Finding My Badass Self

by Sherry Stanfa-Stanley

  The coup de grâce was the package of pink and yellow foam curlers I’d procured the day before at Dollar General.

  I hadn’t worn curlers like these since junior high, before my discovery of Farrah Fawcett and curling irons forever altered my morning routine and my school photos. Since I still remembered the agony of sleeping with foam curlers, I had waited until that morning to deal with them. I failed to recall, however, the time and precision required to put them in place.

  I spent twenty minutes attempting to roll my dampened hair. Most dangled limply, and the rest fell into my bathroom sink. Nearly late for my breakfast date, I finally managed to get a dozen curlers entwined in my hair. I shook my curler-covered head at the irony. I’d chosen this experience mostly for the silliness and the public reaction. But I’d gone to a lot of effort to look like I’d made no effort at all.

  Breakfast was scheduled for a popular place called Chowders ‘N Moor, a fitting nautically named restaurant for someone feeling like a fish out of water. As I crossed the parking lot, I passed a middle-aged couple leaving the restaurant. The woman glanced at me and faux-muttered, “Okaaay. Looking good, honey.”

  Smiling, I continued walking as I pondered her comment. Nope, probably not a compliment.

  I gathered many more strange looks and smirks inside the restaurant. Yet our young server barely blinked an eye, even as a curler dropped off my head and landed next to her while she took my order. My breakfast date, Julie M., simply laughed. Over the past several months, my friends had also grown a bit immune to these outings. Unless they were active participants, they were only guilty—and insane—by association.

  Next up was grocery shopping. As I roamed my local Kroger’s frozen food section, I noted many of the customers were dressed in their best Sunday-Go-to-Meeting clothes. Given their expressions, they believed I was not. Who’d have thought good church-goers would be such a tough crowd.

  At first, I evaded the stares and eyerolls, but curiosity prompted me to push the experiment further. I started looking people squarely in the eye and smiling at them. Those who appeared thirtyish or younger proved far more likely to smile back. Middle-aged or older shoppers either averted my glance or gave me a disapproving look. And then, they peeked into my cart to check out my purchases.

  I didn’t know what they expected my cart to contain, but I hoped a head of lettuce and package of boneless chicken breasts might offset my six-pack of beer, Little Debbie Nutty Bars, and bottle of coal-tar shampoo. (Hey, lots of normal and upright citizens suffered from eczema, seborrhea, or psoriasis.)

  My final public appearance took place at the bookstore in an upscale suburban shopping center. The same pattern followed: Younger customers barely noticed me, while the older shoppers stared as if I had an enormous green head with two protruding antennas. The sentinel clerk followed me, aisle to aisle, his mind not eased until I made my book purchases and headed to the store’s café. Then, I guess, he figured I became the barista’s problem.

  I sat in the café for another half hour, paging through a new book and drinking my venti mocha. I engaged tentatively in a few stare-downs with the older crowd while the amateur psychologist in me tried to analyze this attitudal discrepancy. This was not only a new experience for me, I assumed it was new for most of the more seasoned bookstore shoppers, too.

  Why the difference in reactions I encountered that day? Was it due to younger folks being more open-minded and not yet as judgmental? Or did the younger generation simply have far more lax standards for a public dress code?

  After all, does what a person happens to wear define that individual’s character? And, where—if anywhere—is the publicly respectable or acceptable line drawn? At pajamas? At jeans sagged to the knees? At a thong? Who am I to say? (If pressed, I’ll go with thong. No one needs to see that shit. Unless you are somewhere like Haulover Beach, where apparently anything—or nothing at all—is OK.)

  I consequently found myself less judgmental about how others were dressed when I passed them in a store or on the street. Hey, you, in the leopard-skin shorts and knee socks! And you, wearing the tiara and tutu! Do your thing, people!

  Even so, how others reacted to my appearance still bothered me more than I cared to admit. In most situations over the past months, I’d learned to handle humiliation and to brush off others’ opinions. Yet when it came to my appearance in more everyday circumstances like these, it seemed I still wanted to appear physically attractive or at least normal. Whether it was due to an engrained sense of vanity or a bit of insecurity, it made me wonder: As I grew older, would I grow more—or less—self-conscious about my appearance?

  I probably could make a conclusion from this particular experiment only if I continued my research through additional public pajama parties. Maybe this premiere warmed me up for an encore—especially if I ever got a craving for Nutty Bars at 2 a.m.

  The next time I went out in public resembling a viral Internet photo, I’d head straight to Walmart.

  I’m guessing I’d find my tribe there.

  SPRING

  Chapter 40:

  A SITTING DUCK

  With my recent stranger party being such a hit, I set my sights on befriending a group of very, very young strangers—specifically, six-month-old quadruplets.

  I’d raised two boys, two years apart, with minimal long-term damage to any of us. Perhaps those earliest maternal memories were fuzzy, or maybe I was a sentimentalist, but I recalled lots of cuddling and cooing. Babysitting quadruplets would provide all that—times four.

  Sure, I anticipated that babysitting quads would entail a good amount of work, yet nothing could truly prepare me for the energy and organization required for an afternoon of caring for the Baldwin Quad Squad.

  Mama Laura originally agreed to my babysitting offer under the condition that she wouldn’t actually leave the house. She’d stay home, catching up on laundry and other chores, while giving me full responsibility for the babies.

  Apparently, parents are kind of funny about leaving their babies with a total stranger. Huh.

  When I arrived that day, however, Laura said she’d reconsidered that plan. A couple mutual friends had reassured her I wasn’t totally reckless or psychotic. Besides, little Ryan had cried and fretted the entire morning. I could hear him wailing from his crib upstairs, where the rest of the quads were finishing their morning nap.

  Laura gazed at me, with wild and weary eyes.

  “I really, really need to get out of the house,” she said. Laura provided on-the-spot instructions for quad care, a crash course entailing extensive written and verbal guidelines for a mere three-hour gig. Much had changed since my two grown boys were babies twenty-something years ago. My infants slept on their stomachs, a practice now forbidden. I had never heard of swaddle suits, bottle proppers, or Boppy pillows. And each step she listed needed to be multiplied by four.

  I wrung my hands as she rattled off directions. I started to wonder if this particular new experience might be filled with far more anxiety and far less fun than I imagined. While Laura got herself and her four-year-old daughter, Leah, ready to go to lunch and run errands, I had no choice but to dive in.

  I headed upstairs to the nursery. By now, Ryan was howling and the other three babies—Logan, Madalyn, and Reghan—were all awake from their morning naps. I peered into their cribs and was greeted by a montage of tiny bewildered faces. Each of them eyed me with furrowed brows, as if thinking, “Wait, you’re not my mommy! Who the heck are you?” Yet all it took was a bit of sweet talking before each of their frowns turned to smiles.

  All the babies appeared hungry and eager to be freed from their barred crib prisons. Laura told me she and her husband, Billy, seasoned pros after six months, generally took two babies downstairs at a time. Hmm. So, I could either carry a single baby, leaving three crying ones behind, or I could attempt to appease two at a time.

  Given my questionable coordination, I shuddered at the possible outcome of that latter choice. I opted fo
r four separate trips, tightly cradling each baby with my right arm and grasping the railing with my left, as I maneuvered the stairway.

  Once I had them all settled safely downstairs, I commenced The Changing of the Diapers.

  A famous scene from I Love Lucy featured Lucy and Ethel attempting to wrap chocolates on a conveyer belt in a candy factory. They started off confident but grew increasingly panicky, because as soon as they managed to wrap one, they were met head-on by one more. And then another.

  So it goes with an assembly line of diapering four six-month-old babies. The only difference was I never resorted to frantically stuffing a messy diaper down my blouse. I did, however, find a dirty wipe that night in my pocket.

  To my pleasant surprise, these ended up being the only four diapers I changed that entire afternoon. We experienced several false alarms over the next few hours. But after some sniffing and undressing sessions to ascertain the issue, I eventually discovered just a whole lot of tooting going on.

  Two of the babies grew quiet and content as soon as they were out of their cribs and in clean bottoms. The other two made it clear they wanted to be fed, pronto. Pronto wasn’t an option—not with having to prepare food for four.

  I studied Laura’s written instructions for the babies’ lunch: six ounces of warm water, three scoops of powdered formula, and three scoops of cereal—all shaken well in each bottle. I vaguely recalled that this same routine, with each of my own sons, required about two minutes of preparation. With four bottles, I figured it should take ten minutes, tops.

  Making lunch for quads proved to be a far lengthier ordeal, partly due to my trips at roughly two-minute intervals into the adjoining living room to check on the babies. Sure, I could see them from the kitchen sink. That ten-yard line of vision might have seemed sufficient with my own children—especially with Baby #2, when parental supervision became way more lackadaisical.

  But this afternoon, I was responsible for four infants, and none were mine. Besides, I had read that children were far more advanced now. This could be the day one of them learned to crawl! And, at any moment, she could stumble upon a throat-obstructing-sized object to pop into her mouth! No, none of these babies would choke on my watch! I could not look away for a single minute.

  During one such anxious trip into the living room, I made the mistake of carrying the second bottle in mid-preparation, shaking it as I scrutinized each of my young charges. Little Ryan, still crying, spied his lunch-in-process. He fixed his eyes on the bottle and quieted for a moment. But as I walked away to make the next bottle, without making good on my unspoken promise, he began to wail. Obvious lesson learned too late: Never tease a hungry baby.

  “Just one more minute, Ryan,” I shouted from the kitchen. “I’m almost done, sweetie!”

  Sure, I’d lied to my own children as often as necessary. All reasonable parents do. But I felt guiltier lying to this tiny and trusting babe I just met.

  Once all the bottles were ready, I arranged each of the quads in their Boppy pillows in a semi-circle on the floor. As Laura had demonstrated earlier, I carefully folded two receiving blankets on top of each pillow. Next, I put the bottles in their stuffed-animal bottle proppers. I braced the bottles on top of the pillows. And finally, I stuck a bottle nipple in each baby’s mouth.

  This process would have proven trying for a trained engineer.

  All four babies began eating, with gusto. I collapsed on the floor, in the middle of them, congratulating myself on a job well done. Except the job was far from over.

  Over the next half hour, I readjusted bottles a dozen times and wiped spit-up twice as often. Laura had suggested I burp them each after every two ounces. Yet there was no way of knowing how much they’d eaten unless I took the bottle out of each baby’s mouth and then also removed the bottle-cover propper—which I did obsessively every five minutes.

  To my relief, the quads were patient with me. They also proved to be professional burpers. They managed to rid every bit of indigestion from their systems, as was evident by my formula-drenched clothes. I arrived in a black sweater. I left with it colored milky gray.

  Logan and Mady fell back to sleep, mid-lunch. Reghan drank half her bottle and then seemed happy just looking around and occasionally cuddling with me. But our cuddles were always short-lived because little Ryan apparently wasn’t just hungry; the poor guy wasn’t feeling too good either. At six months (and being born two months prematurely), Laura and I agreed it was possible he was cutting his first tooth.

  Ryan wanted to be held. Oh, I was all about the holding of babies! Every time I picked him up, his cries turned to smiles. I swooned. There may be no sweeter experience in the world than making a baby’s cry turn to a toothless smile. The only problem was that three other babies also needed attention. Every time I snuggled with Ryan, one of the other three needed to be burped, or moved, or held. And each time I put a momentarily smiling Ryan down so I could attend to one of the others, he cried again. Ryan’s cries were relentless.

  I whimpered once or twice, myself.

  My afternoon went like this: Lay down one baby, pick up another. Set down that one, pick up the next. Burp, change a barfy bib, check for pooping or just tooting. Repeat. Sweet Baby Jesus! This routine wasn’t humanly possible! But, I knew Mama Laura did this, day in and day out, with a four-year-old daughter who also needed attention and care.

  Laura was my new hero. No, she was clearly a superhero.

  She laughed when I told her this later. She said she didn’t enter confidently into the role of mother to quadruplets. “I cried when we got the news,” she admitted.

  While parenting four infants and an older sibling had proven to be a heartwarming and rewarding experience, she said patience and priorities were hard-learned lessons. The family adapted to a routine she did her best to enforce. “It helps that they are all incredibly good babies and none of them has been sick,” she added. Well, until Ryan seemed to feel out-of-sorts that day.

  Babysitting the quads demanded every second of my attention and energy. I never once glanced at the TV, which Laura had left on for my entertainment. As if. I crossed my legs and denied myself more than three sips of Diet Coke, afraid to leave the babies unattended if I needed to run for a bathroom break.

  What surprised me most wasn’t the work involved. It was how quickly I became attached to these babies. In three hours, I fell in love with each of them. I got to know them not just as a collective set, but as four little individuals. I discovered and appreciated their physical differences as well as their already distinct personalities.

  By the time Laura and Leah returned, the Quad Squad had grown restless and ready for their afternoon nap. Following Laura’s directions, I swaddled three (Reghan, who recently learned to roll over, was no longer wrapped), and I took them upstairs—one at a time, of course. Logan and Mady immediately fell asleep. Reghan simply lay there smiling up at her crib mobile. Meanwhile, Ryan broke free from my clumsy swaddling, whimpered, and needed to be rewrapped.

  I softly rubbed his forehead until he calmed. His eyes fluttered shut, and he finally drowsed off. I could have stayed in the nursery for hours, stroking that sleepy baby’s head. It resurrected a memory I only vaguely recalled—and didn’t fully appreciate at the time.

  Four babies had proven to be forty times the joy. And forty times the work.

  I left that day exhausted but captivated by the thought of grandchildren. Bring ’em on! It would take some time and convincing, I knew, for my two single, twenty-something sons to get on board.

  I hoped, someday, they’d be up to the challenge—preferably one baby at a time.

  Chapter 41:

  ON THE ROPES

  Compared to many of the experiences on my list, I didn’t give a high ropes course much forethought. I spoke to a couple folks who’d tackled a similar challenge, and I glanced at the venue’s website. The guidelines specified only that participants be at least fourteen years old and four-feet-ten-inches tall. I figured that m
ade me safe by thirty-eight years and two inches.

  I made my arrangements and left it at that. It wasn’t that I presumed I would totally breeze through such an endeavor. But I was preoccupied at the time with a double scoop of life crap, as life tends to throw us, while I was busy getting my remaining experiences scheduled on my calendar. I figured I’d deal with this particular challenge when I must.

  The morning of my excursion, I pulled up the website for further investigation. The high ropes course at The University of Toledo’s Student Recreation Center was situated forty feet above the center’s basketball courts. It included a series of swaying ropes and wooden swings strung from the three-story-high ceiling. The goal was to climb, crawl, stretch, and step one’s way across this mid-air obstacle course. Presumably, a harness and single cable prevented one from crashing to the ground.

  From this lengthier perusal of the course description and photos, it appeared far more menacing. Maybe kind of fun. Nope. This was possibly my biggest nightmare.

  I didn’t possess an actual fear of heights, yet I was terrified of the sensation of falling from high places. I could stand on the top observation deck of a seemingly stable skyscraper and I could drive across a high bridge, with minimal quivering. But any high structure that moved, or any experience that resulted in my moving and potentially facing a downward plunge, was a deal-breaker.

  Before committing to this activity, perhaps I should have allowed it a full two minutes of consideration. Still, what could possibly go wrong? No. What could possibly go right?

  My friend, Laura W. (not to be confused with Laura the Quad Squad Mama, who was enduring her own daily obstacle course), and her fourteen-year-old cousin, Haley, came in town to join me. This wasn’t Laura’s first rodeo. She had attempted a similar high ropes course at a summer camp when she was fifteen. Partway along that course, she fully panicked. She finally convinced the powers-that-be to allow her to escape by climbing down a rappel rope.