Because I didn’t just fall off the parental turnip truck, I’m now ready to share with those of you who may be new to this parenting thing, the single most valuable piece of advice that I could ever give you.
And, no, it’s not that mushy stuff about how you should always make time for your kids because nobody ever says on their deathbed: “Gosh, I wish I’d spent more time at the office.”
That’s one of those things they really can’t prove. It’s just something that people say all the time, nodding sagely and acting like they just thought of it. But the truth is, who really knows? I mean, what if your kids are assholes? It happens. Maybe you really wish you had spent more time at the office.
So, no, I’m talking real wisdom, the useful shit. And here it is. Write it down somewhere, commit it to memory, do what you must but always remember these words:
You must make sure to sign up your kids for summer camp by the end of March.
That’s it. I know it sounds simple but you can plan to sign up your kid for camp, and then life and Pilates class and a random affair with the guy who grooms your poodle gets in the way and, before you know it, all the good camps are full and all that’s left for your kid is “Yes, You Can Become a Mortician” and “Summer Fun with Actuarial Tables!”
Trust me. You have to jump on this camp stuff early or the only skills your kid will learn this summer will be how to Krazy-glue a cadaver’s eyes shut or guess the exact day you’re going to die and what’s going to kill you. Neither of these is the kind of thing you want them practicing once they finish their week of camp and you’re hanging out at the pool sipping mojitos with your grown-up friends.
(“For the love of God, get your kid to stop talking about what he could do with my dead mouth and a jar full of cotton balls. It’s cuh-reepy!”) Your kid ends up going to loser-camps like that and he becomes Walking Buzz Kill.
Speaking of which, here’s a true story: My mother-in-law says that when my husband was three years old, he would count to 500 for any grown-up he could corner. He was scary-good at this and while the entire family was understandably proud of this prodigy-like behavior, I have to say that I feel nothing but pure empathy for the sap who got saddled with listening to a three-year-old recite “One hundred and eighty-nine, one hundred and ninety, one hundred and ninety-one…”
Still, it is famous family lore and everyone tells the story with great pride, including my husband (who, incidentally can now count all the way up to 600), but I just weep when I think about those poor, tortured souls who were cornered on the church steps or at the post office while he dutifully chirped “two hundred and twenty-one, two hundred and twenty-two, two hundred and twenty-three. Hey mister! Where you going? I’m not done yet!”
My point is that Walking Buzz Kill can start at an early age. You have to make sure your kid gets in the cool camps to avoid this horrible phenomenon.
Let me put this in terms you can understand: Summer camps are the lifeboat on the Titanic to a frazzled parent. You remember the movie, don’t you? Let me spell it out for you: With summer camp, you’re Kate Winslet, laying up there hogging the only piece of wood that’s big enough to keep your fat ass afloat until help can come and cart you off to the big, warm boat where there will be blankets and hot tea.
Without summer camp, you’re Leo DiCaprio, stuck with three-quarters of your body submerged in the frigid ocean water and your purple hands hands clinging to a tiny corner of that same piece of wood. Nobody’s going to rescue your ass. And now you’ve got nothing left to do except wonder how long before your eyelashes frost over completely and you, finally, sink to certain death.
Scared yet?
If you’ve waited too late and everything, even mortuary science camp, is filled up, there is still a solution, sort of. You could be like my slacker friend, Barb, who has cagily enrolled her three kids in every Vacation Bible School in a seven-county radius. I don’t approve of Barb’s methods, but I have to admit that she knows how to make the best of a bad situation.
“Hmmmm,” I said to Barb when she showed me a list of all the VBS locations she’d scheduled for the summer. “I didn’t realize thee were Mennonite.”
“Whatever it takes,” she huffed back. “We’re on a budget and this Bible School stuff is free.”
“Yes, but you’re not even religious, I mean, are you?” I asked.
“What difference does that make?” Barb snapped. “The snacks are killer and I’ve got three-plus-hours of free babysitting every day. If I play my cards right, which I will, I won’t have to buy junk food for three whole months. The Presbyterians last year? They had yogurt-covered pretzels for snack one day. Do you have any idea how much those cost? My kids thought they were in heaven. So see, it really was a religious experience.”
I must’ve looked horrified because Barb shot back: “Don’t look so shocked. It’s not like your kid isn’t doing VBS.”
“Yes, but just for one week and at my own church. You’ve got your kids going from Pentecostal Holiness to Episcopalian.”
“I know,” she said a little ruefully. “Last year, by the end of the summer, they didn’t know whether to speak in tongues or demand wine with dinner.”
“And don’t you feel that you should give back a little?” I asked. “I don’t want to get all sanctimonious on you, Barb, but you really should offer to help out at these things if you’re going to send your kids to them.”
“Oh, yeah? What are you going to be doing when your kid goes?”
“I’m doing the snacks one day.”
“Oh, yeah? What’re you bringing?”
“I’m making little tuna fish sandwiches and Goldfish crackers for Jonah and the Whale Day.”
“Sandwiches? For real? Kids, get in here. There’s been a change of plans. Y’all are going to be Methodists next week.”
It didn’t take long for Barb to figure out that about a third of the churches offer nighttime VBS.
I knew this but didn’t tell her because I knew she’d enjoy it too much.
But when the Baptists hung a banner out front advertising nighttime VBS from six to nine, Barb couldn’t believe her good fortune.
“You realize what this means?” she asked me one day.
“You can go to a movie with your husband and not have to pay a sitter?”
“Damn straight,” she said. “Or out to dinner. We haven’t done dinner or a movie since Ray Junior was born.”
It was true. I kind of felt sorry for Barb because she told me the last movie she’d seen in the theater was Men in Black and that had been, like, a decade ago. She’d never even seen Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby, which I consider a pure-T tragedy on account of it’s the funniest movie ever. Every time I think about Will Ferrell jumping out of that car in his underpants, thinking he’s on fire and screaming, “Help me Jesus! Help me Tom Cruise! Help me Oprah!” I just wonder to myself what the Academy is thinking when they ignore that kind of talent.
Instead, they always give the Oscar to somebody who made some incredibly depressing movie. When’s the last time Hilary Swank made you laugh? I mean aside from that scene where she plays the boxer who gets paralyzed from the neck down and tries to kill herself by chewing her own tongue to pieces. Yeah, that one cracks me up every time.
With a script like Million Dollar Baby Pamela Anderson could have won the Best Actress Oscar.
And who was I to judge Barb, anyway? If the Lord helps those who help themselves, clearly Barb was doing the Lord’s work.
Of course, some of my mom-friends have said that I shouldn’t be worrying about day camps because it’s time to send the Princess to (shudder) “sleep-away camp.” Many of her friends have already done this for a couple of years, but I just can’t stand the thought of my Precious spending weeks away from home.
“It’s time,” my friend Carol-Ann told me. “It will teach her how to be self-reliant. Sleep-away camp is fun for her and you, too. Think of all the quality time you’ll have with your husband.”
Yes, think of it. Four hundred twenty-six, four hundred twenty-seven, four hundred twenty-eight…
Carol-Ann wasn’t giving up without a fight. Her daughter had been going to sleep-away horse camp for three years already and was training to compete in the Olympics.
“Yeah, what’s up with that, anyway?” I asked. “Why doesn’t the horse get the gold medal? He’s doing all the work. Shouldn’t he get the medal, a romp in the hay with a willing filly, and all the carrots and sugar cubes he can stand?”
“Don’t change the subject,” Carol-Ann said. “You just don’t want to let go of your baby. I get that. But there comes a time in life where you have to love her enough to let her go.”
OK, that’s another dumbass thing to say like the thing about spending too much time at the office. Why does everyone talk like a Scholastic Book Fair poster these days?
Look, the only piece of parental wisdom you really need, I’ve already given you. The rest is just, well, Olympic-size horse poo.
19
Dancing with the Doofuses
Maybe it’s because I got hooked on watching Dancing with the Stars. Maybe it’s because we’ve been married for nearly twenty years and the closest thing to a formal dance step hubby and I can do is the hokey pokey and sometimes even that doesn’t work out because I forget to put my whole self in.
Whatever the reason, here we were, every Sunday afternoon, taking Beginning Ballroom Dance classes in a mirror-lined room alongside a dozen other jittery couples wearing “Hello” nametags.
In my mind, I would be Lisa Rinna to hubby’s Harry Hamlin. We’d be good at this, possibly even great.
After all, didn’t we have several decades’ experience standing around with our eyes closed, swinging our heads from side to side during Free Bird? We had rhythm. Sort of.
The first class, hubby thought it would be hilarious to drape himself over me and grab my butt cheeks with both his hands in a little sentimental shout-out to the way everybody danced back in high school.
Unfortunately, I didn’t know that’s what he was doing and I just screeched, “What the hell is wrong with you, asshole? We’re supposed to be having fun!”
The other couples looked at us funny. About half were our age, and half were young, fresh-faced engaged couples who wanted to look good for their wedding dance. So young, so wide-eyed and filled with love and understanding for one another. I could feel my lunch creep upward.
I wanted to mess with their sweet heads a little.
“Hey,” I said to the bride-to-be who looked all of twenty years old. “What does it mean when your husband is in your bed, gasping for breath, and calling your name over and over?”
“I don’t know, what?” she said, blushing and smiling.
“It means you didn’t hold the pillow down long enough! Hahahahahahaha!”
“That’s horrible!” she said.
“No, hon, horrible is when you realize that both of you have started ordering the pizza before you have sex because you know you’ll be done way before twenty minutes and that way, there won’t be any lag time.”
“Well, that’s not very romantic,” said the bride-to-be.
“Romantic? Right. Get back to me the first time he asks you to ‘see what you can squeeze outta that zit on my back’ and here’s the kicker! You’ll enjoy it.”
So far, between hubby’s impromptu butt-cheek-grab and my sick sense of humor, we were zero for two as far as making friends with our Introduction to Beginning Ballroom Dance I for Beginners classmates.
While the perky marriage-minded couples were fun to watch, I felt more of a kinship with the elderly couple that fought all the time and always arrived with the distinct odor of bourbon wafting in the door behind them.
Dance-wise, things weren’t going great. Along about week four, I felt ashamed that I had ever poked fun at Jerry Springer’s spazzy turn on Stars. He was a god of dancing, a regular Mario López Baryshnikov compared to me.
The problem?
Our teacher, a wonderfully graceful woman who always appeared to float a couple of inches over the dance floor, took me aside and explained it simply: “My dear, you have a wobbly box.”
Hubby’s jaw dropped.
“I beg your pardon?” I said.
“A wobbly box,” she repeated, not even attempting to lower her voice. “It’s OK, dear, a lot of women have the same problem.”
Oh, sweet Jesus, take me now on account of I’m fairly certain I’m going to die of total and complete humiliation right this minute.
“Look,” said hubby, suddenly feeling chivalrous. “I don’t want to argue with an expert, but I simply have to say that my wife’s box is not wobbly, not even close. And how would you know anyway?”
I looked at him with love-filled eyes. He was my hero, defending my, er, box.
“Because, dear,” she said, looking directly at my husband. “I’ve been teaching dance for many years and when I see that someone’s box step is a tad out of line, I just feel that I must try to correct it. You just can’t go through these classes successfully with a wobbly box step.”
Oh. We knew that.
“Gawd,” I hissed at hubby. “What did you think she meant? You are such a perv sometimes.”
Our teacher, too kind and innocent to even understand what had just transpired, patted my hand.
“You’ll get it; it just takes time,” she said. “You know it took me at least six months to learn the box step.”
“Really?”
“Of course not.”
A few minutes later, she selected hubby to demonstrate a new step, and I have to admit that now that he finally had a decent partner, he was dancing like John O’ Freakin’ Hurley.
Unfortunately, or perhaps because he was still smarting from the whole “perv” comment, this seemed to empower hubby to become the Family Dance Expert.
He began to orchestrate little impromptu practice sessions throughout the week.
“I’m honestly worried about your merengue,” he said gravely one night.
“I’m honestly worried about your chances of living to attend the next class,” I said.
The next Sunday, hubby practically fainted with pleasure when the instructor reminded us the male is always in charge and we must follow his lead at all times.
“Excuse me,” I said, raising my hand. “You do realize that you’re asking me to follow a man who gets lost driving to the mailbox, right?”
The truth was, I was having trouble making the transition from being our family’s “decider” to following hubby’s lead on the dance floor.
“Follow his core, dear!” the instructor would say as she magically appeared at my elbow like Tinkerbell, floating above the floor and whispering into my ear.
“You heard her,” said hubby. “You’re totally ignoring my core and stuff.”
“Where is your core?” I asked.
“It’s in the, er, esophageal area or perhaps the phalangeal area. Wherever it is, I’ve got one and you shouldn’t be ignoring it.”
And with that, he took me into his arms, pulled me close to his chest-core type space and, somehow, steered me into a perfect sequence of tricky rock steps.
He really was so much better at this dancing thing than me. I could imagine Stars’ Emmitt Smith voicing soft approval: “You’re the big easy now, dawg” he would say to my husband.
With his new fancy-dancer status, hubby was really getting to be a bit of a handful around the house. We’d been at it for ten weeks and, while my box no longer wobbled, it was obvious that hubby was the dance talent in our household.
Which is why I didn’t want him to see the newspaper article that reported that tall people are smarter.
His ego was already getting out of control.
I hid the morning paper in the dishwasher, the one place I was sure he’d never find it.
“Hmmm,” he said, holding the curiously soggy newspaper that he had found (!) as he lowered his 6-foot-4-inch self into a ch
air meant for a much dumber person.
“It says here that Princeton researchers have discovered that tall people have advanced verbal and numerical skills,” he crowed.
“That’s ridiculous,” I managed. “What about Yoda? He’s really wise.”
“He’s a character in a movie,” hubby said with obvious, high I.Q.’d impatience. “I’m talking about real people, like, say, me!”
“Oh, great,” I pouted. “I knew you were going to get a lot of acreage out of this just because I’m only five-three.”
He gave me an icy I’m-better’n-you look. And where did he get that damned smoking jacket? “You mean mileage, don’t you? Not acreage. I know that expression because I am tall.”
Damn this report published by the National Bureau of Economic Research (motto: “Tall but Unlaid”).
“It says here that taller children as young as three perform significantly better on cognitive tests,” said hubby. “You do know what I mean when I say ‘cognitive,’ don’t you?”
“Don’t make me hurt you.”
“It’s the process of using knowledge in the broadest sense,” he said. “This includes perception, memory, judgment, the whole, if you will, enchilada.”
“Sorry but I’m too short to understand all but the enchilada part of what you just said,” I said, sarcasm dripping from my words like, well, something that drips a lot.
For some reason, ever since hubby had discovered the smart-tall connection, I was feeling shorter and dumber by the second.
“There are plenty of people who are tall but not smart,” I said, while fervently trying to find my mouth with a forkful of peas. Tricky pea bastards.
“No, not really,” said hubby. “Think about it. We’ve got Abraham Lincoln; you’ve got Tom Cruise.”
Zing!
This must be how Pluto felt. You go through your whole life feeing like a pretty good planet, worthy of textbook illustrations and pop quizzes and cute little planet jingles to help everyone remember the correct order from the sun—My Very Excellent Mother Just Sent Us Nine Pizzas—and then you realize you’ll never be pizza again. Or much of anything else except an oversized gas bag.
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