Something To Say

It is sadly obvious that I’m neglecting my blog lately. I have been trying to think of a suitable excuse (hurricane season? scabies? a touch of ebola virus?) but I haven’t come up with anything convincing. I will say that this blog is not the only thing I’ve been neglecting, if that makes it any more forgivable.

But I have been nudged into posting today by an e-mail I just got from my friend Jenny, in which she wonders if she is losing her mind. Her reason for doubting her sanity is that she has just spoken the following words to her toddler daughter:

"That is exactly why we have a rule in our house against putting cottage cheese in your grape juice!!!!!"

Her worried confession made me think about a list I wrote several years ago, and which I dug up in the hope that I can assure Jenny that when you have children, saying things like that is actually a sign of normalcy. There's a whole new phrasebook that's part of the job. So, here's my list of . . .

Five things I never thought I’d say (but then I had children)

1. "Yes Mommy’s funny, isn’t she? Silly, silly, mommy! Now open the door, sweetie, that’s right, let Mommy back in the car . . . "
2. "Stop that. Your sister is not a trampoline."
3. "Oh, ho! That’s a good one! To get to the other side! Ha Ha Ha!"
4. "Hold still, I’m trying to get it out. How in the world did you get it in there, anyway?"
5. "Oh, I hope that brown stuff smeared on the wall is chocolate."

And another list, the converse of the preceding one:

Five things I used to say (but then I had children)

1. "Would you like a cookie? I made some yesterday and I still have plenty left."
2. "Sure, that sounds like fun. I can be ready to go in ten minutes."
3. "Well, I’m finished. The whole house is clean."
4. "Do you have these pants in a size 6?"
5. "Honestly! I’d never let my kids act like that!"

So, Jenny, I hope this has convinced you that you are sane. In fact, you are more than sane. Your utterance has proven that you are either: 1) a woman who has the uncanny foresight to make a rule against mixing curdled dairy products with potentially dangerous purple fluids, or 2) a mother gutsy enough to insist that she has in fact made such a rule, and confident enough to expect that her family will believe her. Either way . . . brilliant.

Cats Out of the Cradle

Motherhood didn't seem to agree with my cat.

She’s quite a young cat, and I’m sure she was rather surprised – probably even more surprised than we were – when four squirming, mewing blobs turned up next to her one night. I have been feeling a bit strange lately, she may have thought. I suppose these things might have something to do with it.

It was interesting for us as observers to see the remarkable way maternal instinct took over. Despite her inexperience, absence of training and complete lack of access to “What to Expect . . .” books, she turned out to be a caring, conscientious parent, diligently keeping her little ones clean and well-fed.

The kittens reached their toddlerhood and began to explore the house. Their mother followed them dutifully, presumably to ensure their safety.They nursed frequently and rarely napped.

I was in the kitchen one day when I heard a piteous cry. I followed the sound to find the cat, lying in the hallway, feeding her babies  She looked at me and, entirely with her eyes, said the following: “Please, please, help me. I need a break. These kids are driving me crazy. I haven’t had a minute's peace since they came. I hardly remember what my life was like before. I miss those carefree days. Please, oh, please!”

I looked down at the cat, with kittens crawling all over her, pawing her mercilessly, and I could only smile, because I knew something she didn't. “Ah, cat,” I said, “you don’t know this, but these kittens won’t be here long. In just a few weeks, they will leave and go off to live with new families, and have their own carefree lives, and you will be free again. Right now, you think this is your life forever, but a couple of weeks is not very long.”

Now the kittens are gone, and their mother is free. She showed no real sign of melancholy when they left, one at a time, in the arms of new owners. But now she is a different cat. She wanders around the house, looking bored, getting cranky.

I believe there is a lesson for me in this story: I can, and should, learn to appreciate my life full of young children while they are with me. I don't want to become a bored, cranky, old woman who realizes, too late, that the freedom she gave up to be a mother wasn't so much, after all.

Q & A

Kids are naturally curious, so they ask questions. It’s cute and fun when it’s a question you can answer, like "Where does the rain come from?" or "Why does bread dough rise?" But too often my children ask me questions I just don’t know the answer to. I hate that; I feel like I’m in school, failing an exam.

"Mommy, what keeps airplanes up in the air?"

"How do they grow more seedless grapes, since they don’t have seeds?"

"Did you wash my gym uniform? What’s for dinner? Why does the laundry room smell like fish?"

When they ask me those questions, questions that I feel, deep down, I should be able to answer, but can’t, my first reaction is to panic, feeling helpless and defensive. This stage is brief; I quickly move on to the next step, which involves evasive maneuvers. Here are a few answers worth trying:

"It’s all part of the wonderful, mysterious world we live in."
or
"You’ll learn that next year in school."
or
"Go ask your dad."
or
"Hey, who wants a cookie?"

Yesterday, my kids and I were driving home from the store when my seven-year-old daughter asked me one of those questions.

"Mommy, why is the sky blue?"

I was still in test anxiety mode – wait, wait, I know this one, I think I learned this once – when I was rescued by my ten-year-old son, who, looking around with great interest, gave the best answer to that question that I have ever heard.

"What guy?"

This guy.

The Fonz is Cool (and So Am I)

It’s official. The votes have been counted, the decision has been made, and the award has been presented.

I’m officially "Totally Uncool."

The committee that gave me this award is the same group of children that have, for the past fourteen years, regularly given me the coveted, "Meanest Mom in the World" position, so you can see that they are thoughtful and discerning. (It has recently come to my attention that there may be other mothers who are also receiving that particular designation, so perhaps it’s not as prestigious as I once believed.)

But unlike my previous award, which I was actually rather smug about, this new title has left me sputtering and indignant. How can they say I’m not cool? What right do they have to insist that I am not up on popular culture? I bet a lot of people think ‘Abercrombie and Fitch’ is a law firm.

Yes, it’s true that I thought Jessica and Ashley Simpson were two of Marge and Homer’s animated children. And maybe I should have realized sooner that Paris Hilton is not a hotel that shows up in the news a lot. And, okay, perhaps I looked a little foolish when I said, in answer to a teen who told me that he really liked YouTube, that I hadn’t heard their newest album yet.

But, come on! Me, uncool? Out of it? I can play the first part of "Stairway to Heaven" on the guitar. I know how to play record albums backward to hear subversive messages. I can find bad words hidden in the ice cubes in magazine ads. Hey, I can do Rubik’s Cube!

Apparently, so my sources tell me, the things that made a person cool in the 70s and 80s don’t cut it anymore. It’s a new century – a whole new millennium – and my poor kids have to live with a mother who doesn’t even text message.

It is a normal, almost required part of growing up to be embarrassed by your parents. (I remember being horrified at the thought of my friends seeing me with my mother, but that was completely different. She really wasn’t cool.) Still, it’s ironic that these kids who think I’m embarrassing are the same children whose hands I used to have to hold tightly when we went out so that they wouldn’t publicly demonstrate that the contents of their noses could be used as a source of food.

So, I’m taking this "uncool" business in stride. I’ve been around long enough to know that everything comes back around, if you wait long enough. Like that purple suede mini skirt that my aunt kept in the back of her closet for thirty years until it was in style again, my day will come. At some point in the future, there will be a real demand for a person who can tell you the members of the group Wham!, can curl her hair so it looks like Farrah’s, and who knows that if you have a pink and gray plaid wool skirt, you should wear a gray blouse and a pink sweater vest with it. Oh, and the blouse should have a big bow at the neck.

Oh, yes, my day will come again. So I’m not a cool mom. Maybe I can manage to be a really groovy great-grandmother.

Ah, the 1980s: Perhaps not the best-looking decade for many of us

Not Just Another Tuesday

Today we celebrate the sixth anniversary of the terrible terrorist attacks on our country. I remember that day, how it started out like an ordinary Tuesday, with me scurrying around to get my oldest three kids ready for school, and cleaning up the kitchen while the younger three watched Sesame Street. Then my husband called me from work, telling me that something was going on and I should turn on the news.

I remember how quickly we went from innocence to horror. I was pregnant with my seventh child, and I stood watching the buildings in flames, rubbing my swollen belly, wondering what this meant for the world this child would soon enter.

A few days later, as I drove into town to do some shopping, I turned down a road I don’t usually drive on. It was a lovely, tree-lined residential street, and every house, on both sides of the road, had an American flag proudly displayed on its lawn. My eyes blurred and the thick, confused, sad feeling that had been my companion for days disappeared as I drove slowly past them all. We had not lost hope.

The question I asked that frightening Tuesday – what does this mean for the world my children will live in? – has still not been answered. During the past six years, we have seen a lot of terrible and confusing things. But I have seen a lot of wonderful things, too, acts of kindness, and intelligence, and bravery. I am not happy with a lot of what is happening, but I still have hope. It is that hope that will get me out to vote today, because today, Patriot’s Day, is also the primary election day in my town’s local elections. Exercising my right to vote is a small but fitting way to honor those who have worked, and fought, and even died to make sure I keep that right. Six years later, we still have a voice.

Oh, Grow Up

This week we had two events at our house, the kind of occasions I might devote a scrapbook page to, if I were at all inclined toward scrapbooking: my youngest child started kindergarten, and my oldest child bought his first car.

With two such landmark events occurring within days of each other, I could hardly help but think about how my family is changing. The youngest just started riding the school bus, and the oldest just stopped, but it comes down to the same thing: my kids are growing up, and as they grow up, they are moving away from their parents, finding independence from me.

My children are all pretty close in age, so for ten years running I was always either pregnant or nursing or both. It seemed like I always had one who needed to be fed, one who smelled bad, and one whose nose was runny. They were nothing but a series of hyperactive body openings. During this time, whenever I dared go out in public, I was regularly approached by older women who admired my little flock, then wistfully said, "They grow up so fast."

I got a bit tired of hearing it, because it seemed like a fairy tale to me, wishful thinking that was obviously not true. How could this all be going by so fast, I thought, when it seems like three weeks from breakfast to lunch? I looked forward dreamily to a far-off day when they would all be walking, toilet trained, feeding themselves – even going to school.

And now it happened. It really did. It turned out the fairy tale can come true, and in some ways it does seem like it went by fast. There are things I wish I had done, or done better, while they were little, but it’s too late.

Some months ago, I found my five-year-old studying himself carefully in the mirror. "I’m getting grown up," he announced. "Grown-ups usually have hair in their nose, and I’m getting some."

Oh, if only it were that easy. Growing up involves much more pain and trouble than ordinary nose hair can bring. I'm still working at growing up myself, 40-something years in, and now I'm watching my children try their hands at it, too. And I'm realizing that the hard part may be just beginning. Getting all seven of them safely through their teens should be quite an adventure.

I hope it doesn't go by too fast.

The Old Yearbook

Since today is Sunday, I decided to post something relatively serious. This is about something that happened to me a few years ago:

It was about the size of a thin book of sheet music, so the book had been placed on the thrift store's music shelf. I was looking through the stack, hoping to find some piano music for my daughter, when the little book caught my eye. I picked it up and saw that it was actually an old high school yearbook. The book was dated 1942 and was from a school in a small town a few miles away. I flipped through it for a moment, then decided I might as well take it home to look at – the price was only fifteen cents.

I enjoyed looking through the old yearbook that day. Things had changed so much since those times. One of the school events mentioned was a special assembly that had been arranged to inform the students about the bombing of Pearl Harbor. The school calendar included two weeks off at harvest time, when many students in the rural town were needed at home. Pictures showed smiling young people in the fashions of the time. I showed the yearbook to my husband and children, then set it aside.

Several weeks later, I was preparing to visit a church in a nearby town where I had lived some years earlier. I had been asked to speak in one of their meetings. For some reason, as I gathered my scriptures and other materials for my talk, I picked up the old yearbook and took it with me. When I got to the church, I started to leave the yearbook in the car, but changed my mind and took it in.

I sat down in the meeting and waited for my turn to speak. A middle-aged woman I knew slightly came in a few minutes late, sat down beside me, and whispered hello. As I sat next to her, the thought came to me that she might want to see the yearbook, so I handed it to her and quietly invited her to look through it. A few minutes later it was time for me to speak, so I went to the front and gave my message.

When I returned to my seat at the end of the meeting, the woman was holding the yearbook and looking emotional. "Can I borrow this?" she asked. "I would like to copy some pictures." She pointed to a picture of a pretty teenage girl and said, with a trembling voice, "That is my mother. I have never seen a picture of her as a youth. We have no pictures of her before her marriage." She showed me other relatives of hers in the yearbook and asked again if she could borrow it.

"You can have it," I told her. "I bought it for you." She looked surprised, and I said, "I didn't know why I bought it at the time, but I just found out. I bought it for you."

The Power of the Dark Side

I inherited three major qualities from my grandmother: 1) the ability to laugh at my mistakes; 2) a passionate love for a great bargain; and 3) prematurely gray hair. All these gifts combined last weekend in a way that made me richly aware of my heritage, and also made me look and feel like a complete idiot.

It all started at the beauty supply store, where I had stopped to pick up some hair color (to cover Grandma's Gift Number 3). I knew just what to get, and I was headed to that section of the store when I was sucked in by what is, for me, one of the most powerful magnetic forces on earth: a clearance table (Grandma's Gift 2). I was interested to find that the table had hair coloring on it, and naturally I was tempted, but I wasn't convinced – this was not my regular brand; in fact, this was a brand I had never heard of, and it was only about a dollar less than my usual stuff. I stood there, with the bottle in my hand, considering, when I saw a sign on the table I had overlooked. It read "All Clearance Items are Buy One Get One Free."

Something deep within my soul quivered with joy. I filled a bag with the cheap stuff and fairly ran to the checkout.

On the way home, I congratulated myself on my brilliant bargain. The hair color had been marked down to $2.99, and each bottle was big enough to color my hair twice. That meant that I had enough hair color to last me over a year, and at a cost of just seventy-five cents an application. In what can best be described as a sick tightwad fantasy, I pictured myself walking down the road, swinging my stunning brown locks, my pockets jingling with all the cash I had saved by making this impressive purchase, spending my windfall savings on some luxury item, like maybe a corn dog or two.

Back at home, product in hand, I was less confident. The instructions for my new hair color seemed to have been written by someone who had limited exposure to the English language. But I've been covering my gray for years, and I was able to come up with a rough translation. Bravely, I plunged in. I mixed up the coloring, spread it on, spent a pleasant and relaxing 45 minutes smelling like embalming fluid, then washed my hair. It was at this point that I discovered that while some of my hair looked about right, large sections of my hair were several shades darker than I was used to. Also, large sections of my forehead were several shades darker than I was used to.

Remember, I am a person who can laugh at my own mistakes (Grandma's Gift Number 1).  Also, as was clearly demonstrated that day, I am a person who has a family who can laugh at my mistakes. When the hilarity eventually subsided (ha ha), I headed back to the store, this time to buy my usual brand of hair color.

Feeling more secure now — after all, I was on familiar territory again — I re-colored my hair.

Now, perhaps you are thinking, "But if her hair was too dark, how could adding more color to it make it lighter? Wouldn't that make the problem even worse?" If you are indeed thinking this, I would like you to ask yourself another question, which is, "Where was I at the time, when I could have brought up this obvious issue to a person in need, a person who clearly had inhaled too many hair color fumes?"

Yes, I stepped out of the shower later that day looking far worse than before. My hair was so dark in some spots that it seemed to be functioning as a black hole in space would, sucking all the light out of every room I entered. There was no more pretending that I wasn't in serious trouble. Even my grandmother (whose usual perky advice would have been something like, "Just put on your prettiest dress and a bright smile and no one will notice anything's wrong!") would have started looking around for a wooden stake to drive into my heart if I got too close.

Keep in mind that at this point, I had already messed up twice in one weekend by believing that I could be my own stylist, and as a result, I looked like I should be filling out an application to compete in an international Elvira look-alike contest. So naturally, I did what any sensible person in my situation would do: I grabbed the nearest pair of scissors and started hacking off large chunks of my hair.

Okay, it's possible that at this point I had lost the capacity to think clearly.

I'll spare you the next part of the story, as it is rather tedious and also involves profanity. But let me say this: Some people may tell you that there is nothing so expensive as a cheap paintbrush. They are wrong. Compared to the financial hazards of purchasing discount hair color, buying a cheap paintbrush is like dropping your gum in the dirt. I spent far more money trying to fix the problem than I had ever hoped to save. Now, my locks are still not stunning brown, and my pockets are certainly not jingling. At this point, when people ask me, "Ooh, what happened to your hair?" I cannot even distract them by offering them a corn dog.

If anyone else out there loves a bargain like I do, I have some extra hair color for sale. Hey, I'll let it go cheap.

Learn As You Go

I don’t know for sure where they got my name. I suspect that they use the birth announcements in local newpapers to gather a list of new mothers. But when the company called me one day, wishing me congratulations on the birth of my new baby, I assumed they were selling something, and I was right.

I’m not very good at getting rid of salespeople, although I never want to buy what they are selling, so as the woman on the line told me about the parenting magazine I could subscribe to, full of helpful tips and information for an amazing price, I tried to think of some plausible and polite excuse I could use. I didn’t come up with anything and it was my turn to speak, so I said the first thing that came to my mind, not knowing where I was going from there.

"This baby that I just had," I began, "this is my seventh child . . ."

"Oh, my goodness!" the telemarketer exclaimed. "Well, thank you very much for your time, and have a nice day."

And that was that.

I hadn’t expected that the revelation of that simple truth would so effectively make her flee, and I wondered why it had. Was is that she figured the mother of seven wouldn’t have any money to buy a magazine? Or that she guessed I wouldn’t ever have time to read it?

The most likely possibility, I finally concluded, was that she assumed that a woman who had already experienced motherhood six times would already know everything there is to know, and therefore find the magazine unnecessary.

While I appreciated her vote of confidence (if that was indeed what it was), I found that I was uncomfortable with it, because, frankly – here comes a confession – I don’t have a clue what I’m doing here. After a period of time in this job that would, in any other field, qualify me as experienced, I still feel most of the time like I’m making it up as I go.

It worried me a bit when I pondered this, because I had assumed when I had my first child that my lack of confidence and competence in parenting were the natural result of inexperience. How should I know? Gosh, it’s not as if I’ve ever done this before!

But now, after a decade and a half in the biz, I thought I ought to have learned a thing or two, and I wasn’t sure I had.

Then one day a friend asked if she could bring a group of 12- and 13-year old girls to my house so they could learn to make bread. Bread making is something I do know how to do, so I gladly went through the steps with them, allowing each girl to try every step of the process as they made their own loaves of bread.

Everyone’s bread was edible, but I noticed that many of the girls’ loaves had a crumbly texture, or were a bit heavy, or looked lopsided. As I looked at their bread, I suddenly felt the kind of nostalgic affection I would feel looking at a Holly Hobbie lunch box: Hey, I remember that!
It had been a long time since my baking efforts had produced that kind of bread, and I had completely forgotten that when I started out, my bread was usually substandard. Improvement had come gradually, through trial and error, and I hadn’t even noticed how good I’d gotten.

So maybe, it occurred to me later that day, I am better at lots of things, including motherhood, and I just haven’t noticed it.

It’s probably an act of mercy that we forget just how helpless and confused we feel in those early days of parenting. Things get harder, in many ways, as your children get older, but you do have a new competence, born of day by day mistakes and occasional successes, that gives you a firmer ground to stand on when everyday crises try to tip you over.

Now I kind of wish I had saved one of my first loaves of bread. It would serve as a reminder of how far I’ve come. Of course, I didn’t keep one. But I did keep my oldest child, and I look at him and realize we did okay.

I hope that the girls were happy with their bread. I hope they ate it and enjoyed it, and I hope they try again. And I hope they can figure out on their own something I wasn’t wise enough to tell them that day – that no one starts out being an expert at anything, whether it’s playing the piano, or kicking a goal, or making bread, or raising children. You keep trying, keep messing up, appreciating the good stuff and learning from the bad, and one day, you realize, you know what you’re doing.

So give me a little more time. I’ll get there.

Executive Position

I was surprised to even receive the letter.  It came in an official-looking envelope, and informed me that I had been selected to appear in the next edition of Who’s Who in American Executives.

I’m self-employed, and so while I may be my own boss, I don’t think of myself as an executive. I was about to toss the letter, thinking it was nothing more than a mistake in someone’s mailing list, but then I reconsidered. I am the mother of seven children.  Couldn't I be considered an executive in that role?  Sure, most of the time I feel like I’m more “labor” than I am “management.” And my salary compares to most CEOs only if the currency in which I am paid is unpleasant odors.

But when I consulted my dictionary, I learned that an executive is “a person in charge of  administration.”  I’ve actually administered a lot of things – if medicines and punishments count.

So I took another look at the letter.  It directed me to fill out and return the enclosed form to let them know about myself and my company.  I grabbed the form, dug up a pen, and began.

The first few questions were easy.

Job Title?  Mom. (Also, Mama, Mommy, and Hey, you.)

Number of years in this position?  16.

Number of employees/subordinates? [I briefly wondered whether to count my husband, but decided against it.]  Seven.

It got a little trickier from there.

What type of industry does your work fall under? (check one)

I carefully considered each of the choices.

Transportation?  Okay, that’s a yes.

Entertainment?  Uh-huh.

Educational Services? Public Relations? Financial Services? Yes, yes, and yes.

Food Service? Oh, yes.

Hospitality? Health Care? Hygiene? You betcha.

How about Law Enforcement? Hah!  I’ve enforced more laws and broken up more fights than the NYPD.

Check one? I could check any of these.  Janitorial Services?  What do you think?

Just reading the list of choices was making me tired and depressed.  I decided to go on to the next question.  Surely it would be easier.  I read on.

Do you plan an expansion of your organization in the next year?

No.  No, no, I don’t.  I think my organization (and my waist along with it) has seen enough expansions.

In the end, I decided my first instinct about this letter was right, and I made an Executive Decision.  So, if any of you are interested in seeing my entry for the next edition of Who’s Who in American Executives, you can fish it out of my recycling bin.

Make a List

I’m not opposed to record keeping. On the contrary, I am very interested in leaving behind a record of my life, so that in case someday archaeologists, or perhaps child welfare authorities, stumble upon my home, there will be some evidence that adults have lived here.

But I’m just not a scrapbooker. And the last journal that I kept ended with an entry about how upset I was that my mother wouldn’t let me stay up the night before to watch The Love Boat.

So I’m always looking for new and innovative methods of "journaling," and I considered it a good tip when a friend told me that making lists can be a quick and easy way to record family history. Therefore, in the interest of historical preservation, I took some time today to write down the following list:

Things I Found Behind My Oven This Morning

When I Pulled It Out From the Wall to Replace a Part

•  Three pumpkin seeds
• Thirty-five cents
• An admission ticket to "A Christmas Fantasy", held November 22-24 (it didn’t say what year)
• A scrap of paper which said "Bankruptcy Notice" and then some other stuff I didn’t want to read
• Five stale cheese puffs
• One roll of duct tape
• Half a Dorito
• Four pens, two and a half pencils, and seven crayons
• A note reading: "Mom IM gone ill be back"
• A set of rubber "Billy Bob" hillbilly teeth
• One cheese tortellini
• One bottle of sunscreen
• Two hundred thirty seven dollars in Monopoly money
• A miniature candy bar wrapper that read "To My Valentine"
• A mostly eaten piece of pizza
• One air soft gun pellet
• Two chocolate chips (one milk chocolate, one semi-sweet)
• Approximately three cups of mixed dust, leaves, rocks and bugs

Now in the interest of truth, I offer one more list:

Things Behind My Oven Now That I Have Fixed It and Pushed It Back Into Place

(Everything on the above list, minus the thirty-five cents, the Billy Bob Hillbilly Teeth and the milk chocolate chip.)

Yes, of course I thought about sweeping behind there while I had it pulled out.  I even started to go get the broom. But since I couldn’t immediately find the broom, I had some time to think about what I was about to do. The more I considered it, the more I realized it might not be a good idea, and I’ll tell you why.

When I was a kid, I had a friend whose mother pulled the refrigerator out from the wall to clean behind it every week. And my sister once dated a guy who told her that one of his mother’s weekly tasks was to go down to the basement utility room and dust the water heater. (I’ll let you guess what my advice to my sister was.) And once I overheard a woman telling her friend that her mother had regularly scrubbed around the base of the toilet with a toothbrush.  "That’s nothing," the friend said. "My mother did that, and then she flossed around there, too."

What I’m saying is, there are plenty of people in the world who keep house in a manner that would prevent me from wanting to be their next door neighbor. Do I want to turn into one of them? Of course not.

Now, it’s true that sweeping out behind my oven, a region which clearly bore evidence that several major holidays had passed since its last cleaning, wouldn’t exactly put me on par with the homemaker who turns her vacuum on more often than I flush a toilet. But who knows what might have happened if I’d picked up that broom? What if, knowing that the space behind my oven was sparkling clean, I’d had a hankering to peek behind the microwave? And then, after answering a compulsion to get that clean too, I might have moved onto the other appliances. Before long, I could be browsing the internet searching for a fun craft idea to use the twenty-seven pounds of lint I’d found behind my dryer. Next thing you know, I’m taking all the light bulbs out of their sockets to give them a sponge bath, and staying up late organizing my supply of toilet paper by purchase date and ply count. Soon I’m wiping down the inside of the dishwasher with disinfecting wipes after every load and using a Q-Tip and a magnifying glass to clean the shower.  From there, it’s a short walk to becoming the woman standing in her kitchen crying, screaming at the child who last unloaded the dishwasher, "The ⅓ cup measure goes between the ¼ and the ½! Am I the only person in this house with any sense of reason and order?"

It’s a slippery slope. I decided to err on the side of safety.

You know, the more I think about it, the more sure I am that I did the right thing. In fact, I’m going to put the Billy Bob Hillbilly teeth back behind the oven. That way, when Halloween rolls around again, I’ll know just where they are. After all, I’ve got it down on paper.