Accidents and Stupidity

As a mother, I think the thing I worry about most is something bad happening to my child.  I managed to get myself into all sorts of scrapes and scratches and predicaments as a kid.  I was a master tree climber as well as being the best carver in the neighborhood.  I was often hired, for a few pieces of candy or simply bragging rights, to climb high up into the ancient maple tree in our front yard and carve in someone’s name, or two names of two kids who liked one another, or an “I’m going to kick Larry’s ASS” message.  I never once, in all the years I climbed, fell out of a tree.  I jumped out once from the very, tippy top of a pine tree at my grandmother’s house.  Pines are great because they’re so easy to climb.  They’re just like climbing a ladder, except sticky.  I had stood up quickly and proud and not just a little snotty-looking, and yelled down to my little brother from high above the yard, me aloft and bouncing on a pine branch, “See!!!  I TOLD you I could do it!!”  Right at the end of my sentence, as if to truly punctuate my statement, I stuck my head right into a hornet’s nest.  They swirled out around me in a furious buzz and got stuck in  my long hair, stinging me all over.  Panicked I did what any right minded person would do.  I jumped.  My uncle swears both ankles should have been broken and might have been had I not hit the ground running.  He tackled me and threw me into the nearby creek dunking me under the water over and over until the hornets lost interest and left the scene of the crime.  

I was fantastic at getting hurt.  Still am!  Once, my friend Kelly, who was a bike trickster, showed me how, if he shoved his foot, just so, into and under the front fender of his bike while moving, he could pop the back wheel of his bicycle off the ground like he was riding a bucking bronco.  I had never seen anything so neat.  I tried and tried but couldn’t get the hang of it.  Later that week I was riding down the huge hill on the street next to my house when it hit me.  Speed!  I hadn’t been getting enough speed!  I jammed my sneaker under the fender and instantly catapulted myself into a series of somersaults ending in terrifying silence with me staring up at the sky spitting dirt and blood out of my mouth while trying not to cry.  I was a bloody mess and couldn’t walk very well but the mortification of how stupidly I had performed the trick got me back on my feet.  I stumbled home, pushing my busted up bike, limping the whole way on a foot with surely broken toes.  After all, I had unceremoniously jammed them into a bike fender of a bike traveling at god only knows how many miles an hour.  I was too scared to actually get back on my bike and ride it so I pretended to all my awed and horrified friends that I was sure the bike was busted but good and I ought to get it home and get it fixed so I could try that awesome trick again.   Fat chance.

I managed to draw blood even while inside my own house being somewhat supervised.  The first time I decided to try shaving my legs I waited until everyone in the house had been asleep for at least two hours.  I snuck downstairs and quietly retrieved my mother’s razor from the bathtub shelf.  I smoothed on shaving cream and gently scraped a four inch by 1/2 inch slice of skin from my shin.  Blood was EVERYWHERE.  I had no idea that much blood was even IN my body.  Was I going to bleed to death???  After going through an entire roll of toilet paper trying to stop it I finally went and woke my mother.  She was justifiably pissed.  

“I thought I told you you were too young?  I thought I told you that once you start you can never, ever stop!!  What the HELL were you thinking?”

“Mom.  I TOLD you.  I look like a GORILLA.  No one is ever going to want to kiss me with legs like this!”

“Good!!!”

My being accident prone  (a.k.a sometimes stupid and/or clumsy) didn’t stop when I got a little more grown up.  In college I drunkenly ran up the stairs to my apartment wearing my much loved Birkenstock  sandals.  The front of my right shoe hit the front of the stair, but my toes extended out over the stair, then bent all the way back as the shoe dropped and my toes caught the step breaking all the toes on my foot.  Not having my wits about me (a.k.a. being inebriated) and having a party to host, I limped up the stairs, hardly breathing I was in so much pain, drank more gin, walked to the bar a half mile away, drank more gin and woke up with a blackened, swollen foot which no shoe could hold.  As I had no insurance, I did what daddy taught me.  I fixed it all up with duct tape and hoped for a good turn-out in the end.  Hell, it worked for my bike.

I don’t know; these all feel like really great memories.  Still, looking back at all this, maybe I’m right to worry so much about my kid’s safety.  After all, look at the DNA that poor kid is carrying around.

The Plan

 Here's my plan for the day! Mimosa for breakfast. Mimosa for lucnch. Misoma fer dnnier.

Lying and Rod Stewart. That Bastard!

I try not to lie.  I really do.  I had a terrible experience with lying when I was in seventh or eighth grade.  I can’t remember which but I told a ginormous lie and learned my lesson.  At least until a few years later when I lied again and got caught and really learned my lesson.  For good.  Until that time I had an affair.  But that’s a different story because it has sex in it and, oh, wait, so does lie number two.  Anywhoooo, those will have to wait.  Here’s the thing.  As a parent I really hope my kid doesn’t lie to me too much.  I know she will, I just hope I see through most of them.  My parents were shockingly trusting as far as I’m concerned which is why I totally blame them for most of the fallout from all my lies.  If they had nipped those lies in the bud things wouldn’t have gotten so messy.  Actually it was all Rod Stewart’s fault.

See, my best friend’s dad lived in New York City.  Let me say that again.  NEW YORK CITY!!!!!!!!  I grew up in a town so small we got our second stoplight only a few years back.  It was a lovely place to grow up but not only was it small, we were poor.  So when my friend told me I could go with her to New York I freaked out.  My parents freaked out, too.  They hadn’t been to New York City.  They may have been when they were younger...I can’t remember...the thing is we all saw it as a glamourous place filled with gorgeous celebrities and sparkly things.  My parents saved up so I could have a hundred dollars to take with me to spend.  I knew exactly where I wanted to spend it, too - at Saks Fifth Avenue.  A few years earlier one of my rich relatives sent my mom a garbage bag filled with hand me down clothes all for me.  My mother FREAKED out about one item.  It was a plaid blazer.  The ugliest thing I had ever seen.  She held it up to the light and exclaimed, “OH. MY. GOD.  This is BEAUTIFUL!!!”  To which I replied, “Gross.  GROSS.  No way.  I’ll get beat up.”  She goes, “But it’s from Saks!!!!!!!”  She went on to fill me in about how Saks was the best store in the world and that it was where only rich people were allowed to shop.  They didn’t even let in poor people. Ever.

When I got to NY I asked to go to Saks immediately.  I tried to find something I could buy for ten bucks.  I had already spent all my money at the damn airport buying fashion magazines written in French so I would look cool carrying them around.  I couldn’t even find a pair of socks I could afford.  I asked for a bag so I could show it to my mom but was denied.  Bummed, I headed home with nothing from Saks, and not having seen anyone famous in spite of the fact that my parents and I had been convinced the city would be teeming with them.

Once off the plane and back home I was attacked by my parents.
 “Oh my GOD!  Was it awesome?  Who did you see????”
“Um, what?  I went to Saks!”
“Who did you see that was FAMOUS!!??”
This is where it happened.  The big lie.  I suddenly felt like all that money they had saved so I could go to NYC was wasted.  I hadn’t seen anyone.  I had failed.  I couldn’t let them down though so I just blurted out the least famous person I could think of, “Rod Stewart.  I saw him.  I mean I met him.  In a restaurant.”
I figured that would be it.  He was just some old dude I had seen on MTV Classics or something.
“OH MY GOD!!!!!!!!!!!!  OH MY GOD!!!!!!!!!  ROD STEWART!!!!!!!  I LOVE HIM!!!!!!  OH MY GOD!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”  That was my mother freaking out.  FREAKING OUT.

Rambling to my parents I explained that yes, I did get his autograph but that it had been on a napkin that I had then used by accident and thrown away because it was covered in sauce.  Then they let me go to bed.  While I slept they literally called everyone they knew and told them that I had met Rod Stewart and eaten spaghetti with him in NYC.  Then they told my best friend’s dad who called me up because he wanted to hear all about it.  This created a problem for me.

You see, he’s Catholic.  Having grown up not going to church of any kind, I thought of Catholics kind of like I thought of God.  I truly believed that if I lied to a Catholic I would go straight to hell.  So I caved and burst into tears and told him it was all a lie.  He suggested I better fess up and soon as there might still be one or two people my parents hadn’t called yet.  I hung up and sat on the top stair thinking about what to do.  Five minutes later I heard my dad from downstairs, “Get down here!  Hurry up!  Louie from Florida’s on the phone!  I want you to tell him about you and Rod!!  He doesn’t believe me, the asshole.  Hurry up!  It’s long distance!!!!”

If you have read any of my other posts you know my dad isn’t very calm about anything.  ANYTHING.  So, trying not to wet my pants, I called back, rather quietly, “I can’t.  I lied.”
“What???  I can’t hear you!!  Hurry up and get your ass down here!!!!!  It’s LONG DISTANCE!!!!!”
“I CAN’T DAD.  I LIED.”
“What????  WHAT???!!!!   Louie.  I’ll call you back.  Goddamn it!!!!”

I survived the conversation but barely survived the aftermath which involved me calling everyone my parents had told and telling each person it was all a big fat lie.  I still hate Rod Stewart for putting me through all that.  I love telling my daughter that story as a sort of veiled threat.  She always says the same thing, “Wait, who the heck is Rod Stewart?”

Alcohol and the Art of Parenting

“I’m not dirty!!!  God mom, it’s a tan!!!!”

Sure kid.  Sure.

As I’m tying her shoe which she propped on my leg, “I may or may not have stepped in dog crap this morning.”

Nice kid, nice.

I find that these little announcements are better when accompanied by a mimosa.  Then again I think everything is better when accompanied by a mimosa.  MOTHERHOOD is better when accompanied by a mimosa.  It’s just a fact that I have more patience and kindness when I have, er, taken the edge off.  My daughter has reached an age when several new developments in her personality are clashing with several old aspects of my own personality.  First, there is ‘the tone’.  You know the one of which I speak.  We used it when we were, maybe twelve.  “Whaaaat?  God!!!!”  followed by huge, dramatic sigh to which I reply, “Stop with ‘the tone’.  It makes a little switch go off in my head that makes me want to kill you instantly.”  Which she follows with, “Whaaaat?  Whaaaat tone?  God!!!”  There it goes, the switch, CLICK!  It is an audible CLICK. I can actually hear it happen.  This is when it really helps to have a drink in hand.  You know, so I don’t lash out that hand and slap the child closest to me.  Don’t want to spill that mimosa!

My father was better with a drink in hand, too.  It upped the patience level from “I’m going to kill you!” to “If you stay over there and shut the hell up we will get along just fine.”  This rapidly diminished after drink five or so when it would plummet to level “If you use that tone with me just one more goddamned time I am going to put your head through that wall over there, GOT IT?”

Drinking has been woven into the fabric of my entire life.  It was a major factor in my father’s parenting style.  When I was sixteen my dad was grilling steaks on the back porch, beer in hand when I pulled in with my Chevy Citation and informed him that it was overheating.  Again.  He handed me the beer and instructed, “See, you pour a little on, then you take a sip.  Pour, sip, got it?  If you screw it up the steaks are gonna burn so don’t screw it up.”  Got it.  Pour, sip.  Pour, sip.  Sip.  Sip. Pour, sip.  Sip, sip.  Pour, sip.  Wait, was it sip, sip, sip, pour?  Or pour, pour, pour, sip?  Jesus.  Grilling was not as easy as it looked.  Sip.  Sip.  Pour.  Here comes dad.
 “OK, go take it for a spin.  I fixed it.”
“I can’t.”
“Why the hell not?”
“I’m drunk.”
“You’re not drunk.  Jesus Christ.  You’ve been here for five minutes.  Jesus.  You drank a half a beer.  Go try the car out.”
“Dad, I mean it.  I can’t.  I feel drunk.”
“GODDAMN IT.  GET IN THE CAR!!!!!”
Fuck.  Fine.  I will.  I finally get in the car and put the keys in the ignition.  He is standing in front of the car, beer in hand, expectant.  I start the car and immediately back up.  Quickly.  Right into my mother’s Subaru.  Told him I was drunk.  Asshole.
“WHAT THE FUCK??????????!!!!!!!!!!  WHAT THE FUCK???????!!!!!!!!  JESUS FUCKING CHRIST!!!!!!!!!!!!!”
Seeing him all crazy like that, spilling his beer, jumping up and down, I panic.  I throw the car in first and peel out through the yard, then through the neighbors’s yard, ripping up both in my drunken panic to escape.  I drove down the street to the house where I babysat two small children on the weekends.  The father was in the driveway working on his car.  I pulled in, all freaked out, breathing hard.
“Dude, can I hang out for a minute?  If I go home my dad is going to kill me.  I gotta wait about 30 minutes so he can get back to “Grilling Happy Drunk”.

As I write this we are on vacation at the beach.  The beach is one of those places you can be buzzed at eleven in the morning and everyone just high fives you.  You can’t get away with that shit at home in real life.  Thank God we are at the beach though because I swear to freaking God I just heard, “Mom.  MOOOOOOOOOOOOM!!!  God!!!  MOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM.  WhatEVER!!!!!”  Thank God for that mimosa in my hand.  Thank God.

Why I Love Canada or Don't Drink and Blog

OK, here is the thing.  Drinking can be good.  It can give us respite from our daily drudgery.  Plus, it can help us remember or forget, well, lots of stuff.  In my case, I recently had a magical night in Canada.  What started off as an innocent trip to see fireworks ended up as a meeting of Inuit friends, clove cigarrettes (now illegal in the U.S.) and Canadian teens with, well, illicit materials which were of a fan-fucking-tastic nature.  Anywhoooo, after making such friends, enjoying ourselves waaaaaaaay too much, we, my other and I, found ourselves wandering back to our hotel in total disarray.  I laughed so hard I wet my pants.  We may have fell in a river.  I can't believe we weren't arrested.  It was awesome.  Upon arrival we decided we MUST remember the unrememberable and immediately write down our memories of the evening.  Thank god we didn't have internet access of I would have posted this without explanation.  Why the hell I think I can speak, much less type, french, when really screwed up is beyond me.  I admire my trying:

we decided to become fugitives who woned amonkey....we went to dinner at plan bb / side.  we had an amzinf meal of bruchette and beef carpacio.  We shared a dish of Penn avec tomato avec basil et  goat fromage.  t as tres enoyale.   WE decidez a prmenaide a la baeau.  we ent on a grande bteua to vire le fireworks.  during teh firework s wher ere we met an intersint iuit family  we bonded over love of smkoind.  we landed onthe homeladn au canada...we met some amazing kids who really carea bout teh govenemtn.  It was fascinating tom compare cultures.


Here is my sober translation:

We decided to become fugitives who owned a monkey.  We went to dinner at B Side.  We had an amazing meal of brushetta and beef carpaccio.  We shared a dish of penne with tomato and basil and goat cheese.  It was very enjoyable.  We decided to walk to the boat.  We went on a great boat to see the fireworks.  During the fireworks we met an Inuit family.  We bonded over our love of smoking.  We landed on the homeland of Canada.  We met some amazing kids who really care about the government.  It was fascinating to compare cultures.

OOOOOOKKKKKKAAAAY then.

Revenge and Other Joyous Stuff

I dread the day that my daughter decides she hates me.  Like really hates me.  Thinks I am ruining her life.  Thinks I don’t get it, whatever the hell “it” is.  I dread  her wanting to pierce something and me changing my current stance of, “Let her express herself!” to, “What the hell do you mean you want to pierce your tongue?  Why?  Why do you need your tongue pierced?  Are you having sex?  ARE YOU?  Jesus Christ!!!!!”  I dread this.  My own parents used to be cool but they fell off the cool bus a long time ago.  Then it backed up and ran over them again and left them for dead.  Hence their bitterness and anger at all things they used to think were neat.  Like smoking pot, being a liberal, and having long hair.  They used to be so groovy!  “Do you want to try drugs?  If you do, that’s fine, but let us know.  We can do them here where you’ll be in a safe place.”  “You can drink.  But drink here.  Only idiots drink at parties and then get in a car with a bunch of other idiots.”  “Tell us when you want to have sex.  We’ll have you at Planned Parenthood before you can say, “What’s motorboating?”  Of course I knew they were lying, but still... at least they were talking the talk if not walking the walk.  

I rebelled anyway.  One day I just chopped off half my hair.   It was down to the middle of my back when I chose to lop half of it to my chin.  I parted it down the middle first and then, CHOP!  I had seen this really awesome ad in Vogue that showed this girl leaning into a mirror, putting on red lipstick.  I know it was red lipstick even though the ad was black and white.  Anyway half her hair was at her chin and the other half was long.  Oh. My. God.  I had saved up my allowance for Vogue so I could see what people in New York City looked like so that when I grew up and moved there and became famous I would blend.  

My dad LOVED my hair.  He once went a week without speaking to my mother when she got me my first haircut at age three.  My dad routinely pissed me off but I was scared to death of him.  Why the hell I decided that by chopping off half my hair I would be hurting him is beyond me.  It made sense at the time.  And he WAS super pissed.  SUPER PISSED.  He forbade me to touch my hair ever again.  So I did what every kid would do in that situation and chopped the rest off.  

It was really Aimee Mann’s fault.  She was so hot in that video when she was with ‘Til Tuesday.  Remember that video?  The one where she is this cool rocker girl living with this controlling guido guy.  He spends the whole video stomping around in a wife-beater and yelling at her to behave.  Then he takes her to the opera .  She stands up and starts singing and rips off her proper little black hat and her platinum blonde hair goes BOING!!!!!!!! up into punk fabulousness complete with rat tail.  I saw that video at my friend Keith’s house (we didn’t have TV which made music videos seem even more amazing) and I went right home, put all my hair into a tight ponytail on top of my head and chopped the whole ponytail right off.  Right at the rubber band.  The rubber band went BOING!!!!! and flew across the room as it was no longer holding anything and my hair went BOING!!!!!! up into Aimee Mann awesomeness.  When my dad saw it he turned purple, grabbed me by the throat and held me up against a wall with a knife in his hand, “You want to cut your fucking hair???  I’ll cut your goddamn hair!!!!”  And thwack!  He smacked the knife right into the wall above my head.  Holy mother of God!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!  He scared the hell out of me!!!  That was it.  I decided I would kill him.  I had to.  How the hell else was I supposed to live my life the way I was meant to...with Aimee Mann hair?  Duh.  

I thought of  a hundred ways but I really didn’t want to go to juvi.  Plus, my mom really loved him and I loved my mom so, well, you know.  I called my best friend for advice.  She had the best ideas.  She was scary smart.  Scary brilliant and totally evil.  We came up with lots of plans.  All of our plans seemed to involve cuticle scissors.  We used them to snip through almost all the strands of thread holding the buttons on his work shirts.  We left a couple strands so it would take a little time but they would eventually start falling off one after the other.  We poked tiny holes in the band around the waist of his underwear and chopped almost all the way through the elastic so that midway through the day it would rip the rest of the way.  Good times, good times.  

Anyway, the whole point of this is that when my kid gets older and wants Aimee Mann hair I want to be all, “Fuck YES!  And then let’s dye it three different colors!!!”  I hope I remember all this in a few years.  How is it that we *shudder* turn into our parents?  My parents, at least my dad, turned into his parents.  This was a guy who once didn’t speak to his own family for something like three months because one of them said something snotty about his ponytail when he was nineteen.  He may have even refused to go to a funeral for his own grandfather.  Or he went and refused to cut his ponytail.  I don’t remember.  The point is, once, he was cool.  Then he suddenly, he wasn’t.  How does that happen?  OK, I gotta go.  I feel an overwhelming desire to pierce something.  Fuck YES!!!  Then I’m going to dye my hair three different colors.

Beauty and the Breast Beast

So I’ve been thinking about other things I need to teach my daughter prior to her growing up.  Mostly I spend a lot of time, an inordinate amount of time, probably as much time as a guy, thinking about breasts.  Breasts were just so great growing up.  Remember how we looked forward to getting them?  Locking the door to our room and doing those secret “Are You There God It’s Me, Margaret” exercises then immediately checking to see if they were working?  WHY AREN’T THEY WORKING????  I have tried to trace my breast obsession when I was younger to its core and I have a few theories.  One is that I wasn’t breast fed.  Apparently that can really screw you up.  My brother was, though, in an unfair turn of events as far as I am still concerned, and he is obsessed too; so there goes that.  I think the big thing though that undid reality for me as a kid was Playboy.  

My grandpa got Playboy and he proudly kept every single one going back twenty years.  It was quite a hoot, pun intended, to be the first in the family to spy the hidden bunny on the cover.  Everyone in our family read Playboy!  It was hung over chair backs, was slung face-down like a whore on the couch...everybody read it.  Except for me.  I was “too young”.  Puleeeeeazzzzze mom.  Like I haven’t seen boobs before.  Except that when I finally DID sneak it up onto my top bunk in the middle of the day (the best time to sneak books I wasn’t supposed to read, because there is nothing suspicious at all about a kid hiding on a top bunk in the middle of the summer in the middle of the day to read while all her friends are playing outside) I realized, no.  No way in hell had I seen these before.  

Good God, THIS is what I had to look forward to??!!  Oh my GOD!  I couldn’t wait to grow up and look JUST LIKE THAT!  Then when B.M. got her breasts in the middle of fourth grade, long before the rest of us, I was pissed.  I wanted a bra.  I wanted someone to snap MY bra straps.  I wanted someone to tease ME for my obvious awesomeness.  Where the hell were they, those elusive boobs?  I forced my mother to take me to JC Penny’s so I could get a bra.  “Why?  You don’t need a bra.  What in the world are you going to do with it?” my mother asked.  Jesus mom.  I just want the straps to show through my t-shirt so I can at least pretend I’m normal.  God.  “I dunno.  I just want one.”  Huge sighs all around.  She took me.  Literally two hours after we got home my mother totally betrayed me, telling my neighbor who babysat us about our excursion to JC Penney.  I had been busy in my room trying on every shirt I owned to see which one showed the bra straps off the best.  The babysitter laughed out loud, “What the heck are you going to put in it?  Socks?”  Hahahaha!  Fuck you.  “Shut up,” I said.  “No,” she said, “Like, I mean it!  Hahaha!  Do they even come in negative sizes? Hahaha!”  Like, fuck off.  Like, fuck you for your fucking breasts you bitchy bitch.  “It’s a 28.  DOUBLE A.”  So there.  It’s a double A.  A DOUBLE A.  That was way better than an “A” right?  I mean two is more, better than, extra, right?

I am still waiting.  I mean, I have had those moments since then where I now realize how stupid I was.  No, I’m lying.  It wasn’t stupid at all.  When I was pregnant and had my daughter, my tiny breasts ballooned to two globes of fabulousness so impressive you couldn’t pay me to put on a shirt.  EVER.  I breastfed in public constantly just to show them off.  They have since returned to normal much to my dismay.  I have moments, too, when I am supremely grateful for them being so cute AND little, and for retuning to normal.  My fear that they would empty of milk suddenly and then lie there like two tube socks kept me up nights.  Dodged THAT bullet.  Whew.

   

Ok, ok, so on to the big important lesson.  Darling daughter, no one grows up to look like those girls in Playboy, not even those girls in Playboy.  And those goddamn exercises don’t work.  And little breasts are so cute!  They are so great!  “I must!  I must!  I must just love my bust!”  And the second you want to go to Penney’s we are SO THERE.  Not because I want you to EVER grow up.  Ew.  The idea of my daughter with breasts is terrifying.  She is already too powerful in  my opinion.  I will take her because I remember.  Pure and simple.