peevish mama

and I’m about to bitch slap her across the face.  I couldn’t begin tell you why I insist on likening our house to Dame Judy Dench, but it’s working for me, so I’m going with it.  We have a mysterious leak in our mud room.  It’s a slow leak – a bleeding, beading, weeping leak down one particular two by four that Doctor Dash exposed in a fit of manly, muscular plaster ripping.  Our mud room now looks like a crime scene and has for weeks upon weeks now.  We’ve got a guy on it . . . a jack-of-all-trades contractor who loves hunting and Jesus.  He chuckles with pleasure when I call him the Leak Detective.  He also chuckles when I tell him I think it’s a poltergeist.  He’s smart and has a nose for these kinds of things, but he’s slow, and in my opinion, barking up the wrong tree.  So last night after he left, no closer to figuring out why Judy is in the grips of such melancholia, I decided to take matters into my own hands.  

Rule out. Rule out. Rule out.  

Dash and I have been thinking our shower is somehow involved, so I gathered all the food coloring in the house (which is usually slated for play-dough, one of the things that makes me feel incredibly domestic and domesticated when I make it from scratch – narrowly elbowing out chocolate chip cookies) and grimly poured four bottles of green and blue down the shower drain and let the shower run for half an hour.  As my turquoise stained fingers will attest, food coloring is some mad concentrated stuff.  I look like a hapless bank robber sullied by an exploding dye pack stashed in a bag of stolen money.  Despite my little experiment, Judy’s tears run clear, so I think we can safely and finally, rule out our shower . . . which is good because the next move was to rip out the shower floor.  The Leak Detective is at it again, and I’m feeling confident that with the click of my tiny piece of the puzzle, he’s going to nail this baby today.  Lordy, he’d better.  It’s winter.  I need my mud room.  

Come on Judy. Chin up, old girl!

I did it.  I joined the dark side.  I am now a card carrying Costco member and I feel as if I have sold my soul to the devil.  Not a red, spitting, pointy tailed, trident-wielding kind of a devil. More of a mushy, overweight, Dockers clad, slightly balding, bargain shopper kind of a devil.  Sigh.  I feel so dirty.  In my defense, there was a reason – isn’t there always a reason?  I went to Costco because I needed a folding table to set up a bar for the kindergarten parent party we are hosting this weekend.  Doth I protest too much?  And, believe me, I tried Target, and I tried Home Depot (it’s pathetic that those are my valiant attempts at avoiding big box consumerism), but only the dreaded Costco had the exact table I wanted.  It happens to be the same width as my dining room table, so on Thanksgiving, I can put them end-to-end to make one looooong table, stretching into the foyer . . . and all the children of all our friends will eat with us . . . just like the Whos in Whoville.  That is my vision for the holidays.   And fuck me if I didn’t have to go to Costco to fulfill it.  They don’t even sell roast beast at Costco.

If you were there yesterday morning and you heard feeble groaning in the aisles, that was me.  Every time I turned a corner with my wonky cart that would only go diagonally, I saw some food that my family eats, but that was so grotesquely engorged and magnified as to be all but completely unrecognizable.  Have you seen the size of the log of goat cheese?  It’s like the penis of a horse.  No, it’s bigger than the penis of a horse.  How could one family possibly eat that much goat cheese?  This store should be for Jesus Christ of the Latter-day Saints families only.  No one else needs mayonnaise jars that weigh more than my two year old.  No one else needs forty-eight packs of donuts, cheesecakes the size of semi-truck steering wheels, Aveeno sunscreen in gigantic twin packs. Who has that much face?  The size of the box of Frosted Mini Wheats made me blanche.  The paper goods aisle made me weep.  So much plastic.  So. Much. Plastic.  The last thing fat, lazy Americans need is the message that it is acceptable to eat all their shit food on disposable plates that they don’t even have to wash.  The last thing fat, lazy Americans need is the message that all of their hydration needs should be satisfied from a plastic bottle.  The last thing fat, lazy Americans need is the message that they need bigger fridges, pantries, garages and houses in which to fit all this cheap supersized abundance.  

Eating should be a bit more cerebral and contemplative of an act. There should be some aspect of our human consciousness and conscientiousness engaged.  What we are eating, how much and where it comes from are basic, simple questions that bear some attention.  Eating should not simply be the fastest, cheapest way to get’er done.  We shouldn’t just be shoveling stuff into our carts and our mouths.  We aren’t pigs.  Eating should be more work, not less work.  Oh, I’m sounding preachy.  I really don’t want to sound preachy.  I’ll say this about Costco – the wine is divine.  The frozen edamame is great.  I also bought a bag of the potstickers which Nanook of the North swears are a magic bullet for PMS and hangovers.  

So now I’ve got my card, and I know I’ll go back.  And each time, I’ll be slightly more inured to the gigantism afflicting everything in there and I may even start to buy more stuff. I know I won’t always make it out of there with only three things in my cart and my air of superiority intact.  I just wish the card checkers were trained to say “Welcome to Costco. Remember, don’t buy anything you wouldn’t have bought somewhere else anyway.”  I know I’ll need reminding.  Or maybe I don’t take a cart – I only buy what I can carry in my arms.  Whatever – I’m screwed.  We’re all screwed. 

Cream puff filled with fresh whipped dairy cream, anyone?  

This old house needs a fresh coat of paint as badly as Dame Judi Dench needs a bath after a sweaty tussle with one of her young lovers on a steamy afternoon in her Corsican villa.  Fighting against every hasty, lazy, short-cut-taking fiber of my being, I have decided to be a responsible homeowner and prep the walls before they are painted.  Meaning I am cleaning them – old school style – rubber gloves, huge sponges, buckets of warm water and TSP/90 (which, incidentally, is amazing stuff if you’ve never tried it).  TSP/90 takes everything of the walls: dirt, grime, greasy fingerprints, pencil, pen, spaghetti sauce, chocolate and most importantly as it turns out, boogers.  

Never have I cleaned so many crusty boogers off a wall.  Actually, before yesterday I can say with confidence that I had never cleaned any boogers off a wall.  I am no forensic pathologist, but I know a booger stuck to a wall when I see it.  Perhaps it’s all the years of public library patronage in my youth that makes me such an expert (you check out enough books from the library, and you are bound to come upon a booger stuck to a page – a disgusting but true fact of life.)  Seriously, I only cleaned the walls going down to the basement and the basement hallway and I must have scraped off twenty boogers.  What was going on with these children that they were sticking so many boogers to so many walls?  Was there only one culprit or did all four of them get in on the action?  And where was their mother?  Why didn’t she ever wipe a booger off a wall?  

Inhabiting a new house goes so far beyond moving in your furniture, redecorating, changing wall colors. It’s really much more elemental. It’s about substituting your DNA for your predecessors’ DNA.  Doctor Dash and I can still make ourselves writhe in disgust at the memory of the veritable paste of red beard trimmings I scrubbed out of the rim of the sink in our Boston brownstone.  As I gagged and scrubbed and cursed the name of the divinity graduate student who had sold us the brownstone, I kept calling Dash into the bathroom, so he could bear witness to the first truly selfless act I performed as a newlywed.  In our last house, it was the fridge that had me gagging.  It was coated, positively shellacked, in the hair of the old black lab who lived with the old man who lived there before us.  I still haven’t resolved how you get that much dog hair in your refrigerator, short of actually putting the dog in the refrigerator.  And here, apparently, the biggest DNA issue is boogers – walls speckled and spackled in boogers, everywhere you look, everywhere you touch.  Who needs stucco when you’ve got kids like those?  She should have put them to work on some chipped patches on the outside of the house.  Next time I pull out the bucket and gloves, I’m going to be prepared with a little tool, a booger scraper.  As God is my witness, people, I will get every last booger . . . if it’s the last thing I do.

Our neighbors had a conversation with the people who looked at our house this morning, the people for whom I cleaned for two and a half hours.  Apparently, they like the house, they like the yard, they like the location, but the dad has allergies so he’s a little disappointed that this 1921 house doesn’t have central air.  Waaah, waaah.  How about we throw in a year’s supply of Claritin, you fucking baby.

This whole exercise of selling our house has made me hate people even more than I did before.  I have moved beyond peevish, through livid and burned right into vitriolic.  These are troubled times and I am hell on wheels.  I have lava in my gut, hot coals between my ears.  If I yelled at you, your eyebrows would be scorched and you’d be left quaking in a swirling cloud of acrid smoke and believe you me, your knees would be clacking.  If we get one more comment about the lack of a first floor bathroom, I will move to Costa Rica.  I am not joking.  I will forever forsake this nation of toilet-obsessed, nature-averse, histrionic, asthmatic, incontinent, spoiled FUCKERS.  And to add to my red hot ire, the word “fucker” is underlined by my spellcheck.  Is it not a word?  Is it only a proper noun?  How am I supposed to express myself?

WHAT THE FUCK????  

My friend, Lunch Lady Rocker Chick, wrote a piece about nannies, the gist of which is: don’t be a bitch to the kids you are being paid handsomely to care for because we mothers are watching you, we’re onto you, and just because you look better than us in a bikini, doesn’t mean we won’t take your sorry ass down and make you wish you had never gotten out of your canopy bed this morning.  I think, anyway.  She was telling me about her article after many drinks imbibed while watching a bad dad band (that’s a band, consisting of dads, who should, frankly, keep their day jobs.  Doctor Dash has had it with the dad bands.  “No one would burn a night out watching me play hockey just because I was decent in high school,” he groans.  He has a point.)  In any event, I will insert a link to her article when it’s published and I figure out how to accomplish that complicated technical maneuver.    

I have been outraged twice in the last two days by, not a nanny, but a granny.  These two sweet little boys at the pool are under the care of one mean fucking grandmother.  She yells at them, berates them, attempts to quash normal boy behavior, and wields the guilt scepter like the evil queen that she is.  A physical description is in order because she’s sitting right in front of me and I can’t resist.  Her hair is a carefully whipped blond meringue, the kind that gets washed and set once a week at her salon for old bitches.  It’s looking a little crushed in the back and I bet it’s starting to get stinky.  (I would stick my nose in it and sniff it for a hundred bucks, but not for ten).  She has huge white sunglasses with some faux bling encrusting the thick stems (I actually kind of like them in an Elton John – I don’t give a fuck if I look ridiculous kind of way).  She is wearing lots of gold jewelry, a white cotton v-neck sweater and navy linen pants, held up over her small paunch by a gold braided belt.  She is sporting a fresh manicure and pedicure (her nails are red squared-off talons).  Her lips are bright pink and she has drawn in the lips she wishes she had with a shaky, dark lipliner.  Nice.  The powdery scent of her perfume keeps wafting over to me from time to time.  In short, she seems better suited for eating cashew chicken salad at the Galleria Mall in her metallic sandals (come to think of it, I like those too) than watching two boys.  Yesterday as she was shooing the boys into her car I heard her screech, “A storm is coming and you only care about yourselves and we’re all going to get killed and then you’ll be sorry!”  Even my kids were aghast.  My only hope is that she doesn’t spend too much time with these guys.  But here she is again, barking their names from under the shade of an umbrella, cleaning the crud from under her nails with her other nail.  Oh, she’s too terrible.  A modern day witch.  

I’ve got my eye on you, lady. 

I do a shit load of laundry.  And, like pot roast and aprons, it feels like the particular province of a stay-at-home mother.  Can there be anything more archetypically domestic than folding laundry?  Maybe ironing, which I don’t do often.  Although I sometimes feel like I brought this on myself when I decided to throw in the Ally McBeal pumps, I know that I would still be doing a shit load of laundry if I were lawyering downtown.  No doubt.  With three messy chitlins, mucha dirty ropa is to be expected.  Bibs have never been my thing (I’m all about avoiding the tiniest extra step, even when I know it would be prudent to just do it - a stitch in time saves nine is my anti-motto) and now that I’ve discovered spray-on Oxyclean, I don’t even bother to remove a white t-shirt about to take on a red popsicle. 

I have learned this:  you can’t keep clothes clean, but you canget them clean – so peace out and relax.

Our house has a laundry chute, which in addition to being so cute and clever and hearkening back to a more innocent time, is a really really convenient way to clean up the house.  Down the chute, deal with it later.  Three sets of pajamas on the ground (because how, how, how can you be expected to put your pajamas under your pillow and then remember they are there the next night?)  Two down the chute, one under the pillow.  Less than fresh smelling Spiderman undies? Down the chute.  White towel smeared with either chocolate or poo, not worth the sniff to determine which?  Oxyclean and down the chute.  Supergirl’s been dabbing her bleeding mosquito-bite scabs with the dishcloth again?  Ditto.

For all the dirty laundry produced by my kids, Doctor Dash does them a dastardly dirty dog double dutch donkey kong double.  He is the king of wearing a shirt for a couple hours and throwing it down the chute.  Yes, he exercises a lot and yes, I understand he can’t be expected to wear that stuff again, but can’t he take a page from the French and go with a bit of his natural essence and wear the same t-shirt two days in a row?  Or at least all day long?  And his black Pearl Izumi socks . . . oh, God help me!  They look like black cow tongues – and he leaves a pair on the floor by the bed every, every, every day.  For some reason, Doctor Dash needs to get into bed with socked feet, but cannot sleep with socked feet, and cannot be bothered to resock his feet in the morning with those pathetic worms strewn on the floor.  So if he’s home, I passive-aggressively kick them out of the bedroom onto the landing and if he’s not home I pick them up, sometimes cursing his existence, sometimes reminding myself that if anything ever happened to him, I would be so sad to have wasted energy being angered by a motion that takes two seconds, but then that brings me back to cursing him because it would take him two seconds to pick them up too.  And they’re his socks.

So every once in a while, when I go to the basement, I am horrified at the size of the heaving, moldering mountain that has accumulated.  It seems to fester and grumble – like a volcano.  My devil may care, down the chute, deal with it later philosophy can really come back to bite me in the ass.  

And then there’s the laundry fauna to contend with.  Sometimes, as I crouch and sort darks and tie dyes from everything else, one of those crazy hairy urban centipede things will scuttle out of the pile at breakneck speeds sending me into a convulsive whole body shiver.  Apparently these house centipedes are totally harmless and are actually beneficial – they are insectavors . . .  although that line of thinking is kind of like Amy Sedaris reintroducing mice to her NY city apartment when she realized that the mice had been eating the cockroaches.  

But the worst of all my laundry travails happened when we were living in a rental house in Ann Arbor a couple years ago.  I was throwing everything into the dryer and there was one little toddler sock left in the bottom of the washing machine, so I reached in and grabbed it. But it wasn’t a toddler sock at all.  No, it was a limp, wet, drowned, but very clean mouse.  I nearly had a heart attack and after screaming my head off and running away, and shuddering and shivering and screaming some more, I decided to leave the whole debacle for Doctor Dash to deal with.  For the rest of the day, I was plagued by the notion of all those clothes soaking and spinning in . . . . mouse juice. 

Today I threw out an entire case of clementine oranges.  You know those crates you’re so happy to see in the beginning of winter because they’re sweet and easy to peel and your kids will actually eat them and they cost anywhere from nine dollars to six dollars depending on the ebb and flow of their little migration from Spain? 

They had been in the fridge for months and although citrus lasts a looooong time, there are limits.  They had been reduced to desiccated little globules, the shrunken heads of some tribe of orange peoples.  I HATE to throw away food, what, with the starving children with flies in their eyes and all.  Americans waste a staggering amount of food – about a pound every day for every person -  we generate thirty million pounds of food waste per year.  Today I pitched in by pitching the clementines.  As they thunked angrily to the bottom of my trash can (uugh, yes, I should be composting but my list of excuses would require a whole other blog entry), I had a flashback to the fateful day when I bought them.  

It’s the end of winter and my kids are pretty much sick of clementines, but I shift into autopilot at the supermarket (which, coupled with my Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride cart manoeuvering is how I manage to break $200.00 in less than 15 minutes).  I reach for the clementines and pause, my arm in midair like a Stepford Wife whose controls have gone awry and I think:  I shouldn’t buy these, they look a little feeble and everyone is over them.  But in the eternal quest to find food my kids will eat, I allow myself to believe that I can get one more crate’s worth of vitamin C into them and plop them into the cart.  And now they’re mocking me from the bottom of my trash can because I’m such a sucker.  

This is why I do not belong to Costco.  Keep me the hell away from that place.  It’s a vortex for the fat and avaricious and I know myself all too well.  I will be powerless to resist the siren song of gigantic packs of berries, huge pallets of unnaturally rotund tomatoes, enormous bottles of calcium supplements and strange frozen delicacies.  My mother always wants to take me to Costco when she comes to visit and because I relented in a moment of weakness, I am now the proud owner of a tremendous box of frozen Mexican carnitas.  God help me the day I throw those away . . .

Like I said, sucker.