Why do I snap at the kids so much? Why can’t I seem to cook a decent meal without turning meat into shoe leather? Why do I watch so much TV at night? Why couldn’t I ever get rid of this paunch? Why didn’t I moisturize when I was younger? Why do I always forget to bring my coupons to the commissary? Why? Why? Why?!
By the time Francis came home from work, I was slumped in a kitchen chair, staring into a cup of coffee gone cold.
I’d hit bottom.
“Happy birthday, Honey!” he offered with a grin. I looked up weakly, and said, “I think I’m having some kind of mid-life crisis … can you sit down and listen to me for a sec?” For the next twenty minutes, Francis sat calmly in his cammies at our kitchen table, permitting me to tell him all about the hot flash and the resulting epiphany revealing the harsh truth: I had never really amounted to much and it was definitely too late to do anything about it.
Francis waited until the end of my rant, then simply got up and poured us each a glass of wine. I wondered whether he had heard anything I’d just said. Then, holding his glass up to toast mine, he delivered the birthday joke that had become his annual tradition: “Honey, you might have turned forty-eight today, but you’re built like you’re forty-seven!”
I couldn’t help but laugh like I always do, and in that instant, my hot flash turned into a flash flood of gratitude for the ups and downs of life, the simplicity of love, and the boundless support of my little family.
SEASON 4 EPISODE 8
THE SILENT TREATMENT
I’d always been the kind of person who had to fill awkward silences. Someone who couldn’t tell a story without all the excruciating details, who chatted endlessly at social gatherings, then woke up the next morning, slapped my forehead and said, “Me and my big mouth.”
I never understood why I was that way. If every human personality trait from narcissism to the Oedipus complex has its roots in childhood, I surmised that was when it all started.
My father, William Durwood Smith, Jr., who was shipped off to Fork Union Military Academy at the tender age of ten, was determined to be a more hands-on parent than his own had been. If my brother or I disobeyed our father, he simply selected from a variety of corporal punishments that were considered perfectly appropriate, if not advisable. No one would have batted a powder-blue frosted eyelid back then if a parent gave his kid a whack on the tush for saying she didn’t walk the dog because she was in the middle of a particularly riveting episode of Diff’rent Strokes, or if she called her brother a “ginormous butt-face” while in line at Mister Donut.
My dad also had a repertoire of noncorporal punishments, such as making us sit at the dinner table until every last bite of those lima beans was gone, being grounded for coming home twenty minutes after Mom rang the bell, and having to confess to the neighbor that I dug for worms in her front lawn.
But there was one form of punishment I considered worse than a lashing with Durwood’s infamous three-inch white vinyl belt.
It was the dreaded Silent Treatment.
When my father would refuse to acknowledge my presence for a period of hours or days, I had time to ponder the offense for which I was being punished, but also I had plenty of time to feel regret for the thirty-seven other things I’d screwed up in the past. It was sheer agony.
I would have volunteered to walk barefoot over a bed of bumblebees, run through a thicket of thorn bushes, or take a carrot peeler to my shins if only my father would just speak to me again.
Thus, when I became an adult, I couldn’t stand silence.
So when Francis and I stopped speaking to each other right before a twelve-hour drive home from our family vacation, I found it particularly difficult. We had both had it. He’d had it with my extended family with whom we’d just spent two weeks in a tiny beach cottage, and I’d had it with him for having had it with my family.
We went to bed angry the night before, backs to each other, vowing See how he/she likes this—I’m not going to say a word! At six the next morning, we hit the road in silence. The kids, oblivious to our temporary marital discord, slept soundly.
All across North Carolina, I sat arms crossed, staring bitterly out the passenger’s side window. In Virginia, I kept quiet, comforting myself with a small neck pillow. In Maryland, I dozed off. In Delaware, I couldn’t specifically recall why we stopped talking to each other in the first place. By the time we got to New Jersey, I just wanted us to be normal again.
“Are we going to get something to eat?” I croaked, my vocal cords showing signs of atrophy after six hours of silence. “Yeah, in just a few minutes,” Francis said, his soft tone indicating he wanted normalcy too.
After hoagies off the Garden State Parkway, we climbed back into our luggage-laden minivan for the remainder of our trip home. In New York, we chatted about the news. In Connecticut, we were quiet again, only because we were tired.
Finally home in Rhode Island, it was clear that our Silent Treatment had been a blessing rather than a punishment. In the absence of words, we had time to regret. And to miss each other.
Sometimes, silence is golden.
SEASON 4 EPISODE 9
FRESHMAN ORIENTATION AND OTHER ALIEN MIND TRICKS
Our son, Hayden, was abducted by aliens. Strange creatures from a far-off land lured him to their institution, garbed him in their apparel, and claimed him as their own.
To make matters worse, he went with them willingly.
Francis and I agreed, through a complex combination of loans, financial aid, the GI Bill, and possibly human sacrifice, to pay these aliens sixty-four thousand dollars a year to keep him.
No, we hadn’t fallen prey to a Vulcan mind-meld. The Galactic Empire had not injected us with the RNA brainwashing virus. We had not been hypnotized by Sleestaks from Land of the Lost. We merely took Hayden to his college orientation.
When we arrived, they immediately separated us from Hayden, whisking him off with the other starry-eyed newcomers to “start a memorable and important time in their academic and professional journeys.” We knew they really intended to erase our son’s memory. Eighteen years of hard work down the drain.
In order to placate the parents, they pumped us full of coffee, plied us with shiny new pens, and herded us around to “informative sessions” such as “Letting Go” and “Money Matters” in a suspiciously spaceship-shaped building they referred to as “EMPAC”—The Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center.
While the parents were locked in the EMPAC mothership with the institution’s leaders, our children were off playing ice breaker games with legions of bubbly upperclassmen dressed in matching college t-shirts and well-worn sneakers. The incoming freshmen were encouraged to become independent, to make all decisions without involving their parents, other than to send them the bills.
The institution’s leaders tried to allay our fears, characterizing the terrifying experience of handing over our flesh and blood to complete strangers as a normal rite of passage. They told us not to be concerned, because our children would have all sorts of advisors to guide them. There would be Student Orientation Advisors, Resident Advisors, Academic Advisors, Graduate Assistants, Learning Assistants, and Peer Tutors. But all we were thinking was, “Yeah, but who’s going to tell him to wear his retainer?”
They said our kids would be well-nourished with a variety of meal plans ranging from “unlimited access” otherwise known as the “fast-track-to-morbid-obesity” plan, to the “custom plan” commonly referred to as the “go-broke-on-take-out-after-you-expend-your-dining-hall-allotment” plan.
Rest assured, they told us, the students would never go hungry thanks to an impossibly confusing supplemental system of “flex dollars” and “student advantage dollars” which could be used to buy an endless array of well-balanced meals (READ: pizza, chocolate milk, and potato chips) all over campus twenty-four seven.
They paraded a series of experts from the health clinic and campus security before us, telling us that without our adult children�
�s express consents, we were not permitted to know if they got arrested or pregnant. And lastly, we were informed we had no right to access our children’s grades, despite the fact we had to take second mortgages on our homes to pay the tuition.
Finally, we were released into the blinding sunlight to find our newly-indoctrinated children milling about the quad. In order to squeeze every last dollar from our increasingly shallow pockets, we were funneled through the campus bookstore, where we bought Hayden a lanyard with a hook large enough to hold his student ID, military ID, room key, bike lock key, asthma inhaler, a bottle of hand sanitizer, a stick of lip balm, a thumb drive, and—most importantly—a framed eight-by-ten photograph of me, his mother.
Six short weeks later, we surrendered Hayden to this alien academic institution, hoping he would heed the words of a well-known extraterrestrial and always remember to phone home.
SEASON 4 EPISODE 10
TEEN TERMS
One night Francis and I were in the family room, mesmerized by a shameless reality show, when suddenly there was a rumbling down the staircase.
“Mom! Dad! Mom! Dad! Mom! Dad!” Anna, sputtered, while jumping up and down in front of us.
“What is it, Anna?!” I shouted, half expecting her hair to be on fire.
“He asked me to hang out! He asked me to hang out! He asked me to hang out!” Anna yelled while fist-pumping into the air.
“Who asked you to, to … to hang out, and what do you mean, ‘hang out’?”
Still surging with pent-up excitement, Anna grabbed the arm of the couch, and repeatedly kicked both feet behind her. “Matt! Matt! Matt asked me to hang out!” she answered between donkey kicks.
We already knew all about Matt. In fact, every day for the last few months, we’d been hearing Anna talk about this boy: how cute he was, how he would come to the art room to talk to her after school, how great the article was that he wrote for the school newspaper, how he was named Athlete of the Week, how he danced with her at the holiday ball, how he kissed her in the theater costume closet, yada, yada, yada.
“Oh,” Francis chimed in, “you mean he finally asked you out on a real date?”
Oh, jeez. I wish he hadn’t said that. For the next twenty minutes, Anna rolled her eyes and sighed while trying to explain why he was not her boyfriend and they were certainly not going on a date. “We’re just hanging out!” Anna said with one last spasmodic flail of arms and legs, before running off to get dolled up to meet Matt.
Apparently, teen romance as we knew it had changed completely. Unbeknownst to us, the terms “boyfriend” and “girlfriend” were used only when two teenagers were very “serious.” Until then, they were to be referred to as “talking.” When one talking teen asked his corresponding talking teen to go out with him to a restaurant or movie, this was most definitely not a date. This was called “hanging out.”
But “hanging out” was not to be confused with “hooking up,” which, our kids assured us, did not mean what it did back in the eighties. Regardless, it likely included acts in which our teenage daughter should not engage unless she wanted to be grounded for life.
We also learned that parents were to refrain from referring to kissing as “making out,” “mashing,” “frenching,” or “necking,” which modern teenagers considered as antiquated as butterfly clips and Beanie Babies.
Anna eventually reappeared in the family room, all glossed up and ready to go on her non-date with her non-boyfriend. Francis drove her to the base gate and got out of the car to introduce himself to Matt. After shaking hands, Francis looked the boy directly in the eye for a moment, communicating without the need for words: Regardless of what terms you’re using these days, we’ve all been there, and we know exactly what you’re up to.
SEASON 4 EPISODE 11
TEARS ON MY TOOTHBRUSH
It didn’t hit me until I saw the smear of toothpaste on the sink that morning.
I’d heard the stories before. I cried for an hour in the bathtub … I couldn’t get out of bed for a week … I was a snotty, puffy-eyed mess … I didn’t think I’d make it to Thanksgiving.
I listened with genuine compassion to fellow moms, but I couldn’t personally relate. Those things would never happen to me.
Then, we dropped Hayden off at college.
“He’s only going to be three hours away,” I told a friend. “And besides, a little separation will be good for all of us. I won’t be one of those people who blubbers like a baby.”
“Oh, you will,” my friend warned. “Trust me.”
We helped him set up his dorm room with plastic bins, granola bars, power strips, extra sticks of deodorant, clip on lamps, new sheets that won’t be washed this semester, and cheapo particle board shelving that threatened to buckle like a ramen noodle under the weight of the tiny microwave.
Dry-eyed as planned, I kissed his prickly cheek goodbye at four o’clock, so he could go to his first hall meeting and we could wolf down free hors d’oeuvres at the parent reception. After more than our share of chicken bites and veggies drenched in ranch, Francis and I spent a couple of carefree days exploring the nearby lakes of Upstate New York.
I awoke early the first morning back home, after getting home late the night before. I could’ve used another twenty minutes of sleep, but Francis needed a ride to the airport for a work trip, so I shuffled my way to our bathroom down the hall.
I looked bleary-eyed into the bathroom mirror at my pillow-crimped bangs and groped for my toothbrush. Glancing down, I saw Francis’s toothbrush. And mine. But where Hayden’s toothbrush had been, there was only a smear.
A smear that, up until that point, had always irritated me. Why do men refuse to thoroughly rinse the slobbery toothpaste out of their toothbrushes? Don’t they care that someone has to continuously clean the dried-up smears off the sink?
But this time, I wasn’t annoyed. I stared at the smear, and it hit me.
He’s gone.
I felt a hot sting behind my eyes and a flush in my cheeks. In a stupor, I left the bathroom and found myself at the open door of Hayden’s room.
How sweet … his unmade bed! I gulped and pulled a tissue from a box on his nightstand. Oh, and that odor of teenage boy sweat. I breathed in deeply. He never did take that bowl down to the kitchen like I asked. I smiled at the three-day-old tomato-sauce-enameled dish and let a tear tumble down my cheek.
I explored Hayden’s abandoned room, noting every void in the dust where books, alarm clocks, and speakers used to be. I inventoried the vestiges—gum wrappers, crumbs, pennies, and tiny tumbleweeds of God-knows-what. All the things that had once been bones of contention were now cherished relics of the time—now past—when Hayden lived under the same roof with us.
And then, I gave in to the parental prerogative I had denied myself based upon logic and reason, and I bawled like a baby.
Is it Thanksgiving yet?
SEASON 4 EPISODE 12
PUPPY PERSONALITY DISORDER
Once upon a time, my life was normal. I showered regularly. I ran errands. I cooked and cleaned. I watched TV. I slept in a bed.
Until one day, Francis and I drove from our home in Rhode Island to a cranberry farm in Massachusetts and picked up a wriggling ball of fur that changed everything.
We felt a twinge of guilt taking an eight-week-old Labrador retriever away from his littermates, with whom he had spent his days snuggling and tussling. But ever since the death a few months earlier of our beloved Dinghy, the dog who saw us through deployments, military moves, and an overseas tour, we knew our family needed another dog. So we wrapped the puppy in a blanket and nuzzled him all the way home, happily ignorant of the chaos about to ensue.
We named him Moby, a tribute to our tour of duty in nautical New England. However, other apt titles occurred to us that week, as we learned the multiple facets of our new puppy’s complex personality.
Puddle Maker christened every rug in our house, and we considering buying stock in puppy training pads. Kibble Gob
bler inhaled scoops of puppy food as if he were a starving prisoner, usually with one paw plopping in his water dish. Spawn of Cujo had an active period after meals, involving relentless ankle biting, broom chasing, and upholstery shredding. During this time, we couldn’t approach Staple Gun for fear that what might seem like a sweet lick on the nose would turn out to be a needle-teeth lancing of the sensitive area just inside our nostrils.
Sweater Snagger sunk his fishhook nails into us when we carried him down the porch steps for potty time. Although he seemed to know what was expected of him, Little Con Artist enjoyed delaying the potty process long enough that we were forced to stand out in the cold while he innocently played in the mud.
After following me around the house biting my shoes, Limp Noodle insisted on taking a nap while laying over my feet. I sat motionless so as to not incite further mayhem, while the housework didn’t get done, food didn’t get cooked, and I didn’t shower. This was generally the time our base neighbors came by to see the newest member of our family. They all remarked how calm Little Faker was and asked me why I looked so bedraggled.
After the fourth night sleeping on the floor beside the dog crate, I needed a break from the Puppet Master. Just like the dog training book instructed, I gave him a special treat and put him in the playpen we’d assembled in the kitchen. I praised him, closed the gate, and left to drive the girls to school.
Fifteen minutes later, my neighbor called. “What are you doing to that poor dog?!” he cried, explaining that he could hear incessant yelping through the walls of our shared duplex.
I rushed home to find that Mr. Passive Aggressive “made a deposit” in his playpen in protest over being left alone. Canine Picasso also smeared it all over the floor, rug, dog bed, gate, toys, and himself. I spent the rest of the morning scrubbing and disinfecting, and although everything looked clean, we considered deworming the children, just in case.
The Meat and Potatoes of Life Page 13
