Ah, the memories. And the column!

When I was a kid, my brothers and sisters called me “Bess The Mess, The Big Fat Pest.” My mom, when she yelled at me, called me “Old Lady Number 38.” (Something about a train that ran past my Grandma Bessie’s house when SHE was a kid and they called it that and somehow it has been handed down as some sort of insane version of being called by your full name. Or something.)

But chewing out a bunch of kids has its own rhythm and cadence, which translates easily into other arenas, as demonstrated in this month’s Mom, Interrupted.

I haven’t been interrupted in a while.

Or rather, I’ve been interrupted too many times, hence the absence. Without further ado, this month’s Mom, Interrupted, as seen in the Ahwatukee Foothills News.

Attack of the Killer Breast

In July, 2006,  Babytalk Magazine did something really crazy and out-there: they put a picture of a baby on their magazine. It wasn’t just any ol’ baby, though; the baby was eating its breakfast, and all kinds of hilarity ensued (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14065706/):

We learned something new today: if you’re publishing a magazine about babies, you’d best not put a picture of a baby eating on the cover.

If the baby is breastfeeding from an actual (gasp!) breast, then you’re gonna get letters, because that is apparently more controversial than say, a photo of the baby nursing a neat whiskey and kicking back with a fine cigar.

Recently a free magazine for young parents called Babytalk decided that a compelling topic would be “Why Women Don’t Nurse Longer.” A thoughtful look at all the different historical, cultural, and socio-economic factors affecting breastfeeding was the result.

Well, that and about 1,000 righteously ticked-off readers.

To illustrate the topic, the cover photo features a baby attached to a breast. Or to be more precise, a carefully posed, flesh-colored something that must be a breast because it would be just be dangerous for a baby to have anything else in its mouth. Either that or it’s a baby kissing the back of Mini-Me’s head and of course that’s just wrong.

But to Gayle Ash, of Belton, Texas, it was a sight that she had to keep from her thirteen-year-old son at all costs, so she shredded the magazine.

One wonders if the Ash children were breastfed; if so, then Gayle’s son has already seen this view, up close and personal and Mrs. Ash is shutting the barn door after the ahem, cow has run off.

Other women were ‘horrified,’ disgusted,’ embarrassed,’ and ‘grossed out.’ One ripped the cover off and just hoped that her husband hadn’t laid eyes on it, ‘it’ being what one amused observer called ‘Satan’s balloon of lust.’

If nothing else, the staff at Babytalk have answered their own question. Women don’t nurse longer because if they do and if they show even the slightest bit of skin, or if anyone in the vicinity is the slightest bit uncomfortable, then they and their babies are banished to the bathroom, where even I won’t eat my lunch.

We have become a nation of people who think that an item called a Hooter Hider, which is the American equivalent of the burqa for breastfeeding (“Look stylish and trendy while feeding baby!” “Nursing while entertaining family and friends is no longer stressful!”) is a great idea.

Now, I’m hardly a breastfeeding nazi. Please recall that I’m the mom who quit nursing one baby at three months because she looked too much like Ernest Borgnine.

So if I were to illustrate breast feeding, I’d feature a picture that shows breastfeeding the way I remember it: stuck in a corner at a family gathering with a blanket thrown over my shoulder and trying to calm a baby who was screaming in hunger just minutes ago but who is now just biting me. And every other relative is either pointedly ignoring me or furious that I had the gall to show THAT (Satan’s balloon, again) in public.

Let’s face it. Breasts have a dual role in our society: sex object and milk carton. Neither role fully defines them. One role often follows the other, but they don’t mix, and never in front of the children.

And certainly not within squirting distance of Gayle Ash.

We moms just want our dignity. We’re looking for it under our Hooter Hiders.

 

Ó     E.S. Evans 2006

Caulking guns don’t kill people, but really pissed off wives threaten their husbands with ‘em.

For any men in the audience: At what point does a request become a nag? How many repeated requests, with how much time in between each request, are allowed before the aforementioned simple request becomes what www.dictionary.com calls “an old, inferior, or worthless horse”?

This column ran in June, 2007. The story is true; the names didn’t have to be changed because it’s just perfectly obvious what’s going on.

*************************

In the beginning, there was the Newly-Built house, and the House was indeed in sore need of fixtures, and so the husband and wife didst visit the Design Center, and they didst descend upon the perky Design Center Coordinator and select their cabinets, and their window treatments, and their floor coverings.

And they didst select carpet, and the pad was upgradeth to flat rubber, and it was good.

And they didst invite their friends, who dranketh of the wine and beer, and the wine didst spill on the new carpet, and as it is written it was always the merlot and never the chablis that didst tumble.

And the babies didst arrive, and the babies were placed on the carpet to play, and they didst commence to frolic and emit noxious odors and substances and smear the concoctions directly into the pile and the parents didst look upon this with dismay and cry, “It’s your turn to clean that crap up!”

And a puppy didst come to abide with the family and didst take forever to housebreak, and so the parents were causeth to buy products like Urine B Gone and didst crawl over the surface of the carpet with handheld fluorescent lights and they didst marvel at the mess and placeth the puppy once more into its run, all the while wondering whose brilliant idea it had been to select white berber.

And so it came to pass that one day the wife didst weary of plying the carpet with chemicals in a vain effort to keep it presentatable, causing her to say to the husband, “If we don’t get tile in here soon I’m going to leave and then YOU’LL have to keep this stinking mess clean.”

And while the husband didst indeed long for three-day weekends of football and basketball playoffs and kegs of beer and cigars and all-night poker, he didst recall which side his bread was indeed buttereth, and so he didst suck it right up and call professionals who descended upon their abode and didst rip out the offending mess and replaceth it with sparkling ceramic tile.

And the puppies and babies did cavort and frolic and the wife didst look upon it and smile, and it was good, until strawberry jelly wert smeared into the grout and there was much weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth.

But satisfaction didst finally settle upon the land until one day the wife didst realize that not a single wall of the entire downstairs had a single baseboard, destroyed in the Tileapalooza that had grippeth their house for almost a month.

And the husband didst protest that ’twas no big deal; that if he couldst only purchase a $150 miter saw complete with laser optics he wouldst be able to finish those up, lickety-splitteth.

“Lickety-splitteth” apparently meaning “six months” in biblical terms.

And the miter saw didst draw dust and when the wife didst ask gentle questions about when, mayhap, her living room might not look like a construction site, she was accused of being entirely too picky about the caulking gun that wert permanently installed on the coffee table.

And the wife didst not smile, and when gentle reminders wert called ‘nagging’ she didst the only thing that she really could do:

Writeth a column.

 

©     E.S. Evans 2007

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