And fer Pete’s sake…

One of the most enduring memories of my childhood is a vivid flashback of me standing in a ladies’ room stall while my mother impatiently stripped toilet paper off the roll and lined the seat for me.

I can understand the impatience; when you have five kids and you’re at a rest stop or a department store and they all have to go to the john, I can imagine that the drill of lining five toilet seats with bulk-grade toilet paper has to get really old, really fast.

Like most kids, though, I didn’t understand why. I could barely be coerced to wash my hands after using the bathroom, much less caring about the toilet in a public john. So I have to admit to being a little embarrassed (well, to put a fine point on it: humiliated) when mom would give an exasperated sigh and start lining toilet seats. I mean, what was the big deal?

Years later (about 40 of them, to be precise) I understand. Twice today I’ve had to run into a public bathroom and, when I stopped to look more closely at the seat in the stall, I found it again…telltale drops.

I’m tellin’ ya: for all the complaining that women do over men not lifting the lid, and putting the lid back down, you’d think that more women would be more careful about the lid when they’re through with it.

Apparently, there’s a bunch of you who just, well, don’t finish the job properly and leave telltale drops on the lid when you’re done.

There’s apparently another whole sub-culture of women who, mindful of the first group, were taught never, ever, ever to sit down on the danged thing in a public john and so wind up whizzing all over hell and creation because, quite frankly, we just don’t have the control that men say they have when they’re signing their names in the snow but mysteriously lose at 3 a.m. in their own bathrooms.

I have gotten so aware of this that I have other, vivid flashbacks to the delight I felt about ten years ago when I found out that I could order my own little toilet paper liners and carry them around with me, just in case a public john was understocked. I imagine that my own daughters have a vivid flashback of their own of the day I chased after them at a softball game, heading into the loo, waving my little plastic polka-dotted case and urging them to take one.

(Note: I called my mom when I found those little gems and told her how she could order them. She responded with a pause, and then a carefully worded, “You know, even *I* wouldn’t do *that.*)

So, lady, I don’t care what you do in the stall. Do backflips. Read tarot cards. Call your broker. Sit down. Or not. Use those handy little liner thingies. Or not. But when you’re done, please oh please spend a moment and review your handiwork, such as it is, and clean up.

And then, we get letters.

Note: Once this (http://mominterrupted.wordpress.com/2008/03/28/im-your-mom-not-your-concierge/) got published, I got the usual nice feedback from my mother, and then the rest of the world chimed in.

Not long after this column was published, I got a letter from a woman who was fairly irked with me. She said, in so many words, that

a) it was, in fact my job to trot the kid’s lunch up to him no matter how many times he forgot it, since

b) it is, in fact, a 10-year-old’s job to forget things and oh, and another thing:

c) she felt blessed to have a forgetful 10-year-old boy and it was really a crime to ever refer to one as a ‘terror,’ no matter what the provocation and while she was at it:

d) gave me her cell phone number to give to Sam so that, if he biffed his lunch again and I was too mean to bring him more food she would get into that Twinkie/Sunny Delight/hot dog stash in her car and run some up to him because we all know that going hungry for three hours is torture too horrible to bear, especially if it’s your own fault.

Naturally, I was stunned. I turned to Sam, who even then was a thoughtful, intelligent kid, and read this woman’s letter to him.

His first comment: “Does she understand you’re writing a humor column?” Well, maybe not. I’ll remind her.

His second comment: “Is she trying to say that you don’t love me enough?” Um, I’m thinking.

His third comment: “Well, she’s wrong.” Awwww….do you want her cell phone number?

His fourth comment: “No. I want to be a grown up boy, who remembers his lunch and his mortgage payment, whatever that is.”

So I wrote back to Irked Lady and told her what Sam had said, word for word. I also told her that my husband had wanted to keep her cell phone number in case *he* had an emergency but I had told him he was going to have to root around in the laundry basket for his underwear like the rest of us. For awhile, the family joke whenever any crisis occurred was, “Quick! Call that lady! She has hot dogs and Twinkies!!!!”

A while later, a friend of mine who lives in the ‘Tuk called me to tell me that she had been to a parenting class at her local church. The facilitator actually pulled out this column and read it to the class, not as a cautionary tale, but as an example of ‘right thinking.’

I should have called Irked Lady and let her know.

I’m your Mom, not your Concierge.

Note: I’m in the process of posting some of my favorite columns from over the years. Of all the columns I’ve ever written, this one got the wildest response. First, the column, published in the February 18, 2005 edition of the AFN:

This is an open letter to the woman who was standing behind me at the bank the other day when I got the phone call from my son asking, for the 33rd time this year, to bring his lunch to school after he had forgotten it on the kitchen counter.

I could tell from the really rude sound you made that you disapproved of my decision not to bring my son his lunch, even after you understood that it was, indeed, the 33rd time this school year that this particular request had been made. You couldn’t help but know it because I got a little exasperated (read ‘loud’) at that point and please know that I am really, really sorry about inadvertently smacking that poodle you were carrying in your purse.

I tend to talk with my hands. People who know me stand back.

What really got to me was not the rude noise, but your snarky comment to your companion how it was, after all, my job to bring my forgetful little 10-year-old his lunch, even if it was (everybody sing!) the 33rd time he’s forgotten it this year.

I have a job all right, raising these kids, but I think you have mistakenly identified my son as my customer. If he is, indeed, my customer, all the principles of good customer service apply: the customer is always right; anticipate the customer’s needs; fill those needs without the customer having to ask, and always leave the customer delighted.

If I’m going to delight the little dickens, then I’ll just hand him the jar of peanut butter and say, “Hey! Use your fingers! We don’t mind!” Perhaps it would delight you if I just carried an assortment of Twinkies, Sunny Delight, and hot dogs in my car on the off-chance (well, OK, the near-certainty) that Forgetful Man will leave his lunch bag on the counter again tomorrow so I could more easily make that 25-mile dart from the office to school and make sure his every wish was satisfied.

But I see the little red-headed terror not as my customer, but as my product. When he’s 18 years old he’s going to roll off my assembly line, which is an efficient repetition of “Don’t pick your nose” and “For Pete’s sake, flush!” and “Why is your homework lying in the back yard?” and be loosed on an unsuspecting world. So I see you, Mrs. Poodle-in-a-Purse, as my customer, since your’e going to have to deal with the fruits of my labor.

My simple hope is that if he learns with his lunch that he has to remember to pick up the bag and put it in his backpack or otherwise he will go hungry for a few hours, then he is more likely to be very interested in remembering little details like making his mortgage payment and picking his children up at preschool.

In fact, I see my ultimate customer as the unsuspecting young woman Mr. Peanut Butter Fingers is going to convince to marry him. While my first instinct is to shout, “Run! Save yourself! He wipes boogers on the wall!” I know that she is the one who will have to live with my production process.

And she will know where I live.

      

©     E. Stocking Evans 2005

The one where my mojo dies.

Elizabeth Evans’ optimism died this morning at 7:14.

The immediate cause of death has not been determined, but witnesses at the scene say that nothing could have survived the impact of:

Three kids’ worth of elementary-school progress reports with deficient conduct grades colliding with 16 loads of laundry, another round of teens squabbling over squatters’ rights in the shower, the complaints of a 4-year –old over how many marshmallows were in his oatmeal, persistent cash flow worries caused by highly variable work hours in a flagging economy, exacerbated by the plumber finding four Legos in the garbage disposal which apparently had caused the dishwasher to overflow.

Ms. Evans, distraught over the demise of her optimism, was unavailable for comment. According to her four children, the trigger event occurred when the eldest daughter suddenly remembered on the way to school that she needed $20 for a new volleyball after the family dog had eaten hers.

“We were already late for school, and Mom was really rushing, and our little brother was still counting marshmallows, and she was just backing out when I remembered I needed 20 bucks for the volleyball that Tanner ate,” Lane, aged 13, said.

“And then all of a sudden, BANG, there was a big flash of light, the airbag exploded, and Mom wouldn’t get out of the car.”

Paramedics called to the scene used the Jaws of Life, a Starbucks iced café mocha double shot and a Hershey bar to extract Mrs. Evans from the minivan.

Police investigators would not comment specifically on the morning’s chain of events pending an investigation. A spokesperson would only note that Ms. Evans optimism had already suffered a slow decline over recent years, probably from malnutrition.

“Your optimism has to be fed with fresh hope,” the spokesperson noted. “Ms. Evans had apparently been unable to find any for the past few years; she’d been feeding it reheated leftovers so this morning, her optimism just got overwhelmed and couldn’t put up much of a fight.”

Upon further questioning, the spokesperson did concede that “no optimism could withstand that kind of collision. Crash tests with dummy optimisms prove that excessive laundry alone can be lethal, even if the optimism is belted in a safety seat.”

Ms. Evans’ husband, Craig, had already left for work but returned soon after being called.

“This is horrible,” he sighed, kicking a tire on the destroyed van. “At least they were able to save her sense of humor,” referring to Ms. Evans’ wit, which was treated and released at the scene with only minor contusions.

Friends expressed shock and dismay. “The glass was always half full for her,” a neighbor commented, shaking her head and surveying the wreckage. “Now it looks like she’s going to have to get a sippy cup.”

Flowers and stuffed bears are being left in a makeshift memorial in the driveway of the family home where the meltdown occurred. Investigators are frantically searching for Ms. Evans’ mojo, which has not been seen since the blast, and is feared also dead or critically injured. The mojo, described as a “limp, dispirited rag,” could be confused and disoriented, and may be accompanied by Ms. Evans’ groove, which disappeared and was declared dead four years ago.

Anyone with information about the whereabouts of the Evans mojo should contact the authorities, who stress that at this time the mojo is not a suspect, but an investigative lead.

Ms. Evans’ optimism is survived by her sense of humor, persistence, and sheer willpower. No services are planned.

©     E. Stocking Evans 2002

  

I’d like to thank the Academy, and of course, my gigantic rear end.

It all started because I had to lose fifty-seven pounds.

 

I didn’t want to have to lose that much weight. I had begged, pleaded, and bargained with God repeatedly on this one, but He wasn’t budging an inch, and neither was my ass.

 

So I gave up and joined Weight Watchers for the third time. What made this joining different from the previous two tries was that now I had the internet to look at. So, right after coming home from that dispiriting weigh in, I looked online and found a bulletin board community dedicated to losing weight, primarily with WW.

Over the next couple of years, I managed to pry off the weight and wound up making friends around the world. We talked about weight, of course, but also about our lives, and one day, after reading another one of my discourses/diatribes about my hectic life, a member of this community contacted me privately and said a) that I should find a way to write a column about all this and b) that she was in a position to know, being a newspaper editor herself.

Over time, she helped me draft some sample columns and connected me to a fellow editor, John Conway at the Ahwatukee Foothills News. Based on her recommendation, he met with me and decided to run my column.

That was over five years ago.  I’m still writing, mostly because my kids are still running amok and my husband has decided to join in the fun. I started this blog as an adjunct to my column, since there’s so much more to talk about than just the humorous side of being a woman, mother, wife, daughter, and professional in this day and age. 

Normally, no one is happy that they had to lose their weight in dog chow, but for the record: I am.