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Blog July 2008 QUOTE OF THE MONTH: My son got a camouflage pencil as a gift from his teacher. "Isn't this great!" he said, holding it up in the kitchen. "You can't even really see it!' * * * AH, WELL, ANOTHER QUOTE OF THE MONTH "That reminds me of my amnesia." -- my husband said, pretty randomly. * * * I'M RAISING A ... WHAT? One of my greatest fears: My children becoming memoirists. I'm thinking of founding a national organization: M.A.M. -- Mothers Against Memoir. Email me to join. * * * THE GOOD NEUROTIC Elective Surgery. Two worlds that any self-respecting hypochondriac would never put together. * * * ON CUPID Cupid -- I'm Against the Whole Idea. Why would anyone arm a fat baby -- with poisonous arrows or anything really ... Babies lack basic eye-hand coordination. They're disproportionately bigheaded and therefore wobbly and probably poor at aiming. They don't have the most sound judgment. In fact, they can be downright irrational. I don't know what the NRA says about this. But I'm against giving babies weapons -- holiday or not. * * * MY YOUTH For a few years in my early twenties, bars became my homeland. I imprinted on them the way an Englishman does the White Cliffs of Dover. The way my father did on poor air quality from coal mining. And now when I walk past some bar being aired out midmorning, and I smell the wafting doobage and the cacked beer being sprayed off the steaming sidewalk, I get all misty-eyed. Oh, my lost youth! How I miss thee! * * * ON NATURE When I want to commune with nature, I stand on a screened-in porch and take deep breaths. * * * June 2008 Good-bye Cyndi! Today I had to officially erase Cyndi Lauper from the pop-culture reference portion of my brain. It's just made it too easy to pinpoint the year I graduated from high school. I had to rip her out quickly so that it wouldn't be painful. But now it's done. I can still vaguely recall the name -- but I can't start talking lyrics and making Mad About You trivia references. No. The end. There will be harder calls to make in the future. Much harder than Cyndi Lauper. Baby steps, I tell myself. Baby steps. * * * Happy Anniversary -- I WIN! I've been married forever. It was a neanderthal wedding. Some of the guests still had gills. And my husband and I just hit (crashed into ) some big anniversary. I mean no more gifts of like paper or silly putty or aluminum foil. No. We're onto serious weighty materials which I cannot disclose -- because it would date me (see Cyndi Lauper above). But we didn't give into marketing! We celebrated as we always do: the contest. Whoever remembers it's our anniversary and says it first wins. This means that usually my mother wins. She always remembers and she usually calls and then I usually win because I usually pick up the phone first. But she was rebounding from a bug, and so she was delayed. This left me on my own. I remembered it was our anniversary when the dogs were barking and the pest control guy had just shown up. (I don't want to do the psychological digging to figure out the trigger here.) I had a phoner schedule for this exact moment. The phone was going to ring any second. I yelled for a kid -- any kid. One came running. (This is why people should have kids, you know. More on this later...) I said, "Go tell your father these exact words: "Mom says, 'Happy Anniversary. And she wins!" The kid did so. Basically, I kid-ed it in. My husband later tried to dispute my win, claiming that it had to be said in person, with some measure of love. I disagreed. "That's not the way we've ever played it in the past." He acquiesced, and that's the true measure of love -- right there. Letting me win. And I felt a gush of love for him. * * * Reason #397 for having children: In case you can't find the remonte. * * * Have you picked up the JUNE Issue of REAL SIMPLE? If so, check out page 310 for a shout out to My Husband's Sweethearts -- and read "A Day In My Life: The Scented Candle Version." It stinks -- in a way that's oh-so-familiar! * * * Time Flies and All Those Various Cliches: Can I just say that it's sometimes hard for me to figure out what YEAR it is? I've started dating my checks: Early Part of the 21st Century. That's just as close as I can get, and if the banks want to get prissy on me, then fine! Have at it! I don't have time to figure out the year, let alone month, let alone day. And I'm happy to explain how just yesterday my daughter poured orange juice into the answering machine because it sounded thirsty and now owns an IPod and cell phone and wants me to buy her a kiln. And toddlers don't want kilns -- so what I'm saying is she's all grown up and that's disorienting and time flies and all of those cliches are cliches for a reason and and ... it's hard. * * * Quote of the Month: "I think the coffee maker just said the F-word!" -- my 8-year-old son * * * Find of the Month: While digging through old backpacks, my husband found a dead bird in an old tennis can. Now, my kids can be little scientists and hoarders, but this is a bad combination at times. We looked for one of them to fess up and it was the eight-year-old. We explained why messing with dead birds is a bad idea, why you shouldn't shove them in tennis cans -- even if you want to observe (good vocabulary word!) a dead bird. "You gotta admit, it was pretty well preserved!" my 13-year-old daughter said to me later. "And he's quite an interesting kid." * * * How to Get New Shoes: We're going to la France for five weeks, all four of my kids in tow. And my husband told me today that he wants to do a dry-run packing. "Are you kidding me? You know, you'll be lucky if I get around to a real wet-run packing." I'm a known bad-packer. It's not unusual for us to get somewhere and I say, "Can we stop off at a mall if you see one? I think I forgot to pack shoes." (Maybe this is just a subconscious ploy to get more shoes, but it's grandly inconvenient and annoys everyone -- including myself. But I am myself and so what can I do?) Still, he has a point. Since we're going to be driving around all over the place and hitting hotels and family and friends before we get in the actual plane even, he's creating one cross-over suitcase -- in which all six of us will have three outfits each. This is to avoid the constant suitcase explosions that happen every time we take our suitcases out of the car and into a hotel room or someone's house. Only ONE suitcase will explode -- not six. And then he wants the kids to pack a main suitcase that they won't touch until we get to the place we're renting in France. This sounds brilliant and crazy -- and I'm not saying it won't work. I'm just saying that: a. the kids will invariably want -- and desperately so -- what's in their no-touch suitcases. And b. I happen to know they sell shoes (and clothing and accessories) in Paris -- so my packing will be strategically spotty. We are who we are. May 2008 In MY HUSBAND'S SWEETHEARTS, Lucy's mother is full of little gems of maternal advice. Things like: * "You should marry your first husband for his genes; the second for his money; the third (or fourth or so) for love." * "Never let thine ass give into gravity." * "When dealing with a belligerent hairstylist, you must embrace your inner bitch." * "...I like feminism except, of course, when it asks me not to wear a support bra." * "We love who we love -- even when we hate them. And if you've cruised the Chapter Headings in MY HUSBAND'S SWEETHEARTS -- otherwise known as: Sayings Your Mother Never Cross-stitched Into a Pillow -- you may have run across: * "Happy strangers can bring out the worst in anyone." * "Your mother is a woman you don't have to become." * "You can't always eat your way out of a bad decision, but if you want to try, begin with chocolate." * "A family can be tied together by an unlikely series of knots." I was thinking that I should try to add to this collection. And so, here and there, I will blog either riffing off of one of these topics or adding to them. I won't blog religiously or even regularly or even semi-regularly. I know myself. If I could do things religiously and regularly or even semi-regularly I'd be the proud owner of a pair of well-toned thighs. The bad news is: I am not the proud owner of a pair of well-toned thighs. The good news is: I no longer care. (Ever since well-toned thighs slipped to 1,842 on my list of daily priorities, I've led a happier life.) And so my (sporadic) blog will be punctuated with extra little gems of the things-your-mother-never-cross-stitched- into-a-pillow variety. And that brings me to today's gem (drum roll): Ever since well-toned thighs slipped to 1,842 on my list of daily priorities, I've led a happier life. Copyright Bridget Asher 2008 |
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