Search and What?

My husband needs a hobby. Which is why I was thrilled when he came home with what sounded like a promising candidate. He’s thinking of getting certified so he can volunteer for the local Search & Rescue dive team.

“You’re going to rescue people?” I asked.

“What do you mean?”

“Search and Rescue?”

He shrugged. ”It’s really more Search.”

Shopping With My 75-Year-Old Mother-in-Law

My mother-in-law and I do not agree on fashion. Chicos is chic, she counsels, modern. She once told my children I needed to stop dressing like a teenager. An old friend, when I told her this, said, “Clearly she didn’t know you when you were a teenager.” Clearly.

On a recent visit, she conned me into taking her to Dillard’s on the pretense of buying herself a shirt outside of my father-in-law’s frugal watch. After twenty minutes at the Ralph Lauren racks, pointing out which zebra print and nautical sweaters would look lovely with my coloring, she gave up.

“This is my daughter,” she told the sales clerk. “I try to buy her things, but you can’t buy her anything. Because she’s petite, but she’s not petite.”

The woman smiled and nodded toward the petite section. “But there’s nothing young over there. She needs to shop on that side of the store.” She pointed to the department where no one had a walker, or an oxygen mask.

My mother-in-law dismissed her with a look. ”But I like Ralph Lauren.”

Whose Fault Is That?

I don’t bake. Scratch that. I don’t bake often. However, when I’m snowed in or hormonal or really jonesin’ for some homemade sweetness, I’ll bust out the Kitchen Aid stand mixer and mess up my kitchen. This is almost always a bad idea.

If you had been married to me for fifteen years you would know this. And if you had been sitting at the kitchen table working when the timer went off for the cookies and I didn’t come to take the cookies out of the oven and you just kept right on working until smoke started curling out of oven and then nobody got to eat cookies–whose fault is that?

When The Man Is Sick

Men, we love you – really we do. Bless your hearts. But when you’re sick, you are at best ridiculous and at worst, well – just sick. Here’s the thing – get over it. Recently my husband got sick – AGAIN, but instead of going to the doctor, he decided he needed to ‘fight it off.’ The joy.

Day 1

Wow, they weren’t kidding with that cough syrup. I do feel dizzy.

It’s strong. How much did you take?

A tablespoon, just like it says.

It says to take a teaspoon.

No.

Yes. T-S-P stands for teaspoon.

Whatever. Tablespoon, teaspoon, same thing.

k

Day 2

That cough medicine really worked last night. I’m going to take it again.

Okay, but just a teaspoon this time, right?

Oh yeah. For sure.

[20 minutes later]

How you feeling?

[grumble, grumble, grunt] It works a lot better if you take a tablespoon.

Dating at the Prime of Life

For all its pain and suffering, marriage does have one distinct advantage: we don’t have to date. From all I hear it seems really, really, painfully difficult. And it’s not just that I’ve been married so long that I have forgotten what it was like. I never actually dated. I was one of those dreadful girls who just went from one boyfriend to another to my husband with precious few periods of ‘dating’ in between.

I’m not sure I could handle the scene at this age, which–if my friends are to be believed–includes the following:

• men who have grandchildren, yet still live with their mothers
• women who run credit reports before the first date
• limited small town prospects that make dating after divorce feel like getting tossed into a bag of ‘Shake ‘N Bake until someone sticks
• too-high bikini area maintenance standards
• modern communication: did he really get my text?
• so much corporate travel you have to MapQuest your own address when you finally get home
• the new math required to determine how many dates until…
• exes and custody schedules

But go on, y’all – date. I enjoy living vicariously through you. I live to give you my bullshit all-knowing advice without having to personally suffer the emotional upheaval it causes. Who knows? You may end up married like me. Then I’ll be very helpful.

Meet Me at the Hotel Room

Remember when hotel rooms were sexy? All vacation and rendezvous and sheets you didn’t have to clean? Yeah, me neither. But I do remember when a hotel room represented relaxation. A freshly made bed, hours of freedom, drinks mixed with ice from down the hall. And again, the lack of laundry.

Now that most of my disposable income goes toward exposing my children to experiences (and boots) that may create wonderful memories or somehow serve them later in life, hotel rooms are all about the agony of too much family togetherness. Where once there was soft lighting and exotic snacks, now there are wet towels on every once-dry surface and my tweens’ ever expanding collections of grooming aids, which are fast outgrowing my own.

Instead of a good movie on TV (possibly featuring a naked Mark Wahlberg), we are forced to suffer through endless half hours of Miley Cyrus and that guy with the mullet whose head heart we all wanted to break, with a sledgehammer, back in 1992.

There are soggy pizza boxes on the bed. (Okay, maybe that part’s the same.)

I hide in the bathroom reading a book, partly to be alone, and partly so that no one can stink up the 200 square feet that have become our family living space. Did I mention the dog? Oh yes, we’re that crazy. In close proximity to the ever present them, I grow increasingly irritated. I crave escape from my husband’s brilliant observations, such as, “This place really fills up at night.” We smuggle the dog in and out of the room, begging him to ‘go’ at our convenience.

Finally, I turn to the ill-equipped fitness center for refuge and am devastated to see that although there are only two lonely treadmills, the tiny room has been outfitted with three walls of mirror, allowing me to see all that is shielded in my own strategically mirrored home. I want to go home. Now.

Other parents have already crossed over, crossed back into the world of peaceful hotel rooms. They have begun to reserve two of them. I can’t do that. I’m not ready. And I’m far to cheap. Besides, if I did that, what would I have to write about?

Caught in the Act

After an enlightening conversation with a new acquaintance, I decided to ask my Facebook Friends if they’d ever been caught in the act by their kids. The response was overwhelming. The situations people were willing to share with me made me insanely jealous, and also wonder if they knew what that little turny-thingy on the door knob is for. Not a surprise: there were a lot of instances of women getting tossed across the room out of sight.

I won’t go into the individual stories, but I thought I’d let you in on the top excuses given to the traumatized children.

• We’re practicing our MMA moves.
• I’m just rubbing Mommy’s back.
• Sometimes Mommy likes to play Cowgirl.
• I’m looking for my phone.
• Oh come on, it’s nothing you haven’t seen on Channel 726.

and my personal favorite…

• Well I guess I’ll never be able to talk Mommy into THAT again.

Will My Husband Survive the Teen Years?

We’re sitting around the dinner table the other night when the phone rings. Three of us at the table know who it is. It’s the cute girl my 11-year-old son is ‘going out with’, the one I describe as a ‘fellow 4.0 student’ and my son describes and ‘nice’ and ‘accurate’, the one who has very good posture.

The only person in our family who doesn’t immediately know who is on the phone is my husband, John. In his best 1950s Father voice he asks, “Who could be calling so late?”

It is 6:30.

I answer the phone and tell the sweet girl that my boy will call her back. Then I tell John he may have a very difficult decade ahead.

When the Villain is a Husband

One of the most important things about creating believable fictional characters is to avoid making them one-dimensional. Real people aren’t simple, and you never want story people who are either all good or all bad. This comes up a lot at our writers’ critique group meetings.

Recently one woman was going on and on about how there’s nothing she hates worse than some mustache twirling villain that’s just one hundred percent bad. I reminded her that she had no trouble accepting the cheating spouse in my novel who is also stupid, vain, and terrible in bed.

“Oh that’s different,” she says. “That was a husband.”

Disclaimer: The quotations reported in this blog reflect the opinions of those who said them. (Which is why they’re anonymous.) They do not necessarily reflect the view of the blog writer, who is at this writing happily married, to a man who–it’s probably best–doesn’t read this blog anyway.

Hot Date at Sam’s Club

I write a column for a local magazine about how to have romantic date nights with your spouse. I give really good advice like committing to a regular night, shaking things up with novel activities, and taking that extra time to prepare for and flirt with your spouse.

I’m such a fraud.

On a recent Saturday night my husband and I experienced the rare thrill of being childless for a few hours. I sat on his lap and told him there was something I really, really wanted to do. Before he even had time to ponder the possibilities, I laid it on him: I wanted to go to Sam’s Club.

I needed to scope out the food options for the fortieth birthday party I’m planning for myself. (In more romantic couples, the person not actually having the big milestone birthday might be the one to plan the party, but this is about us.) Let the dating begin!

At the optical counter I talked John into some stylish new frames. A few minutes later we shared samples of Goldfish crackers and compared the price of meat and cheese trays. He told me he’d take care of everything for the party, which is not how it will work, but it sounded nice and saying pretty things is half of romance.

This tray of enchaladas wouldn’t let us go. The date would now include a romantic meal complete with free appetizers: pizza, granola bars, sausage. We talked with people we knew–a neighbor, a friend, a co-worker. Turned out Sam’s was the place to be that Saturday night.

We even held hands.

There were no cute jeans, no sexy shoes. I didn’t blow out my hair or retouch my makeup. But it was nice. This errand I could have done on my own was as good a date as any. Doing it together reminded me of how life used to be before the business end of our family got so big it required dividing up all the little tasks that used to bring us together.

We went home and shared those enchaladas in the living room like old times. John tried to sit next to me on the love seat, but it wasn’t comfortable and we’ve got nothing to prove so he headed over to the recliner. And he let me pick the movie.

Maybe I’m not such a fraud after all.

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