The furious mind of a serial mom

I by chance found a blog that I started in February. It goes like this:

This years resolution!

I will not have more babies. (I have four)
I will sell my movie script.
I will buy a house.
I will learn to make perfect profiteroles.
I will loose 10 pounds. (on a strict diet of profiteroles)
I will turn 40.

So far nothing has come to fruition apart from the fact that I have not become pregnant this year and the fact that I lost 10 pounds, but that was purely coincidental. Or possibly due to the strict diet of wine and cigarettes and juicing and and my new found love of Auyrvedics.

So, no, this is not going to be a diet blog and my obese readers will have to turn to other media outlets for literary liposuction. Not that I have any readers as of yet. And maybe never! This summer has been spent in utter solitude. Not on a remote island meditating, reading Eat, Prey, Love, but within the walls of my home along with my three out of four children. And by solitude I would like to state that conversing with a one year old boy and a two year old girl all day is far from inspiring even though most parents would not confess to that even under water board pressure.

And being an adult one feels quite alone even if “There’s nothing like the smell of diapers in the morning!” I also have a eight year old girl in the house who luckily has found refuge from her mad mother in the dreadful Twilight series and spends most of her time filing her fangs in her upstairs bedroom.

My mornings usually start by me staring at the ceiling thinking to my self: ” I’t can’t be morning yet” Who says?”

I have the privilege of waking up with little people in my bed.(Not dwarfs even if they like to be referred to as little people) but my children and a cat named Thriller.

The name explains it self. The “guy” just died and we just got the kitten. I got the little bastard through an ad on craigslist after I, a mother of four, had been considered unfit to keep a cat by the Pet Humane Society personnel. A stark raving mad employee informed me that they would have to see each of my four children personally, which I refused to do, as I think my one year old boy will have nothing to do with the cats upbringing and I think it would be harming for him to enter the grounds of PHS. After the PHS rejection I hastily went for craigslist , a place where you can even at times buy children and opted for a cheap Persian kitty. A Persian for 250 bucks seemed like a deal!

It was weeks late when I had to take the kitty to the vet and pay 375 bucks for ex-rays and medicine that I discovered the awful truth. It had crossed my mind that he did not have the characteristic features of Mickey Rourke, but as I visited the sellers home, a tacky humongous villa with over-sized palm trees I had no time to miss. The eight year old, eighth birthday was coming up so I candidly came into the house, saw the cat, tried to act pet humanly, bought it and left.

It turned out that the cat was in fact a domestic long hair, a fancy name for a regular hairy house cat. Thus a fraud!  I called the seller, who truthfully is Persian and told him kindly but firmly that  Iwould forgive him his lying tics if he agreed to pay me back, lets say 170 bucks. And he did with out a stutter. The bloody criminal.

I did sell a play though, I must say…wrote the first two acts in a weekend, well received, but the third act is stuck in my throat…why three acts? Who cares about the Greeks?

Kitchen makeover courtesy of Jackson Pollock

It was not without remorse that my husband threw out the Spaghetti that he cooked three days ago. I asked gently as I shoved it to him on  the kitchen counter: “Any reason to hold on to this any longer?”

“No” He said sadly. Not that he ever touches leftovers. I actually think he would rather starve to death than eat leftovers. He is the kind of person that needs to open a new pack of butter every time he butters a toast.  I guess the open ones, look kind of second hand, even violated, to him!

It’s quite remarkable that when he cooks, which is relatively seldom, I can remember one occasion in the last twelve months, that being three days ago, he makes a great fuss about it.

Not only does he inform us, his family, kind of announcement style like he is addressing a crowd, that he is going to cook, he also demands audience while he’s at it. And he is not exactly humble about it.

“Dad is going to make the best dinner you have ever had” “This is not going to be any restaurant shit, this is real food for real people!” ” Come here kids, and see how daddy cooks the best Spaghetti in the world”

I was fortunate enough to have caught the flu of the little transmitters, so I stayed in bed on the top floor, reading a brilliant Swedish thriller “Men that hate women”.  Even though my mind was walking the streets of Stockholm, I could not, but hear the rantings and self praise of Top Chef in the kitchen below. My teenage daughter came upstairs and sat her self on the bed giggling.

“Mom, it’s so funny how dad, makes such a big deal out of it when he cooks!”

I replied. ” I know dear, it is pathetic really, but let’s just grin and bare with it”

“Mom, I mean, you cook every day, but when he cooks he talks about it like it’s some kind of great achievement?”

“It is!”

“Well, he told me to tell you to come down, dinner is ready”

I thought about dressing up for the occasion. A skirt and a blouse, perhaps? But decided to stick with patient look as I did not want to risque that the family thought I was recovering. I had 200 pages to go, I needed a least one more day in solitary confinement to finish it. I walked down with a slight limp to emphasize my suffering and entered the kitchen. All four children were seated, quiet as mice, which is unusual, or more like unheard of, and the table was set. To please my husband I  added a lilt of anticipation to my tone of voice, which is not unlike the lilt of Hawaiian music and said: “This smells wonderful” To which he replied, sighing :”I know”. There was a strange silence. Then I dared to ask:

“Is dinner ready?”.

My husband smiled and said: ” I just put the Spaghetti in the water, it won’t be long now!”

I dipped my fingers into the boiling water (fingers of steel) to pick some up to try. It was still hard as rock. I noticed drizzles of spaghetti sauce all over the stove and nearby walls and cabinets. The kitchen looked like Jackson Pollock had paid us a visit. Bless his soul.

“This is not nearly ready!” I was really pissed that I had been called down to the kitchen far to early.

“Don’t you tell me anything about that, I know exactly how to cook the perfect Spaghetti” Why don’t you just take a seat and let me finish this?”

His mission was accomplished. We were all seated at the dinner table, watching him cook the Spaghetti to perfection. How boring! Compared to this, watching golf on TV is like joining a Circus with a handsome gypsy.

He gave each and one of us enormous portions. The kind that would suit a full grown man who’d been working in a mine, twelve hours straight.

If anything kills my appetite, it is overfilled plates. Not to mention the interrogation that followed. He sat him self, table centre and asked sternly again and again: “Isn’t this good?” Don’t you like daddy’s dinner?” To which we all replied, or those of us who talk : “Yes, very good”. It was. I mean nothing spectacular, but truly a decent meal.

The one and two year old did not do a good job of getting this down. The two year old tried to suck up the spaghetti with her nose and when that failed she tried to turn a strand of spaghetti into a bracelet. Very becoming. Her little brother an accomplice of Mr. Pollock, threw bits of meat on the floor and artistically expressed himself by smearing meat sauce over his face and hair. Also very fetching.

Husband was surprised that they didn’t seem to like to eat the food, after all this was the world’s best Spaghetti! And then he said to me: “We really need to figure out what to feed them?” Like he was raising some weird, newly discovered species.

I tried not to loose my cool,  just nodded and tried to look concerned. After all it could not be that they just didn’t like his cooking. There was obviously something wrong with the children. Seriously wrong.

Ménage à trois on Skid row.

It is surprising how the Internet works. In my last blog I mentioned Jennifer Aniston,(I am doing so again for obvious reasons), and found out that over 100 people unwillingly read my blog looking for juicy gossip on their favorite celebrity. And few of them even signed up as my readers, so the scoop of the day is, mention someone famous in your blog and it will attract accidental traffic and even readers.

The wee ones are still suffering flu and look out of the window every morning, like prisoners of war and ask me, consistently: ” Go out”? Park? and I keep saying :” No, tomorrow, tomorrow!”

Kids have no concept of time, so it is so hard to explain things to them that are  not in the present, they have no capacity for the future, or the past for that matter, well, it might just be my family’s DNA. I have very selective memory for things that happened in the past, I don’t miss anything and I shamelessly don’t regret anything. I always find it liberating to loose things and I just hope that someone finds use for the stuff that I have lost in the past. Especially when I loose something of material value.

“Tomorrow” is now the favorite word of the two year old. 

:”Do you wanna cookie?” and she answers “Tomorrow!” Very advanced.

: “Shall we watch, Barney the purple perverted dinosaur?” and she answers somewhat mysteriously and puts one finger up in the air : ” Tomorrow!”

I think she is grasping the concept of delay, of something that is quite not here yet. The story of my life.  I find myself consistently waiting for something that is quite not there yet!

But waking up this morning was different, it was all there, and so real, I did not have to wait!  The moths were here!  I have seen a couple of them flying around, but I have been ignoring them out of fear,  like I feared the title of Erica Young’s, book, “Fear of Flying”, in my mother´s library. As a kid I thought this book was intended for hysterical frequent flyers who suffered sick-bag-o-phobia. I knew my mom didn’t like to fly, as she would sedate her self on Bloody Mary’s before entering aircrafts, and somewhat exit them like she had unknowingly been brought to foreign soil.

My mom also had a habit of throwing tantrums before she would clean the house, a trait that I have cherished and is of great use. It is very simple and anyone can do it. The method is to scare the entire family.  To cry over spilled milk, literally, dirty laundry, whatever you can think of and manipulate your family members to help you, or else risk they will have to put you in to a mental institution.

My sudden outburst this morning, when I realized that something had to be done about the moth infested kitchen cabinets, was quite a show stopper. When the older girls were out the door, running to school like refugees, from the cries of their mad mother, husband arrived like Mad Max, shaking his head, and with out a word, pulled up his sleeves, Clorox in hand, and started cleaning the pantry.

The one year old walked around with a mob in one hand, to please mommy and the two year old kept asking: ” Are you alright, mom?” To which I replied: “No!” 

She then looked at me sternly and said loudly: “Tomorrow…(and even louder) Tomorrow, mom!” And I responded: ” Yes, tomorrow!” and threw her a cloth and told her to clean her toys. Which she did!

This was a most romantic morning, husband and I, swearing loudly, attacked the kitchen cabinets and it’s inhabitants with water, soap, clorox,old toothbrushes and what not. I am not sure PETA would have agreed with our methods. We threw everything out of  the cabinets, because all was infested with pantry tenants.

How can moths enter a closed bag of rice? An unopened box of Oreo’s?  This is a mystery. These were no regular moths, these were Houdini moths!  I even found, strangely, an unopened CD in one of the cabinets, one of my favorites that I keep buying and loosing.  Academy of St. Martin in the Fields  playing Mozart’s 24th, 25th, and 26th Symphony conducted by Sir Neville Marriner. A little moth rascal had made its way under the plastic! A musical moth! And CD’s are impossible to brake into!

Talking about packaging, what’s up with the way dolls are packaged? I bought the two year old a nurse doll, as she is an aspiring health care professional and keeps putting band-aid on everything she finds. The doll was like a victim of some weird BDSM serial killer. A a wire snare a round her neck, and tightly fastened on hands, waist and feet to a piece of cardboard! Quite a sickening sight!

When the kitchen looked like nobody had ever entered it, I took husband out for a ride. We went to IKEA, where I bought new flatware, new glasses(all plastic) as a big portion of this family is not stable enough to conduct themselves around stemware. Then I begged to go to the Salvation Army. Begged! My wish was granted on the condition that I would go with him to a Golf store, first.

Going to Golf stores is a sacrifice for me, because I find nothing more exhausting than watching my husband try out the different irons and listen to him explain their qualities. My husband completely ignores the fact that I have no interest in Golf. But I have found a way of dealing with that. When we started dating, some 100 years ago, I would  try to look  interested.  I even watched golf on TV with him and pretend it was fun! Can you imagine! I never watch Golf on TV nowadays. We are married.  But now I have a way of dealing with trips to the Golf store by nodding my head in agreement, when I think it’s appropriate and he seems to be happy with that.

In the golf store a huge male mannequin caught my attention, at least eight feet tall and so muscular that it was quite hilarious. The biceps were  the size of my waist and it’s buttocks were like two humongous genetically altered watermelons, seedless of course. I asked a wimpish male staff member, if he didn’t feel intimidated or threatened by the size of the mannequin.  I wanted to show him my support.  He was quick to answer but somewhat densely: ” He’s not THAT big!” Right!  If my husband had not, at this point in time already finished trying all the clubs in the store, I would have asked to speak to the supervisor. Males have image issues too. People tend to forget that!

At last we were on our way to the Salvation Army. The Salvation Army is in the middle of my city’s Skid row, a truly appropriate setting where Heaven and Hell meet. I love going there scouting for junk, and have found incredible things there. Today was my lucky day. They had three new pianos in. One was already taken as an elderly drunkard sat snoring on the keyboard, contemplating how to fit it into a shopping cart, so I didn’t dare to even look at it further.

But in the middle of the “show room” was a beautiful black upright piano, a 1902 Decker and Sons, so rugged on the outside but, oh, so beautiful! It looked like an persistent old bar singer, that just won’t stop performing. I touched the keyboard and played “Mary had a little lamb” from my extended repertoire , and it sounded wonderfully. So smooth and charming and miraculously in tune. I played every note to see if it was intact and it responded beautifully. The sustain pedal was there, but the other two were lying on top of the piano. Well, that can be fixed.

I shouted my husbands name.  I love that you can shout in the Salvation Army and nobody thinks it’s strange, and shouted again, very  resonantly. In the distance, I could see, that a pair of Gary Glitter boots had absorbed my husbands attention.  He is a closet Glam Rocker. I shouted once more, so effectively that the old drunkard sitting by the already taken piano, moved his head down an octave. 

Finally my husband came along and I forced him to try the instrument. He played, and played and played, and was surprised how wonderfully it sounded. An old teary eyed hooker walked by and applauded him. The price tag was equally wonderful. $300. We talked about how we would restore it, clean up the wood, strings etc. This was a mesmerizing moment. We were both in love. This was a  passionate ménage á trois, in the making.

We are bringing it home on Friday. An endearing toothless shop assistant came to us and explained that we should not buy it until Friday because on Fridays, he whispered, everything goes half-price!  Even better. 150 bucks for a Decker and Sons 1902 upright piano with an experienced look and heart of gold. No question!