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This week’s Spin Cycle is all about Mother’s Day. Sunday I’m treating myself by taking the G Man (and my camera) to the Cincinnati Zoo for the day – that is definitely a grandma’s idea of fun! But since I can’t really tell you about it before it happens (trust me, you’ll hear and see plenty about it afterwards), I give you an account of my Mother’s Day from 2008.
I had a nice Mother’s Day; in fact I had a nice weekend. A slightly traumatic weekend and Mother’s Day, but nice all the same.
Saturday was lovely, weather-wise, and we knew Sunday was going to be rainy and dreary, so we left Darling Daughter and The Young One home to their own devices (being the brave souls we are) while Beloved drove me to the Prime One Mall in Grove City, Pennsylvania. This is notable – for me, anyway – for two reasons:
- I grew up in Texas. Unless you live in El Paso or Texarkana, you can’t drive to another state just to shop.
- Knowing that The Young One would be mowing the lawn without supervision. You see, as a mother I am convinced that my mere presence wards off any calamity. The downside to that is if I remove my presence, I become convinced that my darling baby, who is a hopeless klutz, is going to mow off his own left foot. Which, of course, he didn’t but is apparently a distinct possibility considering what happened yesterday (I’ll get around to that in a moment).
Traumatic Moment #1 happened when, after we’d wound our way around this absolutely ginormous mall, we got to the piéce de resistánce – the Liz Claiborne Women’s Outlet Store – only to find that it was no longer there. Not only was it no longer there, I was smacked right in the face with THE irrefutable proof that There Is No God – it was being replaced by a Juicy Couture outlet store. (Please, no comments that there are other things signifying the presence of a Supreme Being – this supersedes all of them.) We hoofed it over to the regular Liz Claiborne store, while Beloved assured me they’d moved the women’s store in there – may have, in fact, split the store down the center to accommodate it, while I snarled that if they had moved it to the regular store, it got shoved in the back in a corner approximately 10 feet wide.
And guess who was right? While it was slightly larger than 10 feet wide, it was stuck in a corner in the back of the store. Nor was I the only woman in there who was so pissed she was ready to chew nails and spit out carpet tacks. However, not all was lost, because despite the fact that I was standing in the middle of this greatly diminished bit of dumpy, middle-aged woman clothing Nirvana bellowing “There’s NOTHING HERE for me to choose from!!” Beloved, who knows my taste in clothes almost better than I do myself, was feverishly combing the racks for items he knew would calm me down. Which he did; in fact, he did such a superb job that I came out of that store with more clothes than I’d ever bought at one time in my entire life (maybe I should go hormonally menopausal every time he goes shopping with me…).
Traumatic Moment #2 came the minute I woke up Sunday morning and was forbidden to enter my own kitchen. Note the words MY KITCHEN. It is my domain, my kingdom, my refuge, and I was summarily banished from it while Darling Daughter ruined my pots and pans cooked breakfast. And to give credit where credit it due, I only bullied my way in there once. The smell of burning bacon does tend to bring out the bully in a banished mother; I’m sure I can’t be the ONLY one. The Young One even got into the act – against his will, yes, but he did measure out the ingredients for the blueberry muffins. Which were really tasty, even if they looked more like blueberry pancakes. It was about this time The Young One tripped over his own toenails and rammed the bejebus out of his big toe, which is now the loveliest shades of black and blue you ever saw, and rendered him completely useless for washing dishes the rest of the day. (I rather suspect there will be future, deliberate, toe ramming.)
Breakfast really was delicious, even if it made me realize that I should probably spend more time in the kitchen teaching the children to actually use it as something other than a receptacle for cold drinks and a handy place to microwave leftovers. Although I must say that Darling Daughter did a GREAT job on the filet mignon we had for dinner…at least, I think she did – my judgment may have been slightly impaired by the two and a half pre-dinner Mother’s Day Chocolate Martinis served to me by Beloved. *hic*
Traumatic Moment #3 occurred while I was painting a dish at the pottery store down the street – something that apparently 386 other mothers decided to do since it was raining cats and dogs, and the choices for mother-oriented entertainment (any entertainment, really) is extremely limited here in Podunk, Ohio. One family – father, mother and two VERY small children – came into the store and sat down at the table right next to us. Which was fine. The kids ran amok while Mother tried to coral them long enough to find something to paint. Which was also fine. They sat down and the little darlings, probably 3 and 5, shrieked and giggled and shrieked some more while they splattered the expensive plates with paint. Again fine. Mother sat and threatened them 72 times that if they didn’t “stay in their seats and not shout” they’d “go home right that minute.” Kids continued to ignore Mother, who painted nothing but tried to direct her little darlings on how they should paint their pieces, which they both finished in 4 1/2 minutes. Mother finally made good on her threat, and removed them from the store so they could go next door and get ice cream.
Where was Father while Mother coerced and cajoled and yelled and threatened and finally left with the kiddies? Sitting serenely at the same table, painting the piece he picked out, and ignoring his precious little offspring with a single-mindedness that bespoke long practice.
I wanted to punch him dead in the nose. I swear to the God that doesn’t exist because He’d let my beloved Liz Claiborne Women’s Outlet store be replaced by Juicy Couture, if it had been MY husband who’d let me spend MY Mother’s Day chasing the children around like a deranged rodeo clown while HE quietly sat and amused himself, he’d be talking to a divorce lawyer today. And I’d insist he get custody of his rotten precious little brats darlings. I kid you not.
If nothing else, the jerk guy would definitely benefit from lessons on how to plan and execute a successful Mother’s Day.
I wonder if there would be any money in renting out Beloved for that purpose – surely the mixing and serving of Mother’s Day Chocolate Martinis would be an invaluable skill to learn.
I grew up in a very matriarchal household. My mother was, shall we say, of a very strong character. She was blunt and loud and had very little filter between the brain and the mouth. Very much a child of the 60s (Mom was barely 17 when I arrived in December of 1962) she was uninhibited in many ways, but she also had some oddly conservative views when it came to my behavior (although she’d done a complete 180 by the time my youngest sister, ten years my junior, became a teenager). She could cuss like a sailor when she was angry, but I was not allowed to and the word “Fuck” was absolutely verboten, even in her vocabulary. She was honest and forthright when asked about sex, but when she found out that I was sleeping with my boyfriend at the age of 18, she was not at ALL pleased. She had to work, and work hard, all of her life but I spent my teenage years listening to a litany of “find a good man to take care of you.”
(One of my biggest regrets in life is that my mother never met Beloved…I don’t know if they’d have adored each other or spent all of their time trying to bitch-slap each other into next week. Either way, it would have been extremely amusing to watch.)
It wasn’t until recently that I realized that my love of all things Anne Taintor is because her stuff reminds me of Mom. As far as she was concerned, you could – and should – think what you want, but you better be goddamn careful how you express those thoughts and even more careful about the appearance you presented the world (sometimes I wonder why Mom and The Ex didn’t get along better). Not that she was the kind of woman that wouldn’t leave the house without makeup or perfect hair – she wasn’t sloppy or slovenly, but pearls and heels definitely weren’t her thing – for Mom, appearances were all about the kind of person you were and the kind of life you led.
Or, considering she the fact that she liked nothing better than toking up in the evenings after work (in the bedroom, so we wouldn’t know what she was doing – yeah, right), it was all about the appearance we presented to society.
It’s really no secret where the idea that appearances mattered came from. My mother grew up in a very matriarchal household, too. My grandmother was the epitome of the Genteel Proper Southern Lady, but my grandfather personified the Strong, Silent Man Who Left the Child Rearing to His Wife. And although my mother had been Rebellious Growing Up, she absorbed a great many of my grandmother’s values which, like so many of her generation, centered around “What would the neighbors think?”
Oh, how things have changed.
Every week, my immediate family has two questions for me: Are you doing a Random Tuesday Thoughts post and What’s the Spin Cycle about? This week, I’ve been laid up with a fairly nasty bug (as of this writing, Wednesday evening, I’m feeling a little better, but still pretty crappy), that has pretty much hindered the progress of this post. Because trust me, I begin thinking about it the minute Jen hands out the next week’s assignment every Friday morning. This week when The Young One asked me what the subject of the Spin Cycle was and I told him “Appearances” he naturally asked (he is, after all, a teenager), “You mean how you look?”
“Sure,” I said. “In fact, some of the bloggers who are participating have written excellent posts along those lines. But I think mine is going to be more about how the world perceives us.”
He looked a bit confused, so I said, “When my mother was growing up, and even more so when my grandmother was growing up, it was very common for people to worry about what other people thought of them. If something bad happened to them or their families, they often didn’t talk about it – sometimes they went to great lengths to hide it.”
I regarded the incredulous look on his 15-year-old face, and considered the fact that he is living in the age of Jerry Springer and YouTube and 24-hour news channels that seem obsessed with what is going on in the lives of Tiger Woods and Sandra Bullock and apologies being issued by the Vatican. In a world according to Nancy Grace, nothing is private.
Some very ugly and traumatic things have happened to me and those close to me in the 47 years I’ve been on this earth, and I don’t for a minute excuse the way some members of my family have glossed over and out-and-out ignored those ugly and traumatic things, but I also strenuously object to how every detail of our lives has the potential to become public property. Does it all have to be on the evening news and/or splashed all over the internet? Aren’t we allowed to say “Yes, we’re human with all the faults and foibles that humans possess, but we should be allowed to work this out in private, with some sort of dignity?”
What do YOU think?
I’m stepping out of my comfort zone today (and I have a ton of stuff to do), so no Spin Cycle today – I’ll post it tomorrow. However, I thought I’d post this because I found it both hilarious and thought-provoking:
I know a few of my readers are educators, and even more have children that are either school-aged or have graduated from public schools and I’d really like your thoughts on this.
Texas was the very first state in the country to have standardized testing, which means that our kids were among the first to be put through the grist-mill. Beloved and I have very serious issues with standardized testing – as the parents of five children, we can tell you there is absolutely nothing standard about them. Couple this with the fact that OGT testing – the standardized test here in Ohio that a child must pass in order to graduate – is being administered this week (and has completely disrupted The Young One’s schedule AND education), well, I’d like your opinions.
Standardized testing – what do you think of it?
“Sleep is the overlooked hero and the poor man’s physician. Shakespeare said it’s the thread that knits up the ravelled sleeve of care, Napoleon called it the blessed end of night, and Winston Churchill – one of the great insomniacs of the twentieth century – said it was the only relief he ever got from his deep depressions.” – Stephen King, Insomnia
I have been plagued with periodic bouts of insomnia since about the time I turned 40, and the problem doesn’t seem to be getting any better. If anything, it’s getting worse the older I get.
It’s really disconcerting, because when I was young I slept like a rock – boom! Out like a light and I generally stayed that way until someone or something dragged me out of bed the next morning. But now? Well, most nights I don’t have too much trouble falling asleep and will wake up briefly two or three times. Once in a great while I’ll have a night of genuinely deep, uninterrupted sleep but those nights seem to becoming fewer and fewer, just as the periods of insomnia seem to be increasing.
I’ll go weeks, sometimes even months, with what has become my normal pattern of sleep, then I’ll go through a period where I can fall asleep with little or no problem, but once I’ve wakened – for a drink of water, to go to the restroom or, gawd help us, with a lovely hot flash – I can’t just go back to sleep the way I normally do. Sometimes it’s just an isolated incident, but more often than not it heralds the onslaught of 3, 4 or even 5 sleepless nights spent on the sofa dozing through a movie.
Last night, it was the good old antacid coupled with a mild anxiety attack (another little menopausal gift that just keeps on giving) at 3:20 in the morning. Off to the sofa I went, with my pillow and the afghan, so I wouldn’t keep Beloved up with my tossing and turning. This morning, as we got ready for work, he said, “Next time you wake up and can’t go back to sleep, try to match your breathing to mine.”
I’m not real bright at 7 a.m. after a largely sleepless night. “Huh?”
“You were breathing so rapidly when you got up last night,” he said. “You were almost panting.”
“Yeah, well, an anxiety attack will do that to you,” I replied.
“Well, try matching your breathing to mine next time,” he suggested again. “It might help you calm down enough to get back to sleep.”
Again, I’m not at my mental best under those circumstances so it didn’t occur to me to tell him that part of the anxiety attack was caused by me remembering (and I don’t know why) the truly creepy ending of Paranormal Activity coupled with the thought of the huge pile of paperwork sitting on my desk at the office, so I said, “Gee, dear, I don’t think it’s going to help me get back to sleep by going ‘SNOOOOOORKGURGLESNOZZZZZ’ at volumes that could wake the dead. But thanks for the suggestion.”
He was not amused, although it made for a good story while gathered around the coffee pot at the office this morning.
So, do you suffer from trouble sleeping? And what do you do for it?
This week’s Spin Cycle is about “The Sixth Sense.” ESP. Clairvoyance. Precognition. The supernatural, if you will.
I’m afraid I may be the lone, dissenting voice this week when I say:
Uh…no.
Don’t get me wrong – I would love nothing more than to believe that there are spirits or ghosts or that we can divine the future. I was in my early 20s when I saw the picture of the little girl with fairies that so captivated Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and was really disappointed (although probably not as disappointed as he was) to find out that it was a fake. Who needs Photoshop?
Another big disappointment came when I read the re-released, unabridged version of Stephen King’s The Stand. On page 536 of the paperback version (yes, I looked it up) one of the major characters brings up a study done in the late 50′s by a sociologist named James D.L. Staunton. According to the story, Staunton did a study that shows that, due to precognitive flashes by ordinary human beings, full planes and trains rarely crash. Oh, my! I thought. That’s simply amazing. Alas, a quick search of the internet will turn up the fact that there is no sociologist by the name of James D.L. Staunton, and – needless to say – no study of the capacity of planes and trains that have crashed. It is merely a plot device (and my hat off to Mr. King, because I am apparently not the only person who wanted to buy that little tidbit hook, line and sinker).
I could go into my gullibility over the years and how it’s all been debunked in more depth, but A) it would take more space than I care to dedicate (or you care to read) in this blog and 2) I don’t want to bore anyone any more than I absolutely have to. Let’s just suffice to say that I’ve wanted to believe. Really, really wanted to believe. And every time I’ve found some bit of rationality that has proved it all to be either a hoax or something that can be explained by science.
Every single time.
The whole concept really came crashing down when, after my divorce, my ex came to me and claimed that Oldest Son was sexually molesting Darling Daughter. To say I was perturbed was putting it mildly – as unfair as it was (and it was), I depended on Oldest Son a great deal to help me with his younger siblings; it was just one of the ugly but often necessary parts of divorce. When I asked The Ex how he knew this, he said the woman he was living with at the time – we’ll call her Really Crazy Bitch – told him so.
Not only concerned but confused (as far as I knew, my kids had very limited contact with Really Crazy Bitch), I questioned him further. No, let’s be honest here – I grilled him like a cheese sandwich. How did Really Crazy Bitch know this? Had Darling Daughter taken her into her confidence? Just what the HELL WAS GOING ON HERE??
You can only imagine my disdain surprise when I found out that no, Darling Daughter had not come forth with this information, but that Really Crazy Bitch had found out by “divining” it – according to The Ex, Really Crazy Bitch was clairvoyant.
Let me just point out that Really Crazy Bitch also convinced The Ex to shoplift several high dollar items for her (promises of sex!), leading to two arrests (that I know of) AND had The Ex park a car and watch over her while she stood on a street corner begging for money and pretended to be homeless. All for some sort of “study” she was doing…never mind she was a good 15 years older than The Ex and not attending school.
Yeah. And this is just some of the stuff that I know about.
I’ll just finish this off by saying that “The Sixth Sense” is just one of many things I’d love to believe in, but I can’t. There simply isn’t anything in my personal experience (to say nothing of being backed up by empiric, scientific evidence) that gives any credence to it.
But it’s still a really rockin’ film with Bruce Willis.