[2013] Note to Self- Change the Locks

by Heather Balog

  In true bad mommy fashion, I’m not even listening to him as he babbles away. In my head I am going through my mental to do list. About five minutes ago, I discovered that I lost the post it note on which I had written my actual to do list, causing a mini panic attack. Roger is constantly mocking my post it note dependence, threatening to find me a twelve step program, but quite honestly, I think the post its are the only things that keep me sane.

  All at once, I realize the most important thing that was on my list and my hand flies to my mouth. I forgot to bake the cake. Shit. I will have to run and get a cake from Stop & Shop. I wince as I realize, Beth will love that. For my niece Jillian’s fifth birthday, my sister Beth not only baked the castle shaped cake from scratch (of course), she painstakingly added the castle details with fondant and cake paint. It was a work of art. I was planning to dump the contents of a Betty Crocker mix in a bowl and hopefully get the damn thing to rise evenly on all sides. Beth would have had a good chuckle.

  Beth is perfect. Well, at least, according to my mother and everyone else that knows her, she is perfect. I just know she has a fatal flaw hidden somewhere, and I’ve been fruitlessly searching for it the past thirty something years.

  From the first moment I can remember, Beth was always faultless and I was always the mess. Beth was the graceful dancer, the accomplished pianist and the perky cheerleader. I broke my elbow doing the hokey pokey and my violin teacher asked me never to come back because I made her cat run away. Beth got straight As, graduated valedictorian and went to Princeton.

  I struggled through school with a C average, came close to flunking out from cuts my senior year of high school, and then dropped out of community college after one semester.

  Beth spoke French, travelled abroad and built homes with habitat for humanity, where she met the fabulously wealthy, altruistic and strikingly handsome, pre-med Derek.

  Beth married Derek after a socially acceptable engagement of two years, had a house built to their specifications and spent the next five years as DINKs (dual incomes, no kids) before producing their two point two children, who were also beautiful, well mannered, and of course, perfect.

  Because of my lack of college education and my parents not “being made of money” as my Dad constantly reminded me, I worked part time at Red Lobster and racked up thousands of dollars in parking fines as I parked downtown in New Brunswick every weekend to party with my friends who had not dropped out of college.

  I met Roger when I was dating his derelict step-brother and fell in love. Or so I thought. We eloped to Vegas in a hormone, slash, alcohol induced fury. Did I mention that he was fourteen years older than me and engaged to someone else at the time? Oh yeah. That didn’t go over too well with the folks.

  Mom cried for about three months straight and Daddy just drank Scotch straight from the bottle while mumbling about pedophiles. Roger was a teacher at the time and made a decent living, but it killed them that he was only ten years younger than they were.

  “Why can’t you find a nice boy your own age?” my mother had wailed in between drying her tears. “You’re only twenty. You can go back to college. Remember those cooking classes you liked so much? Why don’t you try them again?”

  “Mom, I can still go back to college. I got married. I’m not dying,” I explained while rolling my eyes.

  “You don’t know anything about him! What if he…” she lowered her voice and her eyes darted suspiciously around the empty room. “What if he has syphilis?”

  “He doesn’t have syphilis, Mom,” I retorted with one giant eye roll as I dragged empty boxes up the stairs.

  “Are you knocked up?” My father cut right to the chase as his fingers twitched. I could tell he was dying for a cigarette. My mother had insisted he quit when my grandfather died of lung cancer and as far as Mom was concerned, he had. We kids knew better. He smoked behind the garage every night when my mother took her hour long bath, and then he doused himself in Old Spice and gargled profusely with Listerine.

  “No, I’m not knocked up,” I had replied defensively. It was just like them to automatically assume I screwed up. They just could not believe I was capable of making an educated decision on my own.

  At first, our marriage was of the whirlwind romance variety that I imagine most marriages resemble at first. We spent the better half of the next week in bed, fucking like bunnies until we ran out of condoms. We ordered Chinese food and pizza and had it delivered as we watched movies naked in bed. We talked nonstop about our dreams of living in a quiet suburban community near my parents and having two kids, a boy and a girl. We never seemed to run out of conversation and laughed at couples that in restaurants and stores who didn’t say a word to each other. Since we had only been together for about two months before making the decision to get married, we had our entire lives to fill each other in on.

  Roger had a college degree and a real adult job which meant he made real money and didn’t have to look through the couch cushions or under the car seats for loose change when he wanted to buy a coffee. Hell, the man actually had a coffee maker in his kitchen! I could have coffee whenever I wanted! This realization on the first day he went back to work after our honeymoon, sent me into a frenzy of tears as I clutched a coffee mug to my chest in his kitchen…our kitchen. I, Amy Phillips, er, Maxwell, had actually done something right in my life. I found the right man to marry. At least, I thought so back then. When I was young and naïve.

  Now, I can hear that man in the kids’ bathroom, gargling with mouthwash. Oh, how I despise that sound. Roger can turn the simple task of gargling into a cringe worthy art form. Along with eating soup, chewing and basically, breathing.

  I scoop Evan back into my arms. Despite his initial protests, I have managed to change him into his adorable little sailor suit. Well, at least my mother thought it was adorable. She bought it for him and made a big deal about how much it had cost and how it was handmade by blind nuns and blah, blah, blah, so I have no choice but to pull it out and force him to wear it. Evan is still on the chunky side and in the sailor suit he kind of looks like the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man of Ghostbusters fame.

  As I change the baby, I can still hear Roger through the walls. He is now arguing with six year old Colton, who is a lover of nature. By that I mean, he is constantly covered in dirt, bugs and all things gross. I have to assume he is a typical six year old boy, but I would not really have much experience in that subject since I am the middle child of three girls. Beth is two years older and Joey is two years younger. Joey is actually named Josephine, but my father, desperate for a son, gave her a boy’s nickname, took her under his wing and handed her a baseball glove. She’s been a tomboy ever since, although my father renounced her with a scowl when she had the nerve to grow boobs.

  In case you haven’t noticed, we are all named after characters in Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. Before my mother was swept off her feet by my debonair father (her words not mine), she was an English lit major. Needless to say, she was extremely well read. She had dreamt of having four girls and naming them after the characters of her favorite book. She probably would have gotten her wish, too, if my father hadn’t put his foot down and slunk off to get a vasectomy. He muttered about “too much estrogen in this fucking house as it is” while he held a bag of frozen peas to his groin for a week.

  Evan and I enter the bathroom just as Colton dashes out like his pants are on fire. He nearly knocks me over in an effort to get out of his father’s reach. Roger is staring after him, swinging a washcloth in the direction of the door.

  “Colt, get your ass back here, now!” Roger shouts. I can hear Colton giggle as he pounds down the steps and out the back door. Roger tosses the washcloth in the sink and shrugs at me, defeated. “He ran away.”

  I snatch the washcloth out of the sink and retort with annoyance, “I see that. You didn’t try very hard.”

  Roger wrinkles up his brow. “Listen, I’m getting too old to be fighting a five year old about washing his fa
ce…”

  “He’s six,” I snap. “Remember? He turned six last week. This is his birthday party, remember?” I cringe as I try not to dwell on this very sore subject.

  For as long as I could remember, I dreamt of the day Colt turned six. The week after Colt turned six, he was going to school full time; first grade. For the first time in almost fourteen years, I was going to get my life back. I was going to be able to fulfill some of the dreams I had abandoned at the side of the road on my trek through motherhood. I was going to take an uninterrupted shower. I was going to finish a cup of coffee before it got cold. I was going to go grocery shopping…alone. I had it planned out from the moment he was born. And then, when he was three and I saw that proverbial light at the end of the tunnel, Roger and I went on a romantic weekend mini vacation to Jamaica. A few weeks later, I found out I was pregnant with Evan. My getaway car crashed into a pole and knocked that damn light out.

  My best friend Laura laughed at me. I guess she was getting me back for all the times I had laughed at her pregnancy woes. Laura is Allie’s friend Kaitlyn’s mom. We met them on Allie’s first day of kindergarten when Laura was pregnant with twins and I was towing around a toddler. Allie and Kaitlyn have been inseparable ever since. And being a baby factory myself, I was not often able to get out and make friends, so Laura and I kind of stuck together over the years, through her subsequent pregnancy with triplets two years later, the same time I was pregnant with Colt. Yup. Poor woman had six kids in seven years. And I thought my life was rough? Laura had it worse. But she had the last laugh. This year every one of her kids are going to school full time and I still have Evan attached to my hip. That bitch was going to get to shower alone.

  I sigh with melancholy and notice Roger is staring at me. “What?” I challenge, offering no explanation for the far-away look in my eyes.

  Roger just shrugs his shoulders, leaving me to stare after him. I stick out my tongue at his back as he retreats down the stairs. I head into my bedroom, wrangling Evan under my arm. Notice Roger did not even offer to take him.

  As I dump Evan on the bed and reach for the handle of the closet door, I catch a glimpse of myself in the full length mirror. Whoever had the brilliant idea to place a mirror on the closet door should be shot. My free hand subconsciously grazes my well-padded abdomen. It used to be flat once upon a time.

  I sigh heavily as I pull on my “fancy” sundress and grimace at how stretched out it is. The material is nearly threadbare and hanging in my chest area from Evan grabbing at it with his hands while I was weaning him off my boobs. I make a mental note to go shopping for some new clothes. Yeah. Maybe when school starts Laura and I can drop the kids off and have a shopping date…

  Then, I remind myself that I just dropped a cool grand on school clothes for the kids and decide against shopping for myself. Yeah, yeah, I know. I’m a martyr.

  Not that Roger would even notice if I bought some new things, nor would he likely care. I am in charge of the bills, so I’m sure I could finagle a new dress or two. But it really isn’t worth the hassle of dragging Evan out to the store with me. Even if I lock him in the dressing room, he always escapes. For a kid who can barely walk, he’s extremely stealthy. Last time I tried to buy a pair of jeans, I was half stuck in them when he crawled underneath the dressing room door. I ran around the store climbing under the racks with jeans around my ankles trying to retrieve him. I’m pretty sure if you google that, there’s a You Tube video of it.

  I pull the sundress over my head and wriggle into it, avoiding all contact with the vicious mirror next to me. Instead, I spy Evan sucking on the remote control that he found tangled in the sheets.

  “No!” I yelp as I reach for it. He has already eaten the 1, 6 and 9 off of our remote in the family room. Thinking I am playing a delightful game with him, he holds the remote out of my reach. I lunge for it as he switches hands. Damn this kid is fast…and smart.

  After I finally retrieve the remote from the two year old (I’m too embarrassed to say how long this actually took), I reach for the hair brush on my dresser. The goal is to create some resemblance to a hairdo before my guests show up, but the alarming squeal from ten year old Lexie tells me that I am too late.

  “Aunt Beth! Mom! Aunt Beth is hereeee!” Her screechy voice floats up the steps, causing me to cringe. Lexie screams all the time. It sounds as if she is acting in a Slasher film 24/7, every statement she utters has an edge of desperation in it.

  “Oh, Mom! Colton jumped off the couch!” “Oh, Mom! Evan has your keys!” “Oh, Mom! The mailman is seven houses away and he will be here soon!” “Oh, Mom! There’s a person walking down the street with a dog!”

  I constantly have to squelch the urge to scream back, “Oh, Lexie, who the fuck cares?” Yes, I know. I’m a horrible mother because I don’t want to hear my daughter babble constantly in a deafening pitch. I know I should be relishing her every word and hanging on to it for dear life. I realize this because Lexie’s sister, thirteen year old Allie, hardly ever speaks to me unless she’s experiencing pain of some sort. Ever since she entered middle school a few years ago, she’s avoided Roger and me like the plague. I shudder to think what is going to happen next week when she starts high school.

  Maybe most mothers are naïve and unaware when their spawn reach high school level, but my husband is actually the principal of the high school. I hear horror stories on a daily basis. Middle school was bad, but damn, I am shaking in my boots thinking about my baby girl entering that zoo on Wednesday.

  “Mommmmmmmm! Come down hereeeeee!” Lexie is causing my ears to reverberate from the unearthly decibels that her voice can reach.

  I sigh with what feels like never ending impatience as I collect the baby, swinging him onto my hip as I head down the stairs.

  Heather Balog is a school nurse by day, supermom and writer by night. She lives in New Jersey with her husband, children, two very needy dogs, and one ancient cat. When she is not writing, she’s thinking about writing, reading, or tending to the needs one of the aforementioned people or pets. Or beating her husband and children at Trivia Crack…

  Novels by Heather Balog:

  The Amy Maxwell Series:

  The 8 Mistakes of Amy Maxwell

  Amy Maxwell & the 7 Deadly Sins

  Amy Maxwell’s 6th Sense

  The Lexie Maxwell Series (Middle Grade Series):

  Lexie Maxwell & One Spooky House

  Lexie Maxwell & Two New Kids

  The Dead of Summer

  All She Ever Wanted

  Letters to My Sister’s Shrink

  Note to Self: Change the Locks

  When the Bough Breaks

  Connecting with Heather Balog:

  Heather blogs at:

  www.thebadmommydiaries.com

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