Month: January 2008

Unforgiven

I committed the unpardonable sin tonight.

I did the laundry.

This morning, one of my teenagers informed me that he had no pants to wear. I told him where I keep a secret stash of pants (the storage room) and, thus, he didn’t not have to attend church half-clad. (I kid. The storage room is a mutated closet where I hang their dressy clothes, like the black corduroy pants I bought each of the boys to wear for our Christmas photograph.)

This evening, I scooped up the discarded black corduroy pants off the laundry room floor and pushed them into the washing machine with other dirty duds. The laundry is a little backed up because over the weekend, that happens. I venture out of the house and in my absence the laundry copulates and gives birth to more dirty laundry.

About twenty minutes later, would-be-half-clad boy comes out (wearing pajama pants) and says, “Mom, did you wash my pants?” and I say, “I think they’re in the washer. Why?” and he informs me that his wallet was in the pocket.

“Bummer,” I said with characteristic care. “What was in it?” I’ve washed it a half dozen times before.

“Money!” he said

“Money can be washed. Anything else?”

“My YMCA card and two cards from Game Crazy.”

“Everything will be fine.”

And he exits.

Moments later, “MOM! MY iPOD IS IN MY POCKET!”

Me: “!!!!!”

Him: “MOM!”

I slide my feet back into my slippers, scurry to the laundry room and see that the machine has twenty-five minutes remaining in its cycle. It is a front-loading machine. I cannot open it mid-cycle or the water will rush out like a waterfall. So, I say, “Well, too bad. Maybe it’s not in there.” He is widely famous of his absentmindedness and often misplaces things. For all I know, the iPod is upstairs on the bathroom counter or in the living room under a couch. Why panic until the cycle ends?

Then the world collapses from the massive outrage of one 14-year old boy.

He simply could not believe that I had the nerve–THE NERVE!–to wash his iPod. I said, “Shane, I do not check pockets. All I did was my job. I do laundry.”

He said, ‘WELL! THANKS A LOT, MOM! THANKS A LOT!” He said some other things he doesn’t have the sense to regret.

Of course, I advised him that the responsibility for pocket-emptying is his. He raged on and on and I let him, only pointing my bony finger in his face to inform him that if he didn’t like the way I did laundry, he could do his own laundry. In fact, I may have said, “FINE! THEN FROM THIS SECOND ON, YOU WILL DO YOUR OWN LAUNDRY. DO YOU UNDERSTAND THAT?!” He disappeared into his room, only to reappear a bit later.

He expressed incredulity that I never said I was sorry and I said, “SORRY!?! FOR DOING THE LAUNDRY? FOR WASHING DIRTY CLOTHES LEFT ON THE LAUNDRY ROOM FLOOR?”

I did finally interrupt his dramatic presentation of adolescent angst to let him in on the fact that I purchased replacement insurance for his iPod for such an occasion as this.

And I did a Google search with these terms: “washing machine iPod help.” There is some anecdotal evidence that an iPod may survive a ride through the washing machine.

However, I am fairly certain I will not survive the life cycle of the common household teenager.

On Academy Award Nominated Movies (and more)

I saw Michael Clayton tonight (starring my boyfriend, George Clooney). Now I have seen all the movies nominated for an Academy Award for Best Picture. (Atonement, Juno, Michael Clayton, There Will Be Blood and No Country for Old Men.) I’m going to guess that No Country for Old Men will win, but it’s hard to know. I’m going to predict the winners here. (Waiting for a password reminder, then I’m going for it.)

Interestingly enough, the sister I spoke of recently (who does not speak to me) will be arriving at my mother’s house (a scant three minutes from my front door) tomorrow night. Do you think she’ll call? Or stop by? Ha ha ha ha.

It’s not too late . . . for you to send something exquisite and expensive for my birthday which is Monday. How old will I be? That’s right, boys and girls. Forty-three.

My daughter is five. I was trying to remember being five years old–that was the year we moved into the first house owned. My dad teased me and said it was haunted, but I didn’t believe him, even at the time.

I remember so clearly that my mother put our vacuum cleaner in its white vinyl box right inside the front door. The glass next to the door was 1970s opaque mottled gold. I remember the sun shining through that glass onto the vacuum cleaner box. (Our vacuum was a cannister with a long cloth hose . . . you pulled it around kind of like a dog on a leash.) When I think of that house, that’s what I remember first: the vinyl vacuum cleaner box in the glowing golden light of that window.

My parents were so young when I was five. My dad was only 28 years old when I was five. I try to imagine growing up, being five in a household with such young parents. I wonder if my parents saw me as clearly as I see my daughter. Or do all children feel sort of invisible and insignificant?

The other day, my daughter was carrying around a dog statue she bought for a dollar at the “One Dollar Store.” She’d had me fasten this purple leash on its neck and she dragged it and swung it around. I told her, “Be careful because that dog might break,” but she didn’t listen to my warning. We were heading to the elementary school to drop off her friend to kindergarten. While they climbed into the van, I jogged up the driveway to grab the mail.

When I opened the van door, I heard and then saw her bawling. I said, “What happened?” and she wailed, “I broke my puppy!” I glanced down at her hand and saw she was clutching a gaping hole where the puppy’s front paw had been. I couldn’t stop myself. I said, “Grace, I told you to be careful.”

She cried with such gusto that I envied her. I can’t even remember the day when I would let loose with tears without any consideration at all. Nowadays, when I feel like crying, I first try to talk myself out of it, then I bite my lip, then I breathe a shaky breath. If I still can’t stop the tears, I wipe them as quick as they fall, force myself to be silent and hope no one notices.

But a five year old hollers and cries out loud, lets tears smear on her face, lets her nose run without regard for appearances. What freedom.

After I promised to fix the puppy with glue, she was instantly all better. Life is simple when you’re five.

I was five so long ago. I wonder if anyone remembers me being five? My dad has been dead for 18 years. My mother’s 65 and from all accounts, remembers very little of her life as a stay-at-home mother.

Sometimes, like this morning, I wish my daughter would stay five. She climbed into bed with me while I was desperately trying to stay asleep, trying to hold onto the images in my dreams. “Will you hold me?” she said, and I flung one arm over her body.

She’d nudge her freezing cold feet onto my legs until I said, “Stop touching me with your cold feet!” but what I really meant to say was, “Please, don’t even grow up. Stay five forever. Let’s just cuddle here under my quilt and pretend that we will always be close and that you’ll always want to be next to me more than anyone else in the whole wide world.”

This is my last winter with my baby girl before she heads off to kindergarten. The next thing I know, she’ll go to junior high and develop a crush on an older boy and get her driver’s license and decide I am so uncool and apply to a college back East and meet her future husband and never, ever, ever crawl under the covers with me and giggle when I tickle her by wiggling my fingers on her back. My days of sniffing her little girl curls will be over.

But I will never forget when she was five and I was forty-two.

Variety

I may have left out some details in my last hasty blog. I am not doing medical transcription forty hours a week . . . in fact, I am no longer doing any medical transcription at all since my other Internet job turned into a full-time job. I work as a Community Manager on a website for moms. When I began, I worked 12 hours a week. Those twelve hours turned into nineteen hours. Nineteen hours turned into twenty-nine hours. Then, remarkably, those twenty-nine hours became forty hours a week, complete with benefits and everything.

I have turned into the mythical stay-at-home mother who works full-time on her computer . . . you know when people ask, “Are there any legitimate work-at-home jobs?” Well, there was one. And I have it.

I absolutely love my job and I am so grateful to have it.

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In other news, three boys are spending the night. How did this happen again? Every time I allow it I think, NEVER AGAIN. And then I relent. I’d rather they all be here driving me crazy than somewhere else doing who-knows-what.

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And now, Six Weird Things About Me, a Meme brought to you courtesy of Smoov.

“THE RULES: Each player of this game starts with the “6 weird things about you.” People who get tagged need to write a blog of their own 6 weird things as well as state this rule clearly. In the end, you need to choose 6 people to be tagged and list their names. Don’t forget to leave a comment that says “you are tagged” in their comments and tell them to read your blog.”

1. I hate raw tomatoes and Kraft macaroni and cheese.

2. Being too hot makes me crabby. I cannot think straight when I’m sweaty.

3. I am fascinated by Betty Broderick and watched not only the CourtTV coverage of her trial, but also the two television movies made about her which starred Meredith Baxter.

4. I used to consider whether I’d rather be deaf or blind. I alway chose deaf.

5. I have never been to a prom.

6. I own a lot of earrings but I always wear gold hoops.

And a bonus weird thing:

7. I like to sleep in a cold, completely dark room. Night lights keep me awake. Even a crack of light under a door will wake me up.

Oh, and I’m not tagging you but if you want to play, consider yourself tagged.

Work-a-holic

Just so you know . . . working eleven hours (on the computer) in one day will make your knees ache.  You will long for sleep with the intensity of a nursing mother who has a newborn.  Eleven.

That’s why I don’t have time (yet) to tell you about going to Seattle with my friends (dear, dear friends).  I went, I ate, I slept, I laughed, I talked, I listened, I shopped and I bought a lipstick which holds great promise (could it be The Perfect Lipstick?).  And then I landed with a thud back into my regular life, got right to work, washed a load of dishes and never really stopped to breathe (or download a photo or two from my digital camera to illustrate the post I haven’t written about going to Seattle).

Tomorrow is normally an easy day for me (five hours of work), but for various reasons I will be working ten hours.

It’s another case of being so close (to the computer), but so far away (from the blog).  Alas.

Rejection

My husband scheduled the cleaning lady for 9 a.m. Saturday morning. I left a list of things to clean from most important (kitchen!) to least (windows). I was dreaming up stuff to add to the list because I didn’t really want much done, just the kitchen and guest bathroom made presentable. Then I took off for the day. I shopped for bargains and then saw a movie (“Atonement”). (The movie was good, but make me want to read the book because I have a feeling the book is better. The book is always better!)

My cell phone battery was dead, so I dug up four quarters and found a pay-phone so I could check in with my husband and let him know what time the movie would be over. (I had to see a later show than I had hoped.)

“So, did the cleaning lady come?” I asked him.

“Well, she did, but she thought we just need a routine cleaning, so she couldn’t do it.”

“She couldn’t do it?”

“No,” he said, “She looked at your list and looked at the areas and said there was no way she could do that in four hours. She offered to get a co-worker and come back. She said it would take two of them at least four hours working together.”

“And how much would that cost?”

“Two hundred and fifty dollars.”

“WHAT?! Are you kidding? That’s crazy!”

“I told her you probably wouldn’t go for that.”

A cleaning lady refused to clean my house! (So, it is true. You really do have to clean your house before the cleaning lady arrives.) I would have happily paid her $100 for four hours worth of work, but she rejected me and my money. Furthermore, she cost herself a customer because I will never again call her and offer her work.

I am mortified and mystified that my kitchen and bathroom were deemed too big of a job for one person to handle in four hours.

So, I cleaned them myself. (It did not take four hours.)
If ever there was a time for you to drop by, that time is now. Come one, come all! By tomorrow at 11 a.m., my house will be the cleanest it has been in years (but please, do not open the door to the Boy Cave because I simply did not have enough time to tackle that job. And the cleaning lady probably would have charged me a thousand bucks to deal with that.)

Preparations

Here is what you do when your college friend from 1984 through 1987 is coming to visit Monday and you haven’t seen her in eighteen (?) years and you are keenly aware that she possesses exquisite interior decorating superpowers which she demonstrated during the summer of 1985 by using small lamps to make a former Hotel 6 room (with aqua shag carpet) seem homey.  (We lived as roommates in said hotel room during that summer when I first met my eventual husband who is upstairs at the moment wondering if I’ll ever come to bed before midnight.

1.   Borrow a dump-truck and rid yourself of the hand-me-down sectional with the rips and stuffing the children like to pull out and leave in fluffy balls on the floor.  Buy a new couch.  And a matching chair because you can.

2.  Paint over the red stripes in your living room which seemed festive and whimsical in 2002 but which have annoyed you for at least three years.  And paint the rest of the family room and the entry-way while you’re at it.  Consider painting the vivid golden yellow living room, but decide against it because who cares.  (Besides me, I mean.)

3.  Spend Saturday hunting for a replacement glass lamp fixture for the vintage lamp which your daughter broke several weeks ago.  A bare light bulb might be acceptable for every day use, but not for a visit by your long-lost friend–and her husband and his sister.

4.  Re-hook the draperies by the patio window because you put the hooks in the wrong place the first two times and were too lazy to fix it two (three?) months ago.

5.  Remember that you meant to install new curtain rods and curtains in the kids’ bedrooms upstairs.  Oops.  Wonder if it even matters.  Consider ways to keep your friends from going upstairs.  “No, our bathroom is broken.”

6.  While your desk is pulled out from the wall so you can paint, unplug every computer, printer, light and electronic device.  Sort out the cords.  Plug in the brand spanking new surge protector and replug everything.  Dust desk.  Rearrange.  Admire.

7.  Thank God that you had the forethought to lose 57 pounds in the last two years.  Because, seriously, that is the worst feeling in the world knowing that you have no choice but to see people who knew you when you were young and cute and had no idea that you were young and cute.  (“Cute”?  Well, you were young.  And had a ton of rock-star permed hair and skinny legs back when skinny legs and giant sweaters and long shirts were all the rage.)

8.  Hire someone to paint the upstairs master bathroom, even though you don’t intend to let anyone see your bedroom because after twenty years of marriage, you still have four Rubbermaid tubs serving as bedside tables.

9.  Hire a carpet cleaner.

10.  Hire a housecleaner and then spend most of Saturday shopping and seeing a movie.

Shoes

A while back, I was late dropping off a little boy for afternoon kindergarten. Because we were tardy, I had to walk him into the school office to sign him in. I waited behind a lady who was signing in her little girl.

When it was my turn to sign the roster, I noticed that the woman before me had written, “Fight over shoes,” in the Reason column.

I found that very amusing, probably because I have a girl and I can imagine fighting with her over shoes. (Though I am more likely to let her venture into public in crazy outfits because, really, why fight it?). With my boys, a more likely reason for tardiness would be “Couldn’t find shoes.” Even now, my almost 15-year olds constantly lose their shoes. I do not understand this. The only time I lost shoes was when I left behind my pointy-toed boots at a retreat center.

By the way, this errant shoe is still here in my storage room. I never figured out where it came from.

When vacuuming the heating vent near the front door, I found a toddler-sized sandal. I have no idea who it belonged to–probably us, many years ago. Some kid must have pulled up the grate and dumped the sandal inside.  Also?  Perhaps I should vacuum out the vents more than once every nine years.  But let’s not rush into anything.
Speaking of shoes, no one is allowed to wear them in the house anymore because we just had our carpets cleaned and I am trying to prolong the cleanliness as long as possible. Wish me luck.

Merry Christmas, but not to me

My 5-year old spent the afternoon at her grandmother’s house which is chock full of bric-a-brac with a large side order of gewgaws, and a heaping helping of curios. Grandma also has a lot of stuff, particularly costume jewelry and chocolate sitting around in candy dishes. My daughter adores visiting.

While I stood in the kitchen waiting for my mother to package up some ham and cheesy potatoes she had overbaked, I caught a glimpse of my estranged sister’s handwriting on an envelope. The sticker-dotted envelope sat right next to the kitchen sink. It looked like a Christmas card.

For a moment, I felt the tiniest ghost of a pang, the flimsiest regret that my sister and I no longer speak. We haven’t spoken a word to each other in over five years. A couple of years ago, I sent her an email and asked if we might discuss in through email why we weren’t speaking. She emailed back, “I’ll call you when I get there,” (there being here–she lives in Japan and was due for a visit to the Pacific Northwest). I emailed back and said, “No, we need to talk before you get here.”

She never emailed me again. She never called me, either.

It’s strange when a person you’ve known literally your whole life (except for those first sixteen months, but I wasn’t exactly a conversational wonder in my babyhood, so that doesn’t count) rips you out like a perforated page in a book. Granted, my anger at her was justified, in my opinion–despite my explicit instructions not to make copies and keep some particularly graphic pictures of my giving birth, she ordered herself copies from negatives and took them back to Japan with her. When I discovered this theft, I emailed her a concise, direct demand to return my photographs. I never got my photos, an explanation or an apology. And that was the end of our sisterhood.
Not that we were very good sisters anyway. If friends are the family you choose for yourself, sometimes family are the friends you wouldn’t have chosen in a million years–you have nothing in common other than a gene pool. For all our differences, though, we were still sisters, sister who had nothing in common, who grated on one another’s nerves and didn’t particular like spending time in the same room from our very earliest days together.

Still. She’s living a life completely outside the frame of my life. She not only cut me out of her life, but cut my children out of her life, too. I imagine it’s easier for them and yet some day, will be more difficult. They don’t miss what they never had, but one day, they’ll wonder why we don’t speak and ask whatever happened to their aunt.

And my explanation will sound so ridiculous: Your aunt doesn’t speak to me because I asked her to return some photos of me giving birth that she took without permission. The deeper explanation is so tangled even I have no idea where it begins and where it ends. You know when you can’t unravel a knot? Sometimes, you just have to cut it out and start fresh.

I guess that’s what we did.

Farewell, O Christmas Tree

The Christmas tree my husband purchased in Detriot ten years ago has been dismembered.  Its branches lie in bunches, segregated according to size.  Tomorrow, I will drag out the large box, pack it away and send it off to the church, where I hear the youth pastor will appreciate having a seven and a half foot tall fake tree for the youth room.  And I say, “Good riddance.”  Good riddance to festivity, good riddance to the rumpled tree skirt the cats frolic underneath, good riddance to Christmas Past.  I’m sick of it.

My daughter came in as I was yanking off the top branches of the tree and said, “Mom, what are you doing to the tree?” with dismay just like Cindy Lou Who when she caught the the Grinch stuffing the Christmas tree up the chimney.  I said, “Christmas is over.  We have to put all this away.  If it were Christmas all the time, we’d never get to swim in the pool, you know.”

Indeed.  If it were always Christmas, when would we celebrate the Fourth of July?  If it were always Valentine’s Day, when would we go trick-or-treating?  If it were always the beginning, when would we ever reach the end?

In other news, I ate a whole sleeve of Ritz crackers tonight.  Don’t tell my other blog.  Don’t even ask.  I have no idea what came over me.

Dropping the balls, crashing the plates

I never got the hang of juggling. I know there is a pattern to it, that you are supposed to toss the balls in a particular direction, but whenever I tried to juggle, the balls had their own wacky orbits and did not follow any pattern whatsoever.

I am trying to juggle a new full-time job, four full-time kids, three stinky cats, two blogs, a husband and a partridge in a pear tree. Everything’s going swimmingly, except for this blog-thing. (And the cooking dinner thing, which I can’t seem to get running smoothly.) I smack my forehead at about 1:00 a.m. and say, “Oh, shoot! I forgot to write in my blog!” and then I fall into a horrible dream in which someone is chopping off my toes. (Not really that particular dream, but that is the worst childhood dream I can remember.)

And you know that feeling you have when you’re in a room full of loud people and you’re talking in a normal tone of voice to a close friend and then suddenly, you realize you have just said out loud, “And the doctor said the discharge was . . . ” just as a conversational lull occurs and your private confession has turned into a head-turning shouted announcement? Oh, you don’t know that feeling?

Then you will not empathize when I explain that sometimes, now, that’s what it feels like writing a blog which has become somewhat less private that it was in the beginning. My topics for conversation are fairly limited . . . and my children are going through a boring, bickering streak . . . no one is giving me any good material, at least nothing I can use here. I clearly need to mingle with more strangers who have no idea what a blog is.

There’s a book about blogging called No One Cares What You Had for Lunch: 100 Ideas for Your Blog which makes me want to clutch my heart in a dramatic gesture and gasp, ” . . . and probably nobody cares what I did today, either, or whether my daughter is driving me nuts with her constant chatter . . . ” It’s tricky to fashion something out of nothing day after day.

And so Happy New Year! 2008! Doesn’t it just seem like yesterday that the nutcases were trying to freak us out by telling us that the world “as we know it” would cease to exist on January 1, 2000? Because the computers would grind to a sudden and lethal halt and we’d all have to beg those fatalists to let us into their bomb shelters so we could eat their stockpiled lentils and oatmeal? I did not participate in that tomfoolery . . . who has time to fret about The End of the World As We Know It when there are more important things to consider such as whether or not there are clean underpants for everyone in the family? And such as whether U.S. Americans can locate The Iraq on a map?

Oh, the late-night hosts are killing me with their writer’s-strike beards! First David Letterman and now Conan O’Brien. Beards always make me think of my dead dad, which is a rather morose thought, but then again, I love to remember him and then shake my head over all the technology he has missed in these eighteen years since he’s been gone. He was one of the original fans of the computer. He built one from a kit in 1977. It had red and blue button and I have absolutely no idea what it did, other than take up all his spare time. He programmed it with cassette tapes, which seems ludicrous, but I promise, it’s true. He would have been in love with the Internet.

So, I know you don’t care what I had for lunch (nothing! I ran out of time between running errands and starting work), but do you care that I painted over the red stripes in my living room? My 9-year old is disgusted with our boring “Wheatfield” walls, but my husband has breathed a sigh of a relief at the monotonous sight. He’d love nothing more than to live in a plain-jane house that looks exactly like a dorm room before anyone moves in. Beige walls, a book shelf, a bed. What else does anyone need?

Well, in less then eight hours, I will be back on the computer, working again, throwing plates into circular patterns that end up spinning wildly out of control. I am a rotten juggler. But I can type without looking at the keyboard and surely that’s worth something.

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