Michelle Malkin needs to shut her donut hole.

True confession: I am a registered Republican.
Another true confession: if I can hold my nose long enough, I can find things on Fox News to sort of agree with.

I am a moderate, a fact which causes my mother (a National Review-reading WFB conservative) to despair. “You’re going to vote for Hillary, aren’t you?” she moans.

Well, probably not. McCain, mom. Which causes her to moan worse.

I don’t usually agree with National Review, and I never agree with their tone. I don’t agree with the tone or the content of The Nation, either.

I say all this so you can understand where I’m coming from when I say that Michelle Malkin needs to STFU, especially when it comes to this flap about Rachael Ray.

The absolute best response I saw was this. Next thing you know, Malkin will go after Helen Lovejoy and her falafel fixins.

I know. Let’s get Fat Tony on this one.

High Anxiety.

You can tell how old you are by counting the rings in your magazine subscriptions.

No, seriously. You can. When I was in high school, I read Seventeen. College and young married? Glamour and Cosmopolitan. (I had to give up Cosmo pretty quickly though: just reading all those italics made me hyperventilate)

I really knew I had hit The Beginning of The End when I let Glamour slide in favor of my Better Homes & Gardens subscription. I finally let *that* one go when I realized two things:

1. The houses in BH&G are not anything like the house I live in. I live in a tract home in the desert, with stucco walls and tile roofs that looked really exotic when I was growing up in Philadelphia but now are all ho-hum. The houses in BH&G are interesting. They’re the homes that George Washington slept in or on the beach or on a lake or in a forest. I kept looking through the mag trying to find pictures of rooms I’d like to replicate (the only way I can decorate anything) and realized that I wanted what was outside the windows: the forest, or the meadow, or the ocean. Anything but the desert landscaping and my neighbor’s wall.

2. BH&G was never going to feature a house that was like mine. When they have a magazine called Tract Homes & Dog Runs, I’m gonna be all over it.

I thought I had found Magazine Nirvana when I found a magazine called Real Simple. It’s subtitled “Life made easier” and it really did, in fact, make my life easier. Cool ways to use old things, great comparisons of products…it was wonderful.

Until yesterday, when I read the continuing feature: One Woman’s Money Diary. The idea is simple: woman sends in her money worries and a certified financial planner analyzes ‘em and helps the worries go away.

June’s Financial Centerfold is a woman who is married with a baby. She stayed home with him after his birth and quit her job. She and her husband are facing these traumas, even after she quit her job:

- no debt, other than their house
- when they moved, their mortgage went down by $1,000 a month
- they earned $285K in profit when they sold their old house
- they save 12% of the husband’s income in a 401(k) and
- put $500 a month into the baby’s college fund and
- still have a ridiculously low monthly outlay

Her dilemma? She can’t feel good about spending any money on herself.

Ahem.

I don’t want to minimize anyone’s pain here, but could we get someone with a real problem? I can’t learn anything from this other than I obviously should have married someone who worked in technology and maybe done a little better with birth control.

This woman has anxiety? Try the anxiety of knowing that your husband’s last camping trip (and supporting trips to REI and Cabela’s) sent your checking account reeling so hard that you came within thirty-seven cents of bouncing six checks. Or realizing that you’re either going to have to work until you’re about 86 or pray that those life expectancy tables that chart you to live until you’re 102 are dead wrong.

That’s anxiety.

She may not be Carol Brady, but she’s no Carmen Electra, either.

Thank goodness.

It took a little while to get it into the AFN, but better late than never, I present Mom, Interrupted’s Mother’s Day column.

In other Mom-related news, Carmen Electra is going to hold off on Carol Brady-hood a little bit longer so she can develop her line of portable stripper poles. I guess it’s safe to conclude that she may not be Donna Reed, but she certainly knows a lot about the Beav.

C’mon. You KNEW I had to go for that one. It was just sitting there.

A bit of a twist on shell collecting.

You’re standing on the beach, minding your own business, and then this.

Words are failing me at this point. The story, with its matter-of-fact details (the coroner is racking up feet in his office this very minute; left feet float differently than right feet…how on earth does anyone know this kind of thing? Just how often does this question come up, for God’s sake?) is one of those where you sit at your computer for awhile with your mouth hanging open.

Has it really been that long?

Have you ever had one of those deals where you meant to take care of something and you kept thinking, “Whoa, I have to take care of *that*” but other things kept getting in the way, like family members getting sick and scout campouts and kids doing their level best to flunk out of school so your life became a whirlwind of teacher meetings and progress reports while other kids were graduating so high in their class that they couldn’t fit their heads in their cars anymore and you had to spend all your soi-disant “free time” compiling photo tributes and getting them (the photo tributes, not the kid) laminated (which is surprisingly inexpensive, by the way; I’m thinking of laminating the dog and some of the sloppier kids, come to think of it) and hauling them off to various places for enshrinement and then you got one more phone call from yet another kid saying that their science teacher insists on meeting with you at 3 p.m. today and you have a sneaking suspicion that it’s not to collect a prize for having The Best Science Student Ever? and so then you started hoping that the blog you hadn’t updated since April 27th would just die a natural death or at the very least WordPress would fall off the face of the earth so you wouldn’t have to think about it anymore but it just stayed on the face of the earth and the guilt just got heavier and heavier and so you just decided to suck it up and suck down too much coffee and just start typing dammit?

I knew you’d understand.

What got me going this morning is more random clicking. I really should stop this, because it just raises my blood pressure and lord knows I have enough of that, what with Mr. Science Guy and his teacher and all. A very entertaining blog called Ads of the Weird reviewed a series of Suave ads targeted at moms and their ability to ‘keep themselves up.’

The blog is interesting; what is more interesting is what happens in the comments, which has turned out to be a brawl between one woman who apparently was a pregnant widow, a software architect, owner of her own business who still manages to look SO good at rained-out high school band concerts that her son’s friends compliment her, her fan club, and the rest of the us who are standing in the shower just discovering that our teenaged daughters have yet again wandered off with our razors.

Every time the MILF of the Year posts she adds yet another accomplishment to her list (I think the last time it was making her own bread during board meetings), so that the rest of us will be stunned and amazed at how she juggles and still manages to fend off Hef and his repeated requests for her to pose naked, holding nothing but her briefcase and her mixing bowl. (Note to my own sainted mother: please don’t ask me what a MILF is. Please google it the acronym and after your hair falls out, let’s just assume you called me and yelled at me, ‘k?)

There are some side discussions: ruminations about how men sit on their collective cans balancing beer cans on their guts, don’t help around the house, but still manage to find time to wonder why their wives have let themselves go.

You know: the classics.

The Romans had the gladiator fights. We have Competing Moms. If you will excuse me, I have to go find my razor. To shave my legs or to slit my wrists because my butt’s too big and I haven’t baked bread during a board meeting in an age…haven’t decided yet.

Did I mention that I’m a contortionist, too?

MSN.com, in some sort of demonic partnership with Good Housekeeping, has put together A Little Slideshow of Guilt and Envy for all of us moms in honor of the upcoming Mother’s Day.

Because looking at a slide of a very pregnant, very beautiful woman, who as it turns out is a mom, a wife, oh, and by the way, a hugely successful Wall Street banker, is just the thing I want to see on a day when I feel, not as if I could do it all, but rather, as if the only thing I could do is curl up in the fetal position and cry.

There are five other slides that manage to push every covetous button I have. The stay-at-home mom who looks like a model (not the sweats-wearing, thirty-pounds-overweight person I became as a SAHM). The mom who looks better at age 62 than I did at 30.

It used to be that, as long as I avoided the Working Mother magazine’s ode to the Mother of the Year, who is always some high-powered executive who teaches underprivileged kids to read when she isn’t tying herself to Greenpeace’s Rainbow Warrior to save the harp seals and whose kids are all honor students and receiving major awards themselves from major humanitarian agencies, I was fine. I could live in my brave little world where I was coping okay as long as you didn’t look under the couch, in the crisper drawer of the refrigerator, or in my youngest son’s backpack.

It’s not safe out there for moms who work outside the home. If we manage to duck the critics who somehow think it’s their place to judge our decision to add to this nation’s gross national product and determine that we are deficient mothers, the minute we run for cover we find that our biggest supporter is putting up another ideal we can’t live up to.

And if I see one more commercial of Kelly Ripa pretending to juggle motherhood and a career, I’m gonna hurl right in Jennifer Lopez’ lap, who is reportedly putting together a reality show about balancing the same stressful proposition.

I hit the Hork Button hard here because these two and their ilk know nothing about juggling. “Juggling” in this environment means things like greeting a wakened baby who is running a 103 degree temperature, but Daddy dashes out to his car in his underwear because he doesn’t want to have to stay home with the baby, so Mommy sucks it up one more time and stays home, putting her job at risk (the job she has to have to make the mortgage payment, by the way, not the job she has so she can afford the Maserati and the housekeeper) and frantically trying to really phone it in via conference calls.

“Juggling” does not mean handing off the baby to the live-in nanny who will take the baby to the doctor, stand in line at Walgreens, and manage the suppositories, then take the baby and give him his bath and put him to bed so mom can come in and read him a story.

“Juggling” in my house is a circus act. It would make a great reality show (and its ensuing episodes: Try to Make It to The School Play AND Not Miss the Mandatory Meeting, followed by the classic Dodge Snarky Comments From Other Moms About Not Really Loving Your Children Enough To Stay Home and the ever-popular Let’s Clean Puke Off The Walls After A Ten-Hour Day at Work! Whaddaya Mean We Never Do Anything Fun?) except that it wouldn’t be funny.

But it would be real.

 

Oh, no! She just insulted Tokyo; Go, Go Bridezilla!

I completely lost the link to this, but it surfaced in The Knot in early March and it just. blows. me. away.

Apparently The Knot (Mom, that’s a popular website for brides) runs a feature where a wedding-related individual surfaces with a piece of advice, presumably bad, that she’s been given. The Knot, in their infinite wisdom, supplies *better* advice.

And sometimes they afford us a glimpse of The Impending Apocalypse.

Here’s the Bad Advice: 

“I was recently a bridesmaid in a friend’s wedding. I’m also engaged and was amazed when she told me I couldn’t wear my engagement ring during her wedding because it was larger than hers…ridiculous!” —Scarlet, Longview, TX

Okay, so I’m thinking that better advice would be to drop out of the wedding because this ‘friend’ of yours has turned into a complete megalomaniac and will no doubt lay waste to entire villages as she cuts a wide swath of destruction in her rampage to the altar. But let’s see what The Knot had to say!

The Knot’s *Better* Advice: 
Being upstaged by a bridesmaid can be a very real fear for some brides. Handle the situation gently — explain that you’d rather not take off the ring for personal reasons. If she persists, remove it to avoid more drama. 

Mom, Interrupted’s Advice
Run far. Run fast. If this ‘friend’ can’t understand the significance of a freaking engagement ring (“personal reasons”? I need to invoke “personal reasons” as a reason why I don’t want to take it off???) then there is no telling what kind of petulant demands she’s going to make in service to Her Day, like some sort of tyrannical, minor god demanding more tribute from her tribe.

This is a joke, right? If the Bridezilla thinks that an entire church full of people are going to be so mesmerized by the disco ball on her bridesmaid’s hand that they will forget to look at said Bridezilla, Bridezilla actually should be humored? What if Bridezilla gets it up her nose that no one in the venue should be prettier than her? It’s okay, honey! We’ll just decapitate the ones who offend you, to avoid more drama.

Please. Say it isn’t so. Because if it is, actually, so and this is what weddings have sunk to, I advocate simply tranquilizing brides outright and delivering them, comatose, to their appointed trysts, since letting them get upset is to be avoided at all costs lest their tiaras spontaneously combust and take us all down in flames.

It is famously said that the only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing. Well, the only thing necessary for crazy brides to triumph is for the rest of us to put up with this stuff to avoid more drama. It’s time we drew a line in the sand, right here, with our eye-popping engagement rings and take a stand against the crazy.

 

 

©     E.S. Evans 2008

 

Luck *is* a lady, and you’re married to her.

Yet another oldie but goodie, published in November, 2006 in the Ahwatukee Foothills News, and going out to all my homedogs who have not yet killed their husbands when they stepped over a Big Wheel to announce they were a) leaving for work and b) did he mention he was going to have to work late and, oh, c) was entered in a weekend-long golf tournament but that’s okay because d) you don’t really work, since you’re home with the kids.

Remember, kids! You can make your own Mom, Interrupted’s Greatest Hits with a printer, some staples, and a good copyright lawyer!

*******************************************************
Talk about your Man Law.

Here’s the first rule of new fatherhood: Never, ever, EVER say this to the wife as you leave for the office:

“You’re so lucky, you get to stay home. I have to work.”

He ignored this rule and found that she can, and will, discover the hidden talent where she can laser him with her eyes and leave him a smoking crater in the front hallway.

He said exactly that to her a week after the baby was born and he was heading out the door back to the cube farm, to a place where no one had mastitis but still had to somehow feed a colicky baby, and where cleaning crews emptied the trash and got the pretzel crumbs out of the carpet. And if her day had consisted solely of cradling her newborn baby and gazing dreamily into a landscape of rainbows and ponies, she would have felt very lucky, indeed.

Instead, that day consisted of cleaning projectile vomit off the walls. She was able to marvel that any creature in God’s creation could move anything that far without a rocket launcher, and was even able to summon gratitude that she had a baby who could go for that kind of distance, but it sure felt like ‘work’ when she was working that mop.

She was also able to spend the day marveling at the other end of God’s creation and just how much it could produce. And cleaning that up, too. Ten times. Twice during the trip to the grocery store.

That day also involved chasing a three-year-old who was hell bent on a) hurling himself off a roof; b) jamming Mr. Potato Head’s eye into a wall outlet; c) leaping from the bunk bed on to the blade of the (mercifully) unmoving ceiling fan; and d) all of the above.

And she was still able to consider herself ‘lucky,’ spending the day with her children.

It’s a good thing she couldn’t consider herself ‘working,’ because that meant she had time to have dinner ready when Poor Working Stiff came home and announced that he was going to watch Monday Night Football and so he didn’t think he’d give the baby a bath tonight or help with the dishes.

If housecleaning, child-rearing, and errands aren’t ‘work,’ and are, in fact, right up there on the Luck Meter with lounging on Waikiki getting cocoa butter rubbed on our backs by a cute cabana boy, then why aren’t new dads dashing home every night at 5:01 so they can get them some of that lucky?

Let’s call a wet wipe a wet wipe. We all know that scraping peanut butter off the curtains is nowhere near an equivalent to an Hawaiian vacation. So quit insulting our intelligence by implying that it is, quit coming home and acting like you’re the only one who’s been ‘working’ all day, and pick up a kid and do something constructive with it.

Face it: the day you got lucky and then made a baby is the day you got lucky and started your family. If taking care of your family is, indeed, the height of good fortune, then I suggest you step up to the table and meet Lady Luck.

Who looks remarkably like your wife.

 

Ó     E.S. Evans 2006

How Shari Rae Koelsch Saved My Life.

The best word to describe Shari is ’serene.’

I learned that in 1986, when I met her. My first husband and I had separated and I knew I needed a place to live and she needed a roommate in her tiny, yet immaculate townhouse in Tempe.

What I didn’t know I needed, but got anyway, was a wonderful, dear friend who was a living example of what it was like to have one’s act together, to live so comfortably in one’s own skin, and to exhibit an aura so peaceful and well, serene that people were just drawn to her like moths to a light.

(Seriously. Men would walk up to her all. the. time. To the point where it was annoying. But they couldn’t resist. Nobody could.)

What I know she didn’t need, but got anyway, was a pretty sloppy roommate who didn’t know what the hell she needed, was drinking too much, and in all ways was a pretty spectacular example of someone who didn’t have her act together.

It was a standing joke between us that, if I was upset, I would start doing things to my hair…henna, blonding, that kind of thing. One night, I came home from a date in a foul mood and was stomping around the townhouse venting to myself like a neurotic T-rex. Shari emerged from her bedroom, obviously awakened from a sound sleep, reached under the sink and plopped a box of Summer Sun on the counter, and then disappeared, without a word, back into her bedroom.

Newly-highlighted, I reconciled with my husband. Shari got married. I had to start relying on other people to stuff a box of Summer Sun into my face when I was upset. We had our first babies the same year. She threw me a beautiful shower.

Over the years, we didn’t stay in touch so well, but her serenity shone out like a beacon from her new home in Chandler. Every time I visited, it was the same: immaculate and happy.

We had re-connected enough for me to know that she was ill, but when I visited her it seemed like nothing had changed. She was managing it, and if she was worried, refused to show it. Her family is just like her: serene and glowing.

Yesterday, right as I was starting work, her parents appeared. (They’re serene, too. There must be a gene for this.) Her father gave me an envelope: it was the kind of card you get at a funeral. Shari’s funeral, to be exact. She had passed away, quickly and unexpectedly, on April 6. She had passed away so quickly that there wasn’t enough time to find everyone (with Shari, there was a lot of everyone to find), and so I missed saying goodbye to her.

It is a huge irony that I missed this: the day Shari died, a very good friend of my teenaged daughter passed away in a car accident, and so I was looking in the obituaries that week, when normally I wouldn’t. I’m wracking my brain trying to remember if I caught even a glimpse of Shari’s tribute, but I’m coming up empty.

As I will be for a long time.

The fact that I didn’t see Shari one more time is my own fault; I cannot believe what it must have cost Elna and Phil in the midst of their own grief to come find me and I am so appreciative.

But I wish I had seen her. I don’t think she needed me. I have no doubt that Shari faced her death with the same serenity that she faced her life. But she saved my life once. I wish I could have returned that favor.

There *is* a God, and He wants me to do WHAT?

I have heard it said that if you believe in God, you don’t believe that there’s any such thing as a coincidence, as everything is part of The Divine Plan. Rarely do you get solid proof of the existence of The Deity on Fox News and Planet Out, on the same day.

I had heard this a few years ago, and all this corroboration does is reinforce the concept that God must be a man. Prostate cancer check = blood test. Breast cancer check = mash sensitive body part between two sheets of glass, cranking them ever closer with a winch hauled out of the Spanish Inquisition.

Now we discover that prostate cancer prevention = pleasuring oneself at every single opportunity. Breast cancer prevention = rigorous diet and exercise.

Okay, okay. I get the point.

But now, to add insult to injury, we get proof that not only is God a man, He dislikes women and has a wicked sense of humor.
Edit: thanks to Jennie for pointing out the broken link.

Oh, and He’s obviously in cahoots with my mother, who is no doubt laughing her fool head off at me right. this. minute.

Note: one could point out that a depressed man could pick up a mop and wash that trouble right out of his hair, but he can’t. He’s too busy on his crusade to prevent prostate cancer.