Tag Archives: mom blog

Nothing Really Happens

Posted on by

If you’ve been reading along of late, you already know that I’ve been trying to live a bit louder. I have been experimenting with some new things in an effort to outgrow my personal borders. Mostly I’m concerned with being a person who doesn’t always say, “I won’t,” in favor of being someone who can say, “I have.” Even if they become my lasts, I am determined to set some firsts.

So running out of gas on the highway fit nicely into my new paradigm.

No car I have ever driven has run out of gas before. I have run out of windshield wiper fluid. I’ve run out of good CDs. I’ve even run out of gas money, but that was easily enough worked around by actually getting a summer job instead of just talking about getting one. To run out of gas while driving was a totally new experience, and one I had wondered about for much of my behind-the-wheel life.

I have a storied reputation of awaiting the illuminated gas tank symbol before bothering to fill the tank. Even when its glow attracts my eye, my tendency is to believe that I still have a few hundred miles before I need to pull into the station. When the needle droops glumly to the Empty line, I raise my eyebrow at it and think, “You were made by an American car manufacturer who surely accounted for my preference to remain seated and my life outlook that gas is an inalienable right,” before returning my gaze to the road ahead while trying to remember to hold my speed at the rumored optimal gas-metabolizing rate of somewhere between 20 mph and 70 mph. I can never remember exactly.

I recall very nearly running out of gas while riding with my father once. We were traveling the lonely expanse of highway that connects Phoenix to its desert cousin, Tucson. We had made the trip to see Eric Clapton perform, one last homage to father-daughter activities before I would leave the state for college. My dad, of the same gas tank-challenging ilk as I, was confident his old Land Cruiser would reach home on the well of petrol we had. His bravado began to erode as the exit we needed loomed an uncomfortable distance ahead. Like an airplane pilot preparing for a hairy landing, he began to systematically switch off all the dials, stripping our road-bound fuselage down to the essentials. The radio was grimly silenced. The air conditioning was ominously gagged. I clutched the undersides of my seat for fear that I might be shed as unnecessary cargo especially given the extra pounds I’d picked up in the lethargy of senior year.

As we barreled toward our off-ramp, the neon beacon of an Exxon lying just beyond, the lights on the dashboard began to flicker. At least I remember it happening that way. Though I also remember asking my dad if we had time to stop at Arby’s first. My mind ranged into the morbid, and I began to hope we would run out of gas, if for no other reason than I would finally see what happens when you do. Surely a villainous cackle rings out through the car before a hazy demon billows out of the steering wheel to damn our souls. Maybe the gas tank explodes in a fiery display of orange and Michael-Bay-film-slow-motion? Or perhaps an automated voice informs us that the car will begin drawing fuel from an emergency reserve that only the dimwitted drivers of the world ever get to learn exists. I imagined that the instant the car swallows that last droplet of gas, the glove compartment automaticall fills with hydrofluoric acid, burning your proof of insurance and car title and stripping you of all the medals and privileges of driving. At the very least, Keanu Reeves would come into play.

I didn’t find out that night since we made it to the pump before any of those outcomes came to pass. It took fifteen more years of pondering, of challenging the convention that cars even need gas at all, to learn what really happens when the gas runs dry. Are you ready to hear what happens?

Nothing.

Nothing happens. There are no violent shudders, no wizards, no explosions, no confetti. When the gas tank empties while you are driving, nothing happens to your car other than it begins to decelerate. You press your foot upon the gas pedal but instead of speeding up, your car is slowing down. The forward inertia that you are losing is so gradual, however, that no one else in your car is even alerted to it. The cars behind you won’t even notice because – much to my surprise – no banner announcing This Dipshit Just Ran Out Of Gas unfurls across your back windshield. In fact, the whole event is so peaceful that even you, as the driver, scratch your head and wonder what is going on. Then that banner that doesn’t appear in your window suddenly unrolls in your head as soon as you glimpse the level of the orange and disappointed-in-you needle.

Once your car slows to its unavoidable resting place, all you can do is wait. You make a few phone calls to see if a friend or a mechanic can rush to your aid with a portable container of gas. That’s all you can do, really. Because if you are the sort of person who fails to drive to the gas station in the first place, you’re sure as shit not going to walk to it.

—

13

Posted on by

Five years ago I called my parents at their home in Arizona, which was always inconveniently and often sadly far from my home in New York City. My dad answered their home phone, an innocuous action yet one that still knocks me off balance every time it happens. His tone, which normally gallops through the phone and fills the ear on the other end of the line with warmth, sounded smaller and tighter. After what seemed an interminable lapse of silence, he began a tale that involved a driver who’d had a seizure. The driver’s car passed over a median and through lanes of oncoming traffic before overturning and finally slamming into cars parked in a parking lot. The EMTs who had arrived to the scene looked on, befuddled that anyone – that everyone – had managed to survive.

The driver was my mother.

I didn’t hang up the phone after my dad vowed that my mother was fine and that she would call me when she was awake. I only lowered it, with a trembling hand, to my lap and stared at the floorspace around my feet. My mind registered very little for awhile before the vague outline of something I’d not yet resolved myself to floated into my consciousness: I wanted a baby.

Beyond the rasher reasons shaped by the specter of losing my mother, like that my mom should know the smiles of grandchildren and that I could never truly be gotten by my own children if they never knew her, there was a quiet conviction growing in me that a child would buffer the high winds of life. That a child could galvanize the thin casing that surrounds our fragile organs and would set in alignment my reasons for doing anything each day. That a child would be my lucky number.

I looked down at my phone. It was 1:13 when I decided to change my life.

13 is an emotionally significant number in my family. It was the number that adorned my father’s baseball uniforms from the time he was a boy through his years playing professionally. It was the number my brother and I each chose in our own sporting pursuits in part to pay homage to him though also in hope it may confer some of his athleticism to us. It resides within our passwords. It becomes encircled on our calendars. The number 13 is inescapable for us, and it turns up all the time, slapping us in the face with its relentless serendipity.

2013 has tiptoed close. I can feel it moving underneath me. And I know that I need a change to my life again. I’m not sure of what needs to change, and without knowing what, I have very little clarity on how. I only know that a change is what I need. I have many wells of joy burrowed deep into the soil of my life. Good kids, good health, good hair among them.  But I’m not immersed in those wells. I’m stepping around them and peering into them from the high ground. I’ve been aware of this void for awhile now, and I’ve tried some corrective measures, like yoga, and fewer carbs, and tailgating less. I tried inviting friends who lack the sarcasm and pessimism I cloak myself in, like the slimming black clothes I always wear, into my circle.

None of it worked.

2013 represents my return to the drawing table. I am going to try some things that make me uncomfortable – beyond wearing leggings and using public toilets- to see how I respond. I have to because I drew my lucky number five years ago, and now the ticking of time has put up the number 13. And my mother, who nearly lost it all in that accident, boldly changed her life last year, and everyone is reminded of it when they see the tranquility that now colors her eyes.

I haven’t determined what those things should be yet so until they occur to me, I’ll probably just start with some situps.

Like 13 of them.

—

(Brave New Year, folks. Thanks for reading. Thanks for listening. For me, they’re the same thing.)

—

Finding Cheesus

Posted on by

I have been thinking that I’d like to go back to church. It’s been a vague desire in my mind for a few years, but one that has been amplified lately by the increasingly verbal state of my children. I cringe every time they wrongly identify a church as a school, a cross as a plus sign, or a priest as a Knight of the Round Table. I knew that we were really in spiritual arrears when I overheard my oldest say about the supposed son of God, “Do you know why they called him Cheesus? Because he loved cheese.”

I didn’t want to tell him that he was wrong because it’s possible that Jesus did love cheese. He loved a lot of things after all. I tend to favor the cheeses that hail from France or Spain, but Bethlehem might have been a glimmering bastion of dairy for all I know. I am certain it smelled like it anyway.

The problem with returning to church is that I don’t know how. I’ve fallen away from the Catholic church, the faith in which I was indoctrinated to the ways of the divine and the mysterious. The fissures began the way they do for all youths on the brink of adulthood. Too little time. Too much sleeping till noon. Too many friends luring you into misadventures. Too few mothers to steer you back toward the straight and narrow. The complete break with the church happened when I learned that the priest whose booming sermons had reverberated inside my eardrums for most of my life had been charged with sexual misconduct with young boys. My entire religious inculcation was defrauded with one glance at his mugshot emblazoned across the paper. This was different than the times the facade had crumbled before, revealing the Wizard of Oz within. When Milli Vanilli was exposed as lip-synching, I kept their tape in my boom box for another couple of years. I couldn’t do the same with the Catholic church. It didn’t help that they’d stopped serving donuts after the Sunday masses either.

I have returned to church for the occasional Catholic wedding. It’s unavoidable when one has a disproportionate number of Italian and Latino friends. But there is a comfortable anonymity in sitting before a priest I will never again hear in a church that I will never again visit. Attending these weddings is a stark reminder of how far down the totem pole of priorities religion has slipped. I no longer know the hymns by heart and I’m always a beat behind the other parishioners in the never-ending rituals of standing and sitting and kneeling. My husband, who grew up in a household devoid of any traditional religion, is certainly no mentor in matters of genuflection and signing of the cross. When the people in the pews stood to receive the sacrament at the last wedding we attended, G whispered, “Hey, I’m hungry. Grab me a cracker.”

And so I’ve become that modern phenomenon of spiritual but not religious. I don’t know what that means, however, since all of my spiritual beliefs are unavoidably clothed in the religious trappings I was exposed to. It seems to mean, for the lot of us, that we believe in a higher power but we’d rather go to brunch as opposed to church on Sunday morning. That probably also explains why I see God in the flaky crust of pastries. It means we want to go to Heaven, if there is one, because Hell, if there is one, sounds really unpleasant. It means we prescribe to the notions of good will toward man, but we can’t actually summarize the Commandments beyond don’t do anything weird with your neighbor.  We know who Jesus is and some of his great works, but Peter, Paul, and Mary are just members of an aging folk band.

This time of year especially, though, and even more so in the shadow of a grisly crime directed at the most innocent of our race, I am feeling like being spiritual but not religious is not doing much for my enlightenment. It’s like being on Weight Watchers but never counting points, which is a sin I am also guilty of. I want to believe in my spirituality and the idea that I can revel in God at any turn and in any place. I’d like to think that I am capable of teaching my kids about the invincible force of love, and the cohesiveness of community, and the salve of kindness apart from the dogmatic shrieks of false prophets.

But I also want answers from someone who sees more clearly and devotedly than I. I need to look upon the face of someone whose eyes are not ensconced with the glaze of doubt that covers mine. I need to hear from a person who can claim insight into the human condition that feels entirely alien to me at this moment.

Mostly I need my kids to see a cross and know it to be the emblem of something bigger than mathematics.

And, Jesus Christ, I need some donuts.

No One Puts Babysitter In The Corner

Posted on by

I spend a lot of time discussing with my friends the virtues of good babysitters and the vices of bad ones. More often than not, the conversations end with one of them declaring, “That just never would have happened when I was a babysitter.” To which I always reply, “Thank Christ I didn’t have an iPhone, though.” If I had a phone the way all the teenagers do now, I can only imagine the text messages I would have sent parents:

- Is chocolate really, really bad for dogs? Or is that more of a personal choice?

- Do you really allow the kids to watch Basic Instinct? I probably should have asked you this 122 minutes ago.

- The kid up the street came over and I heard him telling Jimmy that the school nurse found some moving white stuff in his hair with a pencil today.

- Do you know your neighbor’s wireless password? Network is PadThaiPorno.

- I didn’t feed them because I was worried they might be gluten-free, nut-free, cassein-free, and wheat-free.

- The king bed upstairs isn’t for all of them to sleep in because that’s what they said before they all feel asleep in it…?

- I didn’t realize Michael Bolton had a Greatest Hits album.

- They’d told me they’d never tried Red Bull and I saw a real teaching moment there.

- You did know that I am not CPR certified?

- The carbon monoxide detector kept beeping so I just banged it with the end of the mop till it stopped.

- I said that I charge $5 an hour but that was before we’d established that your kid likes to play Candyland for 3 hours straight and that you don’t have a dishwasher.

- Emma has a boy over, who she said was her Spanish tutor, which I’m assuming to be true since I keep hearing “mi amor” coming from her bedroom.

- What color is their vomit normally?

- If it’s not too much to ask, could you not drink too much, Mrs. Williams, so you could drive me home because Mr. Williams always asks me uncomfortable questions that start with, “I don’t know what your proclivities are…”

- Could we discuss a diarrhea-based hourly raise?

- How is ‘blunt head trauma’ really defined? Related: Your countertops are really much higher and more slippery than normal ones.

- I wish you’d been more clear about what uncircumcised meant. Or I wish I’d been more clear about my boundaries.

- It would have been nice if you could have left money for the pizza delivery man because I had to pay him in gold from your jewelry case.

—

(Crazy texts from your babysitter?)

 

 

I’m Nearsighted, Not Clear Sighted

Posted on by

I recently learned that a friend of mine is a clairvoyant. A psychic clairvoyant, to be precise. I don’t yet know the distinction, but I’m sure it’s better than just being a brunette clairvoyant or a tall clairvoyant. Although being any kind of clairvoyant, which I discovered to mean ‘clear vision’, is impressive to me in light of my recent astigmatism diagnosis.

I’m sure they come in all makes and models, but in my limited experience with mediums, they only look like Whoopi Goldberg. Yet this friend of mine looks nothing like Whoopi Goldberg. Or even Nicole Goldberg, who I knew in high school and who always had so much gossip on the rest of us that I sometimes wondered if she might be clairvoyant. It was startling to me and disrupted my grasp of space-time to learn that my decidedly non-Whoopi-or-Nicole-Goldberg-looking friend is a clairvoyant.  The experience is similar to that jarring scenario in which you find yourself walking beside someone you know pretty well when they suddenly light up a cigarette and you had no idea they smoked. You want to play it cool, like maybe you, too, smoke and no one knows about it, but you just can’t stop staring at the smoke billowing from their mouths and coughing in between pauses in the conversation.

The way I came to realize her post was what really stopped me short. It just came up casually in conversation. And no one freaked out. Everyone behaved as though she’d said she was an accountant or a public safety officer. I only have to mention that I used to work for the company that created Gossip Girl and at least 3 women fall to the floor in an immediate seizure. I once was at a cocktail party at which a man introduced himself as a professional puppeteer and in no time at all people were handing him throw pillows and salt shakers and asking him to make characters out of them. I even once shared an apartment with a stripper, a fact that I soon came to overlook given she knew the best places to get a burrito in the middle of the night. The point is that while these jobs may seem unique, anyone can do them with a little work or some exotic oils. These people are not born with a gift.

In truth, I didn’t respond in a grandiose fashion either. But that was because I was intensely preoccupied with the worry that she knew I wasn’t wearing underwear. Later in the week, after I had time to compose myself and to launder some undergarments, I approached her about it in the schoolyard. I broached the topic distractedly, in that casual way one might try to get the Dermatologist at a party to eyeball an errant mole without having to book an appointment. I waited for her to transmute before me into a Madame Slovinka, swirling her fingers atop her crystal ball. Instead she fished a business card out of the middle consul of her car and pressed it into my hand. At the moment our hands collided, I expected a jolt, an unfurling of images, at once familiar and new, to shudder through my mind’s eye. As I turned, it occurred to me that just because it hadn’t happened to me didn’t mean it hadn’t happened to her.

I called back over my shoulder, “I just might call you.”

Climbing into my own car,  I wondered if she already knew that I would. And that I would make sure to wear underwear when I did.

Despite my piqued curiosity to know what she sees when she looks at me, I haven’t called her. I suppose I’m afraid of what I might learn from her. Never one to look away from a roadside crash or a naked celebrity picture gone viral, I’m concerned that I won’t be judicious in parsing what I would benefit from knowing and what should remain mysterious to me. I’m stricken with a wave of panic when the receptionist at the dentist asks me if I’d like to book the date for my next cleaning six months from now. I can only imagine my dread at the foreknowledge of cataclysmic life events.

And, above all, I’m terrified that I’ll start doing braless pottery and listening to Unchained Melody.

—

(Seriously, would you call? Because I really want to call…)

Things To Bring To Thanksgiving Instead of A Side Dish

Posted on by

Finally settle the question “Where are they going?” by bringing a drifter home for the holidays.

A calculator to tally everyone’s caloric intake. Write the total on each person’s hand with a red pen and a wince.

A life-size cardboard cutout of the deformed guy from Goonies for everyone to genuflect before and feel thankful they don’t look like him.

A party mix that includes the best of the Ying Yang twins.

A horn of plenty spilling over with hamsters.

The Williams-Sonoma catalog to compare against the table your host has set. Rub your temples and mutter, “The mediocrity some people will accept…”

Bring a baby no one knows and pretend it’s yours and that it’s named Pocahontas.

A slideshow of the people you met at a nudist retreat in Key West.

Espresso sundaes for your hyperactive nephews.

A hammer with a note attached that reads, “You’d better hide, Mannheim Steamroller CD.”

Those letters of the alphabet stocking hooks to spell out W-E-I-R-D-O-S on the mantle.

Bring your sister’s ex-fiance and yell, “Surprise! Guess who’s gotten over his fidelity issues?!”

A pair of scissors to dole out group Miley Cyrus haircuts.

A bucket of names for the Christmas lottery but declare that you’ve “left Grandpa out intentionally since no one wants to deal with another whittled bear figurine.”

Some pitbull puppies you traded for expired canned goods.

The Cindy Crawford exercise DVD. Every time someone gets up for seconds, shout, “You go do this in the basement and don’t come back until you look good in a mole and a red one-piece bathing suit!”

The bags of leaves you’ve raked from your own yard. Scatter them wildly around your host’s front lawn, chanting, “From my home to yours!”

The carcasses of dead animals found along the drive. Look at everyone like they’re crazy and say, “We’re eating local, people! Low carbon footprint this year.”

—

 

Not The Acid Trip I’d Hoped For

Posted on by

The dentist hunched over the X-rays of my teeth, which were magnified and back-lit for everyone in the office – but me – to see. He furrowed his brow and methodically stroked his mustache before swiveling his stool in my direction. He looked at me emphatically, and I braced myself for the revelation of something dentally grave.

“You have the same X-rays as the truckers I get in here who are drinking Monster all day long.”

My jaw fell open or at least as open as a jaw can fall when held in traction by flying buttresses of cotton rolls and clamps. I shook my head vehemently, desperately trying to convey non-verbally that I never drink soda nor have I driven an 18-wheeler. He began dismantling the hardware inside my mouth so that I could offer a spoken rebuttal to his cruel assessment of my teeth. My mind roiled with citations of flossing and usage of ADA-approved toothpaste and assertions of sugar-free gum. While I meant to verbalize all these things, when the last clip was lifted from my mouth, something more along the lines of, “How dare you? I’m wearing a cardigan,” escaped my lips.

He waved in reinforcements in the way of hygienists who began silently mixing concoctions and placing shiny metal objects upon the sinister tray hovering above my heart. He pressed my shoulders into the plastic of the reclined chaise and gazed into my eyes with an intensity that made me fear I was seated in the chair of the demon barber of Fleet Street.

“Some people inherit a condition that makes their mouths an overly acidic environment,” he began slowly. “Do you have any questions?”

I thought for a moment.

“So this is my mom’s fault then?”

He snapped his gloves into place and asked his harem of hygienists for the swab. He dredged the shallows of my mouth with a cotton swab before dipping the wet end into a small desktop machine. He clucked his tongue and dropped his head in defeat at the digital readout.

“A good number is anything under 500. Do you know what yours is?”

I’ve never been good with numbers. At a conference, I once guessed a jar held 45 gumballs when the actual total was something like 500.

“Your number is 7,000.”

I winced at the number and the judgment that hung heavy in the air. I shrank into the seat much like the time my college counselor had told me I was lucky I had scored so high in the Reading and Writing sections of the SAT because my Math performance had been downright simian. My dentist nodded solemnly at his staff, a silent cue which sent them scuttling toward cabinets and supply closets. I ran my tongue over my teeth, recoiling at the thought of seven thousand grams or milliliters or knots of crud tumbling off my teeth like a rock dislodging from a scraggy mountain.

They returned holding a tote bag packed to the gills with products. A veritable suitcase of cleaners and rinses that no TSA official would grant passage to. I was discharged minutes later, tote in hand, after paying a sum of money I only hand over for products that counteract aging, not acid development. I lugged my baggage to the door. I turned to the counter around which the entire staff of the dental office seemed to be perched, watching my exit. I dropped the bag to the floor before striding quickly back across the waiting room.

“I just want to understand,” I faltered. “Do I need to use these products forever?”

My eyes darted from face to face of the employees before me, desperately seeking enlightenment and comfort. After an interminable silence, one voice spoke for the rest.

“If you want what’s best for your teeth.”

I lifted my chin and straightened my cardigan as though to remind them one last time that I was a lady regardless of the fact that my mouth was the Wilt Chamberlain of bacteria. I turned away from them and hobbled upon leaden legs toward the door, pausing to collect my bag of products, a maneuver that required the use of leg muscles instead of back ones to lift.

Once home, I opened the bag to inspect the bottles within. There were rinses, spritzes, pastes, and strips. To dig a little deeper revealed measuring cups and mixing sticks. Then I spied the thing that sent me over the edge: Chewing gum.

I had become one of those people with their own special chewing gum. This is a far worse fate than being one of those people who carries their own salad dressing. Because no one ever watches the person who carries their own salad dressing and says, “Oh man, could I have some of that?”

I felt a sob coming on, but I stopped short for fear that the tears made in my body of uneven pH would be like acid rain. I didn’t want to wind up looking like Seal and being the person who can’t share her special gum. After all, it’s going to be tough enough to hold onto my friends once I have to spend my evening hours shocking my mouth like they do the YMCA pool after a toddler craps in it.

—

The Stripper

Posted on by

If you read my last piece then you know that I recently attended a bachelorette party, and that the role of guest of honor was not really reserved for the bride, but for the male stripper who was booked for the occasion. I was privy to the fact that he was reserved and it became a source of near-constant anxiety and yo-yo dieting for weeks. The knowledge of his impending performance eclipsed all the workings of my daily life to the point that if the librarian said, “Erin, do you want to check this out?” my forehead would bead with sweat and I’d whisper, “Am I supposed to check it out?”

Despite it being on the forefront of my consciousness for several weeks, the instant the party host entered the room, her eyes slanted with concentration and fingers clasped around the phone, to say that the neighbors had phoned in a noise complaint, I immediately forgot about the jig. “Seriously?” I panted. “The music isn’t even that loud; We’re using toddler speakers.” She shot me a look that could only be described as, I know you’ve never seen a male stripper and you’re freaking out about balls in your face, but for Christ’s sake, we’ve gone over this a hundred times now.

I steadied my body and silently chastised myself for being the weak link in the chain of seasoned spectators of exotic dancing. I returned my attention to the bevy of tipsy ladies twirling around me and swirling drinks with penis straws so realistic they even had veins molded into the plastic. I sidled up to the dessert table to cut a slice away from the phallic cake, which resembled a maple long john donut atop fuzzy tennis balls.

A woman I did not know well appeared beside me and whispered, “Did you hear his name is Animal?”

I dropped my fork, the only implement not made to look like a penis for miles, and murmured, “That has to be indicative of a lot of body hair.” The thought of it darkened the skies inside my head, but gratefully made me forget about the fact that I was shoveling coconut shavings that were meant to be pubic hair into my mouth.

It was in the next moment that I noticed my friend, and sister to the bride, dart across the floor and launch herself into the couch positioned furthest from the center of the room. I may not always know what direction in which the sun rises and sets or what to do when gangrene takes hold, but my survival instincts rang out loud and clear: It was time to stand far, far away from The Animal.

Before I could even summon the motor coordination to climb a tree, or run in a zig-zig, or play dead, he had entered the room. There was a flurry of movement as squealing women flung themselves at the perimeter of the living room, like newly captured wild animals testing the fences of their zoo enclosure. I held my plate of penis cake defensively, as though it could project a force field if the real thing tried to mount my leg. As he strode to the center of the circle, I backed into an ottoman and lowered myself into the sliver of space between two women.

Something felt off. Not that I had a precedent against which to judge the rightness and wrongness of male strippers, but the figure that stood before us was unlike anything I had seen in movies or heard about in bachelorette lore.

I looked at the woman beside me, unable to utter my grievance, yet she answered with full understanding of my dilemma. “He’s twenty.”

Twenty years old.

I would have reacted better to the revelation that he had twenty balls or had served twenty years hard time. Twenty years of living was an entirely different affront. There was a time when a man twenty years of age in various stages of undress would have been enticing, but I was still wearing braces and talking on a phone that was shaped like lips then.

I looked at his face, which was hard to do, since he was, at that moment, engaged in one-armed pushups with his feet in the lap of a fellow party-goer. As my head moved in rhythm with his dipping body, straining to get a glimpse of his profile, a feeling of dread slapped up against me like an errant wave against the breakwater. I felt anxious and antsy. I could feel the underside of my arms getting wet. I’d had these feelings before. Many times. These emotions well up inside me every time I’m faced with planning a…playdate.

That is exactly what this young boy inspired in me. A need to schedule him a playdate. An urge to fix him a snack. An appetite to pull up his pants, tighten the belt buckle, and say, “My dear, show this stuff to one woman at a time. Preferably one who is not pulling Canadian bills out of her Spanx and wondering if she forgot about an acupuncture appointment today.”

I stood up from my seat at exactly the moment he fatigued of his pushup routine. He rose to his feet, and we made eye contact for a brief moment, before I shot across the floor as though I were avoiding an overturned basket of cobras or the white guy who has decided to start breakdancing at a party. I took shelter behind the kitchen counter with a few other shell-shocked women. We looked on at the spectacle through eyes half-closed by pain and chagrin before one said, “You know, I’m gonna go.”

I watched her turn and make toward the back door. A movement in the periphery of my eye caught my attention and I swiveled my head toward it. There was Animal. Banging his twenty year old equipment against the backside of a woman so blindsided by his predatory moves that all she could do was continue to swipe her carrot through the tub of hummus.

“Wait for me!”

—

Life Changers

Posted on by

I’ve arrived at the precipice of something very, very big. A crossroads of such personal import that the only way I can begin to order the upwelling of emotion is to write about it. My entire existence has been building to this crescendo so the realization that I am now staring down the barrel at it has left me unmoored. I am adrift, bobbing without reason and rationality, in a sea of infinite possibilities and outcomes.

See, for the first time in my long life…

I am about to see a male stripper.

Ever since the part of the brain that is responsible for picking up on details like a male stripper will be attending your friend’s bachelorette party exploded in a dazzling fireworks display of neurons, I haven’t been able to compel the other lobes of my brain to keep on coordinating my basic life functions, like eating, speaking, and using my hands to pick up things. For the sake of my family, I need to return to the days before the promise – or specter, I’m not entirely sure which – of male strippers entered my life. I long to go back to the days when every male I was to encounter would undoubtedly be clothed, a simpler time when occupations that included the word ‘male’ were followed only by ‘nurse’ or ‘teacher’.

It’s kind of like the time before I’d ever eaten Eggplant Parmesan. I didn’t really think about the fact that everyone else was eating Eggplant Parmesan. Ordering Eggplant Parmesan. Seeing Eggplant Parmesan at parties. Once I became of a certain age, it began to rattle those around me and steeled their resolve to make me one of them, an eater of Eggplant Parmesan. My life became a hollow existence plotted around Italian restaurants and family reunions haunted by Eggplant Parmesan. Until one night I was out to dinner with my parents, and I opened the menu, to find it listed – boldly and nakedly – in the Primi section. I pointed at it meekly, unsure I could even utter the name of something that had risen to such culinary prominence in my mind. My stomach lurched just slightly when the waiter slid it off his arm onto the vacant space of table before me. This is it, I thought as a rivulet of sweat cut a path over my left temple. I remember no more as the sweating and digestive grumblings were the precursors to a stomach bug that ushered Eggplant Parmesan out of my body, and my life, as though I were never fit to receive it in the first place.

I’m quite sure the same fate awaits me with the male stripper. The sweating and the gastrointestinal agitation, that is. Not the ingesting of something long denied although I am a very nervous eater. I only know that public rituals such as these quickly become a very graphic National Geographic episode for people like me. In the opening frame, the herd munches mindlessly on the desiccated grass of the Serengeti as the lion they’re blithely unattuned to crouches out of view. There’s a sudden ripple in the matter and the collective is up and sprinting. Except for one. Me. The slow Gazelle. The slow Gazelle wants desperately to be with the others, to be grazing and drinking, but she was too busy thinking about how stupid she looks in a Maxi dress when she is caught alone and vulnerable and staring at the lion’s advancing genitals which are, at this moment, eye-level. Well aware of the futility but game enough to try, the Gazelle turns to run, but the lion’s incisors land squarely upon her haunch.

I don’t know if I’ll actually be bitten by a male stripper, but I’m afraid of it just as I am afraid of being touched and leered at. And all the other verbs that appear in reports of sexual harassment allegations. I’m concerned about how to hold my hands and where to direct my eyes. I’ve felt crippling waves of anxiety over knowing the sort of occupation he will enter the room as so that I don’t mistake him for an actual plumber and begin discussing the winterizing of pipes. I’m wondering about whether I need to introduce myself and establish some mutual boundaries, like a safe word, which I’d like to be ‘Manischewitz’. I’m curious if Weight Watchers points are still tallied if there’s a naked, orange man bumping and grinding on the hors d’oeuvres table. I want the other party goers to understand that I’m prone to strange behaviors while watching displays of pageantry, like returning phone calls from the dentist or alphabetizing the gift cards in my wallet.

I know very little about what lies ahead. The only thing I can count on is that I will never again be the same. And that he will be better waxed than I am.

—