Suburgatory

by Linda Keenan

  Haven’t you always wanted to wow those drab straight friends with lines like this: “Well, my fabulous stylist friend Dave was hooked on meth for years—he calls it ‘Tina’—he said you could have sex for days on end! But after a lot of rehab, and the love of a good boyfriend, he’s OK now … ” or “My gay friend Scott, he’s so fabulous, he just saw my hair and said ‘girlfriend, you call that shaggy animal hair?! That looks like overgrown pubes on your head! Let’s fix that bad boy for you!’”

  Your fabulous gay stylist friend will also joke about how hot your husband is, but actually he’s not kidding about that part. Every six weeks, you’ll get your one-hour dose of fab, and the hottest hair design available within fifty miles. Why do we know it will be the hottest design? Because your Friend is gay! And very, very gay, we might add.

  So call us now and get your own fabulous friend at Friend of Dorothy.

  *Note: Friend of Dorothy does not discriminate, but we don’t employ lesbian stylists, not because of their orientation, but because the modern straight woman simply doesn’t consider them catty or bitchy enough. This bias does not reflect the views of Friend of Dorothy Salon. We know plenty of bitchy lesbians.

  Child Can’t Convince Mom She’s Beautiful Inside and Out

  Suburgatory, USA—A local mom insists she is “fat, hairy, and hideous,” despite the protestations of her son, who tells her she is beautiful “just the way she is.”

  “Mommy, why are you crying?” said six-year-old Brian Gardner to his mother, Judi Gardner, who was hand-­tweezing some stray lip hairs after a wax appointment earlier in the day. “I’m just getting rid of the hair, honey, no big deal. It’s just … just gross!”

  Brian was troubled by this. “But I like you a little fuzzy, Mommy! Like here!” Brian touched his mother’s arm. “Ugh! See, even you noticed my freak arms. Mrs. Sasquatch. I have to do something about that. Maybe laser.”

  “Sabers? Like Star Wars?! Mommy, that sounds scary,” said Brian.

  “No honey, LASER. It’s not scary. It just burns all the hair off with a scorchy light and you just have to wear special glasses and make sure to never, ever look at the light. Not scary at all!” Gardner said, as she boarded her home elliptical machine and Brian settled into the chair and snack tray he sets up during her lengthy sessions.

  “But Mommy, I thought you said that God loves all of us just the way we are!” said Brian. “Yeah right, God’s never seen this giant flat ass of mine,” Judi muttered.

  “What, Mommy?” asked Brian.

  “Nothing honey, you’re right. God does love us just the way we are. But other people aren’t nice like God is,” she said breathlessly, as she increased the resistance on the elliptical. “You know when you see those other mommies at school, when they’re guest reader or volunteering at the library, how good they look?”

  “Mommies are beautiful, all mommies, but you’re the most beautifullest in the whole world,” said Brian.

  “Well, I will be, after I get something called dermabrasion,” Judi said, panting.

  “What’s that, Mommy?” Brian said.

  “Oh, it’s where they sand your yucky face off.” Brian looked terrified. “No, Mommy! Your face is my most favorite face!”

  “Honey, it’s OK, I’ll still have my face. It will just be as soft as a baby’s bottom.”

  Brian started to cry. “I don’t want your face to look like a butt! That’s where poop comes from.” Judi tried calming him down but continued on the elliptical, saying, in short bursts, “Sweetie … I meant that … it will be super soft … you’ll love it.”

  Brian got up from his chair and tried to play with his mother’s stomach while she was exercising.

  “Soft like your fluffy tummy, Mommy? It’s so warm and squidqy.” Judi paused the elliptical, got off, and appeared triumphant.

  “You see? Out of the mouths of babes. I knew I was fat. Kids don’t lie to you about that stuff—they tell it just like it is.” She ruffled Brian’s hair. “I’m so glad I have him around to keep me honest. Brian, who’s the best little man in the world? You are! Someday I know you’ll meet a wonderful, beautiful girl who’ll love you exactly like you are, just like your Mommy does.”

  Mom Literally Dragged

  Back to Suburbs

  Suburgatory, USA—After two days of traipsing around Manhattan reliving her carefree single-girl days, an area mother had to be literally dragged back to the suburbs.

  “Ma’am. It’s time,” said New York City police officer Peter Clark. “Noooo!!!!!!! NOOOOOOO!!! Get your hands off me!” wailed a belligerent Trink Giroux as Officer Clark heaved her into the back of the car. “Watch your head getting into the cruiser, ma’am! Did you just bite me?”

  Giroux was reported missing by her husband one night ago. She joins hundreds of mothers in recent months who have fled their homes and responsibilities, leaving their husbands utterly unprepared to handle their children’s hygiene, homework, and food requirements.

  “Fucking God. That was like right out of The Sopranos when they took Adriana for a ‘drive’ in the country,” said Officer Clark, shaking his head in contempt and looking for teeth marks in his hand. “She was fighting it hard, all right, real hard.”

  Giroux was picked up while trying to pose as a twenty-something hipster at a Lower East Side club, which she thought was Tonic. But Tonic has closed since she lived there. A new club is in its place, and after noting her dowdy attire, dated haircut, and weary, medicated expression, the actual twenty-something hipster manning the door immediately notified police that there was an escaped mom inside the establishment. “What are you saying to me?” she kept asking the young man. “What? I don’t get what you’re saying.” It appeared that he was speaking mostly in the unaffected style of Mumblecore movies, a trend Giroux has utterly missed because of parenthood. She found the hipster’s speech patterns incomprehensible, which enraged her further.

  From the back of the police cruiser, Giroux tried to explain leaving her family and home to Officer Clark. “I just wanted to turn back the clock, just for a day or two. No whining kids, no clueless husband, no ‘accident reports’ from the preschool. NO goddamned OLIVE GARDEN. NO PLAYDATES.”

  “Do you realize what you’ve done, Mrs. Giroux? You left your little kids in the hands of their father. The school said one of your kids came in with a single mitten and another with no scarf. No juice boxes either. Your husband thought Fruit-by-the-Foot was real fruit. Their field trip forms, remember those? No, you don’t, do you? And you don’t care. You’re disgusting. You are disgusting to me.”

  “You’re right, you’re right, I am disgusting,” Giroux said, weeping as they made the inevitable slog back to town through the commuter traffic. “I just wanted to go back. But you can’t go back, can you? Not even for a visit.”

  Back-stories

  Okay, I didn’t need to be literally dragged back to the suburbs, like “escaped” mom “Trink Giroux,” but let’s just say that a lot of the material in this book was based on personal experience. I wish I could dish even more dirt I’ve heard over the years, but I have to be careful in giving you the back-stories, at the advice of counsel. (I’ve always wanted to say that! It sounds like I’ve arrived!) So if this stuff sounds very much like “me me, more about me!” the reason is simple: I don’t have to worry about suing myself.

  The “escaped mom” piece and the one that led the book, “Atheist Mom So Lonely She Accepts Christ,” were among the very first I wrote back in 2007—when I was still praying to Brooke Shields, the patron saint of deeply depressed mommies. I was then and still am an atheist. Sort of like, “God? Come again? Oh yeah, THAT dude!” But loneliness is a powerful motivator, and it was a mom friend, Liz, who first suggested going to a Baptist church playgroup/“parenting classes” by saying, “I’m a Jew from Jersey, and I love it!” At first, this idea seemed—hmm, what’s the formal term—‘ass-stupid’? Still, I began going, and sure enough, this battle-scarred ex-Catholic got an unexpected re
ligious education. The Christ I knew from childhood seemed like He was saying, “Look what a scary mess I am because of you, sinner! Guilty now? Good!” But at this Church, their Christ looked serene, as if He were fresh from yoga class.

  I was constantly stepping in shit, yet they always politely looked away. I asked one of the ladies, “Oh, what’s Ryan going to be for Halloween?” And she said, haltingly, “Well, we don’t celebrate Halloween.” I looked over at my son, who was wearing a snaggle-toothed pagan pumpkin, and my friend Naoko’s son, sporting a merry white skeleton, and I thought, “Great, we just paraded our boys around their church in Satan-shirts.”

  I was bowled over by their hospitality to me. But I still felt like a fraud, hiding my lack of faith and boundless social liberalism, and I wondered if at, say, a gay rights rally or pro-choice rally, would my new friends be on the other side of the line? Did I care?

  Well, I do care very much, as a longstanding fag hag, about gay rights. In “Lesbian Hamsters ‘Just Grew Apart’” I am definitely the annoying “Flora” who foists my homophilia on my child. We have a really old game of Life (free from the town dump) with the classic blue and pink pegs, and I actually did tell my son that “a blue peg should be able to marry a blue peg if they love each other.” Now my son asks his friends when playing, “Do you want to marry a blue peg or pink peg?”

  You might notice, ahem, a little anger in places over breastfeeding. When I told an (ex) pediatrician that breastfeeding wasn’t working for me, while looking disheveled and ready to careen off a bridge, she looked at me as if I had served her a turd on a plate. I wanted to say, “You know, a near-suicidal mom is quite the problem, too, lady, and breastfeeding is making it worse.” Just a note, ex-ped: My kid has no allergies, so here’s a heartfelt “fuck you” to you.

  I have spoken to at least a dozen women about the guilting they’ve gotten over breastfeeding, and for a while I got sucked into a real online breastfeeding collective, which I called the Titty Tribe in “Purchased Breast Milk Tainted by McDonald’s.” I found it fascinating how obsessed they seemed to be with breasts—their own and other women’s. They seemed to be mostly highly-educated, third-wave feminists. I was flabbergasted that a few seemed willing to take even untested bodily fluids from perfect strangers rather than bottle-feed, as I mention in “Wolf Blitzer: Live from the Lactation Room.”

  Closely allied to the breastfeeding guilters are the natural birthing guilters, the target of my ad for “C-Secrets,” a business that will give you a believably “natural” birth story to throw off finger-waggers. This is in tribute to friends Colleen, Kate, and all my many, many other C-section moms who’ve been told the only “true” way to have a baby is through your vagina. Sure, C-section rates do seem excessive. (Call that the Ricki Lake Business of Being Born concession.) But that doesn’t mean women should demean one another about such a private experience that the vast majority probably had little choice in making.

  You might notice Wal-Mart gets a starring role a few times in the book. I’m intrigued by Wal-Mart’s role in affluent suburbia as a class divider. Few friends will admit to going there. “Terry Gotlieb” in “Woman Shops at Walmart to Feel ‘Pretty, Thin’” was actually based on a woman who one day described Wal-Mart shoppers as if they were sub-human. Wal-Mart is the single most diverse place I visit in suburbia. Chuck E. Cheese comes in second.

  I also get my cheap on at the town dump, described in “Join My Weirdo Junior League!”—which is almost entirely true, except for Dumpster-diving and the very end, when my friend Laura notices I’m wearing her discarded shirt. That actually did happen, but I got the shirt at her school thrift store, where I’ve gotten literally $1,200 worth of clothes in one bag for, oh, thirty bucks.

  Laura is the unexpectedly sane leader in “PTO Stunner: New President ‘Not a Power-Mad Psycho.’” Now, the PTO leaders at my son’s school have been fantastic—nothing at all like the evil PTO terrorist Emily “Bin Fahdin.” But that supermarket ambush by a crazed PTO honcho actually happened to a friend in another corner of Suburgatory. This piece was also inspired by working parent friends who feel shut out of PTO. I see a lot of lip service given to the idea of “Can’t we all just get along, mommies?” But the fact is, I see a whole lot of judgin’ going on everywhere. That’s what inspired “Mommy War Combatants Embrace Mutually Assured Destruction.” I so hate it when women tear each other apart.

  Oh, who am I kidding? I love it!

  Really, though, I wished I could have worked more into the book for working moms, but I’m a stay-at-home mom. It’s what I know, it’s pretty much who I know, and many pieces reflect my efforts to combat whiny white mommy malaise. Besides the church, I did become an IKEA regular and a mall semi-regular who bought nothing but took massage chair breaks, not unlike the “Dad Forcibly Removed from Mall Massage Chair.” And I am the pathetically eager, unstoppable Facebook queen lambasted in “Mom Crushed to Learn that Facebook Isn’t Job.” If you can believe it, not one but two apparently single Pakistani mariners did friend me through the Jewish Maritime Historical Society. But they are not learning how marvelous the US is: All they’re learning about American women, from me at least, is that we dress and speak like whores.

  You might notice race comes up quite a lot, and race is certainly whispered about in the very white towns I’ve lived in. The playground encounter described in “‘Funny Racist Lady’ Enchants Prominent Black Townsman” actually happened to a friend. She is in no way racist, and I doubt the famous black athlete would be “enchanted” if she was. But my friend did think the other park-goers were being racist for subtly pointing at them. And he did invite her home for takeout, which is when she figured out he was a superstar and apparently a very nice one at that.

  Other moments I can cop to include an acquaintance referring to Indians as the “New Jews” because of their fierce determination to succeed. It had that strain of admiration plus disgust I see in anti-Semitism. The Ice Cream Man really is universally hated by my parent-friends, no matter his religion or color. But I did indeed meet someone who talked about one of them—a “brown” man of indeterminate ethnicity—as if he was a gypsy at best or a terrorist at worst, saying, “Just who ARE these people?”

  One of the fun things about writing this book was getting back the very insightful copyeditor notes from the whip-smart Imee Curiel. In a couple spots, she said, “Come on, this is just far-fetched.” But in the grand cliche of fact being stranger than fiction, these instances were actually real. There is indeed a high-end car in town with a bumper sticker that says Had Enough?, which is what inspired “Mercedes-Driving Dad Dreams of Easier Life for His Children.” It was a different fancy make of car I couldn’t place. (Being Super Crazy Mega Cheap, I don’t know a thing about new cars; my own cars are old enough to start cramming for their PSATs.)

  I wanted to tailgate this guy, to ask, “Had enough of what?” Inherited wealth? Profound luck? Because I can say without hesitation that the vast majority of people I’ve met who live in affluent suburbia got here by growing up affluent, marrying someone affluent, or getting themselves advanced degrees through hard work but also because they won the IQ lottery—better known as luck. That’s how I got here: luck. So, yes, rich dad apparently fed up with your enviable life, I’ve had quite enough. Enough of you and other rich people complaining endlessly about their taxes.

  One person who endlessly complains to me is a delightfully inappropriate mom friend determined to snag an invite to a supposed swinger party held each year on Halloween. I really did think that key parties were suburban folklore, but I’ve since been convinced that, while surely a teeny-tiny subculture, they actually do exist. I have no doubt that if we did go, we would be the moms who are all talk and no walk that swinger “David Dowd” complains about in his Shout Out. Though I would be all over his seven-layer dip.

  I do love my trashy food, and at some point, obsessive “foodie culture” began to both annoy and alarm me. It alarmed me to think that the healthies
t food seemed to be becoming the sole province of the affluent, which is what inspired “Dog Fed Better than Scholarship Child, Says School Nurse.” And like the character “EatMyShit” in “Waitress Wages Anti-Foodie Jihad on Chowhound,” I became irked by constant Facebook pictures of everyone’s spectacular, one-of-a-kind dinners. My own response to this is on Facebook was a “Moms Against Food Porn” picture series I did of really gross crap food sitting around my kitchen.

  And there’s quite a lot in here about women aging and loathing their own bodies. I go through phases when I become obsessed with one topic, and for a while it was that photo-collage “Faces of Meth” described in “Woman with Eating Disorder Considers Meth.” I showed it to everyone I knew, and no fewer than three mom friends looked at those ghoulish faces, paused, and then said, essentially, “Wow, meth really makes you lose a lot of weight, huh?” The fact is, I thought the same thing and hated myself for even thinking that.

  And I leave you with one more self-loathing incident that I didn’t explain fully in “Child Can’t Convince Mom She’s Beautiful Inside and Out,” because I thought no one would believe it. I did go through a midlife crisis a few years ago, the cheapness was very briefly tossed aside, and I actually bought laser hair removal—bikini line—on an impulse buy. It came with a special bonus: micro-dermabrasion! The day I went to redeem my “bonus,” I brought my son. (Too cheap for babysitting, but not for lasering? Hypocrite!) When I got there, they said, “So sorry, we have you in for lasering your bikini line, and you’ll be charged if you cancel.” So, yes, dear reader, my son sat in the corner, oblivious, wearing oversized protective glasses that kept slipping off his face, while his mommy sat on a table, legs spread, getting her bush lasered off. At least, I thought he was oblivious, until I heard him say, “Mommy, why are your pants on the floor?”

  Acknowledgments

  I had this fear that some of my work might seem, at times, woman-hating, so I’m happy to see how many actual women I have to thank here.