Sundays with Stretchy Pants

Dear Melodie,

It was lovely to see you again in West Virginia. Mike and Tracy love you and PJ, and we can see why. Congratulations on selling your house. I understand why you’re sad about it, though. A house is a very emotional thing, especially when you built it yourself and brought a baby home to it. I hate to see such a sweet person sad even for a minute, so here is something to cheer you up:

I hope this picture of Bizarro Jon Bon Jovi and Bizarro Joan Jett going to prom gives you a good chuckle.

Sincerely,

Bizzaro Jon Bon Jovi’s Little Sister

P.S. I know he sings really well now, but back then he would put his earphones on and sing along to whatever, and the heinous sound made me cry in terror. It sounded like famine, disease, misery, poverty, and painful death. He could play the guitar, though.

Dear Mike,

You can’t tie a dirty sweat sock around my nose, wait until I fall asleep and put horseradish in my mouth, flick me on the back of my head with your sausage fingers that feel like a small lead pipe, pull the arms of my sweatshirt in such a way so you can tie the ends together and then I can’t move my arms, stick your nasty feet in my face while you giggle with glee and I scream in horror, and you can’t eat all the good cereal in one sitting all the way from West Virginia. So there.

Love,

Abby

P.S. Thanks for working so hard on your singing cuz now you rock the house in a big way. I can’t even believe it, but it’s true. I love you! Don’t hurt me. I only posted this for Melodie and you know you want to bring her joy.

I just reviewed a book called Swim the Fly, which I hated. It’s supposed to be very Judd Apatow-ish and I love Judd Apatow-ish things. So when I hated this book, I thought maybe I grew up or something. Frankly, I panicked a little because if I can’t enjoy a good poop joke, I don’t even know who I am anymore.

As with all things lately, infoMania saved my sense of humor. The night that I finished my review and had my crisis of identity, Conor Knighton introduced me to a TLC show called “I Didn’t Know I was Pregnant,” complete with a re-enactment of a mom who thought she was constipated, took an enema (prescribed by her frickin’ doctor. Seriously, he couldn’t be bothered to do a little palpation?), then had the, ahem, movement of her life. You can tell it’s the crap of her life because her husband is standing in the doorway of the bathroom the whole time. The day my husband stands in the doorway while my bowels are moving better be the day I move into a nursing home. When she’s done, she’s all, “Whew, I didn’t think I was gonna make it,” and her husband is like, “Way to go, sexy!” And then we hear a little mew and she says, “Did you hear that?”

*spoiler alert*

You guys, her baby was in the potty.

PS What is wrong with TLC?

So infoMania showed me that and then they showed me this:

And I laughed so hard, I thought I might give birth but I knew I wasn’t pregnant so I thought maybe I would just poo. Thank you infoMania! The best part is Sarah Haskins’ bit at about 59 seconds in. Also, when the announcer gives a promo for 2 other TLC shows, I get the feeling that those were both working titles for some TLC shows that are on the air right now. Seriously, TLC, what is wrong with you?

Turns out, I’m still immature; I just didn’t like that book. Yay!

I’m taking my immaturity on the road today in order to share it with my mom and my brother and his family in West Virginia “only 8 miles in from Maryland,” as my brother likes to say when I tell him my friends fear for our safety on West Virginian roads. My sister-in-law, Tracy, is the queen of poopy humor and they have 3 sons, so I’ll be in good company. She and I are going to run a 5-mile race on Saturday in MARYLAND, while my sister, Tracey, and her friends run the Crim 10-miler in Michigan. Good luck, everybody! And remember what you learned today: If you have cramps, don’t risk gassing because you’ll probably poo!

I had a good perm and stuff,which, believe me, can cover a lot of faults so I understand why there was some confusion by my commenters on yesterday’s post as well as on Facebook. I stand behind my statement that my family and I were a little trashy. It’s ok, there’s nothing wrong with being a little bit trashy and I don’t mean it in a mean way at all. We didn’t have a cess pool in our backyard, but let me count the other ways in which we were trashy so you can all agree with me:

1. We didn’t have a phone even though my dad worked at the phone company.

My brother ran the phone bill up talking to his girlfriend. His Ecuadorian girlfriend. She had been an exchange student and when she moved back to Ecuador, my brother called her a million times until we owed $500 or something like that. That’s $500 in 1987 money. This was pretty much right exactly when my dad moved out. Some people might say it was my brother’s fault my dad moved out, but I won’t go that far. Anyway, we owed my father’s employer $500 and we couldn’t pay it. And, in fact, never paid it. That’s a little embarrassing. And trashy.

Some time after we moved to the apartment, my mom decided to just see what would happen if she tried to get a phone in her name.  I think she thought that because she and my dad weren’t divorced, the phone company wouldn’t allow it, but they did! Anyway, she didn’t tell me her plan, but there was a phone attached to the wall in the apartment and one day, it started ringing! I’m not kidding when I tell you I just about shit myself with joy. I was 15 by then, and had been using  payphones for at least 3 years.

2. I thought the Rathskellar was a restaurant, not a bar. It happens.

After my parents separated, my mom spent a lot of time at the Rathskellar, where I would occasionally meet her for food and drunken conversation. Her sister was a waitress there and sometimes we would get free drinks and snacks. This was before the days of the computers in restaurants. God bless the “human error” aspect of keeping a bar tab. Anyway, I always thought of the Rathskellar as a restaurant and it wasn’t until I was much older that Bryan heard me refer to it as a restaurant and he said, “That was a bar, not a restaurant. Just because you could get nachos there, doesn’t make it a restaurant.” I said, “Well, we always ate there when we were kids.” And he said, “Were there ever any other kids eating there after 5 pm? No? That’s because it was a bar.” Know-it-all. I still think this point is debatable, but because most parents wouldn’t have taken their kids to the Rathskellar, I will cop to the fact that the fact that it was my favorite restaurant as a kid might add to the trashiness.

3. At a certain point, none of my friends were allowed to spend time at my house anymore.

My friends’ parents always said, “No, you can’t go Abby’s house, but she can come over here.” There’s a lot of reasons for that, but I think the very last time I had a friend over was when Jenny V. came over and her parents came to pick her up earlier than expected. We lived in a 2-story house in town (walking distance to the Rathskellar of course). When my dad moved away, we rented the upstairs out. At this point, one of my brother’s friends was living there and he happened to be having a party. Mr. and Mrs. V. came to pick Jenny up and accidentally went to the door that lead to the upstairs instead of where my mom, sister, and I actually lived. (Had they gone to the correct door, they would have seen a note, written on a paper plate and shut into the door that said, “At the Rathskellar!” which, in their very stable minds, maybe wouldn’t have been any better than what they found when they went to the upstairs apartment). So they went upstairs to look for 12 or 13-year-old Jenny and there were all of these teenagers and maybe some young 20-somethings drinking and smoking and probably getting high. Mrs. V might have flipped out a little bit and I’m pretty sure my sister accidentally called her a bitch for harshing her mellow or something like that. My sister feels bad about it, but she said, “I might have been a little tipsy,” which totally makes sense. After that, Jenny couldn’t come over anymore.

3a. We used to write notes to each other on paper plates and shut the paper plate in the door. That’s low on the trashiness spectrum, but still. At any given moment, you could find a paper plate note shut in the door that said, “At the Rathskellar!” or “Chicken patties in the freezer!” or “Do the dishes!” or “Stop taking my wine coolers!”

3b. Our upstairs tenant grew pot in my baby cradle.

It wasn’t the cradle that I used as a baby, it was a cradle that my parents made together when they had a folk-art business in the 80s. It was wooden and it had my name stenciled on it. And it was a perfect spot to grow weed. Apparently.

4. One of our porch steps had a great big hole in it, which we covered with a couple of pieces of wood (that’s not the trashy part). One of our porch steps had a great big hole in it, which we covered with a couple of pieces of wood, and that’s where I hid my wine coolers (it gets better). One of our porch steps had a great big hole in it, which we covered with a couple of pieces of wood, and that’s where I hid my wine coolers when I was 12.

*cough* Moving on.

5. I liked Debbie Gibson. (Maybe that doesn’t prove anything, but it’s still embarrassing).

6. I used to drive our Chevette to school when I was 14 or 15.

By then, we lived in that apartment up above the stores and my mom worked at one of those stores, so she never needed the car during the day. I made a bunch of copies of the keys to the Chevette so every time I got caught and my mom told me to “Hand over the keys! All of them!” I could safely hand her 3 copies without running out. Trashy, but clever. Maybe the most clever thing ever!

7. Our family car was a Chevette.

You guys, I could go on and on, I swear. You have no choice but to agree with me. I had a good perm that may have covered up the smell, but I was a bit trashy.

I like to write. I find it healing and I find it extra healing when I have an audience who says in words or just by reading my posts, “You’re not alone.” I find it super extra healing when someone in the audience says, “Your writing has helped me.” I don’t write about secrets. In fact, I haven’t written about things that aren’t well-known to friends, family, and even acquaintances. There isn’t anyone who knew my family who doesn’t know our struggles.

Is it selfish to be so concerned with my mental health that I would put my family’s pain on my blog? Perhaps. But my mental health is so important to me because it directly affects my children and my husband. My kids are my favorite people. My husband is my best friend. I owe it to them to deal with my life in the best way I know how. If my mental health is poor, my children have a poor life and my marriage sucks. If my mental health is good, my children have a good life and my marriage is good. It’s a simple equation.

I use sarcasm and humor to make light of the tough parts of my life, but everybody knows that right behind humor, there’s pain. I make light of the issues I’ve had with  my parents and my grandmother in order to bring them to light so I won’t be stuck in the darkness of emotional paralysis and denial. It’s denial that makes it impossible to heal. It’s denial that causes our health problems. It’s denial that causes us to repeat these cycles. We all love our children and it’s a basic biological desire to want them to have a better life than we had. I’ve had a better life than both of my parents and I know that the experiences I complain about don’t even scratch the surface of what they had to deal with. Where my mom and dad had practically insurmountable mountains to climb, I only have a few small hills. Still, they’re my hills and sometimes they’re steep. I walk those hills and I get blisters and sometimes it feels like my canteen is empty and my tongue is swollen with thirst and the pain is too much and I want to stop. I will always struggle with the habits that come along with experience and DNA. But awareness is the best tool I have.  Awareness of my failings, both inherited and learned, can only serve to bring about healing. Awareness is my Blister-Block and the fresh cool water that fills my canteen. Of course there will be issues that I’m not aware of, brand-new mistakes that my children will have to deal with. Of course. And then they’ll work it out on their own blogs or on a talk show or in a magazine or a book and it will all be fine because they won’t be in denial and they won’t repeat my mistakes when they have their own kids.

My parents know that it’s sometimes hard to be their daughter. They don’t deny that, but they also have a sense of humor. They have a sense of understanding. They know how important it is to make sense of my story in my own way so I can give my kids a better story. They’re not going to disown me. They might cringe at some of the things I write, but they’re not going to throw a  fit and demand that I take this pain and tuck it away so we can watch in horror as it oozes out of me in destructive ways when I’m parenting or when I’m trying to be a decent wife.

I now have the distinct honor of being the first of my generation to be disowned by a small minority of my mother’s generation because of things I wrote on my blog. I’ve totally been dooced, family style. I honestly thought the “You’re out of the family!” rhetoric would have been buried with my grandmother, but that shit don’t die unless you kill it and you can’t kill it if you act like it’s not there, which brings me to my oft-repeated bottom line: It helps me to write about it. And what helps me,  helps my kids and helps my marriage. And that, my friends, is priceless.

April is just a month full of celebrating around here. Well, celebrating and saying things like, “Really? Is this how old we are? Do we have kids who are going to be 10 years old on Friday? And did we just celebrate our 13th anniversary on Monday? There must be something wrong with the maths.”

The maths are wrong, baby, cuz your hotness is rockin’!

Easter was lovely, except it needs to last much longer so my family can stay much longer and we can have, like, an 8-day feast instead of a weekend binge where we drink and eat too much and hurt ourselves. If we knew it would last longer, we could pace ourselves. I promise we would pace ourselves. My sister and I discovered that it doesn’t really matter what kind of wine a person drinks. If that person drinks too much of it, that person’s belly gets mad at them and punishes them. In other words, it’s not the quality, it’s the quantity. My sister-in-law is wise and she knew that already. She and my brother and brother-in-law, along with Bryan, were able to go to the Ohio Deli (as seen on Man vs Food!) and eat and eat on Saturday, while my sister and my mom and I stayed with the kids. Well, my mom stayed with the kids. Tracey and I just laid around and said, “Shhhh!” But now we know. Damn.

My Columbus friends were able to meet my family and that was lovely. I felt like I should be more nervous about it for some reason, but I wasn’t because Kristen, Dawn and Lynne are just Ohio versions of me, my sister and my sister-in-law. I don’t branch out much in my friendships. And the husbands? All of the husbands are beaten down by perfect matches for their loud and lovely wives, so we love all of them, too. Even my brother. I never found the bellybutton lint he hid here, but I have a feeling he hid it on my pillow. Just thinking about it gives me chills. Or, maybe he unscrewed the screen on the showerhead and put it in there so I shower in lint leavings every morning. Ew!

With that, I’ll leave you with another disturbing image. Everybody knows that My L1ttle Ponies love Easter. I just didn’t know how much they love it until I walked in the bathroom and found this little filly enjoying Maya’s Easter basket. In front of the mirror. Seriously, H@sbro, who designs your baskets*?

*I didn’t buy this basket. My mother-in-law bought it for Maya 2 or 3 years ago. I didn’t even notice what the little pony was doing until I saw her watching herself in the mirror with that look in her eye.

P.S. Don’t ask me what Maya’s basket was doing in the bathroom. Nobody wants to know.