Countdown to Forty

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In an effort to finish our nightmare of an addition that has been two years in the making, Doug and I have decided to refinance our mortgage. When I came home from work today, I discovered our “Mortgage Development Officer” sitting at our kitchen table. Harry is a typical bank guy—suit, glasses, bald with a gray ring of hair around his head. He talked about things I don’t get and never will, like fixed vs. adjustable rates, closing costs, APR’s, FHA’s, ABCDEFJ’s (it’s all the same to me).

As I stood there wondering how many more nods and ugh-huh’s it would take for me to pass out, he finally started speaking my language—or at least, his phone did. There he was, this old guy standing before me in the middle of my kitchen, with “Welcome to the Jungle” blasting from his iPhone. G N’ R—it was the one acronym I could comprehend all evening.

What I couldn’t comprehend was what this bald-headed bank guy with a briefcase stuffed with financial reports and loan applications could possibly be doing with a ringtone set to Guns ‘N Roses. Wouldn’t Bing Crosby be more his speed? Who did he think he was, infringing on my generation?

As he started rattling off his favorite bands, Ozzy Osbourne included, it occurred to me that this man WAS my generation. Before he left, we discovered he was fifty-two. That’s twelve years older than I am. There is less of an age gap between me and boring middle-aged Mortgage Officer Guy than me and my little sister.

I am having a pre-fortieth-birthday crisis. I think back about the way I used to talk about forty with my best friend from the teen years, Carrie Copeland. Whenever someone said something particularly uncool or out-of-touch, we’d roll are eyes and sigh, “What are you, forty?!” When some dirty old man hit on us, we wailed in revulsion, “Ewwww! Isn’t he, like, forty?!” When our parents grounded us and banished us to our rooms, we protested, “What are you going to do…keep me in here until I’m FORTY?!”

Tomorrow, I officially enter that faraway era that I couldn’t fathom back in the day, when people who said “back in the day” were older than Santa, Guns ‘N Roses was light years away from being oldies but goodies, and becoming the first female president was still a possibility (assuming I’d learn from then till my inauguration how to balance a checkbook). I am now that ancient, unfathomable age my parents were when they shook their heads listening to me rationalize why I needed to take a year off between high school and college, rent-free, of course, to “discover myself.” I am now entering that “mature” generation that needs its own separate sports leagues, dating services, and hair styles. I can feel my car insurance rates plummeting as we speak. And I don’t like it one bit.

Here’s to a brand new decade…of babies turning into drivers, approximately two hundred sixty boxes of hair dye with superior gray coverage, and finally having an excuse for being dead tired. Cheers?

Quacking Up

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A conversation between me and Tyler:

“Hey, Mom! What did one duck say to the other?”

“I don’t know! What did one duck say to the other?”

“You quack me up!”

“Hey! That’s pretty cute!”

(With barely a moment between…)

“Mom!  What did one duck say to the other?”

“Again?  What this time?”

“You quack me up!”

“Heh heh heh.  Seems I’ve heard that one before.  Still cute.”

“What did one duck say to the other?”

“Dare I ask?”

“You quack me up!”

“Tyler, the thing about jokes is, they’re really only funny the first time you hear them. After that, they get old.  Can you think of any new ones?”

(After a thoughtful moment…)

“Hey, Mom!  What did one penguin say to the other?”

“What?”

“You quack me up!”

“But penguins don’t quack.  So now it just doesn’t make any sense.”

“But…get it? The penguins were pretending to be ducks!”

Here’s to the next generation of God-awful jokes.

This entry was posted in 6 Six.

Where the Hell Did You Get Your License?!

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Nothing is more conducive to a wandering mind than two tons of high-speed machinery.

Truth be told, a person with ADD has no more right to be behind the wheel of a car than a drunk. Case in point, my commute home from work yesterday.

I was thinking about how the eighth-graders I teach are funny and inappropriate at the same time, and how I probably shouldn’t laugh at their antics. Like during the CMT’s—a statewide achievement test students across Connecticut spend their entire academic careers preparing for all the way until the eighth grade and is, most pundits in the educational arena would argue, most serious business. Some genius in the Hartford schools decided it would be a good idea to supply each student with a pencil, a test booklet and a roll of “Smarties” candy with a motivational message attached. Along with the Smarties came snacks—on this particular day, bananas and milk. Josiah decided to crush his Smarties, line them up in rails on his desk and snort them with his straw. I shouldn’t have thought this was funny, I know—given the war on drugs raging in the city, coupled with the stoic seriousness of standardized testing. In my defense, I didn’t lose it until he set up a trail of banana peels moments before the test began, took a running leap and skidded into my whiteboard, then spent the next three minutes in a dramatic, exaggerated display of sucking in his breath, cradling his injured knee and rocking back and forth Peter Griffin-style on Family Guy, in the episode where he trips on a sidewalk after discovering the last scroll in a Pawtucket Patriot beer in a quest to earn a tour of the brewery. This of course made me think of Seth MacFarlane, and how American dreamy it is that someone went from animated film to world domination. My mind journeyed on to how he graduated from the Kent School in the class of ’91—the year I graduated high school and from the very same state—and how if only my parents raised me in Kent instead of Torrington, maybe he would have had a thing for girls flapping head to toe with leather fringe, bangs teased up like a rooster’s comb and gold eye shadow on her lips, and things today might be different.

Suddenly I snapped back to reality and wondered how long I’d been going straight. At some point on the way home I was supposed to take a right turn onto Route 185, but I couldn’t remember for the life of me if I ever made the turn. I looked from side to side, but nothing looked familiar. Had I ever driven by that farm before? Those condos or that golf club? The daycare center with ducks parading across its sign?

No. I was sure I’d never seen any of these landmarks before in my life. Not that I could count on my certainty, since I could drive by a live circus every day on my way to work for ten years and still never notice it. I spied a driveway to turn around in, put on my blinker and slowed down….then again, nah. It was too narrow, and it would be almost impossible to back out. Besides, that parking lot over there looked a lot more U-turn friendly. Once again, I came to a complete stop….bah, forget it. There was too much oncoming traffic, and I didn’t want to hold up the line of cars behind me. Up ahead was a yellow light. By some impulse, I sped up. Then again, I decided, I could use a red light to give me some time to figure out where I was going. For the third time, I slammed on my brakes. The guy behind me came to a screeching halt just inches away from my bumper.

I stuck my head out the window and smiled my most damsel-in-distress-like smile. “Excuse me,” I chirped, “but can you tell me how to get to Route 185?”

He didn’t smile back. “You’re on it,” he grumbled. I’m pretty sure his teeth were gnashed.

“OH! WHOOPS! Thank you,” I giggled, then rolled up my window and journeyed on, confidently, not feeling the least bit incompetent or ridiculous. Why? Because I’m still driving my mother-in-law’s car with Florida oranges on the plates.

Out-of-state license plates: my own personal written excuse for driving idiocy.

How to Squash (and Resurrect) a Marriage

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In case you’ve ever wondered how to squash a marriage, there are exactly two systematic ways to do so, and only one way to resurrect it.

Squashing method #1: stay home together with three small children for two and a half years.

With Doug out on injury and I opting for the stay-at-home mom route, here is an excerpt of a typical conversation between us:

“It’s almost time to pick up Eva from school.”

“Why don’t YOU pick her up?”

“Because it’s your turn.”

“Do you like to eat?  Because in case you haven’t noticed, I’m pounding a chicken.”  (At this point I should probably mention that there was a mallet in my hand.)

“I can’t even hear you. What is she (Anna, shrieking like a woman from behind the shower curtain in a horror movie) screaming about?”

“I don’t know. Why don’t you go find out?”

“Because you’re her mother.”

“And you’re her father.”

“Guys aren’t good at consoling babies. It’s not in our nature.”

“Since you love nature so much, why don’t you go pitch a tent and live in it?”

“Why don’t YOU go pitch a tent in my pants?”

How to turn a losing argument around: distract the opposition with a lewd sexual comment that doesn’t even make sense. There was a time I thought this quality in my husband was endearing. Now it just made me want to drive a tent stake through his vitals.

Then something funny happened. I got a job.

It was a sweet little part-time gig, tutoring math in a charming elementary school ten minutes away from my house in Simsbury. I would pull one to four polite, suburban kids out of class and play math games with them. There were virtually no papers to correct, no elaborate lessons to plan. The kids were always excited to see me. Next to my decade teaching math to 150 unruly inner city teenagers in Hartford, I’d found my own little piece of pedagogical paradise.

There was only one teeny, tiny little problem. At the end of a good week, I was lucky if I cleared $300. I was penniless.

Which brings me to the second way to squash a marriage: take each other by the hand and stand on the brink of financial ruin.

For a year I scrimped. But I never saved, because there was never anything left over. When my colleagues ordered lunch, I pulled a peanut butter sandwich out of a Spiderman lunchbox. My kids were the only ones in Simsbury who couldn’t order 95-cent books from Scholastic book club. When the Girl Scouts came to our door, we turned off the lights and hid.

The thing about rock bottom is I don’t mind when I hit it. Because every time I do, some miracle always bails me out.

Case in point, another funny thing happened. Out of the blue, the principal of the school I taught at in Hartford called. I got my old job back.

Suddenly, my suburban sweethearts morphed into profanity-spewing, gangsta-rapping, algebra-dodging creatures of the city. My hours doubled. My ten-minute commute was replaced by a 90-minute drive through highway traffic. Every night I came home with a bag stuffed with papers to correct and lessons to plan. But I didn’t mind, because now I was making in one day what it took me all week to earn in Simsbury. Doug’s staying at home amounted from being an annoyance to free childcare. When I went to sleep at night, I no longer dreamed of strings of electric bills and mortgage statements coiling themselves around my neck.

For a solid two weeks, to say I splurged would be an understatement. I brought out my wish lists on Amazon.com and triumphantly clicked “checkout.” I finally replaced the dinosaur of a TV on our kitchen counter with a flat screen. I bought cute little jackets with matching boots for every season. I ate so many Girl Scout cookies I grew my own merit badge. Whenever my kids wanted something at the store, I said, “Sure, throw it in the cart!”

When Doug began to comment on the number of boxes arriving from UPS, I transformed into Daffy Duck on Loony Toons, stuffing a genie back in the bottle after uncovering a Saltan’s treasure. “IT’S MINE, UNDERSTAND?! ALL MINE! DOWN DOWN! GO GO! IT’S MIIIIIINNNNNE!”

That’s when something else happened, but this time, it wasn’t so funny. Doug, who wasn’t too keen on being a stay-at-home dad, made a miraculous recovery. His two-plus-year hiatus was over. It was time to go back to work again.

This didn’t mean an extra money, mind you. We’d been collecting from workman’s comp all along. Nope, this only meant one thing. We had to hire a nanny.

Our nanny has a nose ring, a tongue ring, and tattoos. Her name is Ashley, and she is anything but Mary Poppins—but then again, I’ve never clicked with the conventional type. Out of nearly a hundred applicants, I chose her because she was the one I could sit down and chat with like we were old friends, with no phoniness of hyped-up sales pitch or awkward silences in between. Even though she confessed she’s not the world’s best cook and at twenty-three, not the most experienced house manager, she got right down on the floor and played with my kids. She even let Eva give her a manicure. Anyone who will let a four-year-old paint her nails bright yellow is OK with me.

There is an instantaneous sigh of relief when a woman finally accepts that she can not do it all by herself and allows someone else to do it for her. Every day for the next week, I came home to a clean house, dinner on the table, and happy kids. And the funny thing about clean houses, ready-to-eat dinners and happy kids is they make your spouse, sitting admidst it all, suddenly attractive again.

Which brings me to how to resurrect a marriage, in case you haven’t figured it out. Hire someone else to do the cooking, cleaning, and baby-sitting.

Suddenly, it was as if someone put a Band-Aid on all my problems. The mortgage company stopped sending me hate mail. I could walk through my house without getting a sports injury from leaping over toys. Turns out Ashley can cook. I stopped staring at Doug and wondering why I married him in the first place. For one magical moment frozen in time, every facet of my life was working out all at the same time.

At the end of the week, I sat down and wrote out Ashley’s check. I subtracted it from my paycheck and noted the difference.

After paying the nanny, I make less than I did at my cushy part-time tutoring job in the suburbs, and I’m dining out of a Spiderman lunchbox again.

It’s my life. Someone’s got to live it.

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