Don't Lick the Minivan

by Leanne Shirtliffe

  Chris cleaned up. I sat, guilt free.

  After finishing her bath, Vivian pranced down the stairs in her robe. “What’s that on your cheek?” I asked.

  She felt her cheek.

  “Come here,” I said.

  I looked at the red, pimply skin that was heart-shaped.

  “I think you’re allergic to the face paint,” I said.

  The next day, I picked Vivian and William up after school. They skipped to the minivan, climbed in, and told me about their school birthday party. I drove as they chatted. I stopped at a crosswalk in the parking lot to let a little girl and her mom pass. After they crossed, she turned around and waved. I saw a red heart shaped rash on her cheek.

  My stomach sunk.

  “Vivian,” I asked, panicking. “Did any other girls have rashes from the face paint?”

  “They all did, Mommy,” she said. “We had matching hearts all day.”

  I drove home in a panic.

  “Chris?” I called as I walked in the door. “The pink face paint gave all the girls rashes.” I started to hyperventilate.

  He started to laugh.

  “It’s not funny,” I said, looking around for a paper bag.

  “It kind of is,” he said.

  “Was the paint from a garage sale?” I asked.

  “Of course.”

  “Was it used?”

  “No. It was unopened. It’s just old.”

  “@#$%! I infected a bunch of girls with tainted face paint. I can’t believe it.”

  I headed to my computer. A quick search revealed headlines such as “FDA Issues Face Paint Warning,” “Face Paint Can Have a Scary Side,” and “Face Paint Recall.”

  I scanned the articles looking for words like “permanent scarring,” “facial deformities,” and “plastic surgery.”

  “Are you going to email the kids’ parents?” Chris asked.

  “Are you kidding?” I asked. “No way. That’ll just instill fear in an already phobic population. Plus, the article says there are no long lasting side effects. So far.”

  Chris nodded.

  “Look,” I said. “Feel free to email them yourself. Explain where you bought the face paint.”

  “That’s all right,” he said. “The worst case scenario is that fewer people will come to Vivian and Will’s birthday party next year.”

  Things were looking up.

  Parenting Tip: Avoid purchasing second-hand face paint. If you do, use it only on your own children. This will limit the spread of infections. And don’t even consider third-hand.

  “Mom.” Vivian stormed downstairs. “William won’t let me watch any of my shows on TV. All he wants to watch is Spiderman, and I don’t like it.”

  “Haven’t you blocked Retro-TV?” I asked Chris.

  “You didn’t tell me to block it,” he said.

  “Well, it has commercials ranging from pregnancy tests to the Slap Chop. Will has them all memorized.”

  “Really?” Chris asked.

  “Fettuccine, linguini, bikini,” I said. “And First Response. ‘The only test that tells you six days sooner.’”

  “I’m on it,” Chris said. “It’s easier than parenting.”

  “Mom.” Vivian reminded us of her presence. “I want to watch my TV shows.”

  I’d like to say my kids were coming down from a sugar high, but this behavior was pretty normal for us.

  “William!” I screamed. “Get down here. Now.”

  He came.

  “You need to share the TV or no one’s going to watch it. No more tonight. Tomorrow, Vivian gets to choose. Now it’s bedtime.”

  “But Mom—” Vivian began to protest.

  “Bed. Now.”

  One hour later, I emerged downstairs, sweating from the early summer that seemed to have surrounded us. I grabbed some water since we had no beer.

  “Mom?” Four feet padded down the stairs.

  “For crying out loud—”

  “Get back to bed,” Chris said. “Your mother’s exhausted.”

  Somehow we’d channeled our parents and the phrases they used on us thirty years before.

  “Mom, I can’t sleep,” Will said.

  “Me neither,” Vivian echoed. “It’s still light out.”

  “Yes, it is. It’s called summer in Canada,” I said. “And leave your blackout blinds alone.”

  “But kids are playing outside,” Will said. “Can we play outside?”

  “No,” said Chris. “Their parents don’t love them.”

  Vivian and William looked at each other, communicating something in their inaudible twin language.

  “Can we play outside?”

  I sighed. “No. It’s way past your bedtime. It’s a school night. Go. To. Bed.”

  “But it’s hot. It’s so hot I can’t sleep,” Vivian said.

  “Well, your ceiling fan is on. If I crank it any faster, our house may end up in Kansas. I suspect it’s hot there too.”

  “It’s so hot we can’t sleep,” Will said.

  They had a point. This was record setting end-of-May heat and second story bedrooms in a house lacking air-conditioning didn’t help.

  “Take off your pajamas,” Chris said.

  Vivian and William looked at their pjs, then to me, then back to their pjs, then to each other.

  “Really?” one of them said.

  I nodded.

  “Can we sleep naked?” William asked.

  “No. In your underwear.” Visions of William sneaking his Thomas the Tank Engine up to his room crossed my mind.

  They grinned. You could see the lack of privilege in my children’s lives when they got excited about being able to shed their clothing.

  I returned to my previously scheduled activity, wasting time on Twitter when I should have been tidying the living room.

  “Mom, we’re still hot,” one of them said. Sometimes it was hard to keep track of which twin spoke because they talked in collective pronouns.

  “Stop talking,” I said. “It makes you hot.”

  Chris smiled.

  They trundled off to bed.

  Another minute, another mindless tweet.

  “Mom, it’s hot.” William wandered down the well trodden stairs.

  “Yes. It’s summer. It gets hot.”

  “I can’t sleep. I’m so hot.”

  This time, Chris spoke first. “If you’re that hot, go stick your head in the toilet.”

  “Really?”

  “Good night.”

  Although we didn’t hear a flush, we also didn’t hear any more noise from their bedroom. I shut my laptop. One hundred and forty characters were getting to be too much for me.

  I scooted onto our living room floor and looked around me at the sea of picture books that had been thrown out of the bookcase. Chris joined my Dr. Seuss sit-in.

  “Remember when we used to watch Whose Line Is It Anyway?” I asked.

  Chris smiled. “Yes. Every Sunday night in Bangkok.”

  “Remember that skit where they’d put ‘if you know what I mean’ at the end of every sentence?”

  Chris nodded. A decade together meant he knew where my mind was going.

  We both grabbed a book and opened up to a random page.

  I grabbed a Doreen Cronin book, opened up, and read, “Bob had all the pigs washed in no time, if you know what I mean.”

  We laughed.

  “How about this one?” Chris said, picking up The Cat in the Hat and opening to a random page. “And then something went BUMP! How that BUMP made us JUMP, if you know what I mean.”

  We laughed until our ribs hurt.

  Soon, we shortened the game. We added the double entendre phrase to the end of the titles.

  “Pat the Bunny, if you know what I mean.”

  “There’s a Wocket in my Pocket, if you know what I mean.”

  “The Very Hungry Caterpillar, if you know what I mean.”

  “Where the Wild Things Are, if you know what I mean.”

&nbs
p; But it was the final one that made me die a little death: “Hop on Pop, if you know what I mean.”

  WHO TOLD YOU THAT YOU SHOULD BREATHE THROUGH YOUR MOUTH WHEN DADDIES POO?

  I’m a big fan of using choice as a way to coerce kids into doing what I want them to do.

  I learned this early in my teaching career. I used to spout platitudes like, “You always have a choice, it just may not be a good choice,” but I got tired of hearing teens make gagging noises. So I halted my sermonizing and started putting the philosophy into practice. When a pubescent creature was doing something highly annoying, I’d pause and offer a choice, such as “You can either stop armpit farting and stay in this classroom, or you can armpit fart all the way down to the principal’s office.”

  This either-or strategy, a type of souped-up bribery, proved especially useful for parenting five year olds.

  To Vivian, I’ve said: “You can either eat your carrots and have dessert, or you can leave them on your plate to fester and decay while you starve for days to come.”

  To William, I’ve said: “You can either stop sucking on that LEGO piece, or you can keep sucking on it and never watch The Backyardigans again, ever.”

  The equation of this discipline technique can be indicated by the formula: Choice + Hyperbole = Manipulation. You’re solving for sanity.

  I must use this technique often, because one day Vivian cornered me with her own version of Manipulation 101.

  Parenting Tip: Manipulation 101 is a highly effective discipline strategy. It is represented by the following equation: CHOICE + HYPERBOLE = MANIPULATION.

  I was in the kitchen doing something useful, like boiling water for the fourth time with the hope that I’d actually remember to make a cup of tea while the water was still hot.

  “Mom,” Vivian said, “would you like to sit on the couch and read me a book, or would you like to sit on the floor and play Fish?”

  I took a moment to process the options.

  And you know what?

  It worked.

  A five-year-old connived me—her mediocre mother—into following her agenda.

  Freaking master apprentice.

  There is little choice, however, in dealing with disgusting things when you’re a parent. And there are few things more disgusting than finding used Band-Aids that don’t belong to you in your purse while you’re eating dinner in a restaurant. The only experience that came close to out-grossing that was when I was a college student moving into an apartment. On the floor of what was to be my bedroom, my roommate and I found a goopy condom, one that was used mere hours before. I remember looking at my roommate and saying, “Well, we can rest assured that these idiots aren’t procreating.”

  But back to the other type of sticky-bodily-fluid things: Band-Aids. No parent in their right mind goes anywhere without them.

  Parenting Tip: It is wiser to forget a child than leave your house without a Band-Aid.

  The average length of time a Band-Aid stays on in our house is four minutes. I find the used ones in the bottom of the bathtub, stuck to the bottom of my sock, or plastered to the fridge door. But the greatest concentration of used Band-Aids is in my purse.

  On the eve of the last day of school, Chris and I went on a date. I rifled through my purse trying to find my cell phone to check if the babysitter had called in the past ninety minutes. Chris had gone to the bathroom, and I needed to look like I was doing something. I hadn’t had a chance to change purses so I was using the one that could have held a third baby if I had lacked birth control. Finally, I pulled out my cell phone. Stuck to it were two used Band-Aids. I nearly gagged, but was able to multitask effectively: drop the purse while reaching for the Shiraz.

  Chris returned. “The ratio of used Band-Aids to new Band-Aids in my purse is 3:1,” I told him.

  He grimaced.

  I held up the phone with its accessories.

  “That’s disgusting.”

  Just then our waiter came by. I hid the phone.

  “Would you like another drink?” he asked.

  “Would I ever,” I said.

  The next day, Vivian and William’s last day of preschool, I should have rented a U-Haul trailer with a one-way ticket to the recycling depot. Three months later, I still hadn’t sorted through folders, journals, posters, nametags, and winter newsletters that said someone in the class had lice. I hoped it wasn’t one of my spawn.

  Instead of doing the drop-and-dump method, I backed the minivan into the garage and made twenty-four trips into our house with crumpled construction paper. Good to know my children were glue-sticking their way to literacy.

  Once I finished Operation De-Construction Paper, I made no-name Kraft Dinner; we were, after all, trying to pay back our kids’ bank account. I liked to buy foods with as many unrecognizable ingredients as possible on the box as it gave William and Vivian something to read when they were waiting for dinner.

  Parenting Tip: Look for opportunities to practice your child’s literacy skills. Buying food with unrecognizable ingredients aids this educational pursuit.

  I served dinner, if you could call it that. The food group “Beige” was well represented.

  “So, what happened on your last day of school?” I asked.

  “Nothing,” William said.

  “Right,” I said. “Same as all the other one hundred eighty days?”

  He kept chewing.

  “I know something that happened,” Vivian muttered through partially chewed macaroni. “I learned something.”

  “You learned something at school today? Really?” I asked. I hadn’t been concerned with my sarcastic tone since I broke that New Year’s Resolution on January 2.

  “I learned that when daddies poo, you should breathe through your mouth.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Wow, the curriculum is getting more practical,” Chris said.

  “What does that mean, Mommy?”

  “Oh, nothing.”

  “Who told you that you should breathe through your mouth when daddies poo?” I asked.

  “A boy in my class.”

  “What do you think of his advice?” I asked.

  “I like it.”

  “Me too.”

  “Mom,” said William, oblivious to the conversation that happened, “can I have some more?”

  Help yourself. Later, we’d all be breathing through our mouths.

  THE SAPPY FILES, PART 4 (OR WHY MY KIDS’ FUTURE THERAPISTS SHOULD BELIEVE I DON’T NEED TO BE COMMITTED. YET.)

  Dear Vivian and William,

  There is nothing that makes me more thankful for you both than a trip to the hospital . Adjacent to the bright LEGO-style building that is the Alberta Children’s Hospital, there is a parking garage that sells monthly passes. Whenever I grab the ticket from the entrance, a multitude of emotions runs over me, from sadness for the families who’ve spent countless nights there, to relief that it’s not us.

  We were there for day surgery. For you, William. I am grateful that your dad and I didn’t have to have the argument that I imagine so many other parents have had, wondering if they should purchase a weekly or a monthly pass.

  We took the elevator up to the third floor to the day surgery waiting room, a kid-friendly place with bold art, toys, and cartoons on TV.

  William, I remember helping you into a primary-colored hospital gown that hung down to your knees. You leaned over the train table, nearly revealing your bare butt. I pulled out puppets so your sister could entertain us. My eyes took in everything: a mother on a cell phone, a surgeon briefing a family, your absorption in the moment of play.

  While waiting diaper-less, another child—a toddler girl—peed herself. The receptionist smiled, grabbed a mop, and reassured the girl’s parents. “It happens all the time,” she said.

  There are angels everywhere.

  You both seemed to sense this shift in mood and came back to your dad and me and climbed onto our laps.

  How do you pr
epare a child for anesthetic? I wondered silently.

  But William, you interrupted my thoughts. “Mom,” you said, “will there be a woman and an alligator purse?”

  I tried to figure out what you were talking about. Did that mom over there have a fancy purse? What movies had you watched recently?” I turned to your dad for some clarification, but he was as lost as me.

  “Will ,” I said, “I don’t know—”

  “Mom,” Vivian interrupted, “it’s the book, The Lady with the Alligator Purse.”

  I smiled, both at the thought of that story and at how you and your sister often understand each other immediately.

  I remembered the book. In it, a boy is sick. A doctor comes in and prescribes penicillin, then a nurse suggests castor oil, but it is the lady with the alligator purse who brings the real healing power: pizza.

  “I’m not sure she’ll be there,” I said.

  Sadness clouded your face.

  “We’ll find her,” your dad added.

  Soon your name was called.

  The four of us held hands and walked down a long hallway, through secured double doors, and into a wide holding area, a waiting place. Under bright fluorescent lights, your dad and I stood, every bit as unsure as we were the moment before you were born . Only this time, you and your sister held our hands. You both gave us strength.

  I looked around. The only other people were a Hutterite woman and her teenage son . We exchanged smiles.

  Then, a nurse and an anesthesiologist come out of the operating room and invited you to go with them.

  “Maybe that’s the Lady with the Alligator Purse,” your sister told you.

  I tried not to cling to you. I tried, but failed. Then I watched as you walked away, a pint-sized boy flanked by two medical personnel in scrubs. You walked without looking back through the swinging surgical doors.

  I tried to compose myself, for your sister. I tried hard. The Hutterite woman smiled at me. In a Low German accent, she asked, “What’s he in for?”

  I explained. I wiped my eyes. “It’s not that serious,” I added. “The doctor says it’s routine. Well, routine for the doctor, I guess.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” she said. “He’s your boy.”