peevish mama

Today someone left a note on my car with this question scrawled in giant irate letters on a torn piece of paper towel. I’d like to take a moment to answer, you asshole with the delicate pink floral paper towel and black ball point pen, because it’s a valid question.

The answer is: very stupid.

I parked in a spot that basically blocked the end of the row of cars at our club. There’s currently a giant hill of sand being used for the golf course renovation and today, in my hurry, I parked right next to it. It was a bonehead move to be sure, but there were absolutely no other spaces and I was frantic to catch my kids’ last races.  I was only going to be ten or fifteen minutes so I went for it. I had this vague notion that I would have to back out the whole row to exit, but somehow, in my rush, the thought failed to evolve to completion: everyone else will have to back out too.

I’m not going to lie. The note bummed me out. It felt so rude, so aggressive, so underhanded, so unnecessary. I mean, let’s be real. Is it really that hard to back out? Is it really worth getting all pissed off and scrounging around your car for paper and a pen? Is it really worth it? My sense is no, but it got me to thinking about the difference between being stupid as an immutable quality (the note writer’s implication) and doing something stupid. What made me frown and crumple up the note with an unpleasant rush of adrenaline was the fact that I wasn’t getting the benefit of the doubt. Yes, I did something stupid. I do stupid stuff all the time. I just dropped my iPhone in the pool the other day. My sunroof is probably open right now and it’s raining. But I am not stupid.

If I were to be truthful, though, how often do I give others the benefit of the doubt? Do I draw this distinction when I see a giant white SUV taking up two parking spaces at Lunds? Do I think about possible mitigating factors (explosive diarrea, late for a job interview, wasp in the car)? No, I roll my eyes, I sigh, I feel superior, I might even mutter the word stupid along with some choice adjectives. I am just as impatient with other people’s stupidity as today’s scribe was with mine.

The note today, while surprisingly dickish in this land of stoic vikings, was a good reminder that we should all chill out and give each other a break. Maybe we should all be a little more patient with each other’s stupid moves, because sooner or later, we’re going to do something stupid too.

Having said that, I feel a little better now. But not better enough, so I’d simply like to add FUCK YOU, YOU PASSIVE AGGRESSIVE PIECE OF SHIT! TAKE THAT ROLL OF PAPER TOWEL AND SHOVE IT UP YOUR ASS, YOU ANGRY LITTLE BITCH*!

Sigh. Much better.

*I don’t know if it was a woman or a man, so either way, this works. Sadly, I have a hunch it was a woman based on the availability of the paper towel and the penmanship. It just chaps my ass even more that a mama would dis another mama like that. You put a note like that on a minivan that looks like mine, and there be no doubt you be dissin’ a mama.

In the last twenty or so hours:

I find my thoughts hovering around my friend, Circus Lady, who is grieving for her dad. I made her soup. What else can I do?

I hear of Alexander McQueen’s death. A fashion designer I have only admired from afar, way out of my reach in every way, but he was only 40.

I spend the darkest hours of the night awake, reading by the light of my phone. The last time I checked the time it was nearly four o’clock a.m.

My youngest daughter pushes me to the brink, no, beyond the brink on the way to school. I yell and say things I regret. I am left feeling like a rung out dishrag, ashamed at myself for my rage and lack of self control.

My cleaning lady tells me she’s pregnant. She is one day older than me and is giddy and scared as any woman pushing forty would be at such unexpected news. It’s all right there, written on her face. I notice we are both standing with our hands clasped in front of our hearts. A gesture of joy? Surprise? Supplication?

I try and fail to find a red fez for Supergirl and I am disproportionately sad about it.

I am too tired for this day.

I did it again. I frickin’ frackin’ did it again. I wedged my minivan in a mesa of snow right in my Goddamn driveway. Does this sound vaguely familiar? Hmmm? That would be because I have done this before. TWICE. You might have read about it here. But this time, I am really truly disgusted with myself. This time, I am really truly having serious doubts about my intelligence level. Serious, serious, doubts.

We’ve gotten a bit of snow over the last few days. Nothing crazy. Yesterday the plows went through, leaving a pile of snow about two feet wide and one foot high across the driveway. As I approached, I somehow forgot that my minivan is basically the basset hound of cars, and when it snows it’s like a basset hound on roller skates. It’s amazing how many thoughts can flash through one’s mind in the split second it takes to make a really bad decision. So many thoughts, so little help: I never got stuck in the driveway last winter, surely I won’t get stuck now. Actually, better not try this, I might get stuck. But the snow is super powdery. I’ll bust right through like a car commercial. Or maybe I should park in the street. I might get stuck. But what a pain to carry the groceries an extra thirty feet. I’m going for it.

YEEEEEE!!!!! HAAAAAAAA!!!!!!

. . .

FUUUUUUUUCK MEEEEEEEE!!!!

What made me think I could Dukes of Hazzard it across that snow, I have no idea. But I gunned it. All the better to lodge my van in real good. Like Boss Hogg’s fat knuckles stuck in an olive jar. And so there I was. Stuck. Again. I took Devil Baby inside, set her up with some cartoons and came back out cursing a blue streak with a hockey stick in one hand and a shovel in the other. I peered under the car and it was as I suspected. I had no choice but to loosen and push away the snow trapping my chassis. And there’s that word again. Chassis. I haven’t even thought of the word since the last time my chassis was impaled on an iceberg in front of Blooma Yoga. Incidentally, a hockey stick is the tool of choice for this particular type of excavation. A shovel is useless for getting under the car. Being an experienced chassis dislodger, I pulled out a floor mat so my knees wouldn’t freeze, but I eventually ended up completely prostrate, digging on my stomach, and finally my back. I dug for a good hour, making my way around the car, shedding layers and huffing and puffing as I went. My arms felt like feeble noodles and I was sweating buckets when I collapsed onto my back for a moment’s rest, squinting through my sunglasses at the clear blue sky. It was warm and quiet – I could almost make myself believe I was lying on a beach in Florida, except that, in actuality, I was lying in the street in the sludge next to my minivan in Minnesota. Fuuuuuuck, I wailed, cursing myself for the thousandth time. Fuuuuuuuuck! I heard a polite throat clearing and a little Are you stuck? I leapt up to see an older couple standing on the sidewalk with their dog. I dusted the snow off my shoulders, put on my best neighborly smile and assured them that I would be ok. What the hell were they going to do, anyway? At that moment Big Red (she is not big, but her son calls her Big Red, so who am I to pass up such a great nickname?) ran out of her house. She made the Popeye arms at me and insisted on giving me a push, so I relented and got in the van, careful to put it in reverse. And wouldn’t you know it, Big Red and the old man got me out. Goddamn if they didn’t get me out.

OK, that’s possibly a little misleading. Possibly a little very misleading. I’m no Kenny Rodgers, if you know what I mean. There haven’t been that many who have travelled in and out my door, if you know what I mean. I’ve loved many boys (and still do), but I haven’t luuuuved many boys, if you know what I mean. Cough. Cough. Good Catholic girl, etcetera, etcetera. And yet, and yet . . .

A couple weeks ago, I went out and kicked up a little dust with my girls on a Thursday night and long story short, I ended up calling some old buddies at three o’clock in the morning. You know, just to shoot the shit. First I called The Fox, then I called Devious Knickers and then I called Tartare. By some miracle, none of them picked up, and I left them each long and ludicrous voicemails. I talked and talked and talked until each of their respective phones cut me off. What can I say? Doctor Dash was working an overnight shift and I was bouncing around the house, snarfing Dutch Crunch Mesquite BBQ Chips and feeling chatty. I was in a state of mind that called to mind my old good time friends. I could have kept dialing, but after Tartare a seed of good sense took root and I switched gears and listened to some loud music with my cushy head phones. Like I said, I was bouncin’.

The next morning, over a woozy and funny breakfast with some of the aforementioned crazy girls, I happened to mention that I had called my buds in the wee hours and Nanook’s eyes bugged out at me just a little: You went home and drunk dialed two GUYS? There was no judgment in her voice – just surprise. It hadn’t even occurred to me that my calls might be deemed inappropriate by oh, I don’t know, like, the whole world.

I started pondering, because that’s what I do. Was it inappropriate for me, a married lady, to call two married guys at three a.m? (By the way, Doctor Dash is also friends with them – he has a separate and distinct but equally as important friendship as mine – but I knew them first – they are mine). What’s the litmus test for inappropriateness? What my mother would think? What their wives would think? The purity of my intentions? What The Fox and Devious Knickers think? What Doctor Dash thinks? What is the test?

And more importantly, WHY DOES THERE HAVE TO BE A TEST? They are my friends. Some of the most hilarious, trippy adventures of my life have happened to me with one or both of them at my side. London, Chicago, Southbend, Detroit, New York, Seattle, Key West and God knows where else. We’ve wandered and imbibed and woven miles of floating tapestries with our serpentine conversations, our peculiar observations and our extravagant laughter.

They are two of my favorite people in the world. They just happen to be men.

By mid morning, I had heard back from both of them. The Fox and I chatted on the phone and Devious Knickers and I exchanged a flurry of emails. They were amused by my ramblings, sounded happy to hear from me, if a little surprised at the late hour. It was great to catch up.

Since he is ever willing to indulge me in my musings, to delve into the shadowy crevices of human nature, to poke holes in the smooth fabric of convention and peek his curious little eyeball through, I wrote to Devious Knickers about the issue I’d been noodling since breakfast – why did I feel like, suddenly, the friendship that I had with them was no longer legitimate? No longer sanctioned. Devious Knickers responded: “And to get back to the issue of calling boys that aren’t your husband at 3:30 a.m, yes, you are right that there aren’t too many people who would understand what was at play there.” But isn’t it enough that we all knew what was at play there? I knew I wasn’t being shady and he knew I wasn’t being shady, so isn’t it ipso facto NOT shady?

And to take it one step further, aren’t we allowed to do what we used to do ever again? Eat, drink and smoke everything in sight and go on a crazy adventure in some strange place? There are socially acceptable reasons to see my college girls, but them? It seems like it just can’t happen anymore – not without chaperones. They are lost to me and I to them. We joked of going to Cairo. Exotic cafes with hookahs and belly dancers, delicious lemony mezze, dusty labyrinthian streets, bustling markets with shady characters beckoning and yelling over tables of gold, silk, and fruit. Oh, to go to Cairo!

And to be fair, I got to marry one of my adventure boys. We do go on adventures – I have that in my life, but I still miss those boys, those adventures, that freedom, that youth.

Doctor Dash, is an eminently fair guy, who understands my friendships and loyalties, the things that make me happy. He knows how I am about my guy friends because he was (and is) one of my guy friends. And he agrees that there is a double standard for old friendships based on gender. He agrees that it’s unfair. He agrees that it doesn’t make sense. But the standard is there nevertheless. We talked about the fact that he could jet off to meet up with them at any time, no questions asked. On the one hand I’d be happy that the boys I love are together, reenforcing and tending to old and valuable friendships. On the other hand, I would be bereft. I would feel so left out. So sad to be missing the fun.

To my surprise, he said: You could go to Cairo, but only if both of them went. Aha! Oho! I’ll take that! He is nothing if not fair, my Doctor Dash. Fox? Devious Knickers? What do you say? Cairo? Hulloooo? Hulloooloooloooo???

Just mulling anyway.

Just mulling – missing a vanished piece – wondering if it’s vanished forever.

There have been some recent events, which I’m not at liberty to discuss, that have gotten me thinking long and hard about females, friendships and feelings. For better or worse, I’m not sure if I’ve ever given more than a glancing thought to these issues. I pride myself on my relatively drama free life. I love the ease of all my guy friendships and my low-maintenance girl friendships. The last fight I was in was in seventh grade when my best friend Sweet Sue and I broke up for a whole summer. I can’t even remember why. I do, however, remember seeing her on the first day of eighth grade in Mrs. Strong’s classroom and just adoring her violently Sun-Inned hair and realizing, in a rush, how much I had missed her. We made up. Just like that. Then once in college I got really mad when my friend La Peruanita took my big red boxy sweatshirt, which if I recall correctly, wasn’t even my sweatshirt and might actually have been her sweatshirt, but I had kind of adopted it and it was a crucial piece of my wardrobe. She heard about my ire through the grapevine and the wretched thing reappeared in my milk crate in due course. Crisis averted, I suppose.

When I wrote about the Babe-o-matics recently, it occurred to me that it was remarkable that six girl/women had made it four years with zero drama. But in retrospect I wonder if that was really the case. One of the original Babe-o-matics chose to cut ties with us a few years after we graduated. The rest of us have tried to work through the why’s of it, with little success. There is never a time that we get together that she doesn’t come up. It might be something that has to do with her more than us. Or maybe, something did happen and we missed it.

I have another more recent friend who would say time and time again – she doesn’t like me, or that one’s hot and cold with me, or she has it in for me, or I never know where I stand with that one. And I would listen with a mixture of fascination (because what’s more fascinating than someone else’s drama?) and scepticism. I find her loveable and thus constantly felt like Jerry Seinfeld’s mother shrieking in my best Jewish old lady voice How could anyone not like you?  And every once in a while I’d feel a little frightened by it – like is this ever going to trickle over to me? Because I have a horror of this kind of thing. I don’t think I could go through even one day suspecting that someone I deal with on a frequent basis has a beef with me. It would drive me absolutely bananas. And so I avoid the whole kit and kaboodle.

No drama for this mama.

But I wonder if my drama free life is really as drama free as I think it is. The recent episode that got me thinking about this made me realize that I sort of stomp through life in big boots and maybe I need to be more careful. The whole thing took me by surprise and I realized that I’m just not tuned into this kind of thing, at all. And because these people are special to me, I felt bad about it, even though I wasn’t directly involved in it. As a rule I don’t feel a lot of angst or insecurity or competitiveness with other women and I choose to assume everyone else is the same. Maybe in my fervor to steer clear of sticky situations, I have let myself become impervious to other people’s fragilities and feelings. Maybe my mellow, low-maintenance, confident schtick is really a cop out – because I don’t want to tangle, or tango, or whatever.

Assume socks are drama. It’s possible I’m the guy who truly doesn’t see them on the ground when he walks by. Or maybe I’m the guy who doesn’t want to pick them up, so he pretends he doesn’t see them. I really don’t know. I hate that second guy. On the other hand, I don’t want to spend the rest of my life picking up socks. Isn’t it better to turn a blind eye, sail on above it all, and if you miss a couple hurt feelings here and again, so be it? Or is it better to be open, to be perceptive, to be sensitive to the drama like my Jerry Seinfeld friend?

I don’t know. I don’t know which is better. And maybe it’s not even a choice so much as a reaction you can no sooner control than fear or surprise. In any event, I think I’m keeping my big boots. And I’m not saying I’m going to pick up any socks, but maybe, just maybe, I’ll try to see one every once in a while.

Last year, Thanksgiving brought us Tom the Nut Pecker. It also brought us Tartare, Meester Panqueques and Lil’ Salami from Seattle. By contrast, this Thanksgiving was shaping up to be uneventful, mellow even. In the wake of the South American feast (which was lovely and super fun and, I think, had the intended effect of leaving our guests with full bellies, happy taste buds and dizzy heads), Mama was feeling tired. And maybe it was my general fatigue combined with my general inability to say no to Saint James that landed me smack in the middle of Petco on Tuesday evening, trying not to touch anything and gagging a little at the smell. What can I say? All he has to do is play the tremulously hopeful card and I’m butter. $47.96 later we were fully equipped for the arrival of . . . drumroll please . . . a crayfish. I can just see Dolly and Soul Daddy’s eyebrows shooting up into their hairlines because down in St. Louis, they eat these suckers by the thousands every spring at their big crayfish bonanza and the only money they would consider throwing after a crayfish would be for some cold beers to chase them down with. But here in the upper midwest, we are asses who think glorified shrimps can be pets.

So on Wednesday afternoon, I sat in my minivan, watching the drizzle hit my windshield, waiting for Saint James to emerge from school with the creature, thinking I can’t fucking believe we are going down this road again. Our family’s success rate with classroom animal cast-offs is dismal, and the brooding sky and my uneasy gut portended more of the same. The look on Saint James’ face, however, was enough to chase away my misgivings. Excited and proud, he carried the thing like a new born baby, were said baby floating in a plastic tub, looking like a nasty tiny lobster. And so, in a deja-vu like trance, I drove home, careful not to slosh the newest addition to the familia, letting myself get caught up, just a little, in the joy of naming him. By the time we pulled into our driveway, Bubbles had been christened and I watched in wonder as Supergirl acted super helpful and carried Saint James’ backpack for him so he could deliver Bubbles to his tricked out new pad, complete with realistic pebble bottom, faux seaweed and Tiki guy. 

Folks, I think you know how this is going to end. At around ten o’clock on Thanksgiving morning, I was up to my elbows in turkey giving him the butter massage  of his life when I heard a heart broken wail from the basement. Saint James ran up the stairs, fear and sadness stamped on his flushed and puffy face and cried that Bubbles was dying. What? What? Already? How do you know? I sputtered, my arms held aloft like a scrubbed-in surgeon. He’s on his baaaaaack, screamed Saint James, and his claw fell ooooooffffffff. And that is when my heart broke into little pieces. I didn’t even get to feed hiiiiiimmmmm. And then the little pieces of my heart broke into even littler pieces, which I had no hope of collecting, so slick were my hands with turkey guts and butter.

The rest of the day went by in a fugue of fretting about the turkey and fretting about my son. Up and down the basement stairs he went, over and over, to check on freakin’ Bubbles, at first emerging wracked by a fresh batch of sobs and finally too weary to cry, passing through the kitchen in silence. Doctor Dash whispered that maybe he had too much water in his aquarium, so we went down to check, not that we would know too much water if we saw it. Saint James had moved Bubbles to a smaller bowl where he had put him on top of a piece of cat kibble (incidentally, I’m really glad I paid $16 for a bag of cat food, of which exactly one niblet was used). Bubbles appeared to be clinging to the nugget for dear life and all those little pieces of my heart on the kitchen floor jumped up and broke into even tinier pieces, approximately the size of Nerds. Oh man, that’s so sad, said Doctor Dash, it’s like putting a steak over the face of a dead man. And it was. It was exactly like putting a steak over the face of a dead man.

And it was St. James’ desperate act of tenderness that made me vow NO MORE PETS. Never, ever, ever. Not ever again. Ever. Never.

That is, until Bubbles really died.

And with my boy limp and weeping, his sobs resonating through my chest like thunder, the words tumbled out before I could catch them. We’ll get a fish, sweetie, hush now, we’ll get a fish.

We got a break in the clouds today for a couple hours and I forced myself to take a walk. Seeking a bit of solitude and anonymity, I drove over to Lake of the Isles for a change of scenery. The wind was capricious, whipping the water into a feisty chop and sending the leaves skittering for their lives, like hordes of movie extras in Godzilla.

At one point, I saw a chubby dredlocked young woman give the finger to the back of a lanky hipster guy wearing skinny jeans as he slunk past her on the path. He had no idea she had given him the finger and she had no idea I had seen her give him the finger. I’m pretty sure they didn’t know each other, but I suppose if they had, it would have made more sense. Only to me, it made complete sense. She had the look of someone wearily trying to whip herself into shape. His very existence was an affront to her, for no other reason than the fact that he cut through her line of vision, sending a ripple through her foul mood. 

Being privy to this unguarded personal moment, this human hiccup, this hasty gesture, I couldn’t help feeling a sense of kinship with the chubby woman because I too am wont to a bit of the behind-the-back-finger-giving. Nuns, teachers, librarians, my parents, a partner at my old law firm, pharmacists, drivers, volleyball coaches. One time Doctor Dash turned around abruptly on his way to the garage after we had argued and caught me flying the infamous double fisted fingers. I know, how mature of me. Can you imagine glancing behind you and seeing your wife in the window giving you not one, but two frenzied pumping fingers? It’s absurd and simply one of those things Doctor Dash has long ago learned to accept and ignore. You can believe I holstered those puppies pretty quickly, feeling more than a little sheepish.

The truth is, sometimes we need a way to say fuck you, with out saying fuck you. We need the release, but we need it to dissipate, to flutter away in the wind like a dry leaf. To have it land, to have it stick, would be inflammatory, unfair, rude, hurtful. The Lake of the Isles finger had nothing to do with the guy and everything to do with the girl. I know how these things go, so I veered off the path rather than pass her. If the hipster slinker pissed her off, the yoga pants power walker might just have put her over the edge, possibly into double fisted pumper terrain. And who wants that comin’ at their back?

OK, deep breath. I can’t believe I’m even going to utter the C word on this blog. No, the other C word, you dirty dogs. Cougar. There. I said it, and just because I said it and just because I’m writing about it, doesn’t mean I am one, or close to being one, or preoccupied about being one. Or maybe I’m just kidding myself, depending on your definition, which is, my friends, the crux of the problem. The term “cougar” is bandied about with such frequency these days that it’s hard to avoid it – especially if you just so happen to be a woman approaching the age when such a term might apply.

Listen, I’ve had my ear to the ground and my whiskers in the air on this one. I have been paying close attention and the only thing I’ve concluded is that everyone seems to have a different definition of a cougar. Which makes it very difficult to know if one needs to be offended or flattered should one ever happen to be called or deemed a cougar.

A quick wikipedia check yields this definition: a woman over forty who sexually pursues younger men, typically more than eight years her junior. Pretty clear, no?

About a year and a half ago I emailed my brother, El Maestro de Bife, who has an exhaustive and deep knowledge of all things slightly inappropriate. I knew he was my go-to guy and asked him to distinguish between a MILF and a Cougar. MILF, of course you know, is the crass acronym for “Mother I’d Like to Fuck” – which is just a puerile male way of saying Hot Mama. While I don’t love MILF, I’ll grant you MILF. There are many many hot mamas out there and it is most definitely a distinguishable, identifiable subset of the population and therefor worthy of a name and this is the one that has seemed to have stuck. So fine, I get it.

But what about these cougars I was hearing about? El Maestro responded that while a MILF still has her cubs around her, a Cougar hunts for her fresh meat alone. Interesting! Hunts. Alone. Fresh meat. OK, so as long as I have my chitlins in my wake and as long as I’m not on the prowl, then I can’t be a cougar. In fact, barring a piano falling on top of Doctor Dash, I will most likely never be a cougar. This is part of the popular lexicon that I can daintily sidestep, demurely holding my skirt to my side so as not to be sullied.

Then Barbie turned 50 and she looks fantastic for her age. Her breasts are still half way between her shoulder and her elbow as they should be, if not a titch higher, her feet still tiny, her hair radiant, her skin as creamy as a Coppertone Vanilla milkshake. But someone comes up with Cougar Barbie, imagining Barbie’s natural trajectory (never one for subtlety, it actually would be hard to imagine Barbie growing old gracefully à la Isabella Rosselini or Lauren Bacall). If you haven’t seen it, watch it. Hilarious, no? Heh, heh, ho, ho, ho! Hilarious! The paunch, the leopard print, the Journey – oh Cougar Barbie, you are too much! Still, this does nothing to disavow me of my notion that cougars are not something I need worry my pretty little head about.

And then. And then. Because you knew there had to be a then, in June we went out to the Jersey shore to hang out with our friends Chief Big Voice and Saucy-licious Duddy. Saucy and I were grooving to a really great live band at the Princeton, minding our own business, when I was approached by a young fellow whose opener was an enthusiastic, surfer intoned “Heeeyyyyyyy, a couple a cooouuuugaaaarrrrs!” My head swiveled around, my eyes turned bright yellow, I punched him in the trachea and snarled: “Are you fucking kidding me?” Actually, I only did that last part, but it was accompanied by my most withering Catholic high school girl staredown. I was pissed. COUGAR? Me? Us? We were just having a good time, digging the music, drinking many drinks, laughing our asses off. OK, so maybe we looked super hot, but it’s not like we could help it and we certainly weren’t on the prowl or giving the impression of being on the prowl – we were simply a couple of moms, out on the town, wrapped up in our own hilarious shenanigans. Nothing more. Nothing less. Simple as pie. Rowdy but uninterested. Needing to look no further than the band, our glasses and the people we came with for all the fun we needed. And then. And then, on our way out of the bar someone called Saucy’s sister, Little J, a cougar and she’s even younger than us! 

Screeech. Hold on one sharp shootin’ high fallutin’ minute here folks. Something was afoot. My feathers were ruffled, but not ruffled enough to have missed the look of complete and utter shock on the young lad’s face when I shut him down like a noxious Jack in the Box. It was but a second, because I immediately gave him the scapula of ice, but there’s no denying it – he was surprised, perhaps even dismayed, at my reaction. Could it be? Could he possibly have meant it as . . . a compliment? 

Nooo! we railed, Saucy-licious, Little J and I – No way! We’re not out trying to snag young dudes! We’re not even old enough to be cougars, anyway! Unacceptable! Unfathomable! Unprofessional! Unpalatable! Unfreakingbelievable! Now we were all pissed! And yet. And yet. Because like a then, there’s usually a yet, I think these guys meant no ill. Quite the opposite, I think they were trying, in that broad blunt simian way of youth in bars, to be nice. Well, maybe not nice, exactly. (I may not be a cougar, but I wasn’t born yesterday.) Simply put, these guys seemed to be operating with a different definition of cougar than we were. Maybe.

You need to write about this on your blog! insisted Saucy-licious, Clear this shit up! But all I could do was shudder. No, I couldn’t possibly. To even contemplate the word, to type the word, would feel like an admission, a toe dipped into fountain of age. Peevish and Cougar simply could not be seen together. It was not right. Not yet. Not for a long time. Not for a very very long time. Shudder. Shudder.

And then. And then, because there are always more thens, my friend the Magnificent Bastard sends out a tweet a couple weeks ago asking for top 5 hollywood cougars because he needs them for “work.” His were Julianne Moore, Sharon Stone, Catherine Zeta Jones, Cate Blanchett and Sophia Loren whom he deems “extreme coug.” Then another twitter friend, KC, replies almost immediately, so it obviously didn’t take a lot of thought: Maria Bello, Sharon Stone, Marissa Tomei, Liz Hurley, Vivica Fox and more! OK, fellas, let’s just hold on one more sweet salty snitch snatch second, because these chicks are some seriously hot stuff and not at all the compadres of Cougar Barbie; in fact, I think I may need the definition re-explained to me because if that NJ guy meant anything even approaching this, then perhaps a punch in the trachea was a tad harsh. (Before you start to feel too sorry for him, just know that he was undeterred by my smack down and followed up with an equally compelling: are you Brazilian? for which he received another punch in the trachea.) So I tweet/asked and they both answered that it pretty much just boils down to hot over 40. Cubs and hunting have nothing to do with it. 

Hmmm. Well then. Much ado about nothing. Maybe. Wait, you know what? No. Even assuming you remove the desperado aspect from the term, I’m not sold. Far from it, I’m still troubled and I’ll tell you why. I think forty is a bit young for Cougarville. Forty is the new thirty. Forty year olds have babies and toddlers. Forty year olds are still figuring out what they want to do with their lives. Forty year olds like to play. Forty sounds old because we all remember our parents turning forty, but it feels young. Hell, we all feel downright adolescent half the time. (For the record, I’m not there yet, but fast approaching.) In this day and age, forty just doesn’t feel old enough to be a delineating factor, a parenthetical tacked onto the sentence: she looks good. 

Women my age deserve to be unencumbered by parentheticals for a few more years. It’s only fair. Most of us just got done wiping butts, for crying out loud! So let’s all be peaches and pals and agree to leave the fine foxy forty somethings out of this discussion and move the Cougar line to um, say, fifty. And we’ll talk again in another ten years.

Meow.

We recently discovered that the shower head in our bathroom has two settings: a cleansing, reasonable and perfectly lovely setting and then a wretched, awkward, freaky, horrible setting. One is a proper shower, the other is more a violent sputter – like when you laugh with beer in your mouth and it comes out your nose. Dash likes the latter. And apparently he is not ashamed. He is also impervious to any and all mockery and bullying I can throw his way on the matter.

Every single time I step into the shower, I am taken by surprise by the erratic sputters of water, prodding me like a gangly adolescent boy giant trying to give a back rub to a girl giant at a campfire at the top of the beanstalk. Every time, surprise turns to annoyance. Every time, annoyance turns to incredulousness and I think to myself: OhmyGod, like, for real Doctor Dash? Again? Seriously? I cannot believe this matters enough to go to the trouble to change the setting every single blasted time you get in the shower! UG! Seriously! 

And every time, I change it back.

We’ve been plagued by death. The second and final guppy has moved on to fresher waters and while the exact cause of death cannot be determined at this time, let’s just say Devil Baby played a role. She started the chain of events that led to his demise. Coincidence? I think not. Here’s how it went down.

8:30ish – I hear a huge crash in the kitchen and run in to find Devil Baby sprawled on her back, covered in fish food, mouth agape working up to the big waaaaaaah. Pingo’s tub is practically opaque from all the food in there and he’s going nuts trying to eat it all. I have to work fast. I quickly dechlorinate some water in the green bowl I use to make crepes, scoop him into it, clean out his bowl, fill it with water, dechlorinate it and run to check on Devil Baby, who is still wailing her head off. (I know, I should have checked on her first, right? This fish thing has made me a bit crazy.)

9:00ish – I go back to the kitchen to put Pingo back in his tub and am fiddling with the pump when he pulls a total Tale of Despereaux move and leaps out of the bowl, brushes my arm, and lands with an inaudible splat on the tile floor. I yelp and try to pick him up, but the wriggling makes that too disgusting, so I scream for Saint James while I frantically try to get him to hop onto a spoon. Just as Saint James and Supergirl slide panting into the kitchen, I slip Pingo into his water with a sigh. Phew. Disaster averted. Again. 

9:05ish – we watch him swim around for a while, wondering how, why he should have taken such a death defying leap and slowly it begins to dawn on me. Ohhhhhh, good sweet baby Cupid, can it be? Why am I always so obtuse when it comes to matters of the heart? Pingo is in love with me. After the loss of Pearl, he transferred all his affections to the next best thing – me. The combination of watching my heroic efforts to save him and sheer piscine gratitude so overwhelmed him that he found himself with no choice but to risk everything, for just a touch. When he saw me hovering near the crepe bowl, he saw his chance and took his leap of love. 

10:30ish – Doctor Dash comes home from call and sits on the edge of the bed, rapt, as I regale him with the hair raising events of the night and my cool-under-fire heroics. He seems dubious about my theory about Pingo’s fish crush, but then, Dash is prone to a bit of jealousy in such matters and probably doesn’t want to fan the fire.

10:35ish – Doctor Dash, having gone downstairs to decompress from work, comes back to the bedroom and announces that Pingo has died. We both sigh. I find sleep elusive, my mind racing to figure out what killed him. Was it the food, the fall, the water temperature or did he simply, quietly, die of a broken heart?

Who makes chili when it’s 90 degrees? Apparently, I do. After a long wilting day at a swim meet, I stand in my boiling hot kitchen, crack a beer and proceed to sweat and chop and mutter and swig and mutter and swig and sweat and stir and cuss. Whoever eats this chili is going to feel mighty ornery. One of my rotten children left the basement freezer door open and most of our share of local grass fed cow and happy pig were subjected to a second death. And I was subjected to a grisly scene this morning when I found a huge pool of blood spreading around the white tile floor in front of the fridge. All the meat had thawed overnight, sweating and bleeding all over the place. I am chucking most of it, but was able to salvage a steak and a few pounds of ground beef that were still cold. There I stood, gagging and cleaning, all before my morning coffee, cursing the name of whichever child was undoubtedly rooting around for the football shaped gelpack to press on some imagined owie, causing a frozen baguette to slip, wedge itself in the door and effectively ruin hundreds of dollars worth of meat. As I threw bloody package after bloody package into garbage bags, I realized the garbage men had just gone by and there was no way I could leave fifty pounds of flesh in our bin until next week without creating an unearthly stench and a Lalapalooza for maggots. I had no choice but to stuff the plastic bags back into the freezer, which made me feel like Harvey Keitel in Pulp Fiction – shady, beastly. It’s enough to turn anyone into a vegetarian. Right after I eat that steak, of course.

You see? THIS is why I don’t want pets. Pearl is dead. After four days in our care. She simply stopped eating, oblivious to all our machinations to keep Pingo away from her food. Last night she got stuck against the filter, overcome with exhaustion. Not a good sign.

Now she is lying on a paper towel, her tiny body a parenthesis. I am drinking my coffee with a sense of foreboding. How will the kids react when they stumble down, the soft webs of sleep dropping from their faces?

I’m sad.

And I don’t even like fish. 

I knew this was going to happen.

Poor Pearl.

Before I begin this post, there is a housekeeping matter I would like to address. I am going back to calling my youngest girl Devil Baby. Angel Baby is just too saccharine for this blog and this kid. Devil Baby suits her better, even though everything I said here still holds true. For the most part. 

I am also going to go on record as the only person in the history of the world to say something negative about the Wild Rumpus. I’ll probably be tarred and feathered by all those fresh faced mommies I saw there yesterday, but so be it. The Wild Rumpus is a really cute bookstore tucked away in a really cute Minneapolis neighborhood, with a child-size purple door and a coterie of animals, most of which are allowed to wander around freely, all of which are allowed to spread their dander and feathers and other animal debris and respiratory pollutants throughout. Chickens strut around the store, in and out of people’s legs, taking refuge behind the front desk if a kid gets too gropey. Cats lounge on ratty armchairs and in the windowsills, generally ignoring the chubby hands that pet and poke them. There are salamanders, tarantulas, ferrets, chinchillas, rats, frogs, a bunch of different cooing birds.

Normally, I love the place. It’s magical – a lovely treasure trove of children’s books, a pantheon of book-love, blah blah blah, but yesterday – yesterday everything about the Wild Rumpus just SUCKED. It was the Wild Suckus. I had decided to take Devil Baby there for “Tale Time” – get it? She’s on spring break this week, so I thought I’d start us off with a nice activity after we dropped Supergirl and Saint James off at school. The place was packed – quite literally a zoo – so after Devil Baby harassed a chicken with deformed feet (pigeon toes?), we found a spot on the crowded rug. I looked around. I could have been on Jupiter for all the connection I felt with these well scrubbed women and their pallid children.

Story time began and Devil Baby was having none of it. She was squirming and trying to lie down on the floor – she insisted on closing her eyes and pretending to snore. She kept asking for fruit snacks, gum, chapstick, hand cream. Listen to the lady, Devil Baby, I would whisper, trying to keep my growing irritation at bay. Then came the song time and – slap in the face – the child who sings constantly refused to sing, refused to do the little hand motions. Jesus! Why did I even care? But I did care. A lot. I didn’t drag myself to this hot, stinky bookstore and squish myself onto a ratty old rug, shoulder to shoulder with Minneapolis’ most earnest and loving nannies, young mommies and grandmas for nothing. Sing child! For the love of God – it’s the freaking itsy bitsy spider, child, your favorite – SING!!! But instead she flopped back for some more snoring action. I watched all the other caretakers sway and sing their hearts out, smug, blissful looks plastered on their pasty faces, and I began to feel the sticky fingers of disgust closing around my throat. Are you actually enjoying this? Like, for yourselves?

The banality of it all started to drive me crazy and to more than a few uncharitable, borderline evil thoughts. For which God promptly repaid me with an allergic puffy eye.

Despite my maniacal obsession with keeping my hands away from my face, I must have slipped and it felt like one of the cats had climbed up under my eyelid to work out a hairball. I was dying, but I couldn’t rub it or I would make it worse, turning a wretched itchy eye into a swollen monstrosity. This much, at least, I have learned in my life. In desperation I rubbed my eye on Devil Baby’s shirt. Oh shit, she’s been dragging herself all over this Godforsaken temple of dander. Goddamn it itches! Aah. Fuck me. But fuck me more if I’m going to leave before this goddam story time is over, you stupid bitches! Aaaahhhh. The agony. Itches. Itches. Shit, it itches! More fake snoring from Devil Baby. That does is. Fuck it. We are so out of here.

So I retreated as gracefully as I could with my eye in screaming red hot spasms, trying not to step on any little fingers with my size 10 knee-high Wellington boots. What a bust. What a total bust. I drove us home, horribly depressed because I am not deluded enough to think I was even vaguely in the right for having been so deeply disgusted by the whole scenario. Obviously, if it’s me versus thirty-some women and their offspring, I’m the one with the problem. I may have anger issues, but I have not lost my grip on reality.

It’s me. Devil Baby has no attention span for storytime because, um, I haven’t taken her very many times. At least not when you compare to Saint James and Supergirl. When I offer to read Devil Baby a book she runs away screaming because she thinks I’m going to try to put her to bed. My child – my child – my poor, pathetic, third born, daughter-of-a-spent-husk-of-a-mother child, is a philistine at the tender age of two. I have let her watch too much TV. She knows the words to commercials for acne creams but can’t sit still in a room full of kids to watch a very animated young woman read books. She can take pictures of herself with the Mac, but she doesn’t know that it’s ok, actually encouraged, to read books during the day time. Her favorite song is Rihanna’s Disturbia, but she won’t row row row her boat with the rest of the kids. I feel like a failure when it comes to Devil Baby. I feel like I got all used up with the first two.

Have all my songs been sung? At least those not involving thumpin’ base lines, catchy hooks, screaming guitars or trippy synth?

After the Wild Suckus debacle, I loomed around in a state of melancholy, the weight of my inadequacies crushing my chest. My head felt like a waterballoon, stretched precariously thin, ready to pop and gush forth tears of guilt and self-pity at the slightest provocation. The weather sucks, there is no easy out like going to the park where fresh air and the smell of green can act as its own balm on our ragged psyches. I just needed the day to be over.

And that’s the beauty of days. They end. And start again. Today the weather still sucks, but I decided I would take Devil Baby to Club Kid so I could go to yoga. Club Kid is a pay by the hour child care alternative which I only use in a pinch, mostly because it smells like a daycare which sends me Proustian synapsing back to my working days and because the hourly pay thing feels like the kiddie equivalent of a hooker motel. Today, however, qualified as a pinch. For everyone’s sake, I needed to fix my head and my heart and there is no better way known to me than a good sweaty yoga class. And it worked. What’s more, I ran into my betties and was able to vent, just a bit, just enough, bless their hearts. Thank you Nanook and JJ. I feel better. 

And right now I’m home with Devil Baby. She’s watching TV while I type, but we’re under the same blanket. She keeps pressing her little feet into the side of my leg. And this, I think . . . I hope, is good enough for today.

I’m not quite sure what happens to Doctor Dash when he’s faced with an unopened box of cereal or crackers, but whatever it is – it never ends well. Today I went to pour some fruit loops for Angel Baby and when I tipped the box over the bowl, they went flying everywhere in an avalanche of artificial fruit flavors. It was as if Toucan Sam had vomited all over my dining room table and what’s worse? When I untipped the box, half of its contents ended up trapped outside of the bag. The food stuck between the bag and the box? Like nails on a chalk board for me. Intolerable.

The box had been opened by Doctor Dash and was shredded beyond recognition, a huge gash traveling down the side of the cellophane. It’s as if unopened dry goods send him into an uncontrollable Lou Ferrigno moment and after a bout of painful temple rubbing and teeth gnashing, he ends up with superhuman strength and clams as hands. It drives me bananas. Especially when he mangles resealable bags. Faced with a zip lock, he will rip open the bottom. I just don’t get it. Normally, I’d say he has above average manual dexterity. He does these cool little pen and ink drawings from time to time. And he even performs actual medical procedures on real live human beings. 

What gives, man?

Today I did a very stupid thing. I came out of yoga with Devil Baby, strapped her in her car seat and pulled a u-ey on 44th. It must have been a combination of dehydration and blissed-outness, but I took my turn too wide and somehow ended up completely wedging my minivan on a giant roadside ice floe. Fuck. Fuck. Fuckfuckfuckfuck! As I tried to reverse, my wheels spun in the air. 

I had a flashback to college when I did the very same thing to my parents’ enormous silver gray pleasure cruiser van. That time it was the two passenger side wheels that were left dangling in the air. This is family folklore, never failing to get everyone chuckling and snorting at my stupidity. She calls me on the phone, tells me she’s stuck in the snow, so I come to pull her out and there’s my van, tipped! my dad shrieks, keening to one side to illustrate, tears streaming down his cheeks. Two wheels in the air! And there is no snow – no snow – anywhere! No where!  Ha ha ha ha. 

It is true that I managed to lodge the van on top of the only chunk of ice in sight, but, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, if you stop to think about, this actually cuts in my favor. I now call myself to the witness stand.

Me: On the night of whatever night that was when you were home from college, did you or did you not take your parents’ silver gray pleasure cruiser van to the local supermarket?

Me: Yes I did.

Me: And were you alone?

Me: No, my younger brother, Mario, was with me.

Me: And why did you take your parents’ silver gray pleasure cruiser van to the supermarket that night with your younger brother, Mario?

Me: I wanted to buy chocolate chips, so I could make chocolate chip cookies for a boy I liked at school.

Me: And what did you find when you arrived at the supermarket?

Me: A&P was closed.

Me: Did you park the silver gray pleasure cruiser van to ascertain that the supermarket was closed or did you do a drive by?

Me: I parked.

Me: After you parked, what did you do?

Me: I got out of the van and walked up to the doors even though I could kind of tell it was closed, and then I jiggled the doors to make sure and then I realized it was really closed.

Me: And what was your brother, Mario, doing at this time?

Me: I can’t recall.

Me: How would you describe your state of mind when you reentered the silver gray pleasure cruiser van?

Me: I was upset. I really wanted to make cookies for Roy.

Me: Did you look around you at that time?

Me: I can’t recall.

Me: Do you remember seeing any snow?

Me: No.

Me: Do you remember seeing any icebergs?

Me: No.

Me: Do you remember seeing any large masses whatsoever?

Me: No.

Me: What happened then?

Me: Well, I probably complained to my little brother about the supermarket being closed. Maybe I even cried a little tiny bit. For sure I was mad. I might have said shit shit shit. Then I threw the car into drive and . . .

Me: Thank you, that will be all. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I think you’ve heard all you need to exculpate this young woman from the shame of having implanted her parents’ silver gray pleasure cruiser van atop a rogue iceberg secretly lurking in front of the vehicle. Surely, she could not have been expected to remember having parked behind an iceberg, when the anticipation of making chocolate chip cookies for a boy she liked at college was so cruelly dashed by her disappointment at finding the A&P closed for the night. 

And ask yourselves, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, who was really more stupid in this scenario? The girl who was in-like, who was the hapless victim of a bit of a lead foot and a shameful, furtive, iceberg? Or her parents, who showed up “to the rescue” with nothing more than a shovel and the family Golden Retriever’s red leash. Yes, my good people. You heard right. They looped Ginger’s leash onto the bumper of their SUV and the bumper of the silver gray pleasure cruiser van and attempted to pull it off the iceberg. You can imagine how that worked out.

I rest my case. 

But today was different. Today I was stupid with a capital S. Like Goldie Hawn acting her stupidest in the stupidest of her stupid movies. Having some experience in the matter of impaling my car on ice, I suspected I might be in a bit of a pickle. I threw some snacks at Devil Baby, grabbed the ice scraper, jumped out of the car and kneeled to survey the situation. Oh man, I was stuck – really really stuck, on an angry, immutable chunk of ice. I knew I needed to chip away at the ice to free myself, so I went at it. Like a fury. A few women from yoga came out and found me in my yoga pants and pink legwarmers revisiting child’s pose with the addition of violent sideways ice chipping. And bless their hearts, they wouldn’t leave. They made me get in the car while they pushed with all their little post-yoga might. One woman brought me some cat litter and sprinkled it under the wheels. I tried to protest that what I really needed to do was just – keep – chipping – off- arrgh – that – chunk. 

A sexy older cowboy pulled up in his pick up truck and sauntered over with a shovel full of sand, like he does this everyday – multiple times a day. Noblesse oblige. My yoga teacher, Annie, flirted with him a little bit. I thanked him and said something about his hat and that really, I just needed to get the chassis off the ice, making a mental note to look up the word chassis because here I was throwing it around like I knew what I was talking about, when really, I quite did not. The cowboy tipped his hat up and said, Honey, you’ll never dig yourself outta this one.

I pressed everyone to leave – this was my problem and I would get out of it. It was a mercifully warm day and the exertion of my frantic chipping soon had me shedding my coat. Eventually, my knees started screaming, reminding me I was kneeling in snow, so I pulled a floor mat out of the car to kneel on and kept chipping away. One woman, Kate, insisted on calling AAA for me. I tried to resist, I didn’t want her to have to wait around. Let me call, she said. If I leave, you’re screwed, she didn’t say. She called and went to her car to wait.  

As I kept on chipping, two older men pulled over to help me out, and unlike the cowboy, they got on their knees to assess the situation.  We’ll pick up the car, they said. Oh God, it’s so big, I thought. Let’s try. So they tried and I made them stop because I was seeing too many bulging neck veins through my dirty windshield. I knew I could get it if I just kept chipping, but they didn’t think so. I told them AAA was on its way, thanked them and got back onto my knees. For a nanosecond, I thought about calling a friend to pick me up and leaving the whole bloody mess for Doctor Dash to deal with, but that just seemed unfair. My poor father is one thing. My poor husband, another. Have I grown up at all in these last twenty years?

Shame and necessity give you strength and I chipped and chopped and scraped and dug with a vengeance. I was spitting and swearing – my big cheap rhinestone studded sunglasses slipped down my nose and my pony tail came loose. I was covered in ice and side-of-the-road grime, my knees soaked to the bone, but I eventually got through that shit bastard hunk of ice. 

Everyone had poo-pooed me, but I knew I was free. I got in my car and rocked and rolled and rocked and rolled and after a few good rocks, Kate the Angel ran over cheering to help push and another random guy in a white sweatshirt  jumped in too.  One more rock and roll and I was out, baby!  We called off AAA, chuckled at the big black plastic piece of something hanging down from the bottom of my minivan, and said our goodbyes. 

Thank you cowboy, old dudes, cat litter woman, random white sweatshirt guy, Annie, and mostly Kate – for sticking around. You all tried to help in your own ways.  And where would we be without the kindness of strangers? Not anywhere I’d want to live.

But in the end, sometimes, you just gotta chip yourself out.