Last Night I Met Some Ladies

After some wine, I emptied this into my dishwasher.

Last night I met up with some ladies for drinks and weary of confronting what ails the world—the crisis in Syria, the monster in Cleveland, the Mother’s Day shooting in New Orleans—we opted instead for sharing some essentials within our reach.

First came a primer on bikini waxes. One of our cohort had recently visited the aesthetician she regularly sees, and so she reasonably assumed that the practitioner had examined her file before setting to work on her undergrowth. But when my friend looked down, she saw nothing left. “I didn’t even know what a Brazilian was!” she lamented last night in the retelling.

“Now you do,” I said.

“They’re awful,” another friend said, adding that when she got a Brazilian before her wedding, the woman left just a tiny box of hair. Aside from being unsightly and strange, it had the added misfortune of resembling a certain dictator’s mustache.

“Forget waterboarding,” I said. I suggested that if C.I.A. operatives used waxing as an enhanced interrogation technique, they might be astounded by the results—which met with general agreement.

Then a friend, an expert bargain hunter, described how she’d recently acquired a new dishwasher at just $24 over cost, by amassing coupons and visiting a warehouse store on a sale day. But since the new machine was too big for the slot under her counter, it was residing in her basement. “It was so cheap, I can’t bring myself to return it,” she said. “And maybe, one day, we’ll redo our kitchen.”

We hoped she would. And then the conversation took a slightly more sober turn, when a friend explained how a new plague was visiting our neighborhood, a pestilence involving microbes possibly growing in the water. Our friend who is in the medical field and is researching this phenomenon said the results are not yet conclusive but that the condition, which attacks postmenopausal, well-educated women in our area, presents itself with a persistent cough. “The kind of cough that’s embarrassing and you have to leave the room,” she said. A few of us immediately diagnosed our children’s preschool teacher. And I started to worry that I, too, might be infected, despite the fact that I don’t yet match all the criteria.

When the discussion shifted to summer and trying to keep track of our kids at the crowded township pool, another friend, who also has three young children, offered what I felt was a highly useful tip. “I try to befriend people who only have one kid,” she said. She’s found that these parents, sometimes desperate for playdates, are often willing to help babysit her brood.

“But then they end up having another kid,” I said.

“I look for the older mothers, the ones who are one and done,” she said.

I picked up another helpful tidbit when another friend bewailed the fact that her dishwasher had been leaving a milky residue on her glasses. “I thought it was just my dishwasher!” I cried, relieved. The friend said several plumbers had recommended that she turn up her water heater but that she was reluctant to for fear of scalding her children. The bargain hunter suggested we toss a cup-and-a-half of white vinegar into the works and run it through a cycle to take care of the problem.

So this morning I emptied the contents of an old vinegar jar I found on a shelf into my dishwasher and switched it on. Then I emailed my friend to say that I’d be calling her if I came home to a sour soup on my floor. And while I relaxed for a moment, watching my kids play and listening to the swish of the water, I mused that, although my friends and I may not be solving the world’s problems, we’re pretty adept at helping each other out—and at making each other laugh.

"Your" Awesome Mom

I took the sentiment, if not the spelling, to heart.

I bumped into a friend this morning who said her husband surprised her yesterday with breakfast in bed, the Belgian waffle topped with a dollop of fresh whipped cream, chocolate sprinkles adorning the crown. “Where did you get this?” she demanded. “Did you go to a restaurant? Did you leave the children alone?” She harassed him until her husband admitted he’d cut a deal with the new neighbor, who also happened to be a chef.

I was happy to report that I, too, had breakfasted in bed, my half-full bowl of Rice Krispies arriving on a corroded cookie sheet. The delight of my three children delivering the tray, and the efforts of my husband in assisting them, tickled me. And I hadn’t left them much to work with. Our fridge and cupboards were nearly bare since we had just returned from New York.

The highlight of that journey came when I was sandwiched between our two daughters in a bathroom stall at the American Museum of Natural History and heard the woman next to us exclaim, “I cannot believe I just did that!” When we extricated ourselves from our water closet, we saw her whisking her iPhone back and forth under a hand dryer.

I also enjoyed our arrival, when we finally emerged from the Lincoln Tunnel onto the rain-spattered streets of Manhattan, and our 6-year-old son declared, “Thank god we made it out of Kansas!”

“You mean New Jersey, Griffin,” his twin sister retorted.

The trip home proved slightly less joyful. “I don’t want to be in the car anymore,” Jane, 2, keened. We stopped at a Dunkin’ Donuts off Route 38 to use a bathroom with an empty soap dispenser, which didn’t bode well for my OCD or for the employees instructed by a sign to “wash hands before returning to work.” After so much family togetherness the previous day, I cannot explain why—although desperate for groceries—we chose to pass the balance of Mother’s Day morning traveling to the supermarket together as a pack.

Despite the fact that it was Mother’s Day, the store teemed with women, one of whom patiently explained to me how to sniff a cantaloupe but knock on a watermelon to check for ripeness. I did see one father trundling a cart out of the store, shouting at his three children, his son clutching the ribbon to a Mylar balloon that read, “You’re The Best!” My own husband and I determined we’d all benefit if he sat in the café with our kids, while I looped through the store amassing peanut butter, bread, bananas and the rest of the items on our list.

A 12-pack of Horizon vanilla milks cracked open when I tried to heave it into our cart, littering the floor with little cartons.

“Are you ok?” a solicitous clerk asked. “Can I get you another one?”

“I was going to open it at home anyway,” I said. “I just opened it here, instead.”

He laughed at my joke—the best Mother’s Day gift I could’ve asked for. I was starting to enjoy myself. I even took a furtive pleasure in watching another mom chase her toddler, who seized an apple and took a bite before she could grab him.

In the soup aisle, I spied a couple, the woman heavily pregnant, exchanging words.

“Didn’t you invite her over?”

“I thought about it, but it just sounded so exhausting at the time,” the woman said. She gave me a wink. “Don’t we get a pass once in a while?”

“You definitely get a pass,” I said.

My own husband and children discovered me in the checkout line with “Star,” catching up on Jennifer Aniston’s wedding woes due to the “Fight To End All Fights.” Our kids “helped” unload the groceries, toppling yogurts and bottles of seltzer water on the floor. I made a mental note to look up the spelling of “geyser” at home.

“Arrrrrg,” Jeff said, hefting $250.15-worth of goods into the minivan.

“What, daddy?” Jane asked.

“It’s just quite the scene at the Wynnewood Giant.”

But our older daughter buoyed our spirits on the return ride with excerpts from “Doodlepedia”—which she’d dunned her grandparents for in the museum shop the previous afternoon—a hybrid book which allows her to “doodle and discover a world of fascinating facts” like the one she shared with us: “Women were often considered bad luck on pirate ships so they had to dress up as men to be allowed to climb aboard.”

That evening, we celebrated women's progress and the conclusion of another Mother's Day with a cake our kids had picked out earlier at the store. Produced by some overworked and grammatically challenged bakery artist, it read, “Your Awesome Mom.” And I gladly took the sentiment, if not the spelling, to heart.

Holly Hunter Wouldn't Ask For Help

My husband's second mistake was asking for my help.

I had just dropped my twins at kindergarten and was steering the minivan toward my 2-year-old’s nursery school—debating whether my friend and I should use our hour-and-a-half break to run four or six miles and listing sharply toward four—when my cell phone pinged. I hoped to see a message about someone arranging a happy hour or maybe more details about a friend’s upcoming nuptials. But instead, when I pulled into the preschool parking lot, I read a distress text from my husband: “Locked my keys in the car. Can you drive out to Malvern and help me?”

We live in a town just outside of Philadelphia, about four blocks from the city line. Malvern, where Jeff was attending a meeting, is the kind of deep suburb rich people seek in order to spread out their wares, to secure a “bit of land.” Somehow it seemed fitting that my husband would finally make his way there only to get locked out and that I would be tasked with fetching him back to reality. But Malvern was a distant mecca I’d rarely visited—a place to which I’d lost my return visa.

“It’ll take you about 35 minutes to get here,” texted my husband, a chronic under-estimator. Automatically I knew the trip would last appreciably longer, consuming the sum of my scant respite. And I feared I’d get lost. I sat behind the wheel of our minivan, grumbling at Jeff’s entangled directions to “take Bryn Mawr Avenue past Kent’s house, go right on Darby-Paoli Road, take a left on Goshen Road, follow that for awhile, go right on Providence Road, find the intersection near the blacksmith shop, go right on Warren Avenue after the Radnor Hunt Club, follow Warren Avenue through a stop light, enter Malvern Prep, and drive past the tennis courts and football field” until I found his car.

I must have missed the clause about cross-country rescues when we exchanged our vows nearly 12 years ago. Wasn’t it sufficient, I wondered, that I’d borne Jeff three children and made a baked ziti the previous night for dinner?

“Forgive him,” counseled the tenderhearted Miss Anne when I stormed onto the playground, plopped Jane in her hands, and explained that I might be tardy for singing because my husband was stranded in the hinterlands.

“Forgive him,” she repeated. “It was a mistake.”

“I know,” I said, “but it’s really hard for me. I don’t do these kinds of things.”

And the one time I did make a mistake, leaving my keys in the car ignition overnight and draining the battery, I didn’t bother my husband. I called AAA.

I felt like Holly Hunter in “Broadcast News” when her boss quips, “It must be nice to believe you always know better, to always think you’re the smartest person in the room.”

“No,” Hunter replies. “It’s awful!”

Nevertheless, I decided to test run the preschool teacher's compassion and embarked on my reluctant odyssey. As I drove past Echo Valley Farm, past On Point Farm, past Creighton Farm, past Little Valley Farm, along stone walls, beside covered bridges, around horse-cluttered pastures and past an estate whose for sale sign advertised a “pond”—I began to envision myself a missionary journeying to aid those in need. By the time I finally reached the Malvern Preparatory School’s gracious campus and wound my way through its fields and parking lots to where Jeff was anxiously peering into his car, my anger had evaporated. Plus I had to pee.

“I’m sorry you missed your run,” Jeff said.

“That's ok,” I said. “I’m sorry I was cross.”

Actually, by then I was secretly pleased. I had an irreproachable excuse for skipping my morning exercise, and I felt myself nearly bursting with goodwill, having executed not one but two humanitarian deeds within the course of a single morning: rescuing and apologizing to my husband.

But then Jeff punctured my moral conquest by offering a gallant suggestion.

“Don’t you have a few minutes before you have to go pick up Jane?” he asked. “You could take a few laps around the track!”

I felt my hard-won benevolence leak out the window during the long ride home.

Tell Me Something Embarrassing

An unzipped fly wasn't bad enough for my kids.

I sat on the deck with my 6-year-old twins yesterday afternoon, soaking up, as Joni Mitchell says, the sun pouring down “like butterscotch.” Jane, 2, was napping. I had the dishwasher to unload, dinner to prepare, laundry to fold. But I tipped my chin toward the warm glow, hoping to delay these chores, ignore my kids, and relax for just a few more precious minutes.

“Tell me something really embarrassing that you did,” Georgia hurled at me like a grenade out of the pure blue sky.

I snapped to, did a quick mental scan, and eliminated numerous college-binge-drinking-related misadventures: The time I had too many shots on my 21st birthday and missed a morning flight to the family celebration for my grandfather’s 80th. The time friends and I were caught, inebriated, lugging a mattress out the back door of a fraternity house. Instead, I retrieved what I felt was an age-appropriate whopper.

“When I was on a car trip with another family in 5th grade, my friend made me laugh so hard that I spat chewed-up bits of ice cream cone all over the back of her parents’ heads.”

“Was her mom mad?”

“What did your friend say?”

“It wasn’t me, mommy! It was Courtenay!”

“Tell us another!” my twins cried in glee.

So I regaled them with a 6th-grade tale about accompanying friends to a water park where the highly-chlorinated pools drained the dye from my turquoise bathing suit, rendering me essentially nude by the end of the day. In the recounting, that memory became for me an instant metaphor for my present existence: our three children sucking me dry throughout the day with their incessant needs and questions, leaving me, by evening, a skeleton of my former self, skin stretched tissue-thin, nerve endings wincing just below the surface.

“What did you do?” Georgia asked, still perched on the edge of my adolescent vulnerability and the ancient, chemical pools.

“Cried.”

“Then what’d you do?”

“Got dressed!”

But with their characteristic lack of mercy, my twins refused to relent. They apparently found the image of me as a prepubescent, skittering naked through a water park, insufficiently embarrassing. Rather than satisfying them, each new story seemed to awaken ever more urgent inquiries, more dogged requests for sordid material.

And so I recalled how I slipped and splattered my lunch tray across the cafeteria floor as a freshman in high school, in front of the seniors roosting on the windowsill; how I accidentally flooded a bathroom at work; how I once taught a class with my fly unzipped; how I collided with another car in college, only to see my senior thesis advisor leap out, fist raised.

“More!” my twins cried as I unfurled each fresh boondoggle. No amount of maternal mortification sated their curiosity. So I decided to make it personal.

“Well, there was this really embarrassing time when I was pregnant with you guys and throwing up a lot— ”

“Why were you throwing up?” Griffin interrupted.

“Because sometimes pregnant women feel sick. Anyway,” I said, “daddy and I were at the beach, walking home from dinner, when I suddenly spewed hamburger and milkshake all over the street.”

“I’m not drunk. I’m pregnant!” I remember shouting at an old woman glaring at me from her stoop—though I expunged this part from the retelling.

“That’s not embarrassing,” Georgia said. “That’s just gross.”

And with a flinch of disgust, she leapt off the deck to chase her brother across the yard, finally leaving me in peace.

Dirty Little Secrets

I'll only celebrate when I no longer have to tote one of these around.

Yesterday I heard comedian and writer Marc Maron tell “Fresh Air” host Terry Gross that he had waded out of his dysfunctional upbringing, deep into middle age, only to discover that he’d like to offer his much younger girlfriend the gift of a child.

“Don’t do it!” I found myself screaming at the radio. “You’ll be cleaning fecal matter out from under your fingernails for the next seven years!”

I’m not even talking about diapers, which are revolting enough. But new parents are so sleep deprived and their infants’ needs so persistent that this stage blurs in memory, rendering it somehow more palatable.

I sat on the floor for the first year of our twins’ lives, swabbing up the poop they continuously squirted out. Even when they started solid food, and their feces became more offensive in odor and substance, cleaning up after them was so relentless that we didn’t have much time to think about it. Plus babies are cute. They have chubby legs and gurgle.

What I personally resent, and what no one told me before I embarked on parenthood, was that the wiping doesn’t end with the last diaper. It goes on and on—for years.

I recall when I was still childless and teaching, talking to some elementary school colleagues at lunch. Discussion of the bathroom arose. “You mean you have to help your students wipe?” I asked one of the pre-K instructors, horrified. “I could never do that!”

Three children later, “that” seems to be all I do.

While our twins, now 6, are nearly self-sufficient in the bathroom, at least one of them leaps up from the table during most meals, shouting, “I have to go poo-poo!”

“Just do it,” I keep telling them. “You don’t have to broadcast it.”

But they insist on giving notice. And sometimes, echoing from the confines of their tiled cell, a distress call sounds, “I need help!” Nothing kills my appetite like having to rise from the dry rotisserie chicken I purchased earlier at Giant to inspect a kindergartner’s backside.

Having to help our 2-year-old in the bathroom seems more justifiable, although I still haven’t forgiven her for last summer’s swim diaper blowout at our township pool. And while I am delighted that Jane has since learned to make her deposits into a toilet, I continue to view assisting her as an entirely repugnant ordeal.

Sometimes, during daylight hours, Jane entertains me with descriptions of her feces. “It went ‘plop!’ three times,” she says, alighting from her throne to inspect her work. “There’s a mommy one and a daddy one and a baby one!” I can’t help but laugh. But at other times, I find my forced participation in the evacuation of her bowels to be a cruel torture.

Jane splinters our slumber, often at 2 or 3 a.m., stumping into our bedroom and declaring, “I have to go potty!” I’d love to tell her to stop bothering us and just go in her Pull-Up, but I sense that this advice would lift to the top of a list of grievous parental failures. And so either my husband or I heave ourselves out of bed each night to help Jane push up her stool, place the potty seat on the toilet, clamber up top, pull down her pants, wait (sometimes for quite awhile), clean her undercarriage, pull up her pajamas, depress the flusher, shove the stool to the sink, clamber up top, open the tap, lather her hands, turn off the water, dry her fingers—and then trudge back to bed.

If we’re lucky, Jane falls again quickly to sleep. If we’re less fortunate, we’re all awake for the next several hours, during which time Jane inevitably has to “go potty,” and repeat the aforementioned process, all over again.

And then take last weekend, when Jane informed me with 15 minutes left in her brother’s soccer game that she had “to go poo-poo.” We were at an elementary school field. The buildings were locked. So I pulled out a potty chair I keep stowed in the trunk of our minivan for just such occasions. As Jane sat and sat and sat in the parking lot, however, we ended up receiving company. Another minivan arrived, a clown car, it seemed, one that kept burping out spastic kids and adults, who couldn’t get ahold of their balls, tie their shoes, find their coffee cups—who couldn’t seem to pull themselves together enough to move on and afford us the privacy we deserved.

I hovered in front of my squatting daughter, trying to avoid eye contact with the strangers whirling around us. I silently willed Jane to hurry up with her business. When she finally did finish, I was stunned by what she had accomplished, quickly covering up the mess with a plastic supermarket bag. When the other family eventually left the area, I tipped the contents of the toilet upside down into the sack—which unfortunately bore a few holes—and ferried it extended out in front of me, Jane in tow, over to a dumpster.

“I did a good job!” Jane declared.

I resisted tossing her in and silently swore that I would save my celebrating for when I was no longer toting around potty seats—and when the only ass I was responsible for was my own.