Something New (9781101612262) Page 12

  I’ll take the filet mignon cheesecake anytime.

  Monday hits me with hurricane force. I am a great believer in three-day weekends because frankly, two days is not enough. I know that sounds funny coming from someone who doesn’t have a job. But when it comes to raising kids, Saturdays and Sundays are those blissful days when you don’t have to get up at five just to make sure your children are clean and fed and combed and brushed and appropriately clothed and have all their belongings, including homework and class projects and items for show-and-tell (which for some reason is now called “share”). Not that I ever truly sleep in on the weekends, but I am able to lie in bed until seven with impunity, knowing that if my children want breakfast before I grace the kitchen with my presence, they can get it themselves. Since it takes a good forty-eight hours to get into a groove doing anything, I think an extra weekend day would be nice, just to be able to fully relax into laziness. But no, Monday comes all too soon and jerks us back to reality.

  It is on this Monday morning that Matthew suffers one of the worst meltdowns I have witnessed to date. And it is all because I was not able to mend his favorite shirt and, through a colossal lapse in judgment, deposited it into the trash barrel, which was collected by the smoke-spewing, ear-shattering sanitation truck only moments ago. It is safe to say that as I watch Matthew scream and pace, his scrawny bare chest heaving, clawing at the alternate shirt I provided until I fear he might rip it to shreds, his face a scarlet mask of fury, I consider that a trip to a family therapist might be in order. Or a session with Dr. Phil, which might not do Matthew any good, but would elevate me to TV personality. Maybe I could just casually mention my blog on the air.

  “How could you throw it away?” he bellows, snot streaming from his nostrils like that girl from The Blair Witch Project. “That shirt was…was…was…”

  I am afraid he is going to say my best friend. I have the urge to put my arms around him and hold him close to me, because whatever the deep-seated reason for this outburst, Matthew is truly feeling pain, and my instincts as a mother far overshadow my incredulity that the loss of a fucking T-shirt can inspire such a cataclysm. However, his rage is currently directed at me and I am aware that he would welcome a hug from me about as much as he might open his arms to a runaway chain saw.

  “…my favorite!” he cries.

  The shirt in question was a hand-me-down from my sister’s son Luke, now eleven, who Matthew believes saved his life at the beach last summer when the family came for a visit. Luke was learning to boogie-board, and Matthew was showing off his mediocre skills when his foot got looped around the leash of his own board. Luke, sensing my son’s distress, leaped into the foaming surf and hauled Matthew out of harm’s way before a two-foot wave crashed with ho-hum force against the sand. The fact that Matthew had been in water only ten inches deep escaped his notice, and for the rest of the trip, he followed Luke around like a puppy, waiting on him hand and foot until even Luke grew tired of the attention. But my nephew was gracious enough, on his departure, to award Matthew with a long-sleeved, navy blue, limited-edition cotton shirt with the legend Surf or Die emblazoned across the front, which he had finally outgrown due to a sudden preteen growth spurt.

  Matthew has worn that shirt twice a week ever since, regardless of its state of cleanliness or lack thereof. When the small hole finally appeared in the armpit, he had to relinquish it to me for healing and safekeeping. And now he is looking at me like I am a traitor, a heretic, an evildoer in the worst George W. sense of the word. He is looking at me as though I’d stuffed his cousin Luke into the garbage bin.

  “This is the worst thing that’s ever happened to me,” he proclaims tearfully.

  “Jeez,” says Connor, taking his seat at the kitchen table and tucking into the nutritious meal of eggs, toast, and melon that I have prepared for him. “Take a chill pill, why don’t you.”

  Matthew wheels around and glares at Connor. “Shut up, Connor!” he snaps.

  “Hey!” I yell. “Watch your mouth, Matthew!”

  “Or what?” he shoots back. “You’ll throw away my favorite sweatshirt and my favorite pants and my sneaks, too?”

  I feel a headache coming on.

  “Sit down and eat your breakfast, Matthew,” I say through clenched teeth

  “I will NOT!” he screams. “I want my shirt. I want my Surf or Die shirt! I am not going to school without it!”

  Just then, Jessie ambles into the kitchen and sits at her place next to Connor. She takes one look at the dish of scrambled eggs and shrieks.

  “I told you I am a vegan!”

  Did I say headache? No. I feel an aneurysm coming on.

  Connor grins and holds his hand up in front of his face, his fingers splayed apart down the middle. “Live long and proper, dude,” he says.

  “It’s prosper, prosper, prosper!” Matthew corrects him urgently. “Live long and prosper, you idiot!”

  “Matthew!”

  “Whatever,” Connor replies.

  “It’s vegan, not Vulcan,” Jessie explains.

  “Whatever,” Connor repeats, taking this crazy morning in stride.

  “Matthew,” I say again, injecting an icy calm into my voice, “I don’t give a crap if you go to school shirtless, but you will sit down and eat your breakfast right now or suffer the consequences.”

  “He has to wear a shirt, Mom,” Connor says around a bite of eggs. “No shirt, no shoes, no education.” He winks at me and I thank God at that instant that I have one halfway normal child with a good sense of humor.

  Matthew has not moved an inch. He fixes me with a laserlike glare reminiscent of that Damien freak in the Omen movies. You know, the glare the kid shoots at the unlucky bastard who is about to get decapitated by a renegade sheet of window glass? That’s the one.

  “I will never forgive you for this,” he says in a low guttural voice that I don’t recognize.

  “I have apologized, Matthew. If you want, I will apologize again. But your shirt is gone, and there’s nothing I can do about it.” Except haul my ass to the dump and forage through a metric ton of shit to try to find it.

  “I hate you!” are his final words as he races out of the kitchen and up the stairs. I hear the door of his room slam shut. Then I watch as my daughter picks up her eggs, stands, saunters over to the sink, opens the cupboard underneath, and chucks the eggs into the trash can, plate and all.

  It’s definitely time for a faux bowel movement.

  Fourth Post: March 19, 2012

  SomethingNewAt42

  RITALIN FOR DUMMIES

  Have you ever looked at your kids and wondered, “Where the fuck did you come from?” I apologize for my language, but seriously. You grow these beautiful creatures in your belly, you nurture them and nurse them on your breast, you help them take their first steps, and you’re filled with pride by every little accomplishment they make. And then one day you look at them and realize that the amazing little beings you’ve created have been body-snatched by a tribe of total shitheads.

  I have heard the debate about medicating kids, that parents are too quick to introduce Ritalin to their children’s brains. But, I ask you, is it such a sin to want even-keeled, socially hospitable, well-mannered offspring? And the truth is, sometimes, for a parent, more specifically, a mom, it’s a “lesser of two evils” choice. Like, if I don’t medicate Junior, I’ll have to make a reservation on the Xanax express myself. And what’s the harm in insuring that Junior’s first-grade teacher, Mrs. Finklebaum, doesn’t get so overwrought by the bipolar behavior of her students that she shows up for class one morning packing a bazooka? Wouldn’t that be worse than a wee bit of juvenile pharmaceutical assistance?

  My nameless relative is so passionate on the subject of kiddie Prozac that I have told her she ought to run for Congress and use that as her platform. She finds it reprehensible that any parent would voluntarily monkey with her child’s synapses or neurons or gray matter, or whatever. She thinks that it’s the parents’ res
ponsibility to relate to and communicate with their children more effectively and that we wouldn’t need any f-u-c-k-i-n-g drugs if there were better parents in this world instead of lazy, disinterested, jack-a-s-s-e-s too wrapped up in themselves to invest the time and energy it takes to raise happy, well-adjusted, confident members of society. Of course, she has the advantage of having three perfect children who are smart, excel at everything, and have self-confidence up the ying-yang.

  I myself used to be on the fence about this most heated subject. That was until one of my children turned into a vegan (see post #3) and another one of my children turned into a shirtless spawn of Satan. Yes, folks, after the past two mornings, I have come to think that crushing up an antidepressant and sprinkling it over my kids’ Cheerios like sugar might be just the thing.

  And if you will excuse me now, it is way past medication time for me!

  By Tuesday, two of my children are not speaking to me: Matthew, because I have not made his Surf or Die shirt magically reappear, and Jessie because I had the temerity to serve hamburgers for dinner the night before.

  “You sort of had it coming,” Jill tells me, sipping at her coffee and avoiding my eyes. She has applied a soft, subtle pink shade to her lips, which are uncharacteristically pursed, thereby giving her pretty face a decidedly perturbed vibe.

  “Excuse me?” My mug stops halfway to my own lips and I gape at her, stupefied. “How on earth did I ‘have it coming’?” I smack my mug on the counter, my coffee as yet undrunk. Droplets splash over the rim of the mug and land on Jill’s pristine counter. She quickly grabs a towel from the oven handle, snapping it angrily for effect, and urgently wipes the drops away as if the coffee is molecular acid about to eat through her turquoise-and-gold-flecked charcoal granite. I watch her silently for a moment, then shake my head. “I can’t believe you’re on their side.”

  “I’m not on anyone’s side,” she retorts, tossing the towel into the well-hidden plastic receptacle for kitchen laundry under the sink.

  “Bullshit. You’re supposed to be on my side. Automatically.”

  “Look, if Jessie wants to be a vegan—”

  “She’s eight!” I hear my voice rise.

  “Girls grow up fast these days,” Jill says evenly, regaining her practiced composure as an antithesis to my growing ire.

  “Since when did you become the authority on girls, Jill? You have three sons!”

  “And Matthew, poor guy. Did you ever think maybe he didn’t care about a silly little hole in his shirt?”

  “This coming from the woman who throws away clothes if they have a thread unraveling from the hem.” It’s true. The three Ds never leave the house looking anything less than photo-shoot ready.

  “I think you’re being selfish, Ellen. They’re kids, not robots. You cannot bend them to your will.”

  This platitude from my cousin stops me cold. I can’t remember anyone in my life ever having called me selfish, and it certainly doesn’t evoke a pleasant feeling now. My cheeks burn as I sift through the events of the past two days for instances where I was selfish. I can point to several bouts of foolishness, the odd insensitivity, and maybe a couple of moments of outright irrationality. But I honestly don’t see how I have been selfish. And I do not want to bend my children to my will. Okay, maybe a little, but what parent doesn’t want that? Still, not once have I expected them to be anything other than who they are.

  “I do not want to bend them to my will,” I say, trying not to sound defensive. “I just want my daughter to eat a hot dog once in a while and my son not to have a nervous breakdown over a T-shirt. If that’s selfish, then guilty as charged.”

  Jill says nothing. She still does not meet my eyes. After years of familial friendship with this woman, I can read her pretty well. “What’s wrong?” I ask.

  She shrugs, sighs, then shrugs again for good measure.

  “C’mon, Jill,” I press. “Spill it.”

  She is silent for a good thirty seconds. “Your blog’s doing pretty well, huh?”

  Twelve thousand hits as of this morning. I have not yet written today’s post, having decided to put it off until after I’d received a little tea and sympathy from my cousin, which turned out to be coffee and lambasting.

  “It’s doing great, yeah. So? What’s up with you? Why are you mad at me?”

  “I’m not,” she replies, but the way she says it, she might as well have said, Die, bitch. Well, she would have spelled it out, of course.

  “Out of the blue you’re defending my kids and calling me selfish. What gives?”

  Another thirty seconds. Finally, she gives.

  “My kids are not perfect, you know.”

  Oh, shit.

  “They have problems, too. And I am not some whack job who pickets the school with anti-Ritalin signs and makes tofu cheesecake. Your ‘nameless relative.’ You make me sound like a total d-a-m-n weirdo.”

  I try to decide how best to handle this situation. My track record with my loved ones over the past few days is nothing to write home about, unless “home” is Dear Abby. Jill is my cousin and my best friend and I love her with all my heart, but she can be way too sensitive and she often makes too much out of things that others might find inconsequential. To illustrate this in more detail, I would like to point out that several years ago, between her birthday and Christmas, Jill received four copies of Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff from various friends and relatives. (All four books are on the bookshelf in her guest room, collecting dust, and, as yet, unread.)

  Still, I admit I have not stepped back and considered how my irreverent, and sometimes less than flattering, words might affect her. Each time I sit down to post, I find myself settling into a fugue state, and I can hardly remember the actual writing of my blog. It’s not unlike being high. The fact that each post has struck me as amusing is a stroke of good fortune, the fates smiling on me, because it’s almost as though someone else is at the computer. And my “nameless relative” has become a shtick, a tool, an endearing gimmick that creates continuity with each post. But apparently, the nameless relative is none too happy about it.

  I rub my face with my hands and take a deep breath.

  “I’m sorry, Jill,” I say, because I am, and also because I know she wants to hear it. An apology cements her importance in the world, and I’m all for bolstering one’s self-esteem. (I know for a fact her husband has never apologized in the entirety of their marriage.) “It’s just a blog,” I continue through her silence. “You know? The one you pushed me to write?” I give her a pointed look, willing her green eyes to meet mine. “It’s supposed to be interesting, informative, and funny.”

  One side of her mouth curls up as she finally looks at me. “Well, one out of three isn’t bad.”

  “Exactly!” I agree enthusiastically. “My humor is all I have going for me. You know how much I love you and your kids. And I would never want to hurt you intentionally.”

  “I know,” she says, cracking her first smile of the morning. “I’m overreacting, aren’t I?”

  For a split second, I flash back to the gawky teenager that Jill once was: too skinny, a mouthful of braces, and freckles in the era before they were considered fetching. The boy I liked had called me lard-ass, which was something he’d probably overheard his father call his mother, because, forgive me, but Mrs. Heddy Champlain’s rear end was the size of a dirigible. Jill had immediately come to my defense, telling Sonny Champlain that he better get some glasses, because my derriere was perfect, thank you very much, and then she proceeded to sock him in the stomach.

  “You’re not overreacting,” I say. Not much, anyway. “And if you want me to leave you out of the rest of them, I will.”

  She ruminates for a moment, tapping her nails against the counter in a staccato rhythm. “It is anonymous, right? No one knows it’s me.”

  “And no one will,” I assure her.

  “Until you win. Then everyone will know it’s me, but it’ll be great because I’ll be the ‘namel
ess relative’ of a star.”

  Fifth Post: March 20, 2012

  SomethingNewAt42

  A MOMENT’S REPRIEVE

  Dear blog reader, you may have come to expect from me a certain irreverence and a modicum of sarcasm, but I would like to take a moment to ditch the sarcasm, stretch my sincerity muscles, and discuss friendship.

  Friendship is a privilege, not a God-given right. It is a precious flower to be nurtured, not an avocado that can be abandoned in the produce drawer of the fridge, forgotten until its already wrinkled skin has fossilized and its flesh has turned grayish brown. It is a blessed gift meant to be placed on an altar and worshipped, not shoved in the closet on a dusty shelf next to those old cassette tapes that you just can’t seem to part with even though you no longer own a cassette player.

  That “nameless relative” of whom I have spoken in my past four posts is actually more than a relative. She is a friend. She is the kind of friend any of you would be thankful to have, one who sticks up for you even when you are behaving like a horse’s ass. The kind of friend who tells you you look great in Lycra even when you both know you should have given it up twenty years ago. The kind of friend who hates your husband when you do and loves him when he treats you right and is deeply offended when anyone makes any untoward comments about your commitment to the PTA even though you know that she knows that you missed the last charity fundraiser because your TiVo was broken and you just couldn’t miss the Lost series finale.

  My nameless relative would walk through fire for me. And she’d do it in four-inch heels and look fabulous. So whatever comments I make about her, or stories I tell about her for the sake of humor, I want you to know that she is just about the best thing since Motrin, and like Motrin, I couldn’t live without her.