Is That The Shirt You're Wearing

by Kristen Brakeman

  My heart pounding, I somehow knocked the tarantula to the ground and used the broom to brush him down our very long steep driveway. With each brush, the tarantula would jump back up, turn, and start to come towards me. Apparently, tarantulas pursue their prey.

  Finally, somehow, I was able to sweep it down onto the street.

  Pumped up on adrenaline and a desire to protect my

  children (born and unborn), I started my car and set off to finish the job. Convinced it was him or me, I backed up my car and took aim at the stunned tarantula. I could not take a chance that he would crawl back to my house, my home.

  When the deed was done, I pulled forward and looked out my window to see if the creature was still moving. I think I saw him flinch. So I threw the car back in reverse and ran over him again, just to make sure. Really sure.

  In hindsight, it is possible I overreacted.

  Looking for support, I recounted my terrifying tale to friends. They didn’t pity me. Instead, they looked at me like I was a crazed murderer. They scolded me and lectured that tarantulas aren’t dangerous. They make great pets. They’re sweet natured. Sure. They didn’t see him. They didn’t see the look in his beady little eyes. At least I think those were eyes.

  Interestingly, after my husband heard the story, it seemed like he treated me differently. Almost like he was afraid. I believe he even muttered something about being careful never to cross me.

  Sometimes it pays to be a loose cannon.

  Since the initial tarantula incident, we have had five or six more visits from these horror-film castoffs. I have begun to wonder if my initial response created bad wildlife karma; much like what happened with the tiki idol on the Brady Bunch Hawaii episode. It’s as if the tarantulas issued some type of arachnid fatwa against me.

  And so, on this more recent evening, I decided it was time for a new approach. I had to change my luck - anything to keep these furry multi-legged creatures out of my life. While my girls cheered me on (and my husband continued to enjoy his delicious dessert) I oh-so-gently persuaded the tarantula to leave our front door. Using the gentlest of bristle strokes, I carefully ushered him off the front porch, scooted him down the driveway, and back into the wilderness where he belonged.

  “Tell your friends!” I yelled after him.

  3 1/2 weeks

  This has been a great week. It’s been nice not having to get up early to drive the kids to summer school and yesterday we had a fun day at the beach. Not a one of us got E-coli poisoning from the sand, which is always a bonus.

  Also, I got really good news from my mom that she does not have the bone marrow cancer after all. Yay! It seems that the third doctor thinks that her sudden weakness was caused by the medicine that her first doctor gave her for the pain in her knees. One day I wrote down all the medicines she takes and it filled an entire page, there were over a dozen in all, half of which I suspect are taken to counteract the effects of the other half.

  She’s back to ordering us around again, more proof that she’s starting to feel better. Whenever I call her, I receive some sort of assignment. Today it was about that emergency pendant I got her. The “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up” type.

  “Did you call the company yet? Because it still isn’t working. I call the number and push the button to test it and nothing happens.”

  “Yes Mother, the technician said that likely the battery needs changing. He said if you open up the back there’s a spare.”

  Silence.

  “Hello, Mother, did you hear me? He said you could get a small screwdriver and open up the back . . . Are you still there?” “Yes, yes. Well, I suppose that could be it. I don’t know.

  Why don’t I have your brother look at it the next time he’s here?” “Okay, fine, let him look at it. But this man was fairly confident that it only needs a new battery.”

  “Well, I suppose anything’s possible.”

  I hung up and emailed my eldest brother to ask him to change the damn battery. Fortunately he agreed.

  I thank my lucky stars that I have lots of brothers and

  sisters, two of whom live closer to my mom than I. Sometimes I marvel that between doctor appointments, shopping, bills, banking, and all the things that need fixing around her house, it takes the combination of all five of us kids to fill the shoes of my father.

  I’m going to make sure that my daughters know how to change a battery before they move out of our house, and a light bulb too, oh, and where the circuit breakers are. These will be the minimum requirements for home graduation.

  The rest is icing.

  Sharp Like Knives

  As I set down the orange juice on the breakfast table, I was stopped in my tracks by the sight of my 12-year-old daughter struggling to cut up her pancakes. Holding her knife in her left fist like a ski pole and her fork like a video game nunchuck, she ground the two utensils together until her plate became a mess of shredded, torn pancake bits.

  My future Mensa member and current household video- game champion had no more ability to use a knife than had our cat.

  How did she escape learning this basic life skill?

  Looking back I admit I purposely kept knives away from my kids. I thought that giving a sharp object to a child could only end badly.

  Whenever we went to a restaurant where knives were recklessly set on the table, the inevitable sibling sword fight would ensue, only confirming my suspicions.

  It’s likely also that a diet of kid foods were partly to blame. One doesn’t need to cut up chicken nuggets, pizza, and macaroni and cheese. Though my kids often dine on more grown-up fare like salmon, shrimp and pastas; these are again, all fork-friendly foods.

  After deciding to brush off the knife incident as a minor blemish on my otherwise spotless parental record, I was faced with another shortcoming.

  My two older girls wanted me to bake a heart-healthy corn soufflé to serve our dinner guests. Rushed for time, I instructed them to start without me by gathering all the ingredients and opening up the cans of creamed corn.

  With the front room finally tidy, I went to check on their progress. I walked in to find every drawer in the kitchen open as my daughters rummaged about, muttering, “I don’t know which one is a can opener. Is this a can opener?”

  “No, I think it’s this thing,” the other one said, holding a corkscrew. “Or maybe it’s that thing there?” while pointing at a garlic press.

  Astonished, I interrupted. “What? Do you mean to tell me that neither one of you knows what a can opener looks like?”

  I reached into the appropriate drawer. “This is a can opener!”

  “Oh,” they said in unison.

  “You’ve never used a can opener?” I demanded, only to be treated to shrugs and the onset of uncontrollable giggles.

  “Oh, yeah. Go ahead and laugh.”

  I tried to impress them with the seriousness of the situation. “It won’t be so funny when The Big One comes and Daddy and I are squished under the entertainment center and you kids have to fend for yourselves. What will you do then? Huh? I’ll tell you what you’ll do. You’ll starve! I can see the story on the Ten o’clock News: ‘Local children starve to death in a kitchen surrounded by cans of food!’”

  Now gasping for air, Chloe somehow managed to squeak out, “We won’t starve. We’ll order a pizza.”

  I ignored her. “This weekend, the two of you are going to learn about the kitchen, and we will have a special class in advanced knife work.”

  Morning came and after a half-hour of Show and Tell with the kitchen utensils and appliances, I presented my children with a stack of easy-to-cut French Toast.

  I gave them a lengthy dissertation on proper knife holding technique and exact index finger placement for maximum pressure, and then encouraged them to try it themselves.

  Chloe tried to flaunt her knife skills first, but soon food went flying off the edge of her plate. Samantha made a couple feeble attempts and then disregarded my advice and began mashing up
her French Toast like she had her pancakes. Again, more giggles.

  I was ready to admit defeat when my seven-year old asked, “Mommy, am I doing it right?”

  To be honest, I forgot my overlooked third child was even at the table. But now, I was thrilled to learn someone had actually been paying attention.

  “Why yes!” I gushed. “You are doing it right! Wow, girls… look at your much younger sister. See how well she wields her knife? Why can’t you two be more like her? Excellent job, Peyton. Here, have some more syrup and powdered sugar.”

  I knew very well I had violated the advice of every parenting book by comparing the children to one another, but I didn’t care. I was feeling desperate.

  Sadly, my efforts were all in vain. Chloe and Samantha soon abandoned their utensils entirely and resorted to ripping off bites of French toast with their teeth, much like the feral children they were apparently meant to be.

  The good news was that at least my youngest child would someday be able to enter civilized society. In the meantime, I can only hope that someone in the Silicon Valley invents a game that teaches kids how to use a butter knife.

  3 weeks to go!

  We booked a rental house at Lake Inferior, and we depart next Saturday. It’s a ten-hour drive but I’m telling the kids it’s a mere seven. I’m afraid they won’t get in the car if they know the truth. Once they’re buckled in I’ll fess up. Maybe.

  We wanted to leave this past weekend but we couldn’t miss Barry’s daughter’s bat mitzvah, a fact that irked me a bit. After all, when I had my Episcopal Confirmation service as a child, no one outside of my family was expected to attend and the ceremony and reception lasted only an hour. This kid’s daylong religious ceremony was now dictating our entire vacation, eliminating two possible weeks of Saturday-to-Saturday rentals. But once I was at the synagogue, I had a change of heart.

  It became clear that Barry’s daughter’s religious training was far more intensive and meaningful than my own had been. The focus on the child’s relationship to her family with the passing down of the prayer shawls was quite touching, and I liked that the Rabbi and his folk singer sidekick had a kind of David Letterman/Paul Shaffer thing going on, with the Cantor providing little musical buttons to the Rabbi’s comments. Their music made me want to stand up and clap along. It was nothing like the mournful choir hymns that I suffered through every single Sunday of my youth. I really enjoyed the service.

  Well, at least for the first hour. As the second hour came and went, my focus changed to an appreciation of the synagogue’s padded benches, a stark contrast to the wooden pews that used to torture my bony bottom. How thoughtful of my Jewish friends, I mused, while I seriously entertained the notion of lying down on the inviting pillowy cushions. But when they opened that Ark Cabinet to remove the Torah for the sixth time, I started looking around for a suggestion box, because I wanted to anonymously propose just leaving the damn thing open for the remainder of the service. Good God people, make up your minds!

  It’s the routine aspects of religious rites that provide comfort to some, but for me it was this repetitive stuff - the up, the down, the kneeling, the up, the down again - that drove me nuts as a child and ultimately away from the church as an adult.

  Since my husband is a self-described heathen, he left the religious training of our children to me. I decided that I would teach our kids about religion gradually, hoping that if I didn’t force it upon them, like it was forced on me, they’d find an appreciation for it on their own. I realize now, it was a stupid, stupid plan. It became clear that I had failed at their religious training when one day we were talking about Elvis sightings, and my youngest earnestly asked, “Is Elvis Jesus?”

  God forgive me.

  It drives my mom nuts that my kids are on the heathen path. I’m sure she counts it as her own personal failure, which only adds to my guilt. So, whenever I can, I still try to educate my kids about religion. As we drove from the synagogue to the reception I spent the car ride explaining and extolling the virtues of the bat mitzvah service we had just witnessed. Apparently I got pretty carried away because at one point Samantha asked, “Are we going to become Jewish now?”

  I don’t know, maybe. Probably best if we don’t mention it to Grandma.

  Is That The Shirt You’re Wearing?

  When my mom would drive me to my best friend Becky’s house we would pass by a construction site, overgrown with weeds and full of debris. My mom would eye that field and invariably say, “That looks like a good place to dump a dead body.”

  As an eight-year-old, it’s hard to know what to do with a statement like that.

  My brothers and sisters and I regularly teased our mother about her dark view of the world but never dreamt it would rub off on any of us. Though I’m upbeat about the big issues in life, my kids mock me for going through daily life with a dark cloud over my head. Like my mom, if I see a glass elevator in a hotel lobby, I wonder if it might soon crash to the floor, sending shards of glass into my backside. Before sleeping I turn off my electric blanket because I’m convinced that if I ever forget, I will surely be electrocuted in the night. And, yes, when I see an empty field, I marvel at what a wonderful depository it would make for a dead body, maybe two.

  It’s likely the natural order of things that a child’s desire for independence makes them want to be nothing like their parents. Yet in the end, most of us grow up to be just like them. Physically, I can already see it happening. Besides sharing the sloth gene, my mother and I have, shall we say, “vein issues.” The other day I was watching TV with Peyton and noticed that she was playing with the giant vein on my hand. “Why does it stick out so much?” she asked. “And why are the veins so blue and bulgy on your legs?”

  “They weren’t that way until I got pregnant with my third kid,” I snapped. Of course, she had no idea what I was talking about and I didn’t have the heart to point out that I could already see the veins in her arms through her translucent skin, a sure sign that she would one day have the same problem that I have.

  Besides, she was merely asking a question. I was so much meaner to my mom. I remember going swimsuit shopping with her when I was a teenager. After trying on a royal blue one- piece, she asked my opinion. I said, without hesitation, “It looks okay, and the color matches the varicose veins in your legs.” It’s a wonder I am still alive.

  I think that I’ve inherited my mother’s hearing loss too. Her hearing began to decline in her forties, much like her father’s. Unfortunately, we were not the most sympathetic family. We would get frustrated that we had to repeat things and annoyed that she had a habit of simply guessing at what we said and then providing an answer for that. We couldn’t understand why she didn’t ask us to repeat something if she didn’t hear it clearly.

  Of course, I do this now. Sometimes it’s true that I’m guessing at what people have said, but a lot of times I genuinely think they have said one thing when really they’ve said another. So, my replies are totally off base, which provides for endless hilarity, apparently. Whenever I accidentally give my inappropriate answers, my kids will do an impression of me by throwing out random non sequiturs like, “Louisiana Purchase,” “Microsoft Word” or “Munchausen Syndrome.” Was I that cruel?

  While I’ve always figured that there was little I could do about genetics, I was confident that I could at least avoid inheriting my mom’s less desirable personality traits. Yet, here too I was wrong.

  After vowing not to become a worrywart like my mom, I’ve become that as well. My kids know that they can’t leave the house without hearing my list of warnings about strangers, cars running red lights, and sudden inclement weather. If there is a bump on my arm, I automatically worry it’s a deadly tumor. I obsess about the most unlikely of scenarios, like what if my healthy daughter has a seizure while performing in her school play and no one renders aid because they think it’s part of her performance? Even my lottery fantasies are ruined by the knowledge that if we did win, our family w
ould inevitably be torn apart by ruthless infighting.

  I’ve also tried not to mimic my mother’s practice of giving indirect criticisms, but I’m losing that battle as well. You see, she has a remarkable ability to voice her disapproval without overtly sounding like she’s doing so. Statements like, “You decided to wear your jeans then?” which clearly means you’re underdressed. Or, “I see you opted not to serve the green beans,” which obviously means her dinner is ruined.

  “Oh, is Ryan a girl’s name now?” my mom said recently after my nephew named his second child. An innocent sounding question to others, but one which we all knew to mean, “Why the hell did you give your daughter a boy’s name?”

  I can’t fault her too much because I know that she inherited this skill from her own mother, who upon hearing that she had named me Kristen commented, “Oh, you named her after that prostitute who’s sleeping with the English politician,” referencing the scandalous Keeler Affair from the 1960’s. Really, my mom’s comments are mild by comparison.

  So I know it’s inevitable. As my daughter readied for school just this morning, I swear I heard my mother’s voice as I asked, “Is that the shirt you’re wearing?”

  “Yes, Mom, it is,” my daughter replied. “And Ryan is a girl’s name now, Grandma.”

  Oh.

  2 weeks, 4 days

  I’m getting really excited about our trip to Lake Inferior. I like going to new places and seeing new things. Whenever I arrive at a new place, I have to do a reconnaissance mission of my surroundings before I am able to relax. On our two island vacations, I made my husband drive the rental car around the circumference of the island so I could get my bearings. I suppose that would be a tad more difficult on a really big island, like Australia, for example.

  I wish I could ask my dad what he knows about the Mt. Lassen area. He would always have a million facts to share about everything and he had answers for every question. Like one time, there was this really big hailing thunderstorm at my house and after a bit I noticed that the hail had stopped making noise. I called my dad, “Listen, there’s white stuff falling from the sky and it’s soft and fluffy and doesn’t make any noise when it hits the ground. Do you think it could be snow?”