-uh” type back and forth with the children watching intently like it was Pinky Dinky Doo and SpongeBob Squarepants involved in an angry game of badminton.
Husband got specific. What if she wanted to go into the military, he asked. Again, I had the whole eye-bulging, jaw-catching thing, but I controlled myself. “ROTC,” I responded. Suppose she wants to be a rock star, he countered. Conservatory of music, I replied.
Finally the Tyrant started screaming about something and the debate morphed into whether I should open a bottle of Cabernet or just have a beer.
Now, the truth is that I’m not terribly concerned about the Diva going to college. In my humble maternal opinion, she is the most beautiful child on the face of the planet and will obviously be a supermodel by age 17 and, it’s true, a rock star soon thereafter. But doesn’t it seem premature to already be giving her permission to ditch college? It seems a little like confirming that ketchup is indeed a vegetable before she’s old enough to appreciate tomatoes. Also, I don’t want her to get a big head.
I do find that I’m less worked up than I thought I’d be about my children’s futures, perhaps because I find other parents far too worked up about it. I don’t need my kids to make a ton of money to take care of me in my old age. I’m hoping my parents don’t expect that of me, though I’d be happy to check with our homeowners association about getting a trailer out back.
I’m much more focused on the happiness and well-being of my children, and on manners. I’ve always said that my kids might end up in juvenile court but, dammit, they’re going to say “yes, sir” and “no, ma’am” to the judge when the time comes to speak. Really, I think manners can take you far in this world.
Plus there’s the whole college fund issue, which we haven’t really addressed because we’re finding pre-school costs way too taxing. We keep hoping that, by the college years, our kids will be good at something so they’ll have a chance at scholarships. Maybe the Pterodactyl’s creative trash-talking indicates a propensity for basketball, or the Tyrant’s ability to accurately throw things at her brother’s head shows a talent for softball.
I’m afraid the Diva might be really good at dating, which presents a complicated set of problems and is another reason I’d like to set her sights on college ASAP.
A friend who has two little girls recently confided in me that he didn’t understand why people got so worked up over teenage pregnancy. He just wants his girls to be happy, he said, and if they have babies younger than expected, then he’s just fine with that.
I had to disagree, mainly because teenagers having babies, to me, means mothers of teenagers having to deal with babies ... again. And by that time I can promise I’ll be too tired to do it all again.
All of this means that I think it would be very nice if my kids went to college, and if they don’t, it better be because they found something better to do, which will be fine with me as long as they can be self-sufficient, at least for a while.
Because by then, I’ll just need a little time to myself. That, in my opinion, is what sending your kids to college is all about.

Should I get one? I'm taking a poll.

Should I get a tattoo?
Husband and I have an ongoing debate about this, and I have promised him that I won’t do it. I’m not sure why he is so offended by the idea, but he doesn’t make many demands of me other than insisting I stay on my happy pills, so I feel like I should comply. Also, he’s worried a tattoo will get droopy when my skin gets old.
Even BFF has weighed in on the issue, sending me articles about how tattoos are “so ‘90s.” Of course, she already has a tattoo, so it’s possible she’s trying to thwart my efforts to be as trendy and hip as her.
But you know, the option just sits there, like the last Oreo left in the pantry. And I want it.
Normally this idea resides benignly in the back of my consciousness, but every so often something happens to propel it forward. Today, the propellor is Michelle Obama’s legs.
If you have better things to do than read about stuff that really doesn’t matter, let me clue you in. The media is in an uproar because Michelle Obama wore shorts when traveling on Air Force One on her way to the family’s Wyoming vacation. They weren’t short shorts, but nor were they long shorts. I’d call them medium. The hem hit her legs about mid-thigh. She appeared to be wearing a twinset with them, which I found a little strange, but whatever.
Now Michelle Obama does have some nice legs, though I don’t think they are as nice as, say, mine, for example, and she looked just fine in her shorts, as though she might be going to a neighbor’s backyard barbecue. Her bottom half was dressed for burgers and Bud Lite, and her top half was dressed for salmon and Chardonnay.
But some media types did not like the fact that she was traveling on Air Force One in casual shorts. They find it “inappropriate.” And I think the implication is that it was inappropriate for her age, which is 28 days younger than me. I am 45.
All summer long I have been tempted to buy myself some of those trendy short shorts to wear, but have been worried that it’s “inappropriate” for my age. But now I’m a little miffed that anybody thinks I can’t wear anything because of my age, so I’m going to go find some today that will hopefully be on sale since I will probably wear them once then give them away.
Same thing with tank tops, which I have been hesitant to wear for years because I was worried I’m too old to have my bra straps showing. But you know what? I now understand that the public at large knows that I wear a bra regardless of whether the evidence can be seen. I’ve talked myself into believing that it’s nearly sexist for me not to be able to show my bra straps. I have boobs! I have to wear a bra so I don’t get sweat marks on my shirt from my breasts bouncing on my stomach! So deal with it, people! And now I wear tank tops and dresses with skinny little straps and I don’t care who sees my bra, as long as the bra is clean.
I don’t think Michelle Obama’s shorts were particularly flattering on her, and they were a little wrinkled in the crotch area from sitting on the plane. I probably would have worn something else. But we’ll never know, as I could never be First Lady or probably even work as an air conditioning repairperson in the Oval Office due to that awkward little incident from my senior year in college.
The point is this: why does anybody care what she wore on the plane to Wyoming? And, by the way, maybe she had been wearing a skirt but little Malia got airsick and threw up all over her and all she had in her carryon was a pair of shorts?
And why can’t I get a small, tasteful tattoo?

Vacation Odyssey: The Final Installment

MONDAY

It is the final day of the Vacation Odyssey. I will be sleeping in my own bed tonight after 16 days on the road.
The worst has occurred. At the moment I hate the words Mama, potty, hungry, thirsty, and the phrase “The DVD Player Broke Again.”
I’m currently drinking gas station coffee and feeding my pain with chocolate chip cookies and peanut brittle, which is not good for my cavity.
For the past two nights the Tyrant has slept with Husband and me, which is a bit like trying to sleep with a greased piglet. Every part of my body hurts, even the top of my foot, inexplicably.
We’re listening to Lady GaGa’s “Poker Face” for the 148th time this trip, since the Tyrant requests it every 30 minutes. It’s disconcerting to hear a 2-year-old sing, “Baby, when it’s love, if it’s not rough it isn’t fun.”
“Do you think you’re the only one suffering?” Husband just asked me.
“Woe. Is. Me,” I said. In other words, yes.
We left the Cape Saturday morning.
Here I must insert the caveat that I love my in-laws dearly, and that I treasured my time with them. My kids spent quality time with their cousins, and I’m grateful they’ll have these memories of summer bonding with extended family.
However. I have never been so glad to say goodbye to a purported vacation mecca. So long, weathered gray shingles. Sayonara, federally protected conservation land. Good riddance, fried clam bellies. No more renting wet suits so my kids can swim in August just down the beach from seals. Seals! The water was cold enough for SEALS!
Get me back to Florida, where the gas stations sell beer and wine and the beaches are free and nobody wears shirts when being interviewed on television about hurricane preparation.
After leaving, we spent the first night with friends in New Jersey. We arrived to discover they were having a big party, a social custom which Husband and I vaguely recalled from our youth. Our friends are fabulous hosts, and the food ranged from seared tuna and roasted veggie sandwiches to hot dogs and wings. We tried to be polite guests, although the Tyrant pooped on the party deck 10 minutes before guests were scheduled to arrive and the Pterodactyl threw such a tantrum later in the evening that Husband took him into a closet to mute the sound.
The hostess had worked her ass off preparing for her fabulous party, and get this: when it was over, she went upstairs to bed. Her husband stayed up until 3 a.m. restoring the house to its pre-party state of organized perfection. Then he got up at 7:30 a.m. to make us homemade chocolate chip waffles for breakfast, and the hostess sent us off with a huge box of homemade chocolate chip cookies for the kids. I’ve eaten 11 of them so far.
Perhaps the best thing they did was convince us to take the Cape May ferry connecting New Jersey to Delaware and drive down the east coast of Delaware and through Ocean City, Md. It was a great day for a ferry ride, and the kids ate a hearty ferry lunch of nachos and Lucky Charms marshmallows.
Husband was excited to drive along the beach in Delaware because as a boy he spent several summers there with his grandparents. And we got to spend a lot of time there because the children staggered their potty needs so that we had to stop four times in 45 minutes. I am not making this up. But luckily one of the stops was at a McDonald’s next to a street sign marked Evergreen Road, and Husband by chance looked up and recognized it and so found the little beach shack his grandparents called The Monsoon. That little bout of nostalgia nearly mitigated the toxic conditions we endured in the above mentioned McDonald’s so that the Diva could eliminate four drops of pee from her bladder.
We stopped last night in Emporia, Va., a town which, if judged by its I-95 interchange, should be evacuated and burned to the ground. We stayed at a very pleasant highway hotel franchise. I suspect it was so pleasant because it was about five minutes old. Certainly the paper walls will fall down soon and the building will implode sometime next spring.
But the rest of it? Shit. Even the water tasted funny.
According to our current schedule, we should be home HOME HoMe HOME by dinnertime. First we have to stop at the kennel to pick up the dog. She has been there for 16 days. I’ll have to sign off soon to work on securing a second mortgage to pay for her stay. It will be hands down the costliest single expenditure of the so-called vacation.

TUESDAY

I am writing this from my very own living room. I have survived. I need the proverbial vacation to recover from my vacation. But that’s okay. Not only do I have renewed appreciation for my neurotic little life, I also have renewed appreciation for my chaotic little family. If I ever again have to be locked up in a motorized landfill for 55 hours with salt water taffy, Lady Gaga and four people, there are no four people I’d rather be with for the journey.
Truthfully, though, let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.

Pneumonia and roaches and other vacation hazards

The house we’re renting on Cape Cod is a cute little cottage except for the roaches, although the pest control guy claims they’re beetles but he agrees that they should not be inside.
Here’s what I don’t understand, however, about this Summer on the Cape phenomenon. Why is everyone so anxious to pay such a premium for so much inconvenience? Okay, it’s pretty here. But what am supposed to do? Besides go to the beach, which is a quarter mile walk along a busy narrow road with no sidewalk, and I can’t drive because you have to be a resident to park there and even if I had a resident sticker I’d have to wait for an hour for a spot.
But back to the house....it is a cute little house. Let’s put little in italics, for emphasis, particularly for nine people. Four big people and five rugrats. The real problem, however, is that when we arrived, it had not been cleaned after the previous renters departed. It was passable, because rental agreements stipulate that you have to leave the house “broom-swept,” whatever that means (Who are these people? Do you think I want to go on vacation to clean somebody else’s house?), but the bathrooms hadn’t been cleaned, the trash had not been emptied, there was even coffee left in the pot. There was a pair of dirty underwear under the bed. Two pairs, in fact. I mean, ick.
After several calls to the rental agency, the homeowner began calling. He called three times. No, he did not want to apologize for charging us $2,700 for the privilege of staying in his dirty house. He wanted to tell us that the rental agency had been feuding with the cleaning company and somehow our house didn’t get cleaned. But it wasn’t his fault.
He came over the next morning to tell us again that he understood this mess wasn’t our fault. Duh. But that it wasn’t his fault either. And that the cleaners would be there soon.
The cleaners came and cleaned the house and that was done. We went to the beach and swam in the frigid waters and dug in the sand, and felt temporarily very Cape Coddy.
Back at the house, the Diva told me her throat hurt. I gave her some ice water. That night at dinner, she told me she was cold. I gave her a jacket. She said she wasn’t hungry. I told her she needed to broaden her culinary horizons. Then I took her temperature. She had a fever of 102, and white pustules on her tonsils.
Husband reluctantly took her to the emergency room the next morning because I couldn’t get a
pediatrician’s office to answer the phone. There is one walk-in clinic that’s open evenings from 5-6:30 p.m., which I don’t find very helpful.
Anyway, the doctor took 45 seconds to diagnose the Diva with strep throat.
At the drug store, after I paid for the penicillin, I asked the pharmacist if he could recommend something to help with the pain in my increasingly throbbing cavity tooth. He said no, nothing other than ibuprofen, and he asked when we were headed home. “Saturday,” I said. “But we’re driving. To Florida.” He whistled.
“Who’s the penicillin for?” he asked. I told him my daughter had strep throat. He pointed at the Tyrant, who was with me. “No,” I said. “She has pneumonia.”
He shook his head, then said he’d be happy to recommend a good scotch.

The same night the Diva fell ill with strep, we arrived home from dinner just after dark. When my sister-in-law turned on the light in the basement bedroom where her two boys were sleeping, dozens of gross brown bugs scurried everywhere. My sister-in-law was, understandably, completely skeeved out by this, and she made her husband sleep in the basement with the bugs while the two boys slept with her in a queen-sized bed. She’s cranky now.
We called the rental company. They spoke to the owner who promised to send over the pest control company to spray enough chemicals to eradicate every known species of bug in the Northeast. We said no, thanks, but we’d rather our children not return to their homes as altered species.
Our 4-bedroom cottage is now a 3-bedroom cottage. Actually, last night it was a 2-bedroom cottage, since the upstairs bedrooms have air conditioning and the downstairs bedroom does not. All those rumors about the Cape having a cold windy summer? Put them to rest. The heat has arrived. Right now, I am writing at 5:30 a.m. while Husband, Pterodactyl, the Diva and the Tyrant pretend to indulge in restful sleep, all in the same bed.
The owner visited the morning after the bug discovery to announce again that this was not his fault because he pays a pest control company to handle this stuff. He did some vaguely threatening chainsaw work for about an hour then cut some of his hydrangeas and gave them to me as some sort of compensation. Then he showed up again last night at 9:30 p.m. to collect bug samples. At this point I think he is stalking us, and I’m going to take my boxing gloves out of the car and leave them in a prominent place.
Just to further complicate matters, the Pterodactyl is having a very rough time because most of his cousins are older and tend to exclude him from playing. He tussled with one younger cousin who bit his finger so hard I thought it might be broken.
I’m getting a little cranky myself. Husband said I barked at the children so loudly at the ice cream store last night that people actually stared. I have no memory of this. Also, I forgot to get my happy pills refilled before I left, so I am parceling them out sparingly.
And get this -- it’s only Day 3. We’re not even halfway through.

Note

Vacation Odyssey #3 was posted a day late. Sorry. Hilton wanted $10 for wireless connection

Vacation Odyssey #4

It’s the final day of travel to Cape Cod, and we are finally heading in that direction now at 10:29 a.m. We’ve been in the van for 21 minutes, and I’ve already taken the Tyrant to the bathroom at Stop & Shop, threatened to cut off the Pterodactyl’s hand and throw it out the window, and cried because the Diva didn’t like the DVD I bought for her. I’m exhausted.
It has been a long 15 hours and crankiness has infected everyone at some point. That might be partly because everyone’s a bit constipated as a result of Husband limiting liquid intake to avoid bathroom stops. Except the Tyrant, who is taking the antibiotic Augmentin for her pneumonia. Did you know that one of the side effects of Augmentin is frequent loose bowel movements? The Tyrant has been potty-trained for months. There has been some regression on this trip.

Yesterday afternoon we decided to stop in Hershey, Pennsylvania for the night. We were all excited to visit Hershey’s World of Chocolate, and it didn’t disappoint. Husband called it the greatest entertainment value in the history of America because....get this: it’s free. Free parking, free visits with the giant Reese’s character who looks like a square brown penis with eyes, free ride on the chocolate car which takes you on a tour of a fabricated chocolate factory. But here’s the catch: while you’re riding on the car, you’re breathing in some sort of chocolate heroin fog which makes you think you might die or kill someone if you don’t eat chocolate immediately. Then you exit through the gift shop. And the whole “free” concept goes to shit.
But still, it was fun, a little slice of Americana that I can paste in my mental scrapbook of Nice Things I’ve Done For My Kids.
It was after 9 p.m. by the time we pulled into the Hershey Hampton Inn. It was booked. So was the Days Inn, the Springfield Suites by Marriott, the Harrisburg Residence Inn, and the next four hotels we stopped at to beg for a place to sleep.
We just kept driving and feeding Hershey’s Kisses to the children until they fell into sugar comas and quit crying. We drove until after midnight.
That’s the bad news. The good news is that the only hotel we could find was a really nice Hilton and the only rooms left had two double beds so I had to get two adjoining rooms and we all slept great. (Yes, cha-ching, cha-ching, if you’re counting.)
We all felt refreshed for about 15 minutes until the arguments began over who could have which complimentary beauty products. The Pterodactyl was nearly insane with envy because the Tyrant had a shampoo and a conditioner and he only had a shampoo, and only calmed down slightly when I found a shower cap for him.
Husband and I realized the boy was probably hypoglycemic and needed to eat. We all did. So before we left the hotel, we spent $36 in the gift shop for breakfast, not including the adorable heart-shaped mirrored compact the Tyrant stole.
We sat in the luxurious lobby living room and ate blueberry scones, a cold muffin, some fruit, potato chips, two pats of butter and a packet of mustard. The coffee was delicious. We watched guests arrive for some sort of fancy Indian wedding and admired the women’s colorful sparkly saris.
Finally we caravanned through the hotel to our car, lugging the recyclable Publix bags in which our stuff was packed and leaving a mustardy trail of potato chip crumbs behind.
Now we’re driving through New York City. We’re really, truly on the last leg of the first part of the journey. We should be on the Cape easily by dinner. What could go wrong?

Okay, here’s a glitch. It’s a gorgeous day in NYC, and every single person who owns a car is trying to escape via I-95. We will never get out of Connecticut. I’m on the verge of exiting the highway immediately, renting the first house I see and enrolling the kids in school. The Tyrant only sleeps when we play Poker Face by Lady Gaga so I’ve heard it 300 times in a row. The 3-pound supply of Hershey’s chocolate from Chocolate World is dwindling. If my trainer is reading this, consider me a major renovation project to undertake 10 days from now.

Okay, glitch #2. Sister-in-law just texted to me to say she had just arrived at the Cape rental house. She wrote: It’s going to be a long week.
Sigh.

Vacation Odyssey #3

Day 2.
We all slept well. That’s the good news. And we’re on the road by 7:30 a.m. after a raucous breakfast that ended with my hooligans stealing approximately 400 tourist brochures for places we will never visit.
For the moment we’re quietly chugging along in our landfill, which is really beginning to smell.
“My lunch goal for the day,” I just said to Husband, “is for the kids to not eat chicken fingers and French fries.”
“Yes. I agree.”
“Maybe a Panera, or something.”
“Right. Because the Appalachians are full of Paneras,” he said. “God. Could you be any more suburban?”
“Well, honey. What do you think they’re going to eat at Mama’s Down Home Country Kitchen Diner?”
“Dirt. Or coal residue.”
So now we’re back to being quiet.

I’m thinking about the Diva asking me to explain Hamlet last night, and how she’s getting to the age at which she understands that bad things happen in the world. The other morning I was in bed reading the newspaper, and she was snuggled next to me watching television, which incidentally is one of the most awesome feelings in the world, when she said, “Mom!” in an urgent voice and pointed to an article in the paper. I looked where she was pointing, and saw the headline: Woman eats baby’s brain.
The Diva is a very good reader and it was too late to brush it off and tell her it was nothing. So I was stuck explaining to my 7-year-old that sometimes people get sick in their heads, like their brains don’t work right, and they think it’s okay to do terrible things. And she said, “Oh, right. My friend Jay told me there’s somebody at camp like that.” So I used that diversion to steer away from detailing the story of the woman who carved up her own 7-week-old infant and took a few bites of him.
This all makes me a little sad. I hate that I’ve got to stain, even slightly, her perennial sunny outlook on life. I particularly dislike introducing her to fear, even if it’s a healthy fear, the kind that keeps her safe from predators and prevents her from placing herself in dangerous situations. But I know it’s part of parenting. I keenly remember how I learned healthy fear. I was 7 years old, the same age as the Diva is now, when I broke the rules and rode my bike in the street. I got hit by a car. That showed me.
I certainly don’t wish that kind of lesson on my children. At the moment, I’m happy they’re safe in the back seat watching the Jetsons, and that their greatest fear is that we’ll spend the whole day in the car again, which we will.
Husband just found an NPR station. I’m going to sign off and look for a Panera.

Okay, succeeded in avoiding chicken nuggets for lunch. We had ice cream instead at the Natural Bridge Gift Shop in Virginia, and then we descended 34 stories into the earth to see some caverns, which were very cool. The Pterodactyl was fascinated, especially when we walked over some 2x4s and told him it was an underwater bridge. The Diva was bored to tears. Literally. She was cold. She was tired. She couldn’t see. She was scared. She only rallied when we left through the gift shop, but I’m proud to say we didn’t cave. Pardon the pun.

Vacation Odyssey #2

Well, we’re five hours into our Vacation Odyssey Driving Trip to Cape Cod and Husband is already in the doghouse.
We are in Bumfuck, Alabama. Today’s headline in the Bumfuck Times is: Feeling Love -- More than 40 students dedicate life to Jesus Christ. On the plus side, Hank Williams apparently grew up around here.
We’ve actually only been on the road for three hours. Add onto that 45 minutes for breakfast, half an hour trying to extract ourselves from the Cracker Barrel Country Store, and half an hour trying to figure out how to insert the disc into the DVD player that Husband PROMISED HE’D FIGURE OUT HOW TO USE BEFORE WE LEFT ON THIS GOD-FORSAKEN JOURNEY.
Part of the problem may be that he decided yesterday that we’d leave Destin at 4 a.m. this morning so that the children could sleep part of the way. Then he bought a bunch of rum and served everyone Exotic Island Punch for the rest of the night.
He did get up at 3:30 a.m. to load the car. Then we carried the children to the car and strapped them into their seats. The Diva resumed slumber immediately. The Pterodactyl dozed off after about 20 minutes. The Tyrant fell asleep three hours later as we were pulling into the Cracker Barrel for breakfast.
We had a nutritious delicious breakfast. (Husband: eggs, biscuits, sausage, grits. Me: eggs, wheat toast. Diva: steak fries and three bites of chicken. Pterodactyl: bacon and butter. Tyrant: eggs, catsup, butter, gummi worms.)
Then we spent half an hour trying to drag our kids out of the Cracker Barrel store, which is like a retail glue trap. At one point, an employee actually walked up to the Diva and placed a giant purple monkey Webkinz in her arms and said, “Feel how soft!” Are you kidding me? Do you think I’m going to spend $20 on something that isn’t going to keep her quiet in the car for more than a nanosecond? Instead we bought candy they could suck on for a while.
Husband is pretending to be fascinated by everything he sees along the highway, including billboards, orange work barrels, hills, and the Hyundai manufacturing plant we just passed. “Wow,” he said. “Now that’s the kind of thing you just don’t see when you’re flying.” He added that he thought it would be really cool to take a tour of the plant.

I asked Husband about his target destination for the day. He doesn’t have one. I’m guessing we’ll stop at whatever point the DVD player stops working. Hopefully by that time, we’ll at least be out of Alabama, where you can still smoke in restaurants and highway road signs advertise the Alabama Division of the Sons of the Confederacy. Yikes.
My back hurts already from contorting myself around to: hand Pterodactyl a sippy cup, rub Tyrant’s leg, pick up Teddy when she throws it at my head, open the computer to the downloaded AAA Triptik, administer the Tyrant’s pneumonia medicine, and pick up Gummi Worms from the ground. Also, nothing perfects the art of coughing up phlegm like a little bout of pneumonia. So I am surrounded by baby wipes full of mucous that the Tyrant has spit into my hand or retrieved from her nose. Too bad the dog is in the kennel - used baby wipes are her favorite snack.

Okay, fast-forward to the night. We’re in a Knoxville, Tennessee Hampton Inn, having accomplished an 8-hour drive in a mere 13 hours. I thought we’d never get out of Chattanooga. But it seemed silly to be so close to Lookout Mountain and not go look out at it. Then it seemed stingy not to ride the Steepest Incline Train In The World, particularly when the Pterodactyl thinks trains are even better than potty talk. And then the Diva got carsick going up the mountain, the Tyrant plastered chewed-up Gummi Worms on her fingernails like nail polish, we all got cranky coming down the mountain, and after eating a late lunch at a fly-infested Wendy’s, we drove a little more and called it a day.
We walked along Knoxville’s riverfront, which was nice, and found a little Shakespeare in the Park and had some ice cream. The Diva inexplicably loved Hamlet and kept asking me what it was about. Like I know, just because I’m a writer.
It was a nice evening. Back at the hotel, the Tyrant's Teddy came up missing, and Husband had to light out into the night to search; he finally found it at the ice cream store, thank goodness, or I seriously would have canceled the rest of the vacation.
I’m really proud of us for getting through this day. I’d even be giddy about it if we didn’t have two more like it ahead of us. Five more, if you count the trip home. Tomorrow I’m going to calculate how much money we’re actually saving by driving instead of flying. My guess? Not enough.

A Vacation High

A Mother of the Year I know is frequently posting Facebook status reports about her wonderful life with her handsome husband and beautiful children.
You know who you are. And I admit that occasionally I have had less-than-charitable feelings toward you because of your perennially sunny disposition and outlook.
I now understand that I have been jealous. I further understand that part of the reason your life is so great is that you look at your life as being so great.
This burst of enlightenment has come to me courtesy of a fortunate confluence of events. First and foremost is that I have finally managed to regulate both my happy pills and my hormones in a way that allows me to smile without grimacing and fold laundry without the urge to tie bra straps around my own neck.
Secondly, I am on vacation in Destin, Florida and currently writing this from a balcony overlooking the crystal aqua waters of the Gulf of Mexico. And my parents are paying for the condo.
Thirdly - and possibly most importantly - I think I might be maturing. After 4.5 decades of life, I think I have realized that the world doesn’t revolve around me. Nobody really cares about my crow’s feet or the fact that I wear the same clothes for three days in a row or whether I shave my legs. Life goes on for billions of people regardless of whether I’ve bounced a check or waxed my eyebrows or served my children cupcakes for breakfast.
Now, I know you’re thinking that I should have come to this conclusion many, many years ago. But I didn’t, mainly because I am at heart a pretty selfish person. In time, I think I will expound on the reasons I may have developed into a selfish person.
Right now, though, I’m just happy. Life’s not perfect: Husband just took the Tyrant to the urgent care clinic because she either has an ear infection or swine flu and is keeping us up all night with a tubercular cough. I have a cavity. I know it’s a cavity because I went to the dentist and he told me it was a cavity but I canceled my cavity-filling appointment because it interfered with a workout schedule, and now I’m paying the price. And I still have this 24-hour, 32-minute drive to Cape Cod looming before me.
But the coffee is strong, the wine is cold, the seafood is fresh, and the sisters are having fun together. The eye-rolling has been tolerably limited.
It’s a good day. I think I’ll go relax and wait for something to fuck it up.

Addendum: the Tyrant has pneumonia. That has definite fuck-up potential. But I’m looking on the bright side. It’s only in one lung.

Vacation Odyssey, Volume I

I have great news. Today is the start of our two-week cross-country odyssey, which includes back-to-back extended family vacations and driving to Cape Cod in our motorized landfill which has 94,000 miles on it.
It is possibly the most fun you can have in a minivan with one overly-optimistic adult, one adult of questionable mental stability, two young children, one barely potty-trained toddler and no liquor.
Obviously this is not great news for me. But it is exciting news for those of you who like my blog, and even better news for those of you who, for whatever reason, have wished misery upon me. Your dreams are coming true as we speak.
We are currently driving to Destin, Fla., for a visit with my side of the family. It’s a 6-hour drive. We left our home at 10 a.m., and right now, it is 2 p.m., and we have traveled about 100 miles. There have been six stops so far - one to drop the dog off and go to the bathroom, one to buy a toy and go to the bathroom, one to buy food, one to just go to the bathroom, and two stops to buy food and go to the bathroom.
The morning began ominously. Upon waking, the Pterodactyl made the horrifying discovery that he had left his Leapster at the restaurant where we ate dinner last night. The Leapster was to be his sole entertainment for the road trip, other than eating sugar. But Hot Firefighter Husband jumped in the car and retrieved the Leapster, saving (a small part of) the day. When he returned, he left the Tyrant unsupervised near the luggage and she dug out the Diva’s Nintendo DS and broke it in half. First destination: to buy a new Nintendo.
After all the stops, we’re now cruising along with two of the three children asleep. The Tyrant threw two lollipops at my head so my hair is sticky, and there’s a strange flapping noise coming from outside the car that apparently wasn’t covered under last week’s $2,200 check-up. Husband is on steroids for burgeoning sinus infection and is already sick of me. He’s driving right now listening to his iPod with earphones.
But we’ll reach Destin before dinner and have a very nice time. Our condo is right on the beach and the kids will play with their cousins and we’ll have frozen fruity drinks every afternoon. The only wild card is my dad, who quit smoking for the 800th time a week ago and informed me yesterday that he still hates everybody, which is unfortunate, unless I can convince somebody to give up a little Ativan to slip into his coffee. Or beer.
No, the real fun will begin in a week, with our 1,519 mile trip to Cape Cod to congregate with Husband's side of the family. The AAA Trip Estimator puts our travel time at 24 hours and 32 minutes.
Visiting Cape Cod in the summer is an annual vacation, but we usually fly. This year, we (Husband) waited to long to buy airline tickets, and we (Husband) decided against selling a kidney to pay the last minute fares.
Husband has a nostalgic vision of car trips from his childhood, the longest of which was nine hours. “I’m having a great time!” he said to me at the last rest stop. “What could be better than being together as a family?” Then he bought me some coffee from a vending a machine.
Of course, he’s driving, listening to music with earphones, and I’m getting wet sticky candy beaned at my head and wrenching my back every 10 minutes trying to retrieve dropped items and address the Diva’s running list of questions and commentary: What’s a shoplifter? When are we gonna be there? My stomach hurts. Can you buy me the game Clue? I wanna be Miss Scarlet. Can I play a computer game? I’m ready to get out of here. I’m tired. What can I do?
Well, we’ve finally reached Tallahassee, averaging about 45 mph on the highway when you include all the stops. All children are asleep. The strange flapping noise has disappeared. I’ll sign off now. I must concentrate on convincing myself that I don’t have to pee.

A great diet I don't recommend

I’ve always thought that I was one bout of botulism away from my ideal weight. I now know that I’m one-half of a bout of botulism away.
I feel certain my recent stomach woes came from a can of tuna salad. You know - the kind that’s already mixed together with mayo and junk so that you can eat it in your cubicle with crackers?
I ate it for lunch the other day, and every bite further confirmed my suspicion about its grossness. But I ate it anyway.
The queasiness began immediately. I had rinsed out the can and placed it on the counter so that I could recycle it, but every time I looked at it I was nearly overcome with nausea. So I threw it in the trash. But then every time I opened the trash I imagined the bad tuna fumes reaching up like long green fingers to shove more grossness down my throat.
By evening I was having hot flashes and cold sweats, which made me decide that all of my symptoms were due to hormone withdrawal. I had forgotten to refill my prescription two days earlier. So I called Husband and, again, hot firefighter to the rescue. He showed up in the ladder truck to deliver my hormones.
But it wasn’t the hormones. By evening I was puking violently while the Diva watched “iCarly,” occasionally yelling out to me “You okay, Mom?” and me yelling back, “Don’t come in here, honey!” and all I could think about was that fucking tuna salad can.
It’s possible, I guess, that I picked up some sort of stomach bug, but we are leaving for a vacation with my side of the family in three days and my mother is obsessively paranoid about stomach ailments. Even the mention of an upset stomach has my mom reaching for the Immodium or at least for the Pepto-Bismal. So I’m steadfastly sticking to my botulism theory, in part because it’s too late to arrange for my rented condo to be contained in sterile bubble wrap.
I am happy, though, that I’ve managed to drop three or four of the 30 pounds I’ll gain simply by being in the same zip code as my family. You know what I mean. Nothing says “family vacation” like the complete reversion to childhood paranoia and pettiness, and my adolescent obsession was being the fattest one in the family. Which I wasn't! Well, okay, I was. But now, here at home, I’m fit and healthy and comfortable in my skin. On family vacations, I am a raging wart hog with toilet paper stuck to my shoe. It’s nearly impossible, without a full-time therapist and serious psychotropic drugs, to overcome this innate transformation, though I’ll take any help I can get.
And with this in mind, I’ve got one thing to say about botulism. Bring it on.

Is it time to talk about sex?

One day in 7th grade religion class, Elle started passing around a note.
Every girl who read it dissolved into giggles then passed it on. When the note came to me, I opened it up. It said: Did Joseph fuck Mary or did God fuck Mary?
I dissolved into giggles and handed the note to the girl next to me. Eventually Mrs. K. confiscated the note, and contorted her face while screaming, “DO YOU THINK THIS IS FUNNY? WHO THINKS THIS IS FUNNY?”
I laughed because I was supposed to, but I didn’t really think it was funny because I didn’t know what fuck meant.
So I went home and found my mother in the laundry room and tearfully told her I thought I was old enough to learn the meaning of the word fuck.
Later that night, she gave me a couple of books she had been saving and we talked about it, and then I knew all about sex.
Ever since then, I have believed that I learned about the proverbial birds and bees far too late in life.
But now that it’s nearly time to start teaching the Diva about sex -- she’s almost 8 -- I’m thinking that she should never find out. Or that maybe I should just tell her, “Penises are really gross,” and leave it at that. But that wouldn’t work since I have a 4-year-old son who has a penis, and I don’t want her to tell him it’s gross, even though I prefer to think of his penis as more of just a little stick that pees and not an actual penis. (That’ll come to an end, too, I fear -- yesterday the Diva found a Black-Eyed Peas video online showing Fergie in a thong, and the Pterodactyl said, “I like her.”)
Call it residual Catholic guilt, sexual repression, whatever -- I know that I’m supposed to teach my daughter that sex is healthy and beautiful and something wonderful that occurs between two people who love each other very much, but I just don’t think I can do that when the truth is, the idea of a penis anywhere near her precious little ... um ... my Great Aunt Eva called it her pock-a-noose ... so the idea of a penis anywhere near her pock-a-noose makes me feel dizzy and weak and like I want to hurl. Seriously.
Yet I’m painfully aware that the time is drawing near. BFF’s son, who is even younger than the Diva, asker his mother last year where babies come from, and BFF told him a convoluted story about how the mom really loves the dad so the dad gives the mom a seed and the mom puts the seed in her belly and the baby grows. Of course he had all sorts of follow-up questions, like, where does the seed come from? Did you swallow the seed? Oh. My. God.
“Oh, no,” I told her. “Listen. Let me introduce you to the word ‘magic.’”
“You do not tell your children that babies come from magic.” She was aghast.
“Oh, yes I do,” I said. That’s also how I explain Santa Claus, rainbows, and how Papa’s bones got to heaven after he died.
I realize that the Magic Reasoning won’t -- and shouldn’t -- last forever, and as if to mock me I’m finding sexual innuendo in every children’s show I watch now. Last week the kids were watching “Max & Ruby,” a sweet insipid little cartoon about Max the bunny and his big sister, Ruby, with occasional appearances by Ruby’s friend, Louise. On this particular episode, the three little bunnies were playing doctor, and I hear Louise say in her gentle little bunny voice, “Okay, now, Max, Nurse Louise and Nurse Ruby are here to check you out! Open wide!” and I swear I had to glance over at the television to make sure they weren’t watching the Playboy channel.
Plus, the Diva is into watching sitcoms now, and I’m sure it won’t be long before iCarly or Hannah Montana or those idiot Suite Life boys have some sort of sexual escapade.
I’ll come up with something. In the meantime, if she asks me what fuck means, I’ll just tell her the truth: it’s what Mom says when she’s really really mad and she forgets to just say shit.

About the drinking, Part II

Writing about my teen/young adult partying exploits resulted in some significant inward groaning, but it was pretty effortless. Lots of people have similar stories to tell, though not everyone can talk about launching the African Queen from its floating berth at the 1984 World Fair in New Orleans.
It’s much harder to write about how drinking affects my life now.        
I suspect there are a number of people who read Part I and assume this will be a glowing endorsement of some 12-step program, a penitent account of how I came to realize the error of my ways.
        That’s not the case.
        I know a couple of people who don’t drink, never have. I know lots of people who don’t drink very much - Husband included. And I know several people who don’t drink anymore because they did realize the error of their ways and quit.
        But mostly I know people like me, who like to drink and drink often and sometimes drink too much.
        Husband and I don’t argue very much about serious stuff. I mean, we argue about the dishwasher (AGAIN with the dirty blender!) and whose turn it is to pick up dog crap in the front yard.
        But here’s one thing we’ve fought about often: drinking.
It bugs him that I enjoy my wine. It bugs him less now than it did because I’ve come up with some rules. I’m always able to drive the kids to the hospital if I’m alone with them. I limit drinking before the kids’ bedtime so I won’t be too cranky while putting them to bed. I don’t get mad at Husband when, thinking I’m acting tipsy, he makes me eat something, or passes me a glass of water and tells me to drink it.
But I guess it’s still an issue, because we fought about this very column. Statistics say that at least one of our children probably will battle a drug or alcohol problem, he points out. How can we best prepare ourselves to deal with that eventuality? And is it okay for our children to grow up thinking that alcohol is something fun and whimsical and harmless?
Now I know you’re thinking - uh, if it’s causing problems in your marriage, and you have to come up with rules about it, you’ve got a problem.
       Well, yes and no. Yes. But no. And I’m working on it, and I’ll do whatever I need to do to remedy the situation. Except, perhaps, what it takes.
       My shrink once asked me if I’d ever thought of not drinking. “No,” I said. She looked at me sort of knowingly. I’ve been looking for a new therapist.
       What is about drinking? It’s not like I even get drunk any more.

       Okay, I’ll be honest with you, after that last sentence, I shut down the computer and met a girlfriend for drinks. And, unfortunately, we met at Pusser’s and it was half-off all wine, and it seemed downright irresponsible not to just get a bottle. Getting the second bottle was definitely irresponsible, but by that time a third friend had joined us, and after all we were celebrating my friend’s first grandchild. I’m pretty sure my friend was desperate to prove that she’s not yet grandmotherly, which she isn’t (she’s six months younger than me!), and so I felt obligated to help her feel young and vibrant and still able to party.
       The next morning I woke up with a hangover. When you’re my age and at my alleged level of maturity, you don’t like to think of yourself as having been drunk, and you come up with a number of reasons for why you have a hangover. On that day, yesterday, I reminded myself that I had not eaten anything for many hours before I started sipping wine. When my friend and I realized we needed to eat, we ordered rare ahi tuna. So for dinner I had wine and raw tuna. Then I arrived home an hour and a half late -- babysitter wasn’t too happy -- ate four oatmeal raisin cookies, four Advil and a bite of cold pizza, and fell asleep in my clothes. And I broke rule #1.
       On the bright side, I did a killer workout the next morning at the gym to sweat out the toxins and my guilt and did not have any wine at all yesterday or today.
Why did I do that? Why do people drink? There’s tons of research on that, and I can only speak for myself. I consider myself a “social drinker,” but what does that really mean? That I don’t do shots any more? Which I don’t.
       Again, the real issue here is how all of this affects my children. The Diva, now 7, has definitely reached the age at which she’s aware that there’s something attractive and mysterious about “grown-up” drinks. Yesterday while I was cleaning the kitchen, the kids were playing family and I heard her tell the Tyrant, “Ok, honey, the babysitter’s here. Mommy and Daddy are going out to have cocktails.” But I’m not alone here. My BFF’s son named one of his imaginary friends Chardonnay. Though really, my friend’s more of a Pinot Grigio gal.
       I wonder sometimes what my life would be like without drinking. Better? Boring? Would I play more board games? See more movies? I do think I would lose 10 pounds pretty quickly, and that’s an attractive motivator.
       I don’t think I’ll find out anytime soon, though I haven’t ruled it out. I think my lifestyle -- kickboxing instructor and full-time mom -- keeps my drinking issues in check. I’m healthy and I love being strong of body and mind, and on the vast majority of nights I go to bed early and sober and wake up rested and happy. But I really like having a drink or two, and on the rare occasion, three or four.
       I wonder if I’ll change my habits when my children are teenagers, and I believe that if I have to, I will. Husband is hoping that the Diva, who was born in Vietnam,  has the somewhat common Asian trait of being allergic to alcohol. Sometimes, frankly, I wish I had it, too.
(Man, this was hard to write.)