Belle Weather

by Celia Rivenbark

  Some of these Perfect Mommies are responsible for a ghastly new trend that is sweeping the country.

  Called “ghosting” for Halloween or “elving” for Christmas, I am “barfing” at the notion that, at the end of a day of work, laundry, carpooling, cooking, and helping with homework, all I want to do is look at my front door and discover a white ghost-shaped cutout attached to a bag of treats. There are instructions attached, telling me that I must now skulk around in the dark and place my own homemade treats in bags for two new victims, er, neighbors?

  I’m not thinking this is what the dead kid meant in the movie when he advised everybody to “pay it forward.”

  A friend who has exhaustedly been “ghosted” at home and even at work, says she’s just churning the stuff.

  Brilliant!

  She and I think it’s possible that only one sucker actually baked treats a few weeks ago and the rest of us are just passing them along until they get really moldy.

  It didn’t take me long to figure out a way around this foolishness. You simply tack a ghost cutout you’ve made yourself on your door and they’ll think you’ve already been ghosted. It’s just like Passover in the Bible, only without the mess and fuss of putting blood on your door.

  I believe my idea is worthy of a Nobel Prize or at least a “No Doorbell” prize.

  To the mommies who came up with this nonsense for the holidays, let me just say that you just need to go out and get yourself a good old-fashioned, feet-to-Jesus orgasm and you need to do it yesterday.

  You are obviously under a lot of stress.

  Like teacher gifts and all the rest of it, this is the sort of stuff that only a woman would inflict on another woman.

  Can you in your wildest dreams see a bunch of men sitting around talking about ways to share treats with neighbors, making it fun for the kids and lots of work for them?

  You can? Oh, sorry. I meant straight men.

  Men get a lot of things wrong, but one thing they all excel in is their absolute total commitment to never adding a bunch of useless crap to their day just because “it sounds cute!”

  You think a man is going to sit up all night cutting out little white paper ghosts or green and red elves to attach to a bag of homemade candies?

  Oh, hail no. Not as long as we live in America and there’s still porn on the Internet.

  You think a man is going to put up with tying little multicolored yarns to the bag and handwriting the “ghosting instructions”? See above.

  These very specific rules require that the treats be left in a brown lunch sack on the doorstep, accompanied by The Official Ghosting (or elving, or leprechauning, or Easter bunnying, etc.) poem which you’ve hand copied just for them.

  The last time somebody left something on my doorstep in a brown paper sack, it wasn’t candy and it damn sure wasn’t edible. It was also on fire, but that’s another story.

  And don’t we already have enough crap to do during the holidays? Elving adds just one more level of horror to a Christmas to-do list that’s already as bloated as Kim Jong Il after his weekly pork rind binge.

  Of course, I have been criticized for not being enthusiastic about this “neighborhood bonding exercise.”

  Hey, I didn’t choose my neighbors. I don’t want to get to know them better. I just want to take a stroll at night, dart about the hedges beneath their windows, flatten my body to the ground and wait until it’s safe to look through their open drapes to see if any of them have anything that I’m jealous of. Is that so crazy?

  Besides, you know how neighborhoods change all the time. You never know who’s moving in or who’s been kicked out.

  I’ll miss ol’ Darius Lardbottom.

  15

  Nature Deficit Disorder Is Naturally Upsetting

  Like a lot of kids her age, my Princess is big into music, mostly pop and rock listened via sparkly ear buds hooked into her MP3 player. It’s a constant companion, this little gizmo that can hold hundreds of songs so that you are guaranteed that you will never have to experience the horror of a quiet, utterly still and silent moment no matter where you are.

  She likes Gavin DeGraw, Hellogoodbye, Fall Out Boy, Panic! at the Disco, and a bunch of other people I’m too un-cool to recognize.

  Sometimes I can barely suppress an urge to tell her about the truly great rock and roll bands. I want to put on a cardigan (because frankly it’s cold all the time lately) and tell her that back in my day, you had “your Led Zeppelin, your King Crimson, your Jethro Tull” and so forth. I don’t think she’d care much, though.

  Soph and her little friends walk around with their iPods and MP3s hooked to them like tiny rhinestone-dotted colostomy bags. They wouldn’t think of leaving home without their tunes.

  Which is why I’ve decided that one way to make the Princess listen to me would be to reach her through music, a medium that she obviously is passionate about.

  Moms all over this great land have their own Greatest Hits or Best of collections with them at all times, these mantras that we repeat all day, eighty times a day, to our kids. Sadly, our nagging “hits” aren’t nearly as much fun as Fergie describing why she’s so Fergalicious or Nelly Furtado boasting of being a Promiscuous Girl. Double ick.

  It almost makes me nostalgic for those dreadful Kidz Bop CDs favored by the five-year-old set and featuring the annoyingly wholesome vocal stylings of a fresh-faced bunch of kidz who just want to grow up and marry their own Usher some day, even the boys.

  You won’t find my “greatest hits” on the shelves at Best Buy or even the scruffy-but-cool independent store where the sales guy has a barbell in his tongue and keeps trying to sell me Rage Against the Machine, and I’m thinking how does this weird barbell guy know about my ongoing problem with my overpriced piece-of-crap vacuum cleaner?

  Mom’s Greatest Hits won’t make it to the Billboard charts but it might sell well on one of those late-night TV commercials if I can scrape together enough dough for the studio time to actually lay down some tracks. (That’s music lingo to you ordinary cats; try to hang.)

  Unlike other mail-order CDs such as Music From the Godfather, as played on the pan flute, my greatest hits are targeted to moms like me. Here’s a sampling from my unofficial, yet-to-be-released CD:

  Make Up Your Bed, Make Up Your Bed, Make Up Your Bed, Make Up Your Bed (Oh, and one other thing: Make Up Your Bed).

  And who can forget the classic stylings of:

  Don’t Talk to Strangers (I Don’t Wanna See Your Puppies, Perv, But Hey My Mom Loved Thriller).

  The hits just keep coming with:

  Eat Your Vegetables, Eat Your Vegetables, Eat Your Vegetables, Eat Your Vegetables (Oh, and One Other Thing: Make Up Your Bed).

  And who can resist the classic chart-topper:

  No, Hell, No, You Can’t Have a Guinea Pig (Until You Can Prove You’re Responsible Enough to Take Care of It).

  Admittedly, it’s hard to compete with the music kids really like so you’d have to have cool artists record Mom’s Greatest Hits.

  Beyoncé could be pointing to the laundry basket that needs to go downstairs when she’s saying “to the left, to the left” instead of a cheating lover being instructed on how to get out of her house pronto.

  As in:

  You Must Not Know ’Bout Me (I’m the One That Won’t Let You Go to the Sleepover ’Til You’ve Cleaned Your Room).

  When they’re not listening to music, kids are playing video or computer games.

  And when I tell my kid that she and her friends should play outside, they just stare at me like I’m Psycho Environmentalist Chick.

  I just think it’s sad these kids don’t know the sublime pleasure of trapping lightning bugs in a mayonnaise jar on a sultry summer evening, as I did as a child. I’ll never forget the magic of watching these graceful, charming creatures glow orange and yellow, elegant little flashlights in the night darting about inside the jar until they finally collapsed into a dead, crunchy heap because, my bad, I’d forgotten the
damn holes in the lid. Again.

  At least I know I’m not alone in thinking that kids need to get outside and play.

  A new study has found that children today have “Nature Deficit Disorder.”

  They’ve lost connection with nature, this generation that is nauseatingly fluent in Wii, MySpace, and High School Musical. When tested, only a few could identify a wild salamander or recognize poison oak.

  To be honest, I don’t know a wild salamander from a tame one, but I’m guessing that the wild ones party with Timbaland. I wondered how the Princess would do with a test on nature.

  “In which direction does lichen grow on trees?” I asked her.

  “I’m not sure,” she said. “What’s lichen, anyway?”

  “I think I left a pot on the stove,” I said.

  Hey, the acorn didn’t fall far from the lichen-covered tree, now did it?

  I’ve never been a big fan of the outdoors, particularly the part that’s outside.

  I’ve always been mildly suspicious of fresh air and exercise. People who camp always crow about how “food always tastes better outdoors!” No it doesn’t. It tastes better indoors served on lovely china with napkins folded to resemble the backs of swans.

  And although I know I should exercise more, I can’t help thinking about that poor Chinese housewife who went for a hike and ended up having a two-inch-long leech stuck in her nose.

  Turns out she paused on her long hike to splash some fresh water from a stream into her face. A tiny leech swam right up her left nostril.

  Later, she would tell reporters that she wasn’t worried about leeches in the water, explaining, “I’m used to seeing all these worms in the water while hiking.”

  OK, I have to throw up.

  Anyway, two weeks later, she felt something strange in her nose. She went to the doctor who discovered the leech was getting bigger by the day.

  At this point, I would’ve keeled over dead but this woman was tough, hons. The kind of woman who washes her face with worms. Doctors tried to remove it but were unsuccessful so it kept growing for another couple of weeks. If this leech had gotten any bigger, Angelina Jolie would’ve tried to adopt the sucka.

  Finally, doctors sprayed the leech with a nasal spray chock full of anesthesia. After the Longest Two Minutes of Anyone’s Life Ever, the leech slowly backed out of the woman’s nostril and was gunned down by the S.W.A.T. team. OK, retrieved with forceps but you get it.

  At this point, the woman ran screaming from the room and jumped out of a tenth-floor window, plummeting to her death. No, no really, she’s fine.

  All of which is by way of saying that hiking’s bad and napkins shaped like swans are good.

  So perhaps I’m partly responsible for my daughter’s abysmal lack of knowledge about flora and, uh, the other one. Could she be suffering from Nature Deficit Disorder? And, if so, what was the cure?

  That’s easy. To combat this disorder, which, I’m guessing, is easily diagnosed by detecting a fixed stare and excessive Cheetos orange dust around the mouth and fingertips, children suffering from NDD are being told to “climb trees, build forts, and explore creeks.”

  And in possibly the weirdest marketing tie-in of all time, even McDonald’s and Hummer are helping find a cure.

  My kid’s Mega Happy Meal last week came packaged in what looked to the jaded grown-up as an advertisement for a Hummer. But no! Look closer! It’s actually a moment in environmental exploration brought to you by Hummer.

  Is it just me or does anyone else find this as hilarious as the phrase “Singer Paris Hilton”?

  I read the Hummer Happy Meal “fun maze” copy with a mixture of revulsion and admiration. You gotta have some set of balls to suggest that you park your Hummer to “stop for a hike” because “it’s a fun way to see the outdoors and get exercise!”

  Yes, drive your eight-million-pound Barbie war machine twenty miles so you can get some exercise. Makes perfect sense to me!

  At the end of a fun day of Hummer-inspired swimming, hiking, and climbing you can “sleep under the stars.”

  Stars? What stars? Wasn’t that the ozone you just burned up?

  My favorite suggestion was that the Hummer will help you cross over a fallen tree on your path. Go ahead and run over Susan Sarandon clinging to it while you’re at it.

  How fortunate that Hummer is here to help our nation with this awful epidemic of Nature Deficit Disorder!

  Sure, it’s a little like asking Michael Richards to emcee the Essence Awards but no matter. It’s for the children.

  I told Soph that she needed to unplug herself from that glittered colostomy bag and get outside and get some fresh air, experience nature up close and personal and she—being a Princess and all—said that was a great idea.

  “It is?” I said, hopefully. Maybe that Mom’s Greatest Hits was really helping.

  “Sure. We’ll go to Ulta and get some peach-pulp pedicure lotion ’cause that’s very nature-y.”

  That’s not exactly what I had in mind, but I shouldn’t have been surprised that this was her take on “nature.”

  USA Today did a big story on how ten-year-old girls, who are notoriously suffering from NDD, are going to the spa for massages and facials these days.

  What does a ten-year-old need a massage for? Tough afternoon of sitting around playing Dream Life got your neck muscles sore? Shopper-shoulder from hauling around bags full of overpriced T-shirts from Aberzombie?

  Puleez.

  Maybe I’m just jealous. I was forty before I got my first manicure and it just seems more than a little unfair that a ten-year-old is working in a mani-pedi between homework and oboe lessons.

  While a facial would’ve been a good idea for those of us who grew up as teenagers in the pre-Accutane era, it’s hard to figure out why a ten-year-old (or even younger according to the article), really needs one.

  At that age, isn’t it still OK for the banana-berry facial to be less from a fifty-dollar treatment administered by someone named Ramone and more from the yummy remnants of a Baskin-Robbins smoothie?

  It’s not just little girls, of course. There’s also something called the “mini-metrosexual phenomenon.” This explains the astrounding success of preteen boys’ body sprays such as Tag and Axe.

  Clearly, we’ve come a long way from the date-night dousing of Brut that I remember gagging on in high school.

  Still, there’s something creepy about a ten-year-old boy fretting about hair products when he should be analyzing box scores or putting his sister’s bra in the freezer. I mean, what kind of freaks are we raising these days?

  Nature Deficit Disorder freaks, that’s what kind.

  Of course it’s fun to dress up, experiment with makeup, and play big-girl hair. I mean you’d have to be Cruella De Vil mean not to allow that once in a while. But the notion of regular spa appointments for little girls sits with me like a bad fish taco.

  I’m not ready for Sophie to breathlessly inform me that Rumi has had a cancellation by another “client” whose “like, grandmother died or something” so now she can get her hot-stone massage after all.

  It started out innocently, I’m sure. Just another way for moms to bond with their daughters. But it’s gotten out of hand and now we have an entire industry catering to seven-year-olds who tweeze.

  To them I just take a page from Hummer’s playbook and advise them: Go climb a tree or something. Bark is great for exfoliation.

  16

  Make Your Own Damn Pancakes

  Although I’m still not paying for my kid to have a spa day, until she can have hers at Fantastic Sam’s like a good redneck girl, the message apparently isn’t sinking in.

  When I asked the Princess what kind of birthday party she wanted this year, she didn’t hesitate: “A sleepover with professional salon make overs for everybody and facials and hairdos and manicures and pizza and we’ll give everybody AeroBeds with their names monogrammed on them in fancy hot pink thread and we’ll go to the waterslide and the
bowling alley and maybe a movie afterward.”

  “Do what?”

  “Well, you asked me what I wanted,” she said, bottom lip out to here. “I was thinking we could get an artist to come and give all of us henna tattoos for our arms and our ankles and maybe a really big one around our necks! And we could pierce each other’s ears!”

  OK, as long as she keeps things within reason.

  As I tried to recover from this announcement, Soph scampered off to find paper for a list of party supplies.

  “We can rent a popcorn machine and a Slushie machine and have a make-your-own-sundae bar and we can make s’mores!” she said consulting a list entitled “Party Fun.”

  “Won’t all that junk food make everybody hurl?” I asked.

  She gave me a look that clearly said I was a dumbass.

  “Nobody ever gets sick at a sleepover. They’re too much fun!”

  “What about the kid who got the 104-degree fever at your last sleepover and thought she was Willy Wonka?”

  “Oh, that was just that one time.”

  On the appointed day, nine little girls arrived with sleeping bags, inflatable beds and apparently eighteen pairs of pajamas and twenty-two singing Hello Kitty toothbrushes apiece.

  We’d downsized the party considerably (Slip ’n’ Slide, cookout, and a movie shown outdoors and projected onto a white bedsheet) after I told the Princess a lot of parents might not be thrilled to discover that their daughters were freshly tattooed and pierced the next morning.

  “What about spray tans?” she asked. “That would be cool.”

  I had a momentary flashback to a horrific tanning-bed scene in Final Destination 3 in which two teenage girls are trapped in overheated tanning beds and their skin starts dripping off their bones like queso dip.

  “No!!!!”

  At the party, hubby and I realized that nine-year-old girls have extremely short attention spans.