Pay Backs

This week has been the week for me to get paid back for all the horrible things I did to my mother.  Because apparently buying my mom nice presents from L.L. Bean every so often is not good enough and now karma is trying to exact its own special little gift.  FUCK YOU KARMA.  See if I ever buy you anything nice.

Anyway, earlier this week we are all sitting around the dinner table, eating some pasta that I lovingly made for my loving family.  It is all very picturesque and then, out of nowhere, my darling son, who has the softest cheeks ever created and still looks alarmingly like he did when he was but a wee one year old, looks up and says, "What's an H-O-R-E?"

And I'm sitting there thinking, "Does he mean 'hoary'? Like gray?  Like "fell off in hoary flakes?  Reading Coleridge again, old chap?"  Because obviously.

But Matt, well Matt is a guy and he knows we're not going to get into a discussion about the Romantics.  He's like, "Sam, come in the bedroom with me."  And Sam does.  And I get Alice settled long enough for her not to destroy anything and go into the bedroom myself.  And there sits Sam, still angelic, and Matt's lips are parted in the craziest grin and he's like, "Sam, tell your mom what a whore is."

And Sam looks at me, cheeks aflame and goes, "You know, it's a woman who shows her ta-ta's too much.  Like boobs.  Like those things."  And he points at my breasts.

First off, yeah, that's fucking hilarious.  You try standing in front of your child  when he is saying something like that and not at least cracking a smile.  For real, folks.  At least 30% of parenting is trying not to guffaw inappropriately when you are trying to be OMG PARENTAL SERIOUS.  But also, guys?  AWKWARD.  Here I am, this totally female-body-positive mother in the whole, "OH LOOK AT ME!! I GIVE AND NOURISH LIFE" kind of vein.  And now...reduced.  In the pointing of an 8 year old, I am now dirty, like a spring breaker with an empty bottle of Cuervo and a bunch of beads.

So I'm speechless, and thankfully, Matt takes the wheel, and he's explaining that a whore is someone who has lots of boyfriends for money and not for love.  Which is a pretty good way of explaining things if you think about it.  It's pretty obvious which parent has the advanced degrees, is it not?  Anyway, I chime in there to talk about how names like that are very hurtful and must never be said, hoping Sam wasn't awake all those times that I told Dustin Pedroia that his mother was Satan's whore in Hell.  (Note:  He definitely wasn't, which really doesn't excuse me saying that, but Red Sox?  Yeah.  You see how it happens.  Another 20% of parenting is waiting until your kids are asleep before turning into the worst kind of degenerate.)


I call my mom the next morning to tell her about the whole thing because I knew she'd get a kick out of it.  And she does.  She cackles like a fiend.  Because here's the thing:  when I was in 4th grade, I didn't know what a whore was either.  I heard it at school, and figured it was kind of like being stupid, only for girls.  So I told this kid, Max, who made the grave mistake of not being an Atlanta Braves fan and saying something to me about it, that his sister, who I only remember as wearing really high waisted denim shorts, was a total whore.  Mostly because I didn't like her shorts.  Anyway, Max did know what a whore was, so he told his mother, who called my mother and raked her over the coals about me having a filthy mouth.  So yeah.  I guess I deserve everything I get, huh?

Anyway, fast forward to this morning.  Alice kept me up all night because a storm kept her up, or at least forced her to have a lot of dreams about spiders.  I get up and take my shower, and I'm laying on the couch, trying to muster the strength to get through the day when I remember that I had not dried the jeans that I washed the night before and boom--Sam has no clean pants to wear to school today.  So I run out to the laundry room and throw the jeans in the dryer.  As I'm doing so, I notice all this paper all over the bottom of the washer and spread throughout the laundry.  Turns out Sam left a huge stack of early 90's baseball cards that he found in our garage in his pants pocket.  I don't even know how he fit them in his pocket, much less how he didn't remember to take them out.  And now--here they are.  And I'm getting ready to go wake him up and chastise him ferociously, but I remember suddenly that I once left a tube of Hard Candy Vamp lipstick in my pocket, and my mom dried it, thus staining an entire load of clothes with the color of Gothic sadness.  Remembering this, I just sigh dejectedly and throw the jeans in the dryer.  Turns out Sam wanted to wear shorts today anyway.

We get ready to go to school/work.  And I should mention that throughout this, Gabby is not speaking to me at all.  Why?  Because last night, I told her not to eat her ice cream with a fork.

Read that again, ya'll.  "Because last night, I told her not to eat her ice cream with a fork."


Turns out there is this little shit in One Direction who is afraid of spoons.  He has spoonphobia.  Now, I understand lots of wacky mental conditions, because HELLO?!?  CRAZY, PARTY OF ONE!  But being afraid of spoons?  This defies all reasoning.  Gabby has been avoiding spoons for a little while now, but I have let it be because I hadn't the energy to say anything about it.  But have you ever seen someone try to eat a bowl of rapidly melting ice cream with a fork?  It is maddening.  It is, I'm sure, a proven torture device, especially when the person eating the ice cream is sitting on your couch in clothes that you paid for and really don't want to see stained/ruined.  Waterboard me or force me to watch you eat that ice cream--either/or, I WILL TALK.

So I kindly tell her to go get a spoon.  And she gives me this big long story about how when she was but a wee child, there was this weird commercial that had something in it that VAGUELY LOOKED LIKE A SPOON (important note:  it was not an actual spoon) and it scared her and since then she has been just a little bit scared of spoons and has only recently gathered up the courage to say FUCK ALL and totally stop eating with spoons.

This is when Sam wins the award for BEST LITTLE SIBLING EVAH and goes, "No, she didn't.  There's some guy in One Direction doesn't eat with spoons, so now she doesn't either."

So Matt googles this to confirm, and folks, THIS IS A THING.  LOCK UP YOUR DAUGHTERS AND YOUR SPOONS.  Teens everywhere are eschewing spoons because well, isn't it obvious.  FEAR.  LOATHING.  SCOOPING MOTION.  LACK OF TINES.  The internet tells me it is a show of solidarity because OMG SPOONS.

This is when Matt and I forget everything we are supposed to do as good parents and roll our eyes and say, "Gabby, this is over.  You are now eating with a spoon.  That is the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard."

And Gabby, because she is 13, jumps up, tells us we don't understand her and hate everything she likes, takes her ice cream and FORK and stalks off.  And she's still not speaking to me, except for this one time when she came out of her room, confronted me in the laundry room and told me that it wasn't until she started listening to 1D that she got the strength to stop eating with spoons, SO GOD MOM THEY GIVE ME STRENGTH.  And well, I suck at life, so I retort without thinking, "You should be looking up to Hillary Clinton and Eleanor Roosevelt--not a bunch of robots from England who can't take a crap without Simon Cowell telling them to!"  BOOM.  I'll accept my parent of the year trophy now, thanks.

She's still not talking to me.  OBVIOUSLY.  She communicated with me this morning through a vast network of eye-rolls, degrading looks, sighs, and dejected sniffs.

Anyway, I never got into boy bands.  But one time, I made my mom listen to a bootleg Hole cd that included, between tracks, a detailed description of how to give a blow job.  In the car.  I didn't hear it, because I was too busy sitting in the back of the car chewing Bubblicious Cotton Candy BubbleYum and talking to this weird guy friend of mine about OMG BANDS MUSIC GAH THE COLOR BLACK.  So it was probably that little incident, you know, that I'm getting paid back for.  I'm sure my mom wanted to tell me not to look up to Courtney Love, but she was smarter than me, so she didn't say it, and in time, I got over it.  She did mistakenly "lose that cd" when she cleaned out the car, and I only found out later that that cd contained all the blow job tips I desperately needed to hear as a 13 year old.  My mom told me about it when I graduated college and she drank some champagne and got started saying, "WELL, I NEVER THOUGHT WE'D SEE THIS DAY!  Let me tell you kind of shit you pulled!"

This is a very long way of saying that if you have kids, you are going to get paid back for all the crap you did as a kid.  You can't escape it.  It's like copy and paste Facebook status messages, the common cold and Jehovah's Witnesses.  It will find you.  Buy the booze now, friends.