Monthly Archives: December 2010

If Only The Van Had a Hot Tub

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If you’ve not ‘met’ Kristine from Wait In The Van, you’re hitting up the wrong party circuit, friends. She’s sharp like off cheese and does things previously seen only on episodes of Jackass, like dabble in Colon Blow to see if it really works. She makes me laugh all the time, so I was more than eager to wait in her van this holiday season. She threw some Saltines at me and only told me to ‘sit down and shut up’ a few times.

My husband would have come along for the ride except he was too busy sitting in a place I’d never have thought to look. And now wish I hadn’t.

Jump over. And while you’re there, check out the van. Turn up the radio and recline the seat.

http://waitinthevan.blogspot.com/2010/12/splish-splash-he-was-taking-bath.html

Born Again! SITS Day, In More Ways Than One

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Today is a big day for I’m Gonna Kill Him. If my husband makes it through this day, we’ll be destined to ride into the sunset on our matching Alpacas. I’m certainly not sharing a saddle.

Our third child – the third in less than three years – will be arriving after making me wait an additional week. As if I haven’t gestated as long as an African Elephant as it is, this one will have to be taken by force. Evidently she is the only being to enjoy living with me at the moment.

The other great news is that after another long incubation period, my day to shine in the blogosphere has finally arrived thanks to the illustrious SITS girls. For those unfamiliar with this impressive group, it’s a trio of exceptional women who make it their mission to spotlight bloggers and bring us to each other’s digital doorsteps. They’re the Godfather of Bloggers but with less pomade and cannoli and maybe more clout.

So I’ll be reveling in my SITS day while in my hospital sits bath. Leave me some love as I’ll be wearing a diaper and a gown imprinted with lambs all day.

Welcome to my blog. And, Baby Liv, welcome to the world!

SITS

I Was Felt Up But Not By Husband

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My husband and I had a date night this weekend.  Dates have devolved into solo activities in which one of us consents to watch the kids while the other takes in a movie, visits friends, or sits on a park bench inhaling a smokeless cigarette while waiting with anticipation for an alien abduction. This weekend, however, marked a change.  We went out together.  We each got dressed. We left sleeping babies at home with my mother. We got into our car.  We played something resembling adult music while we drove. He held my hand. He acted a little nervous. My heart was even racing and I felt some nausea, like I did before our first date when I realized I was about to meet a man from the Internet who could be related to John Wayne Gacy or, worse, dress like Dog The Bounty Hunter. I hate to stoop to the tawdry, but by the end of the date, my unmentionables lay in a pile and my knees were up by my ears.  In a public place, no less.

No, we were not in a Denny’s parking lot. G wasn’t hungry for once.

We were in the hospital. We checked in because I was having contractions.  Given my history of birthing babies in the time it takes to rapidly flip through the latest People magazine while in the checkout line at grocery store, I thought it best to hustle in to the hospital.  At 2:00 in the morning, G and I left our house, and our magical date night was underway.

In reality, had we been meeting for that first amorous outing, we probably would have looked each other up and down, shook hands, and with a shrug said, “Well, we tried.” What G possessed in vitality and vigor when it came to handling the first birth has all been lost by the third. He was attentive and alert, even dressed in a work-casual collared shirt with khakis, for the birth of Dom a few years ago. With exception to a detour to McDonalds so that he could fuel his body with 14 Egg McMuffins while I pushed out a nine pounder with nothing in the gas tank but the Pad Thai I’d eaten 16 hours prior, he was rooted by my side.

When I awoke him this time, he was groggy and still held by the grip of NyQuil, a drug I’d declared black market and raided the house of once I passed my due date. He’d broken into his stash hidden behind the toilet evidently. After punching him in the face, he dragged himself out of bed and threw on a pair of dirty jeans and a Hooters shirt procured on a trip to Ft. Lauderdale from four decades past.

Approximately seven minutes after we arrived to the Labor & Delivery room, G had settled into a Barca lounger with his legs splayed and mouth agape.  He was only missing a Coors Light and the clicker.  As I suffered the indignity of urinating into Dixie cups, wearing a gown even Giselle couldn’t remain covered in, and answering form questions as to whether I’d ever contemplated having unprotected sex with anyone from the continent of Africa in the last 10 years, G slumbered peacefully. He awoke when I jabbed him in the ribs to co-sign some documents. While he may have looked like an aged fraternity boy after a bender, his attorney training snapped to attention when handed a contract and pen. “Did you read this thoroughly before signing? Red flags?”  Trusting he was still functioning largely on Auto Pilot, I said, “Looked fine. Standard stuff. The baby will be tagged on her ear and sent to live in a leper colony in Waco while the government studies the effects of radiation exposure.” He signed wearily, “Okay, that’s fine.”

As a monitor kept record of the heart beat and contraction movement, G alternated between snoring and grumbling about a ‘spouse bed’ he longed for each Delivery room to be equipped with. In his altered state, he must have lost track of the fact we were in the hospital entirely because he began using birthing apparatus as sleep aids, like he was a subject in some kind of sleep research lab. His legs were perched on a birthing ball; His head laid upon the plastic pillows used to prop up a woman’s hindquarters. Considering I won’t even try on a bathing suit that appears to have a hygiene strip that’s been tampered with, I was bothered by his intimacy with foreign amniotic residue but thought better of waking him.

Periodically he would startle awake and yell out, “She needs an epidural!” Three pregnancies have taught him that I will tolerate any change in birthing directive so long as my vagina is as comatose as Michael Jackson after a Propofol injection. Now that we live in a small town where natural births are favored as opposed to the New York Metro where you can buy an epidural from a Rite Aid drive-thru, I’ve kept him awake many nights enumerating instructions for raising the kids alone after I perish in a non-epidural-aided delivery.

We were told that we could go home after a couple of hours of non-productive contractions. I signed release paperwork and pondered the advice of my brother, who is a Navy Seal but fancies himself a Midwife, to jump off my kitchen table. As we were collecting our belongings, the nurse said encouragingly, “There are some at-home remedies you could try.  Some couples swear by sex.”

I looked at my date clad in his Hooters shirt and then at my swollen midsection. What do you think this is, Lady? Spring Break ’98?  We drove silently. And while I let him come upstairs, there was definitely no action.

One Thing Never To Do in Bed

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Shit the bed. If you’re a mother, you just sprang to your feet, raced up two flights of stairs shirtless, cursing a blue streak and praying you remembered to put the waterproof mattress pad on the toddler’s bed.

Breathe easy. This is not the kind of shit the bed I reference. I’m talking of the crass phrase meant to convey a complete failure of a plan or function. For the wordsmiths, the origin of the phrase is speculative, but I’m nearly positive it’s not Latin. I hear this expression often because I have a brother in the Navy who routinely has reason to say things like, “I’m coming home because Mission Clubfoot Hawk Wing shit the bed.”

The expression bothers me profoundly. Every time I hear it, my body submits to an involuntary shudder. It’s rooted in my general disdain for bodily functions dedicated to filtering and removing waste. I don’t like shit. Never have. From the time I was a wee one, I developed a neurosis that left me unwilling to use a public toilet for that purpose. I became expert in forging my mother’s signature so that I could escape the confines of school for the privacy of my own loo at home. I chose my college dormitory based on schematics I may or may not have traded sexual favors to an admissions officer for. I needed certainty the photos of co-eds smiling and laughing in their ‘suite with adjoining bathroom’ were not merely staged for the recruitment pamphlets only to bait and switch a nervous freshman upon her matriculation with a series of stalls with faulty door locks and poor ventilation. When I lived in Australia, I nearly revoked my own student visa when I saw the bathrooms were not only shared but coed. I would have sooner attempted to log roll a salt water crocodile than share the bathroom with a man battling his own log. I thought I’d overcome my aversion after a summer internship with a Gastroenterologist.  Every time I saw a scope snaked up a rectum, though, I attempted to siphon the patient’s dose of amnesiacs into my own circulatory system.

When I became pregnant for the first time a few years ago, I was forced to loosen my grip on the usage of my nether regions. Once you’ve had the singular experience of watching a doctor slip a condom on an ultrasound probe, you’ve been damaged in a way that not even Richard Simmons could undo. By the end of my term, I was turning up to the OB like Lindsay Lohan to the club – ill-fitting attire, no underwear, and a glaze over my eyes. Despite my mother’s urgent pleas to both put on some pants and glance at a few paragraphs of a pregnancy book, I found both acts so tedious that I took to slipping an US Weekly inside the cover of my What To Expect and occasionally would deign to wear my husband’s boxer briefs. Reading that manual was unnecessary as I learned that people love to be apprised of your pregnancy milestones in terms of simple produce. They want to hear the baby is the size of a mandarin this week.  This pleased me as I could offer a hearty thumbs up and shout, “A pomegranate!…An avocado!…This week, it’s a Panamanian Melon!” while avoiding any discourse about morning sickness or the nursery I was supposed to be transforming.

The Internet proved rife with citrus analogies, as well as other more interesting factoids, like ‘babies are born without kneecaps.’ So while I remained clueless to any Pottery Barn Baby trending colors and pushing techniques, I knew that babies were ‘stronger than oxen pound for pound.’  I loved this useless knowledge and I dug deeper for more.

Then I read that 70% of women have a bowel movement when delivering their baby.  They shit the bed.  Or the delivery table.  Either way, my plans to have this baby emerge as shiny and polished as a post-facial Kardashian totally shit the bed.

Despite disingenuous attempts to assuage my reeling mind with assurances that this also means 70% of the most elegant women in history, like Princess Diana, Grace Kelly, and Bristol Palin, have pooped while having a baby, I knew I’d wandered above my pay grade. I needed a medical miracle. I needed a surrogate to transplant this baby within immediately. I thought about how to present this to my doctor. He could become an Obstetrical God, deified for reaching new surgical heights.  We would pose for international medical journal covers behind the surrogate who just pushed out my baby along with her own feces. If denied on grounds it was too dangerous or completely illogical, I’d seek out the medical team of Grey’s Anatomy since they’re always willing to take on hair-brained operations no insurance company would sanction. Or I’d ask for a full bowel removal right before delivery. I’d bury it in the yard where a meadow of daisies and irises would blossom each spring. It would be lovely.

When the delivery day finally came, I was in a full-on panic. I was in the Bargaining stage of Elisabeth Kubler-Ross’ Stages of Grief.  I’ll trade the epidural for a colostomy bag. I’ll give you my husband – he’s very fertile! – if you put me into a medically-induced coma first.  G knew I was more anxious about pooping on the table than dying on the table. Rather than tell me I’d be among that magical 30% who silenced their bowels, he goaded me constantly.  “They’ll put a bucket under you, like the carriage horses at Central Park.  You won’t even know you’re doing it even though everyone is staring at that bucket.”  He would aim at my Achilles’ Heel, which was that my OB was a very refined and dapper man who happened to be the Chief of Obstetrical Surgery. His name was Theodore, for Christ’s sake.  With exception to one obese chipmunk, men named Theodore were to be respected, not shit upon. “Don’t worry, he was nearing the end of his career anyway, so you won’t feel too bad when your crap drives him to retire.”

Now I’m on the eve of my delivery date for Baby #3. I can say, with total frankness, that I have no idea if I shit on my medical handlers or on my baby’s head the first two times.  No one told me.  I never saw the bucket.  And because G only had the balls to glance at the crowning baby for .4 seconds during the first birth, he posessees no more knowledge on the matter than I do.  He loves to tell me that I did, and that everyone needed to board an Ark to spare themselves from drowning.  Don’t Ask Don’t Tell dominates the delivery room the way it does the communal showers in the barracks.

Dr. Theodore Cohen did retire after my first. I remain hopeful that it was because his plan to work until he died of advancing age in his sleep shit the bed.  And not because I did.

(If you did, don’t feel badly.  That makes you my hero since you lived through it without needing a lobotomy.)

Sex, Lies, and Medical Tape

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LoveSex. These words are emblazoned vertically on the leg of sweatpants worn by the woman beside me on the elliptical machine. She’s probably had better luck securing free personal training than I’ve had with my own exercise pants, which read LoveCarbohydrates across the ass. I decide to have a pair made up that read SexCroissants since I’d get down and dirty with a flaky French pastry any time. More irritating than the advertisement of her love for sex is her evident love for cardio. While her legs complete revolutions with the speed of Wile E. Coyote pursuing the Road Runner, my own pace is akin to Driving Miss Daisy. Quite literally, I need a Southern man in a chauffeur cap to manually rotate my legs while I turn pages in my book and sip sweet tea.

I turn away as the blur of her legs gives me motion sickness. My gaze falls to the woman in front of me, on a rowing machine, whose plodding pace provides the Dramamine effect I need. I glance at my machine’s clock. 2 minutes. I return my eyes to the rower who happens to have exactly 30 visible tattoos.  I imagine there are more beneath the cotton-poly blend unitard, but my nausea returns. I determine to study each tattoo for 1 minute to fulfill my parole upon this machine. While entranced by an Ancient Chinese character that she likely believes to say ‘Determination’ when it actually is the sinograph for ‘Hungry Dragon for Pork Flavored Top Ramen’, I am interrupted.  Yes, Gladys, 26 minutes left. Put your name on the clipboard. Yes, I’ll wipe down the handlebars. I know I’m sweating like John Candy at an Easter buffet.

By the time I reach the rower’s impressive harem of multi-colored serpents, Gladys stands behind me, cane leaning against the machine and sweatbands in place on her pulse points.  I disembark the machine and make my way to the free weights.  Hi Milt. Nope, no baby yet. I do remember you were a physician in the 40s. I think these mats were in use in the 40s, too, so I hope you don’t have to deliver a baby here. I halfheartedly raise my dumbbells while simultaneously reading about the Traitor of Trader Joes in the Economist. I must break my addiction to the Trader Mings line. I collapse upon the mat in between Harold and Edith, both working themselves toward a partial stroke with their elastic bands. Our bodies heaped upon the vinyl, we huff and puff and exchange a united look. A look that imparts one common philosophy: Why the hell are we here?

But that united mind is precisely why I am there. To be around others like me. Those who have no business exercising.  People who stare at a running track like it’s the Gobi Desert. Folks who need a spotter not for the bench press but to rescue them from an unwisely attempted toe touch. These are my gym compatriots – granted their definition of Depression means standing in line for a bread ration while mine means waiting on hold for a Zoloft script – and we see each other three times a week.  Unless one of us dies from overexertion in water aerobics.

G doesn’t understand why I bother with the gym given I can barely walk a flight of stairs without the feeling I will drop this baby like it’s hot. It’s because I want to look like Eva Mendez. He says that’s going to to take more than some side bends. Perhaps Milt will give me a post-baby body overhaul. He was a very prominent surgeon during Prohibition, you know. I bet he made lumpy white girls Latina all the time. I go because there’s no taboo on gray hair, no shortage of Icy Hot cream, and child care is free. Free child care. I drop the kids off and start boring an escape hole through the wall like the place is goddamn Shawshank. Any occasion my children can be cared for at no cost while I stretch on a mat discussing why Richard Burton was really no good for Elizabeth Taylor with a limber dame named Pearl is worth some discomfort.

The day G offers to come with to the gym throws a dumbbell in my routine. Instead of a Tshirt promoting retirement hot spots like Boca! and Palm Springs!, he wears legitimate sporting attire, made of materials like Goretex and fabrics that wick, which has nothing to do with candles incidentally. He boards the cardio machine next to me and turns his dials to Annapurna levels. I scan the floor for Phyllis in case we require a few puffs of her oxygen tank. As I acclimate to my negative acceleration rate, G pokes me in the ribs and points strongly at one of the overhead monitors.  Suze Orman. Today’s subject is financial advice for the chronically in debt.  He mouths ‘watch this.’  I turn my volume louder and gesture toward my own monitor and pantomime ‘Also financial.’  Court TV. I’m learning about the legal system and how it impacts those who borrow cars without asking permission and meet bankrupt lovers on Bootycall.com.

He dares to the distant end of the weight shelf that my kind never visits. He asks me to spot him while he lifts an anvil. I wave and tell him I can see him just fine. He spies me on an adductor machine and attempts to drop another weight plate on the stack. I tell him I will drop my uterus on his Nikes. After what seems an interminable workout, I inquire if he’s ready to leave. He is still in his ‘core routine’ and will need to do a ‘cool down’. My cool down happens over cups of decaf and collective blood pressure assessments before the assisted living bus arrives.  I leave him to collect the kids. We wait in the lobby. We wait so long that Harold, one of the young at heart, dies from aging complications. G emerges with wet hair.  You took a shower here? We live a mile away. Did you wear disposable flip flops? Do you have hyper fast actin’ Tinactin?  Kids, keep Dad’s hooves out of your mouth since they are fungal.

You don’t want to go to Dunkin Donuts?  That’s the whole point of going to the gym. Lard is repelled from your body if you eat within 20 minutes of exercising.  Everyone knows this.  At least Sal and Esther do.

I’m unconvinced the couple that exercises together stays together. This is why, I presume, all of my gym friends are widows or widowers and wear nylon pants that read LoveLipitor.

(Do you work out as a couple or is exercise best done in a darkened cellar?)

Satellites are Run By Martians Who Know Everything

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Satellites. I don’t really get ‘em; I just know they’re up there.  They’re suspended in orbit, beaming essential information like directional coordinates, international intelligence, and Howard Stern’s advice for treating genital warts. When it was time for my mother to join the modern world through the purchase of her first cellular phone, my brother and I went to the Verizon store with her to guide her through the process. As she pored over coverage maps, straining to decipher ‘safe’ zones, the salesman attempted to clarify the way minutes are tabulated. “You see,” he began in a voice mothers use for mentally unstable toddlers, “You’re in Arizona. You can call anyone in Arizona, Utah, New Mexico, and Colorado at no cost. See, they’re colored in y-ell-ow. The rest of these States – the blue ones – are out of your plan so you have a limited amount of minutes.”  As my brother and I considered which Native American reservations in the Four Corners she could call with abandon, Mom thought she’d stumbled upon the loophole that would bring the wireless giants to their knees. “Well,” she started carefully, “My husband travels a lot so he might be in Las Vegas in the morning, where I would call him, but then have a layover in Topeka before landing in Cleveland in the evening, where I might need to call him again. So my point is, sir,” and she really emphasized the ‘Sir’ because this was the part where her inner Erin Brockovich was about to cripple international telecom, “How do you know where he is when I’m calling him?”  My brother, who’d had enough despite his usual boundless patience for my mother, shouted, “Jesus, Ma, it’s called satellites!”

Thus satellites began to take over daily existence. My husband and I dropped our land line in favor of cell phones. We bought Sirius Radio since I decided access to the Greatest Hits of Marky Mark while never hearing another commercial for disposable catheters was well worth the investment. The same brother bought us a GPS system. We spent an inordinate amount of time deciding upon the provenance of our digitized tour guide. G wanted Mr. T’s voice, which I nixed on the grounds I did not want to be called a ‘fool’ every time I turned the wrong way. I favored the Australian bloke, but it became obvious that G needed accompanying subtitles scrolling along the windshield. We both agreed the Indian woman was subliminally compelling us to pick up Chicken Vindaloo.  We finally agreed on the British Chippy based on her non-judgmental declaration of ‘Recalculating’ whenever a deviation from course was made. Like any relationship based on one person giving while the other takes, cracks started to form in the shiny veneer.  G would question Miss Brit but eventually cave when she persisted. I would defend her staunchly since she enabled me to paint my toenails or organize the middle consul, but I knew it was only a matter of time before one of us was going to be dumped in the river that can be found 1.4 miles ahead, turn left, destination on the right.  He stopped using her in time, favoring a hack system of staring at the flow of water, or the angle of the sun against a stick, or forcing me out of the car to ask a gas station attendant I suspected had a collection of Mason jars containing human organs behind the counter.

Our driving differences came up recently whilst out to procure some last minute baby items from a Target of a far away land. We don’t live in suburbia where Target is as ubiquitous as pervy neighbors named ‘Stan.’ When we need to purchase something beyond ‘Socks For the Whole Family’ or a jar of Smoked Turkey Gravy, we must load into the car and drive to the ‘big city’. G was due to catch a flight out of the major airport so he agreed to ferry the family the distance. I settled in to the passenger seat where I could fake sleep through discussions of joint account spending and reasons I’ll never have my own bathroom.

I lifted a falsely closed eyelid when we abruptly stopped on the highway. I’m accustomed to frequent stops when G drives. His personal bumper sticker would read, “I break for Boston Market and any establishment to sell Mountain Dew.” This time we were stopped in a line of traffic as far as the eye could see. 0 MPH. Beads of sweat started to form on his brow as he anticipated missing his flight between the traffic jam and the Continental Cavity Check coming from TSA. I sensed he was about to go off-road.

“Just wait a little longer,” I said reassuringly, “it’ll be cleared by the time you figure out an alternate route.”

So we waited till our respective ropes began to fray, his borne of a need for inertia and mine due to a lack of patience for traffic unless there is carnage I can witness. G gets frustrated at the stand-still that occurs from traffic, compelling him to seek routes that could add hundreds of miles and years to our trip. I become irrationally annoyed at being suspended by forces I cannot see. I just want to know what we’re dealing with – is it roadkill, an overturned bus of kindergarteners, or an impromptu U2 concert?  And if we’ve waited long enough, the only impediment I want to see when we finally round that bend are those mechanized spiders from War of The Worlds.  Nothing less than the End of Days will satisfy me. If I see those deadly spiders spewing fucking lasers, decimating every human in their path, I’d say, “Alright, fair enough. We should have listened to the news.”

Having reached his boiling point, G pulled our car into the shoulder lane and proceeded toward the turn-off. AC/DC is the only entity capable of describing the Highway To Hell ahead. The single lane, pockmarked with holes, wound through hinterland that left me praying, “Please don’t let us be stranded here because AAA will tell us to eat some trail mix and start burning the tires for warmth.” As I prepared my road flares while muttering that I’d be more comfortable in the back of a Hot Wheels, G took turns faster and faster. He failed to realize that a 39 week pregnant gut feels as though it has G-forces pressing upon it with every dip and dive. Traveling with me is like transporting an Orca whale from the ocean to the aquarium. I writhe around, suspended in my lifting device, covered in damp cheesecloth, and I snap at my handlers after the effects of my tranquilizer dart wears off. I need salt water rubbed into my pores and blowhole every 90 seconds while someone dangles fish heads in front of me.

By the time we’d righted ourselves and intercepted the highway ahead of the blockage, I’d asked Kirk Cameron for the Way of The Master a dozen times, but neither God nor Mike Seaver could cure the ache that had taken over my pelvis. We left G – and my uterus – at the passenger drop-off sidewalk as I climbed, stiffly, into the driver’s seat. “Now,” I sighed and said aloud, “How do we get to Target?”  D looked up and chirped, “The car knows, Mama.”  I looked at my two year old as I dug for the GPS.  While my husband and mother may not trust the work of the satellite, my pants-peeing child had the right instinct. The car knows. I followed his command and switched on the British Chippy. Because my bumper sticker says, ‘My toddler is smarter than my husband.’

(Directionally challenged?  Would you die without GPS?)

Time Travel Ain’t For The Weak of Lung

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I went on a voyage this week. An international trek, no less! I complain about road trips with my family and lament the loss of carefree and exotic jaunts in my life, but that’s because I’ve been limiting my travel paradigm to that which happens aboard planes or upon highways. A few nights ago, on the eve of my birthday, I determined to harness all the brain power experts say we haven’t tapped to suspend time and halt aging. I was hoping to block the formation of a few crow’s feet; I didn’t want to convert to Benjamin Button. I’ve got enough babies in my life. If successful, I’d stop the clock on my aging cells; If not, I’d have mustered enough telekinetic energy to at least bend a spoon or levitate a plate, either one gangbusters at a cocktail party.

But so much more happened. I wandered through a wrinkle in time. I warped space-time as we know it. Don’t ask me to explain the mechanics; I’m not Stephen Hawking even if I mumble a lot and drool on my shirt. In the space of moments, I took a trip back through the ages. I passed decades. I reversed through Centennials.  From my window seat in my time capsule, I thought I spied the Grand Canyon, but I realized it was just an era – or was that an epoch? – sliding silently beneath my hurling rocket. I asked the flight attendant for pretzels, but she informed me they have yet to be developed.  How about pheasant and a gill of whiskey? Before I could dig in to my grouse, we’d arrived.

London. The Industrial Revolution. The Victorian Era.

Where are my sweatpants? My recent ensembles have teetered on matronly, but when did I start wearing a bun and petticoats? “Excuse me, sir?” I asked a passing gentleman who resembled the mentally unstable who work at Colonial Williamsburg, “Do you have the time?” He pulled out a gold pocket watch. Christ, these historical theme park employees and their authentic props are irritating. He hurried down the lamp-lit street as a shriveled toadstool of a woman cackled in my ear, “You’d best be on your way, Love. There’s work to be done.” With that I was teleported to the inside of an 1800s textile factory. I choked on the black smoke hanging thick in the air as I plucked lace blouses off the line. The soot, a byproduct of the steam and coal burning machinery, invaded my nostrils and my eyes. I pleaded for a window to be opened, but there was no way to ventilate the room and the overseer kept threatening to keep my two pence if I didn’t stop my belly-aching. I’m no math whiz, but I knew that even despite the power of British currency that Taco Bell pays better. My head spun, my eyes teared, and I realized both that I’d not been flown in for Kate and Prince William’s royal wedding and that Thomas Kinkade was full of shit. I fell into a heap upon the rodent feces-covered floor…

Allow me to be your guide in making this time-travel itinerary your own. It begins with allowing your husband control of all household utilities. Where you would have opted into a home heating contract that includes seasonal cleaning of your prehistoric furnace, he foregoes such luxury. Soon you notice small deposits of soot collecting around vents, which you ask him to rectify urgently since he is the keeper of utilities. He fails to do so before going out of town. The next stop on this guided tour is to wake in the frigid night to find your house has become one of those igloo hotel attractions French Canadians love to visit. Spend the next 8 hours on the phone with a man named ‘Larry’, endeavoring to make him understand that even Palins can’t endure such temperatures without hollowing out a moose carcass to take shelter within. As you eye the family dog and wonder if Google can walk you through the steps of pelt making, a service man arrives to fix the furnace. He informs you the system was overthrown by a coup of oil burning byproduct. What he does not tell you is that clearing the blockage will throw a plume of soot over your home to rival the ash from Mount St. Helen’s eruption.

After the greasy candleblack settles, you will spend the next 2 days vacuuming, scrubbing, and laundering every surface and textile in your home. Dig into your meat pie, folks, because your whirlwind trip to London circa the Industrial Revolution has begun!  The soot will instantly transform your children into Dickens characters, faces smeared with grease, holding up their bowls of ash-sprinkled gruel, “May have I some more, Miss?” No longer will you need to threaten coal in their Christmas stockings because their socks hung by the chimney with care are already filled with it. The Upper Respiratory Infection your family was suffering has been upgraded to more ominous maladies of a Chimney Sweep from the 1800s. Who worries about a little post-nasal drip when you’ve got Coal Miner’s Lung?

Upon my return from the Victorian streets of London Town, I became a more modern literary character. The never-ending billowing of soot had left me delusional, and I became the dark matron tortured by her desire for purity and cleanliness in every V.C. Andrews novel. As my kids screamed in protest, I plunged them into bleach water and vinegar baths so I could rid them of their demons.

Because my husband has been out of town – and not at a filthy textile factory – he has only heard our tales of tribulation through the puffs of our family-pack of rainbow colored nebulizers. After ceaseless wheezing from my end of the line, he asked me to focus on the positive aspects of carbon dioxide toxicity. In the spirit of the holidays, we will take the high road and accept our role as the world’s alpha group in a long-term study of the positive effects of soot. Step aside, Cindy Crawford, those French melons you claim keep your face more youthful than that of my 2 year old are about to be outdone by a cheap smear available domestically. Forget ethanol, we haven’t even needed a battery in a TV remote since our house became its own renewable energy source. We’re really saving on groceries as no one has required a meal in days since soot empties slowly from the stomach. Lastly, if any of my kids show football aspirations, I already know how they’ll look in eye black and a Raiders jersey. Provided the black on the windows doesn’t completely obscure the sun, leaving us with Vitamin D deficiency, we are developing our own adaptation of A Christmas Carol to bring to the American masses. Ebenezer Scrooge and Bob Cratchit will be portrayed by my husband and daughter while I spice up the chorus with my best Dick Van Dyke rendition of ‘Chim Chim Fuck-meee!’  Our son will play the role of Tiny Mutant Tim. With 3 arms and a nasty case of rickets.

God Bless Us, Every One!