The Trouble With Car Trouble

This is the June edition of the print version of After the Bubbly, an award winning family humor column. If you’d like to see it in a local publication, let me know and I’ll do my best to get it there!

A couple of summers ago I was unloading an obscene amount of groceries when I noticed a thick, pink substance on the garage floor. Lemonade maybe? But it appeared to be coming from inside the car. After I got my dairy and frozen goods out of the sweltering trunk, I dipped my finger into the pink stuff. It didn’t smell like anything and looked about as worrisome as IHOP syrup, which is only dangerous to my thighs.

About an hour later I had to run an urgent errand. (Running low on string cheese, most likely.) Because my husband was out of town, I had another car to drive, one which did not have pink goo oozing out of it. However, I chose to drive the leaky car. It started and drove fine, until the thermometer light came on. I tensed when it started to blink, even though I had no idea what that meant.

If I designed cars, there would be a light that said, Pull Over. And if you didn’t immediately comply, another light would come on that said, NOW! If you still didn’t get the hint, the car would turn itself off. But my car doesn’t have this handy imaginary feature. Despite the warning light, my trip was uneventful. I finished my urgent errand and drove home.

The next afternoon, after loading into my car five children, four snorkels, two masks, a box of crackers, forty-five fruit snacks, a gross of beach towels, and enough juice to flood a small country, the car wouldn’t start. I tried again while the children whined, hot and cranky. Clearly this was another urgent situation so I did what I had to do. I switched cars and went to the pool.

Then I had to make the call. “Do you want to hear the bad news?” I asked my husband.

I told him about the harmless smelling gunk, the flashing red thermometer, and the non-starting car. Luckily I married a man who remains calm in the face of mechanical trouble.

“Was the car leaking while you were driving?”

“No,” I said. “It was in the garage.”

“And the light, when was that flashing?”

Here’s where things started to turn against me. “Oh, well…. see…. I needed to go to the –”

“You drove the car?”

He’s even calm in the face of four-digit repair bills, but he felt bad for the car. I couldn’t feed his panic, but had to reassure him that there was nothing to worry about, just a task to accomplish. “What I need to know is whether I should have the car towed to the dealership or if you think we can put in some more of that pink stuff and drive it over.”

My husband sighed from another state and I heard the hang of his head. “I hope you didn’t seize the engine.”

“No.” I brushed it off. “I think it’s something else – something easy to fix.”

Neither my husband nor the mechanic agreed that it was something ‘easy’ to fix, but it didn’t matter. I may not be good with machines, but things always work out for me. For instance, my new car is very shiny.

When You Want to Run Away

This is the September edition of the print version of After the Bubbly, an award winning family humor column. If you’d like to see it in a local publication, let me know and I’ll do my best to get it there!

When I was a kid I never wanted to run away and join the circus. Now that I’m older, I get it. Although it’s not my dream to tame lions or become the bearded lady, I understand the lure of escaping to some exotic life where the tightrope you walk is literal as opposed to the figurative balancing act we do here in the world of diapers, homework, and ear infections.

My mother tells a story about her mother, who would tell her children that if they didn’t behave she would run off to Tucumcari, New Mexico and they’d never find her. To which my mother calmly responded that they most certainly would find her – in Tucumcari, New Mexico.

Mom shouted similar warnings to my brother and I as kids. She would run away and never return. We didn’t have reason to believe her empty threats, but then again, you never knew. Moms are crazy like that. Our mothers and grandmothers didn’t mess with balance – work-life or otherwise. They didn’t have spa days or antidepressants or Oprah. They just woke up in the morning and did what needed doing. And if they lost it once in a while, well, they were entitled.

Genetics notwithstanding, I have yet to issue such a circus-running-off sort of threat. I prefer short periods of actual escape to fantasies of long-term flight. Running off for weekend writing classes and conferences recharges my depleted mama batteries and gives me strength to face the days of infinite laundry and incessant requests for Nintendo DS cartridges. I schedule my respites months in advance and write them on the calendar – in pen. In Sharpie even.

My retreats may not be as exciting as swallowing swords, but for me, some quality time with a spiral notebook and a half decent pen is usually enough to return equilibrium. And if it’s not, I run off to yoga class, where we make like a tree and stand on one leg, or rest our thighs upon our biceps. That’s balance. These are the things that keep me from losing it.

So next time you’re tempted to run away and join the circus, remember that you can juggle fire in your own kitchen and rig up a tightrope in your backyard. Just make sure you wait until after you’ve finished all that other balancing  – you know, the checkbook, the food groups, and the quality time spent with each child.

And if you hear of any writers’ meetings in Tucumcari, New Mexico, don’t come looking for me.

Lela Davidson is a Northwest Arkansas writer seeking to balance life, love, and laundry with a husband, two children, a dog, and an ever-changing number of fish. Read more at www.afterthebubbly.com.

Compliments Are Never Weird

Thanks to Kim Enderle at Peekaboo Magazine, I’ve had the crazy good luck to be read by a lot of Northwest Arkansans over the last year and a half. I don’t know how many people actually read After the Bubbly and Chasing Date Night, but I do know that I can’t get out of any social situation (yes, that includes Walmart) without someone mentioning something they’ve read.

I cannot tell you how happy this makes me. Deliriously, giddily, stupidly happy. That some snot mouth remark hatched in my highly scattered mind made you laugh? When I hear that, it’s the highlight of my day.

At a party the other night I introduced myself to someone who mentioned she was just reading me today and almost sent me an email to let me know how much she enjoyed my column.

“But I thought you might think that was weird.”

Let me state very clearly: compliments are never weird. Honestly, the more effusive the better.

What’s weird is when you compliment me once and I subsequently harass you each and every month to make sure you have not only read my columns, blog, and assorted Facebook and Twitter status posts, but that you were also so entertained that you had to stock up on Poise pads. That would be weird.

Thank you, Dear Readers, for playing along. And thank you, Kim, for creating a magazine people want to pick up!

Are We There Yet?

This is the July edition of the print version of After the Bubbly, an award winning family humor column. If you’d like to see it in a local publication, let me know and I’ll do my best to get it there!

Are We There Yet?

This year I bought airline tickets for August in April, which made me wonder when summer vacation changed from a time of pure freedom to just another set of squares on the calendar to coordinate. After a frustrating afternoon working out travel details, I realized there is a life cycle to summer vacation.

When we were kids the last day of school and the first day of the next year may as well have been decades apart. Life consisted of trips, reading lists, and sleeping in. We lived for waterslides, watermelon, and trout fishing. The end of summer was too far into the future to imagine. Just like those long car trips where we simply could not help ourselves from asking, are we there yet? Read more

They Like Me, They Really Like Me!

I didn’t make a fool of myself ala Sally Field, but I would have if they’d let me.

The print version of After the Bubbly won first place in the Mazie Cox Reid Column award at the Oklahoma Writer’s Federation Conference! This was a serious accomplishment considering the judging audience isn’t exactly my target demographic, as evidenced by the honorable mention, Campus Codger and the 2nd place winner Viewing Life Through Tri-Focals.

So THANK YOU to OWFI, and THANK YOU to all of you who read online and in Peekaboo!

And if you’re wondering what’s a Peekaboo?, it’s our local family magazine here in Northwest Arkansas. They run me every month, which proves I can play nice in print. If you’d like to see the column in your local publication, please let me know and I’ll do my best to get it there!

Here’s a sample of recent print columns:

The Case of the Easter Bunny
New Birthday Plan: No More Kids Parties
Making Babies…. Oh the Glamour!
Cut Costs This Year, Starting With the Tooth Fairy
Garden Spiders Beware

Get Busted, aka Parents Gone Wild

This is the June edition of the print version of After the Bubbly, an award winning family humor column. If you’d like to see it in a local publication, let me know and I’ll do my best to get it there!

Get Busted

When my kids were little, their doctor busted me.

“Anyone in the house smoke?” she asked.

“No,” I said, totally telling the truth.

“Mom!” My five-year-old daughter looked at me wide-eyed, as if I’d said a bad word. Then she turned from me to her new role model, the kind and presumably honest lady doctor. “My dad smokes.”

“Busted!” said the doctor.

Cut to me backpedaling and using way too many words to explain away my husband’s weekly cigar. Or was it nightly? Either way, he smoked outside so it didn’t really count. Right?

“Right,” the doctor assured. She was nice, unlike the little traitor I’d been feeding for half a decade.

That brush with not-even-bad behavior made me want to let out a rebel yell. Being a grown up can be so lame. It reminded me pool party where, by the time the cops showed up, we had dwindled to a dozen thirty-somethings around a half empty keg making really bad karaoke.

Back in the day, I rocked a pretty hard Love Shack baby, but that involved way more alcohol than my adult liver cares to process. But now I have fun in a mature and non-rebellious way, drinking beer not purchased by anyone’s older sister or boyfriend, but by tax paying and law abiding adults.

We’d started to gather bags and say our goodbyes when two young officers appeared inside the gate. I would have sworn they were strippers. (That, or our host had put them up to it to make us all feel younger and badder.) But they were completely serious. After interrupting a particularly heartbreaking rendition of Prince’s Kiss they said to the homeowners – and I quote – “don’t make us come back out here.”

Had someone been watching Cops? I ached for the DJ to cue up that Bad Boys song. What-chou Gonna Do? The guy who’d had to stop mid-Falsetto looked like my eight-year-old when I say lights out. Just a little longer? Pleeeeeze!

I wondered what the police expected to find. No rebels here – just a bunch of grown-ups amid a sea of mayonnaise-based salads and a beer fridge full of milk. My husband, who hadn’t been too hot on the party idea in the first place, gave me a look that said this never happens while watching World’s Greatest Engineering Feats. But we’d had a great time. Who can argue with burgers, brew and ‘tater salad? The only thing missing were his cigars.

The big question – other than don’t the police have some Meth labs to eradicate? – was who would call the cops on us? Did the shrill of our under-primed voices at 10:15 on a Saturday night rile the neighbors? Was backyard karaoke now a crime? Bad words crowded the tip of my well-behaved, un-pierced tongue.

We shared stories from Fondmemoryland where life was one big kegger. We recalled busts long past and embellished tales of daring escapes and stealth camouflage in basements and shrubberies. Now our booze is tempered with chips and dips, the babysitter needs to be home by eleven, and we really shouldn’t swear, but can’t we have any fun at all? On the drive home I wondered if the OnStar people could fine me for singing off key to the radio.

I wanted to be irked about the cops showing up to ruin our fun, but truth was, the party was pretty much over anyway and there’s nothing to make you feel like your old rebel self than getting busted by the cops. Even if it was only for really bad singing. So slam one back, light one up, sing off key. Get busted! I dare you.

Lela Davidson is a Northwest Arkansas writer with a mean Dixie Chick impersonation. The closest she’s been to busted lately is when her family almost turned her in for serving past dated potato salad.

The Case of the Easter Bunny

I admit it: I can’t wait until the days when the Easter Bunny no longer hops by our house. It’s not that I don’t like holidays, I just can’t take the pressure of having to be responsible for making them happen. And the trouble with children is that you can’t pull much over on them, especially when they seem to be on the elementary school track for pre-pre-law.

This is the story of one Easter Eve a few years ago. I lay in bed trying to fall asleep amid some low level tension because something just wasn’t quite right. Suddenly I bolted up, frightening my husband out of a sound snore.

“Oh crap!” I said, “I’ve got to do the Easter baskets!” I got up, turned on lights, rummaged through the guest room closet for baskets and candy, and set about making the sweetest little tokens of love from the Easter Bunny. I put them in the kids’ doorways and went back to bed, where the father of my children was sleeping just as peacefully as before my crisis.

In the morning the kids came to our room to show us their loot. My then six-year-old daughter looked up at me with genuine curiosity. “I wonder why the Easter Bunny gave us the same baskets as last year?”

Note: If you’ve been reading this column long, you already know that the Easter Bunny is a touch stingy. She doesn’t really see the point in buying new baskets year after year, and this was the year she decided to test her theory that the kids wouldn’t really notice anyway.

“Mom?” my daughter asked, “Are YOU the Easter Bunny?” Leave it to the little one.

I shook my head and offered up a little snort. “Do I look like I’ve been out all morning hopping around dropping off Easter baskets?”

She eyed me, weighing whether or not to push the matter. She was holding a bag of sugar after all. Finally, the little lawyer-in-training just wouldn’t let it go. “It’s just that you said the Easter Bunny was a girl AND the Easter Bunny knows what kind of books we like AND —-“
Maybe Mommy needed a basket full of Midol. I snapped. “I’m not the Easter Bunny. Okay?”

Everybody backed off the bunny.

When they asked later why the Easter Bunny didn’t give them very much candy this year, I told them maybe she knew they’d be getting a lot of candy at the Easter egg hunt that afternoon.

“Not that I would know,” I added. That was my fatal mistake. If this were a Grisham movie, there would be a close up on me as a bead of sweat made it’s way down my nose.

“Are you sure you’re not the Easter Bunny?” my son asked. His eyes narrowed. “Because usually when people say ‘not that I would know’ it means they know.”

It’s getting hard to come up with smart remarks, but not impossible.

“And usually when a kid asks too many questions about a basket of candy, it means they go to bed early and a monster comes in the night and eats all their candy.”

Case closed.

Image Credit: ButterflySha, Flickr

Like This? Try These:

• New and Improved Mother’s Day
• Not the Only Bad Mother
• A Case for Arts in Education
• Show Me the REAL Texts

Making Babies…. Oh the Glamour!

I had my last baby when I was thirty. And when I say last, I mean that’s it. I won’t be one of those women taking prenatal vitamins and Boniva at the same time. I don’t have the energy. I waited until the ripe old age of twenty-eight to have my first child, then followed up with a second only twenty-two months later. I had to work quickly because way back then we were afraid to get pregnant after thirty-five. A lot has changed in the last ten years. Pregnancy over forty has become accepted and, if you believe the celebrity photos, easy.

As I inch toward forty, the biological clock still ticks. Instead of have-a-baby-have-a-baby, it now says just-one-more-just-one-more. I fanaticize that if I had another baby, I’d do everything right this time. I would coordinate perfect outfits, put on makeup, and shower every day. I indulge this dream for about a minute before I remember the sleepless nights, continuous feeding, and far-flung emotions. Between post-partum, PMS, and peri-menopause I can’t imagine what older moms are going through. I’m pretty sure if you knocked on their doors at nine in the morning, they wouldn’t be red carpet ready.

Despite the reality of baby rearing, glitz and ease is exactly what we see in those magazines we peek at in line at the grocery store. People may complain that Hollywood glamorizes young pregnancy by holding up Jamie Lynn Spears and Ashlee Simpson as role models, but I’m more offended by the forty-is-the-new-twenty-two celebrities that are selling us regular women a bill of goods.

• Gorgeous Naomi Watts recently gave birth to a second son at age forty. She claims to have lost all her baby weight breastfeeding. I’m sure it had nothing to do with the live in personal chefs and trainers.

• Forty-year-old Australian actress Rachel Griffiths plays an American on Brothers and Sisters. She’s pregnant with her third and like our homegrown celebs, she has a penchant for unique names. She has a son named Banjo. Let’s hope age has wised her up. If not, she may end up with a cute little Fiddle or Harmonica.
• Desperate Housewife Marcia Cross gave birth to twin daughters at age forty-five. Seriously? At least she’ll be able to use her AARP travel discount to take them on their senior trip.
• Supermodel Stephanie Seymour recently had another baby at forty. Paparazzi caught her frolicking in the surf. Is it wrong to hate her? There’s not enough Pilates in the world to get me into a bikini post childbirth – and I started ‘young’.
• Perhaps the wisest is none other than the daughter of the King himself, Lisa Marie Presley. She welcomed twin girls last year. She was forty, but she was prepared. Ms. Presley had two other children 16 and 19 years ago, so now she’s got live-in childcare. That’s what I call planning ahead.

Show me these A-listers at nine o’clock in the morning. Show me these beautiful people frantically chasing down a toddler, trying to get neon poop out of the carpet, and dripping in spit up. Then I’ll be impressed. My advice? If you’re planning to get pregnant over forty, do yourself a favor and cancel your subscription to People magazine.

Cut Costs This Year, Starting with the Tooth Fairy

Peek at Me in Peekaboo

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