500 Acres and No Place to Hide

by Susan McCorkindale

  “So, new moms, take heart. You won’t always have to get up for the two a.m. feeding. Eventually your kids will replace the breast with the bag. But just watch where you walk when you wake them. The folks in Alaska still haven’t accepted my apology.

  “Thank you.”

  Dr. Suzy maintains an office on her farm in Fauquier County, Virginia, where, when she’s not busy filling Hefty trash bags with dead groundhogs and making sure the snakes in the kitchen don’t eat the kids’ snacks, she conducts cutting-edge research on such subjects as nails, males, and designer sample sales, jeans, heels, and buy-one, get-one deals. At present she’s developing several new-mom-only medications, all of which are designed to be taken with wine, and one that induces short-term deafness when your kids start to whine. In addition, Dr. Suzy offers weekly bartending workshops at which she imparts the secret to making her famous Morning Margarita, and the trick to drinking it and staying coherent for your parent-teacher conference. (Hint: It involves a tote bag, a covered pitcher, and two cups. Swing some salt, and your kid’s a lock for at least A/B Honor Roll all year.)

  Chapter Fourteen

  COMING AROUND TO COUNTRY

  I warned Cuy not to get too attached to Marnie, our Rubenesque Rock Cornish hen. But did he listen? Not a chance. He said he had plans for that chicken. I said I did, too. He planned to show her. I planned to Parmesan her. As it turns out, neither of our plans panned out. Why? Because Marnie’s true calling was cutlets.98 From her one breast, I got enough for two meals. For the third marine division. From my two breasts I couldn’t nurse a newborn. Trust me on this.

  You would have liked Marnie, with her plump frame, pretty feathers, and piercing black eyes. But I liked her sliced thin, dipped in egg (generously supplied by one of her hen friends), coated in bread crumbs, and browned to perfection in lots and lots of big, bad, artery-clogging, butt-broadening oil, and served with a cucumber-and-tomato salad and a side of broccoli, all of which Hem grew, and which tasted great. Even the grubs.

  Yes, we raised her, butchered her, and consumed her. What should you get from this incredible tale, besides stunned by the fact that I cooked and nobody keeled over, and the sense that Frank Perdue is probably pissed at me? Scared. Really, really scared.

  Why? Because I’m becoming one of those folks who live off the land. Me! The woman who raised takeout to an art form and perfected it by not ordering from the same restaurant twice in six months. Me! The woman who awakened one Christmas morning and said, “Hmm, I’ve got fifteen people coming for dinner today. Should it be Thai? Italian? Chinese? Ooh! Only shrimp lo mein and moo shu pork can assuage that hunger pang. So it’s . . . Chinese!” One phone call and three hundred and fifty dollars later, it was.

  That’s right. Everything I railed against is silently, insidiously seeping into the very fiber of my being. And I’m not the only one.

  Case in point? Casey.

  Tough as it is to believe, the family holdout has begun to succumb to the charms of the country. Not all of them, of course. Just little things, like the fact that his five-hundred-acre backyard means he never has to go to a paintball park ever again, and if he wants to shoot off Roman candles every night, nobody’s gonna complain.

  Time was when Casey would come in from school, work, wherever, and play his guitar. Or watch the History Channel. Or spend insane amounts of money on iTunes.99 Sure, sometimes he’d go outside. But only under penalty of death—or worse, the possibility of my confiscating his iPod. In fact, Casey left the house so infrequently, we referred to him as Mr. Inside, and Cuyler as Mr. Outside.

  These days Mr. Inside is outside before I even know he’s home. He drops his backpack on the back porch, pulls on his helmet, and takes off on one of our four-wheelers. No, “Hey, Mom, ya here?” No, “Yo, Mom, what’s for food?” Nothing. Sometimes, if I’m upstairs making beds or talking on the phone, I have no idea he’s out racing around the property until he returns frozen, if it’s winter, or covered in burrs, if it’s spring or summer. And in the fall? Casey doesn’t come in at all. Or at least not until Hem goes looking for him.

  How awesome is that? I joke, but you have no idea how happy I am to see my son, the kid who collapsed into a snowdrift the first time he ever saw the farm, finally coming around.

  Of course, that doesn’t mean I’m not traumatized by how comfortable I’m becoming with country stuff.

  The other day Hem and I hit Tractor Supply for chicken scratch and something called Laymore, which is, quite literally, chicken food designed to make the hens “lay more.” From the moment the automatic doors slid open it was as if some other woman were shopping with my husband. I don’t know who she was, but she couldn’t get enough of the waterproof rose-colored gardening gloves and plastic orange ponchos with matching pull-on pants. She oohed and aahed at long-sleeved T-shirts dotted with livestock, and thought the snap-front, guy-style shirts in John Deere green were “So great!” She was a pushy bitch, too, dragging me through the shoe department and shaming me into trying on work boots.

  “You want those?” Hem asked, watching me clomp up and down the aisle.

  “God in heaven!” I said, looking down. “How’d they get there?”

  “Very funny. Why don’t you try that on, too?” He nodded in the direction of a black-and-blue-plaid flannel shirt. “It’ll complete the whole lesbian lumberjack thing you’ve got going. Not that there’s—”

  “Anything wrong with that!” We laughed at the same time. “Great. Now I’m taking fashion advice from the Jerry Seinfeld of farming.”

  “So get ’em.” He sighed. “But when you wake up tomorrow and realize you own a pair of boots an Italian war widow wouldn’t wear, don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

  “Stop. You had me at lesbian lumberjack.”

  The long and short of it is, I didn’t buy the boots. But what kind of brain fizz possessed me to put them on?

  I’ve shown our rental houses in heels. Corralled cattle in heels. Fixed fence boards, fought off snakes, and shooed the goats out of the garden in heels. I’ve lifted hay bales, changed the hens’ bedding, and chased a raccoon out of the chicken coop in heels. Platform, chunky, stiletto; I wear’em and I work ’em. I like to think of it as “high yield in high heels.”

  Okay, I totally stole that quote from one of the T-shirts at Tractor Supply, but still.

  The point is that I’m slowly but surely losing myself to this country stuff. It’s fine for the rest of my family, but I liked the old me. This new chick who raises chicks and chows ’em down makes me nervous.

  And the fact that I went back and bought those rose-colored gardening gloves plus a pair in lilac and, shhhh, the black-and-blue-plaid flannel shirt begs just one question: Can work boots be far behind?

  Chapter Fifteen

  THE MOTHER OF ALL REALITIES

  If I knew then what I know now about being a mom, I would’ve had my tubes tied when I was ten.

  Twenty years into marriage, and seventeen years into motherhood, it’s official: I’m one of those women you don’t want at a baby shower. While everyone else is cooing and gooing and telling the MTB100 to “enjoy every moment” because “they grow, and they go,” I want to haul her butt to a bar, get her a virgin colada, and give her a clue.

  Make that a couple of clues.

  I want to start by asking, “What the heck were you thinking, honey?” I won’t give her time to answer, of course. I mean, what can she say? “Everyone else is doing it”? (So I guess if everyone else is jumping off a bridge into a river of reeking Pampers, you’d do that, too?) “I’ve wanted to be a mom my whole life”? (You mean to tell me you spent your youth fantasizing about staying up all night and being barfed on? Might as well be a groupie for a rock band, babe. It’s a whole lot more fun and easier on your figure, too.)

  No, once you’ve reached the baby shower portion of the program, it’s way too late to question the MTB’s motivation. But still, she needs a reality check.

  And who better to give it to
her than the Reality Chick?

  Hello, my name is Susan, and I’m a bitter blond crone with two kids who some days just wants to knock the blocks off everybody who didn’t level with me before I embarked on this motherhood business.

  Like today.

  Today is the first day of summer vacation and already Cuyler has that “there’s nothing to do” look on his handsome face.

  Excuse me? You declined attending a dozen different camps because you said you couldn’t wait to have fun on the farm. So go ahead: Milk a chicken; goose a goat; run with the bull calves. But please stop looking at me like I should be able to pull bunnies out of my butt to entertain you.

  “I’m bored,” he announces while I’m sitting at my desk trying to wrap up the copy for a Web site that’s due by the end of the day.

  “You’re what?” I ask. I cannot possibly have heard him right. It’s nine thirty in the morning. School let out yesterday. At twelve thirty. Not twenty-four hours later my son’s run out of things to do? And he’s telling me? If I’d so much as thought the phrase I’m bored within fifty miles of my mom, I’d still be polishing silver.

  “You’re kidding me, right?” I reply. “Get your fishing pole and head to the pond.” He doesn’t move. “Okay, okay. Grab your backpack and your bug book, and go collect creepy-crawlies.” Still not moving. “All right, better idea: Go shoot BBs at Dad’s collection of empty Budweiser cans.”101

  “Been there, did that,” he responds, sighing and rolling his eyes. “What else have you got?”

  “What else have I got? I’ve got the car keys, my friend, and, while I’m loath to use even a gallon of our overpriced gas to get you out of my sight, in five seconds I’m going to haul your hindquarters to the library and leave you there with a list of books you’ve got to read before you can return to the boring old farm. That’s what I’ve got.”

  I didn’t catch his reply; it was obscured by the pounding sound of his sneakers as he stampeded out the back door.

  Maybe it’s catching; earlier today Casey also left the house in a huff. Perhaps you heard him stomping around, slamming drawers, and generally throwing a tantrum the likes of which I haven’t seen since he was a toddler. It was so bad, I actually stood there wondering how to soothe him. Dig out his “fluffy”? Find his “baba”? Dust off his “binky”?103

  His problem? His new workplace. Yes, today is the first day of my firstborn’s first summer job. A job he doesn’t want, and that he has sulked and moaned over, and cursed us for since we set it up. A job he’s left us hate mail about, and threatened to run away over. Is he cleaning the public toilets in Central Park or picking up litter along the highway? No.102 He’s employed on a farm. In the fresh air. He’s building fences and making hay and helping move cattle. All things he could do here, but he won’t; heaven forbid he should work for his father.

  He’s also earning a whole lot more money than he would slinging burgers at McDonald’s or Burger King or Taco Bell.103 Those places were his first choices for employment. Why? Because they’re filled with young people and he wants nothing more than to be one of the gang.

  And that, of course, is the crux of the problem.

  Every now and then the rumor goes ’round that there are Crips and Bloods making milk shakes and working the cash registers at the local fast-food restaurants. And why not? I’m sure Crips and Bloods have bills to pay, too.

  But if that rumor turns out to be just the teensiest bit true, my kid can’t work there. Why? Because in addition to being sweet and funny and easily as good a dancer as any of those young Disney movie stars, my big guy is also the very definition of gullible: an easy mark who has a heck of a time telling the good kids from the bad seeds. All he wants is to make friends. And that’s very, very hard to do when you’re autistic.

  I’m no expert on autism, but I know how it’s affected my kid. To be clear, Casey is high-functioning autistic, so he’s luckier than most. But he still has a terrible time reading social situations. Body language is almost totally lost on him. And he literally cannot take a hint. But what’s worse is that he assumes everyone, whether they’re nice to him or not, is his friend.

  Some days he’s better than others. But most of the time he gravitates toward anyone who’ll give him the time of day. So we can’t just stick him someplace, cross our fingers, and hope he’ll be okay. We have to be involved and make sure of it.

  And no teenager, autistic or not, takes kindly to that.

  Like I said, there are days, weeks, months, even entire quarters when I really want to bop everybody who didn’t level with me about motherhood. Who didn’t tell me that no matter what I did to make my kids’ lives easier, happier, safer, more loving, and more fun, they were going to find fault with it. Who didn’t try to make me see for even a second that the road to hell is paved with good intentions and untied fallopian tubes.

  Kidding, of course. I love my sons. But that doesn’t mean they’re not making me nuts.

  Right this instant, Casey—you know, the kid with the well-paying job during an economic downturn—is texting me from a cornfield: “How could u do this to me mom?” and “Soooo hot” and my absolute favorite, “Please, somebody save me!” And my little guy? He keeps popping in to pout and tell me—say it with me now, people—“There’s nothing to do!” I ask you: How can there be nothing to do? The kid’s got five hundred acres to play on. My brothers and I had a patch the size of a place mat.

  Ah, yes. We’re one day into a ten-week break and already both my babies are miserable. That must be some kind of record. From zero to suicidal in under a single summer day! It takes most kids at least forty-eight hours to get that glum. Which makes me wonder if there isn’t something really special about my parenting style. I mean, maybe I should give classes and coach other moms. Then I’ll never have to shop for a baby shower present again. I can simply give gift certificates to my seminars.

  Or maybe I’ll just shut the hell up and hit babyGap like everybody else. Ignorance, after all, is bliss. And nothing says bliss like a teeny, weeny leather bomber jacket, pants, and matching booties.

  Of course, it also screams, Bitch to change the baby in! But nobody asked me, now, did they?

  Chapter Sixteen

  THERE OUGHTA BE A PILL

  Remember Sea-Monkeys? They came in a packet and you put them in water and, supposedly, they came alive.

  I was never really sure whether they did or not, because it seemed to take an awfully long time. I mean days and days of nothing happening and my mom saying, “Susan, throw that stinky stuff down the drain!” And then one day, when I was at a Girl Scout meeting pretending to give a Thin Mint about achieving a sash full of cooking, sewing, and babysitting badges, aka the original T.G.I. Friday’s “flair,” she seized her chance to chuck the whole thing in the toilet. I came home, spied the carnage, and thought, holy cannoli, we’re going to hell.

  I was certain we’d committed murder and, being a nice Irish-Italian Catholic kid, equally certain I was going to burn for all eternity with Hitler. And Stalin. And Mussolini.

  Not to mention my mom.

  “Susan, get your hair off your face. Benito, don’t you think she looks better with her hair off her face? See, Susan? Even Mr. Mussolini agrees.”

  Just the thought of being trapped for the rest of time with Joanie jawing about my hair with the likes of killers, rapists, and whoever gave The Blob the green light was enough to send me straight to confession. The priest cleared me, then gave me two Hail Marys and one solid piece of advice: Sea-Monkeys are for chumps. But kill a Chia Pet, missy, and you’ll never get a direct flight to the pearly gates.

  All these years later, I still think of the Sea-Monkeys. The guilt’s gone but I’m intrigued by the idea of a pet in a pill. Why not, right? We have pills for pain. Pills for depression. Pills that prevent my colon from seizing like somebody filled it with cement. Love those pills, and Ativan is awesome, too.

  So why not pills that can do really cool things?

 
; Here at Dr. Suzy’s Fantasy Pharmaceuticals, the Glaxo-SmithKline /Forest Labs/Merck–like conglomerate I have in my head, we’ve got several revolutionary pills in the pipeline.

  For starters, there’s Busy Bee. Designed for kids (like mine) whose favorite phrase is “I’m bored!” and parents (like me) who are sick of buying duct tape and ducking those nosy buddies from Family Services, Busy Bee banishes the “there’s nothing to do!” blues in seconds. Simply sprinkle a touch on your little sprite’s breakfast and say, “See ya at dinner, sweetie!” Dozens of ideas fill your kid’s head and he (or she) is off and running. Building a tree fort, bathing a hen, even, believe it or not, reading a book. In an instant, your kid stops moaning and groaning and you don’t need duct tape. Or an attorney. Oh, yeah. Busy Bee’s gonna be big.

  Next up there’s Insta-Friend. We developed this one for my sweet firstborn and the millions of socially awkward kids just like him. If you met my boy, you’d love him, which would immediately identify you as an adult, because kids his own age would rather have their iPads nailed to their foreheads than be forced to sit with him at lunch. I’d cry about it, but when I do I can’t see, because the protein clouds my contacts.104

  Insta-Friend’s great because it works for kids of all ages. And there’s no worry if your child can’t swallow a pill. Why? Because you take it for him! Simply pop it and poof, the perfect friend appears. Your child likes to ride his ATV all over creation? What a coincidence; so does Insta-Friend! Your little one’s most comfortable coloring? Insta-Friend’s packing a carton of Crayolas! And there’s a free added bonus: Every Insta-Friend comes with a box of Kleenex, because you’re going to cry when you see how happy your kid is.

  And speaking of kids, if yours think bathing is something that should be done once a quarter whether they need it or not, you’ll want to consider Clean Freak. Created with my dirt-loving duo in mind, Clean Freak dissolves instantly in junior’s fruit juice, and works immediately upon consumption.