Tag Archives: family

They’re Trying To Disown Me

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I once attended an auction while my husband, G, was out of town. I’d never been to an auction and had no idea what to expect. I knew they were the playgrounds of the upwardly mobile and that if I wanted to fit in, I had better look the part. By the time the event rolled around, I was in a full-on body sweat induced by the utter void of pastels and mother-of-pearl accessories in my closet. The closest thing I had to a WASP-y ensemble was a bottle of Lithium and that was all but emptied upon checking my online bank account before rushing out the door. I felt calmer once I was there and camouflaged against a line of people appraising the items on display for bidding. I drew comfort in chortling and saying things like, “Don’t you find chicken such a pedestrian choice?” After an hour of mingling with the other guests and jotting down an offer underneath an item with a determined casual air, I was ready to go home, feeling confident I had handled my first auction with poise.

Then it was announced that the auction was beginning.

Just as G had once learned at a ritzy wedding reception that he needn’t empty the whole of the raw bar into his mouth because a four-course meal was still to come, I discovered that a silent auction is merely the appetizer to the main event. And I couldn’t afford to eat.

I spent the next two hours stress-chewing my cuticles and tearing parsley into pieces while contemplating an escape route that involved setting fire to a section of the building. I called G once I was home to report my winnings from the silent part of the auction. A sailboat cruise for $40. He questioned how I could have procured a two-hour boat ride for only forty dollars. He wasn’t impressed when I told him that my winning strategy involved a placing an hors d’oeuvres plate on top of the entry paper.

He concluded a dogmatic speech about the objective of fundraisers and the importance of educational materials for young minds tersely, “You can’t represent our family at these sort of functions anymore.”

So I let him claim his rightful seat, stoically representing our clan when it came to writing donation checks and telling the Girl Scouts we’ve had enough of their trans-fats. I was permitted only to sully our reputation in a restricted capacity, mostly by tipping poorly and delaying the grocery line while I finish articles about botched liposuction.

Thus I couldn’t have been more shocked when G named me our family’s official representative to compete in a 5K race.  The last race I had attended was a fun run for children that our son wanted to partake in. When we arrived to the starting line of that event, a friend called out, “We’re running, not yachting!” I was wearing boat shoes and white jeans because it had failed to occur to me that one doesn’t just turn a three-year old loose on the trail and await their crossing at the finish line. I traversed the next mile in a hobble, being discourteously passed by toddlers in soggy diapers.

Still I was going to attend this 5K, and, by God, I was going to win it for my family. After all, I had been carbo-loading 32 years for this day.

As I pulled my car into the parking spot, I saw two men jogging toward me, breathless.

“Did I miss the race?” I called to them.

“No, no. We just ran the course to warm up for it,” one of the runners called back.

Fuck you, I muttered, which must have sounded like ‘good luck to you’ because they gestured with one of those waves that are meant to be uplifting between exercisers. It was becoming abundantly clear I wasn’t going to be winning any Sportsmanship trophies – or first place ones, for that matter – this day.

I sidled up to the registration table where a refined older gentleman was posted to gather race fees and information in exchange for an official number to pin to my Lycra. I noticed the other registrants entering into their preparatory modes, hopping and stretching hamstrings. I did a few cursory swivels of my trunk, straining to look athletic and imposing as if I had just climbed Annapurna with no oxygen and with a catheter bag to catch my urine tied to my leg. I was transferring into my visualization phase, in which I imagined myself crossing the finish line and leaping into a vat of cream cheese with a bagel as my inner tube, when the man at registration curtly informed me I was five dollars short in paying my race fee.

I began to explain that I had only brought twenty dollars because that’s what I had been told to bring and that walking back to my car would likely expend any energy I have stored because all I had eaten for breakfast was a spoonful of Gorgonzola and some chocolate sauce.  I was attracting an audience curious to see who was defrauding a charity. A gracious onlooker, moved by pity, paid my balance and escorted me to the starting line. I took my place toward the back of the crowd, acknowledging myself to be more of a slow gazelle that will only exert real energy once a tiger has ripped away part of my haunch. Plus, I’d forgotten to blood dope as I had meant to.

The whistle blew and the racers lurched forward as if there were piles of money and injured babies to be found along the trails. I stopped participating exactly 90 seconds later, opting instead to walk with a friend who had her toddlers with her. As we passed the halfway mark, the two men who had warmed up for the 5K by already running a 5K were on their return leg, each one’s chest heaving as he strained to overtake the other.  I caught the eye of one and shrugged my shoulders and gestured to the kids at my heels as if to say, “Kids! Just won’t let me win this race!”

As we descended the steep grade that would usher us toward the finish line, far behind the others who had dashed up an unforgiving hill, I realized that I was going to have a very unimpressive race story to relay to G and the kids. When my foot hovered over the ending line, where the last volunteer had been abandoned to stand in the cold to wait out my safe return, he said dryly, “Anyone behind you?” I turned and looked up the road by which I had just come. It mocked me by its barrenness.

While I warmed up with a hot chocolate, the caloric content far in excess of what I had burned, I contemplated how to convince G that I had finished the race in an earnest show of competition. A friend tugged my arm, “You just won the best prize in the auction! They called your name!”

Armed with my free paddleboating session and t-shirt, it occurred to me that I could weave a believable yarn about finishing in the top of the heap. My family didn’t need to know that I had come by my loot by a random drawing of my name. Yes, I could tell them that I had won it, honorably and nobly, nobody the wiser. It’s their fault for decreeing me the envoy of cardiovascular activity when I only possess a dexterity at receiving paper cuts and eating off other peoples’ plates.

I entered the house, forcing a slight limp and making my breathing ragged to enhance the authenticity of the fraudulent tale about to escape my lips, and G came to meet me in the hallway.

“They posted the times online already. You really came in last?”

 

—

 

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!

In the Market for a Birthday Monkey

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I saw my name in bright lights early. I had hit the big time by the time I was a pre-teen.  While some child stars had to wear Vaseline on their teeth and skin-tight flammables before a leering Ed McMahon, my fame came easily and without Aqua Net. It also came annually. Every day, as the family Suburban made the voyage to school, we passed the Dairy Queen marquee.  One day a year – November 30th – that luminescent billboard boasted my name with a birthday message. Sure, there were years they’d run short on letters, resulting in “Hpy Bdy Ern”, but I was temporarily famous nonetheless. Not everyone in our Ozarks town had a mother who ate enough Blizzards to earn that kind of clout with the Dairy Queen store manager. Combine the exhilaration that comes with seeing your name on a board usually reserved for advertising $2.99 Combo Meals with my mother’s penchant for festooning my door with toilet paper and streamers, I was one step short of wearing a tiara and a sash to homeroom. When I was in high school, it was en vogue to have balloon arrangements from your friends and family delivered to the Principal’s office. If one were really lucky, the Mylar assortments would be delivered not all at once, but staggered throughout the day, so that all of your classmates could witness the frequency with which you were paged to pick up your packages. I’d feign embarrassment and false humility with eye rolls to all staring at the helium rainbow hovering overhead while really hoping I’d qualify as a float in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.

Birthdays changed once I’d left my mother’s house and forfeited the benefits of Blizzard addiction. My college friends attempted to replicate the grandeur, but not even the local Chinese Buffet infamous for Hepatitis breakouts and ludicrous menu misspellings would co-op their sign with my birthday message.

Once marriage and my own family arrived, my birthday devolved to a non-occasion.  The first birthday post-children culminated in my husband encouraging me to run out to pick up a cupcake while he watched the baby. I read once that Katie Holmes had cupcakes delivered to her movie set on her birthday, but I bet that was after Tom Cruise had all the vanilla beans in Madagascar sent to the most renowned pastry chef in Paris who personally baked those cupcakes and walked them (transatlantically) to the birthday girl. I had hoped that would be the dark blip on my birthday radar, but the following year was even worse. G’s dog had gone through a particularly heavy shed during the summer, leaving me grumbling about living with Cousin Itt and owning a vacuum with a motor meant for a blowdryer when we needed one with the horsepower of a Boeing 747. G’s interpretation of these rants was that I would really appreciate a more robust vacuum…for my birthday. Alas, for my 30th birthday, he bought me a Dyson.

A goddamn Dyson vacuum. Had he not returned it within moments of unsheathing it, I would have hung myself with that patented Air Multiplier technology.

You pragmatic types to claim you would love to receive a cleaning implement for your birthday, think twice. Christmas, or the Lunar New Year, or Victory over Japan Day are all suitable holidays for these gifts, but your birthday is not. After enduring two back-to-back pregnancies while still working, I was expecting nothing less than a cruise, the Hope Diamond, a singing telegram from Madonna, or the dedication of a newly discovered constellation in the solar system.

This year is shaping up a little like Vacuumgate. My birthday is today and I would normally have something to look forward to – at the very least a major appliance to return – but G is out of town. An important business trip has whisked him away to a function that sounds a lot like a high school Model UN trip. The circle of dear girlfriends I’ve left behind since moving to Maine was always accountable for taking me out to a celebratory dinner no matter what stood in our way. I was so delusional with fever one year that I started a fire by placing my menu on the tabletop candle, but not even arson was going to keep me from breaking birthday bread with my friends. The distance of the Northeastern Seaboard will, however.

In lieu of dinner, I had planned to take advantage of the 60 minute foot massage and pedicure at a local spa one of my closest friends had sent. My feet have not been attended to since an August pedicure, which left the Vietnamese woman sloughing and puffing in dire need of trail mix and a Gatorade. I’ve been wondering if OPI made a nail color to match the purple hue of my daughter’s latest black and blue when G burst my birthday balloon. “Isn’t a foot massage going to put you into labor? That’s what that pregnancy book said. You should hold off on that with me out of town this week.” See, G read about 4.5 pages of a pregnancy book to prepare for the birth of our first child, and from it he walked away with two nuggets. The first is that he should never, ever, under any circumstances offer me a foot massage. The second is that some women experience an enhanced libido during pregnancy. Both assertions are complete bullshit, but I have learned through three pregnancies now that I’m not going to have my sore and aching feet rubbed. He’s learned that he’s not going to have something of his rubbed.

Without a husband, or my mother, or those friends, and with heels that have fissures the size of the San Andreas Fault, this year feels more like a Tuesday than a birthday.  If you ask my kids to name the person of honor, they’ll respond jubilantly with ‘Dora!’ or ‘Santa!’  To capitalize on this, by the end of the day I may be wearing a red velvet hat or a backpack with a monkey on my shoulder. Regardless, we will be visiting a Dairy Queen after dinner where I will point to the marquee and tell them about the time their Mama was a birthday queen and local celebrity.  Even if it was just for a day.

(Tell me about your birthdays – good or bad).