Is That The Shirt You're Wearing

by Kristen Brakeman

  Week Six

  “IIIIIIIII’m gonna swingggggg from the Chan-duh-lah- ear, the Chan-duh-lah-EEEEEAAAAAR!”

  Few things make me happier than the sound of my 15-year-old and her best friend singing at the top of their lungs to the songs on my car radio. They sing with such unabashed joy, and what makes it even better is that Samantha is completely tone deaf and even though she knows it, she seems to revel in it.

  What I also like about her dreadful singing is that she does it in front of me. I would have never sung like that in front of my mom at her age. I love that she’s not self-conscious like I was, well really, am.

  I stopped yelling at my bird friends because I got too self- conscious in front of my own children, and also because I’ve been yelling at the TV a lot lately and I started to think that all this yelling was getting out of hand. It can’t be healthy.

  After returning from dropping off the singing Samantha, I went to check on my little bird friends and discovered that they weren’t there anymore. So I moved closer to investigate. That’s when I noticed that the entire circumference of their nest was covered with a thick layer of bird poo. Yuk! It was disgusting. Those bird babies had been living in their own filth!

  Well good riddance to you, baby birds. You repulse me

  now.

  About the time of my dirty bird discovery, Chloe began

  tearing the house apart in a mad search for our glue gun. We hadn’t seen it in months. Eventually her search led her to the long-abandoned art cabinet and soon the entire contents of the art cabinet were spread out on the kitchen floor. Then, an amazing thing happened. She cleaned the art cabinet! She threw out old stuff and organized – perhaps not as logically as I would have wanted - but still, she organized it.

  Then, she found this old puppy sticker book and proceeded to put puppy stickers one very appliance and cupboard in our kitchen. I realized, had she done this as a four-year-old, I would have probably scolded her and given her a time out. But at 18, it just made me laugh and was so adorable that my heart actually ached as I thought about how much I was going to miss her when she leaves in a month.

  I think that when I’m old and dying it won’t be the big events like graduations or weddings that will stand out in my memory. Instead it will be the everyday stuff - the lounging on the couch together and yelling at the TV, the cleaning out of cabinets, and the dreadful yet wonderful singing in the car - that I’ll remember the most.

  At least, I hope these are the things I’ll remember.

  It’s Just A Damn Chair (A Damn Comfy Chair)

  After the moving van pulled away, we took stock of our old shabby chic furniture that now sat in our sixties-era mid- century modern home and realized, “This crap has gotta go.” It was completely out of place. So we added “new furniture” to our growing list of things that had to be fixed or changed in our new home.

  Three weeks and 13 years later, our new furniture finally arrived.

  After positioning my sleek new couch and stylish chairs, the deliverymen and I moved the old antique couch and chairs out to the covered patio, ready for a closely-timed pickup from the local thrift shop.

  Unfortunately, the thrift shop workers deemed one of my chairs, the overstuffed pink one, too worn and unsightly to sell. They rejected our reject.

  When my youngest arrived home from school later that day, she ignored the new furniture, and instead zeroed in on the lone, banished chair. “What’s the comfy chair doing outside? You’re not planning to get rid of the comfy chair, are you? You can’t get rid of the comfy chair!” she said with horror in her voice, as if I had impulsively decided to give away her older sister, or worse, the family dog.

  “Honey, you knew we were getting new furniture. When you buy new furniture you get rid of the old. We can’t keep it. There’s nowhere to put it.”

  “You can put it in my room!” she said, almost in tears.

  I didn’t bother explaining that the giant overstuffed chair wouldn’t fit through the hall doorway without taking a jackhammer to the nearby wall. Frankly I didn’t even understand why we were having this conversation.

  “I won’t let you take it! I’m going to go sit on it so you can’t get rid of it. If you get rid of it you have to get rid of me too.” I briefly considered that option. Instead I used restraint. “Sweetheart, I know it’s a comfy chair, and I liked the chair too. It’s served us well, but it is just a chair.”

  “But that’s the chair where we always read together and I use it to make my forts and it’s where the cat likes to sleep.”

  I knew I couldn’t convince her so I decided to give it a rest and wait for my husband to get home. He has a much better way of dealing with these sticky situations. He always finds the right words, whereas I tend to lose my patience. I guess it’s cause he understands illogical emotions whereas I’m apparently half Vulcan.

  And he had better handle the situation, because there was no way in hell that that pink velvety stained chair was staying in my living room with my new creamy white couch and my Mad Men-era mod orange side chair. It simply wasn’t going to happen.

  When my husband arrived home I cornered him in the kitchen and explained the touchy situation and asked him to talk some sense into the child.

  But his response was not what I expected. “Well, she’s right. It is a comfy chair,” he said, sadly.

  “What? But we finally bought new furniture. We can’t keep the old stuff. It would look horrible together.”

  “I know, I know, but it is the most comfortable chair we own. And it is the chair I always sat in with the girls when they were babies. I’ll just . . . I’ll really miss that chair.”

  “See,” my youngest said, after sneaking into the room. “You’re not getting rid of it.” Oh good God. Why didn’t I think to bribe those thrift store workers when I had the chance?

  It was just a chair, after all.

  But then I looked at that chair and the memories came back: the middle of the night nursing sessions with my infant daughters, the evenings sitting with them when they were learning to read, my husband making his weekly phone call to his now dead father – all in that chair.

  That damn chair.

  So then my husband suggested that we could recover the chair and keep it. He showed me some furniture catalogs that had paired big leather comfy chairs with modern furniture and I had to admit, they looked pretty good together. It seemed like a good compromise so we moved the chair back into the house and called our local upholsterer.

  But the bad news came. The price to cover our big chair:

  $2000!

  Had we lost our minds? I could buy a brand new chair for

  a fraction of that price! There was no way I was going to spend that kind of money to keep this chair. Yes, I could probably find a cheaper upholsterer and track down some wholesale fabric at the garment district, but a new chair would still be cheaper and a lot less hassle. Also, if you think about it, our chair re-covered wouldn’t even look like the chair of our memories.

  So for months the chair has remained, covered in fabric swatches - not really part of our new living room, yet obviously not gone from it either.

  We should really get rid of it. It is the logical thing to do. Because it is just a chair, right?

  Week Seven

  My kids, having grown up in the texting era, never consider the idea that they might answer our damn telephone. So when I call home, I have to yell into the answering machine, “Somebody pick up the phone!”

  When I came home today I saw that the message light was on, so I hit play on the machine. When I heard a voice, I thought it was my mom. In fact, I actually picked up the phone to call her back when suddenly I realized, “Oh my God, that’s not my mom. That’s me!”

  I had completely forgotten that I had called home earlier in the day.

  I told this to my husband, who asked, “What are you upset about? That you sound like your mom, or that you didn’t remember leaving the message?”


  “I don’t know. I guess both, now that you mention it.”

  Then he smiled and shrugged, as if there was nothing more to say.

  He didn’t attempt to put a positive spin on it and I was glad about that.

  We have too much respect for each other to waste time with silly lies.

  Other than the horror of my voice message, this has been a very satisfying week. Suddenly things are happening. First, I got Peyton to make a new sticker chart for my mom. We asked her companions to give her stickers each time she does a lap on her walker from the den to the kitchen to the front room and back. Peyton made a chart a few months ago when the doctor first laid down the law about the dangers of my mom’s inactivity, but that chart mysteriously vanished. This time, she had better use it. I won’t let her throw in the towel that easily.

  Also, Samantha finished learning the history of the

  world. Yay! Though I do have concerns about the quality of her home study class. I mean, how much are you going to remember from a four-week long history class that covered one year’s worth of material? Samantha tried to reassure me. “Don’t worry Mom, I never retain anything from school anyway.” Well that’s music to a parent’s ears. Also it turns out she only has to read 100 pages of that damn Iliad. Not the whole thing like poor Chloe did. Yay for the decline in educational standards! There will be no need for English teacher walloping this year.

  But what’s really got me excited is that after adapting my elf-themed children’s book into a screenplay, a friend of a friend of a friend said they knew someone who knew someone who could get it into the hands of a Disney star! How lucky is that? I shall write my Oscar acceptance speech now.

  Ah, who am I kidding - rewrite.

  Health Hazards You Can’t Ignore

  In the middle of Chloe’s most stressful semester in high school, with three Advanced Placement tests on the horizon, she developed an ear infection. My pediatrician’s standard “Let’s wait and see” approach to handing out antibiotics was not going to fly. Time was of the essence and she needed to get better, and quick.

  “We could try giving her some Amoxy . . .” her doctor started to suggest.

  “You can stop right there, buddy,” I cut him off. “That pink crap hasn’t worked since she was three. She needs the hardcore stuff. Give her the strongest one you’ve got.”

  Confident I had singlehandedly saved my daughter’s GPA, I filled the prescription of horse pill-sized antibiotics. But after three days, she felt even worse. She said her head hurt and her ears felt like she was underwater. She also said she felt like her head was stuck in a bowl full of popcorn. I wondered how she could possibly know what that felt like, but I was too scared to ask.

  She couldn’t miss any more school so I filled her with Tylenol and sent her on her way. Then I Googled her list of symptoms.

  I quickly came upon something called mastoiditis, which can occur when the ear infection moves into the mastoid, the area of the skull behind the ear. Left untreated it could result in hearing loss, facial paralysis and death. Death? What the hell? I sent her a text immediately; “We’re going to the doctor right after school. Your ear pain could be very serious.”

  Seconds after the dismissal bell, she jumped into my car. It seemed my text message had really rattled her. “So what’s going on? Am I dying of cancer?” she asked.

  “No! Cancer? Honestly, I don’t know why you overreact like that. I can assure you that you’re not dying of cancer, but you could go deaf. And, since your grandma is already deaf and I’m well on my way, the cards are stacked against you. We can’t take any chances.”

  “Really,” I continued, “you can’t ignore problems with your ears . . . or your eyes. Did I ever tell you about the guy I knew at work who ignored an eye infection and you know what happened? He went blind! That’s what happened!”

  My eldest child and her sisters, already in the backseat, were captivated. So then it hit me, this was what those parenting experts refer to as a “teachable moment.” I had their complete and undivided attention – a rare thing indeed. I don’t think I’ve had their undivided attention since . . . well, frankly I can’t remember ever having had their undivided attention.

  I needed to use this moment wisely. I needed to impart some parenting wisdom - words that could possibly help them for the rest of their lives.

  “Okay girls, listen. Seriously. These are very important medical words to live by. Number one - eyes. Never ignore problems with your eyes. Number two - ears. Never ignore problems with your ears. And number 3, um . . . breathing! Very important! If you ever have a problem with your breathing, don’t ignore it. It could very well be pneumonia and that will kill you dead. Ask Jim Henson.”

  “Who is Jim Henson?” the youngest asked.

  “He’s dead. That’s who he is, because of pneumonia.”

  I was on a parenting high. Who knew how many future medical maladies I might have prevented with my sage advice? “What if your heart stops beating? Is that something we

  need to worry about?” the older one asked, dryly.

  “Okay, yes. Make that number four. Now you have four rules to live by. Keep it simple.”

  “What if one of your limbs suddenly falls off? Can you ignore that?” the middle one added.

  “Fine. Five. Five rules to live by: don’t ignore your eyes, your ears, your breathing, your non-beating heart, or your falling- off limbs. That’s it. Five.”

  I knew they were mocking me, but I didn’t care. I was sure that my impromptu teachable moment had been a success. What’s more, my kids were going to see proper healthcare behavior modeled, as they witnessed me rushing my eldest to the pediatrician to save her from a life of permanent silence.

  But then, as I confidently explained to the doctor how I came to my diagnosis of mastoiditis, my medical authority came in to question. It seems, the doctor explained, that had my daughter had this particular ailment she would have had giant bulges protruding from the side of her skull, and her ears would have stuck out from her head much like an old Howdy Doody doll. The doctor even pushed his own ears forward to demonstrate, a la Dumbo.

  Though he explained this to me with the patience of a man who’s spent a long career reassuring worried parents, I’m pretty sure that the cough he pretended to suppress was really a very large giggle.

  My kids, on the other hand, were suppressing nothing. They laughed and laughed at their mother’s over-active imagination. It turned out that my daughter’s ear infection was just that – an ear infection that, upon further inspection, was greatly improved.

  I didn’t care. Maybe today my mothering didn’t prevent a serious malady, but I’m sure my words of wisdom someday will.

  On that, we’ll have to wait and see.

  Week Eight

  I have a bajillion things to do and made the mistake of saying out loud, “If I could just have an empty house for a few hours then I could actually get something done!”

  So then my husband started singing, “The Cats in the Cradle” again. That joke is really getting old. Like Peyton, he has a knack for cutting to the chase. We’re different that way. If someone irritates him, he’ll tell them instantly. Like at the softball game the other day, the head coach did something that irked him, so he told him. Then they talked about it and then everything was fine. Whereas if someone annoys me I’ll bite my tongue and walk away, then stew about it for weeks, write angry emails that I never send, and fantasize secretly about revenge.

  We’re different because our families were different, yet they started out almost the same. Both of our fathers were engineers, but while my dad worked in his government job for over forty years, his dad hated having a boss so he quit after only eight. That’s when his parents bought a record store. They owned it through the sixties and seventies and it was located in San Francisco so they became fully immersed in the hippie culture. And by immersed I mean, they dressed like hippies, ate pot brownies, and engaged in couples’ yell therapy. So yeah, pretty imm
ersed.

  We recently found pictures of them from that era and they are very funny – dated, sixties-style clothes, shaggy hair

  – the works. Those shots were in this big bin of family photos and slides that my husband has spent most of the summer scanning into our computer. For a couple months now we’ve had these photos spread out on our bedroom floor. I started to get a little frustrated about them being there for so long, but then I remembered that my older brother did the same thing after our dad died. He spent months scanning our family photos and transferring old films, and got really into genealogy too. Maybe it’s how males have to grieve; by feeling like they’re doing something instead of just sitting around feeling sad.

  I understand that he still needs time, and that this photo project lets him remember and reflect. Even I have reached into that box and laughed at the picture of my mother-in-law wearing her ridiculous candy kiss hat, or marveled at how my father-in- law looked so stern in all our pictures. Yet he would tear up watching my kids play.

  Also in that photo bin I found this big white sign that said “Brakeman” on it. I remember that my dad had it printed and brought it with him when he picked us up from the airport after our honeymoon, like he was a limo driver. He was always doing silly things like that, going out of his way to show that he cared, under the guise of trying to get a laugh. He wasn’t much for affection and he would never dare tell me how he felt, but I always knew.

  I miss my dad and the way he did those silly things that meant so much. But I also miss the way my father-in-law wore his heart on his sleeve, and gave me big bear hugs when he saw me. Even though he’d always tease me about the way I’d stiffen whenever he’d give me one.