POSTERITY FOR RENT

When I pass to what I hope will be a heaven where chocolate flows in all the rivers and calories don’t exist, I want my family to laugh together as they remember my quirky ways and cry as they recognize that I am irreplaceable. Of course, it will take something drastic, like me dying before they realize how fabulous and indispensable I really am.

As we visited together at the family homestead after a recent funeral, I looked around at my brother’s, my sister and my cousins families and their posterity and realized that I had six children and only one of them had made any attempt, to multiply and replenish the earth.

It was time for an immediate family council to render some gentle encouragement. My immortal words went something like this.

“Hello my children. Take a good look around this room. Do you see all the people here? Do you notice that you’re Aunt and Uncles each have several children who each have several children? Do you notice something lacking in our family?"

At this point, my children begin to murmur and laugh about how they have no intention of ever getting married, let alone having children. I hold up my hand to quell the revolt.

“Perhaps you don’t understand me. I am not making a request here. I am telling you, when I am gone, I expect you to cram the first five benches of the church with posterity. That means you will get married and you will have children—lots of children. Don’t even think of filing in behind my dead body and only filling up half a row.”

“Mom,” they say, "you have posterity. Ariana has five children. She is our representative.”

“No. Not good enough”

This is where I applied fear and guilt. “I am telling you right now. You are responsible for providing me with posterity. When I die, you will know that you didn’t give me the one thing I wanted and you will feel excruciating pain.”

I pause for effect as I poke my finger at each of them.

“And if you don’t, I will know it because I will be dead and I will be able to see into your souls. If you are not feeling miserable enough, I will put my finger on you and send an electric shock that will run through your vital organs and you will know that I am going to hurt you, bad.”

I felt satisfied that I had made my point until Adam said. “What makes you think they will let you out? They must have rules about letting crazy people run free even there.”

“Don’t you worry. I will find a way to inflict the proper amount of retribution. And I will align all the family that has passed on before to join my in my revenge. Think of all the generations before me that you are letting down.”

“Don’t worry mom” said Garret. “I’ll bet we can find a place that has posterity you can rent for funerals. In fact, that might be a great business venture.”

My children, they never take me seriously.

“I’m just saying, you give me posterity and plenty of it or I will give you nightmares and cold sweats. I’ll have years to perfect my haunting techniques. You just remember this, a mother’s work is never done.”

O CHRISTMAS TREE

O CHRISTMAS TREE
When it comes to Christmas, I reek of tradition so you can imagine my shock when Rick and I had the following conversation.

We were at our friends Christmas party, admiring their tree when Rick turned and with nostalgia dripping from his tongue, said. “See how nice it is to have a real Christmas tree. It smells so good.”

I was wearing flats so I had to poke him in the ribs to get him to look down at me so I could glare at him. “Are you kidding me? I’m not the one who wanted a fake tree.”

“Well, it certainly wasn’t my idea.” he smiled and walked towards the food.

It must be nice to be him and be able to eat after telling such a whopper. Was it possible he had caught some virus that had wiped from his memory our trauma drama Christmas tree traditions?

First was the nagging; days turned into weeks as I tried to get him to set a date that was convenient with him and when the whole family could come together to get the tree; preferably, some time before the season ended. Rick runs on his own calendar; one with endless days of about forty-five hours each.

After we got the tree we waited another eternity for him to get the stand built. A store bought one was somehow never big enough.

Thanks to his mother, he entertained us with a tradition from his childhood. Once the tree was up, we were privileged to wait until the wee hours of the morning for him to drill holes and wire branches into perceived blank spots for the perfectly shaped tree.

Every year I envisioned a happy little family like the kind they have on TV, all smiling over cups of hot chocolate and cider while we strung popcorn and cranberries.

By the time I finished untangling the lights and the kids were swimming in hot chocolate, and running through the popcorn blizzard that had blown through the house, Rick was tired and ready to hang himself with the lights. Forget about hanging them on the tree.

It was a darn safe bet that I wasn’t going to climb up and down on a chair three thousand times trying to hang them when he was tall enough to reach the top of the tree with little effort. Who asked him to be Michael Angelo and sculpt the dang thing anyway?

When the tree was finally decorated Rick took up the roll of nagging. Everyday I was grilled about the dangers of fire. Did I water the tree? Was I sure? Did I know how thirsty a tree was? How do I know the dog didn’t drink the water? No, I was smaller and closer to the ground than he was so it was obviously my job to check the water level.

The nagging never stopped. Did I have to have the lights on all day long? Had I checked to see if the needles were breaking in half yet? Then, to prove that he was the more annoying of the two of us he would jab me in the ribs just as I was dozing off to be sure I had turned the outside lights off too.

Of course I had turned off the lights, which, by the way,I had strung at great pesonal peril, all by myself. However, I had to haul myself out of bed so his highness could get enough sleep to build up enough energy to contine the strenous act of working his jaws the next day.

On a good year we enjoyed these festivities for two to three weeks before the ‘when do we take the tree down’ party began.

I wanted it gone the day after New Years. Rick was all for two days after Christmas. Apparently that was the day the needles all fell off and the tree was practically a stick.

We usually ended up pulling the decorations off the naked branches the morning of New Years Eve.

Our tree traditions always ended with Rick wading through the pine needles and badgering me on how we should get a fake tree while I nagged him for the next several months about just when he was going to take the tree off the front lawn and to the dump.

Maybe he is right. We should get a real tree. I miss those traditions.

HOW LOW CAN YOU GO

Sunday morning I sunk to a new low. I blame my fall into corruption on my daughter. It all began Thanksgiving Day and once you lower that bar...

Technically speaking it was Thanksgiving Night at exactly 11:03 pm when Ariana drug me into the pits of hell, our local Wal-Mart.

It has been my tradition to hit the stores at 4:00 am on black Friday for those spectacular sales that make me feel warm and fuzzy inside. May I take this opportunity to say that never in all my black Friday forays have I once been lured into Wal-Mart.

If you are not certifiable when you go in you are when you come out. I have seen the survivors first hand wandering around different department store chains, chunks of hair missing, eyes rolling around in their head. It isn’t pretty.

This year Ariana actually left hearth and home Thanksgiving morning to scope out our local Wal-Mart for the exact location of the items she wanted to purchase later that night and to brush up on the rules of the game. IE what time did items go on sale etc?

For years, I invited my girls to shop black Friday with me and they always vehemently declined while shoving long lists into my hands. Now that Ariana was a mom she had come down with her own case of bargainitis.

This was the first year I had absolutely nothing to shop for so why did I find myself boxed into an aisle in Wal-Mart, laboring for breath, my hands protecting my head and feeling completely sac religious for shopping on Thanksgiving Day.

I am going to take a moment to answer that question. “I am a completely unselfish, over the top loving and now, thanks to my Wal-Mart experience a little more insane, mother.” That is my only excuse for what happened Sunday morning.

While I hadn’t actually had chunks of hair plucked from my head in Wal-Mart, I was still having a bad hair day. I had gotten up early, dressed, applied my required three pounds of makeup and was fiddling with my hair.

I was determined to wear it up for a change. It went better with my chosen ensemble. At 8:40, ten minutes after we usually leave, Ariana and my grandchildren left without me.

Ariana couldn’t resist reminding me how anal I was about being on time. It wasn’t uncommon for me to remind my grandchildren they would be going to church in their underwear if they weren’t ready to walk out the door at 8:30. This was no idle threat. Ask Garret.

Not only was I a hypocrite but I was forced to ride with Garret who was always late. At least I was dressed so the underwear threat didn’t scare me. By nine o’clock, I had taken my hair out at least six more times.

It is not easy to make your hair look messy. It’s an art. You have to make it look like you threw it up without making it look like you threw it up. At 8:55, I decided to wear it down.

I ran to the closet and pulled my black boots on before I noticed my pantyhose were blue. My boots didn’t come up high enough to hide the blue so I pulled them off and changed my panty hose, careful to pull out a black pair.

I decided to give my hair one more try. After three more attempts it was the right combination of artistry. We walked out the door at 9:15.

Half way to church, I looked down. I was wearing navy pantyhose. I could have sworn they were black. I didn’t even know I owned blue hose until that morning. Apparently, I was inundated with them.

To make matters worse, in my effort to save time I had decided to forgo pulling my boots on and had opted for my black heels.

I was going to church wearing navy blue pantyhose that clashed with my brown leopard print skirt and my black heels. And who was I kidding, my hair looked bad. I was reliving my worst vanity and late nightmares all rolled into one.

This is what happens for trying to be a supportive mother and lowering the bar to shop on Thanksgiving Day. It was all Ariana’s fault.

THE PHONE

One day I may be forced to either write a book about my phone frustrations or get therapy.

It doesn’t help that my mother-in-law is always yapping, but in the nicest possible way, about the fact that we can’t find the phones.

“I have never seen a household that has more problems with the phones than yours.”

I am well aware that by ‘yours’, she means mine. Somehow, her little Ricky is absolved from ALL implications of blame and I am the blathering fool who runs around the house. “Where’s the phone, where’s the phone. Who had the stupid phone last?”

It’s not as if we have only one phone either. We have five of the little bleeper’s and my mother-in-law, although I am far too charitable to mention it to her, was the reason our last four phones died.

She is lost in the time warp of a generation ago where you physically hung the phone up. She cannot grasp the fact that if you hang the phone on the charger every time you use it, it will ruin the charge. Before long, the battery runs out when you say hello.

I know she did it because every other phone abusing body in our house insist they never hang the phones up; a fact I can attest to because when I run through the house on my daily marathons looking for the stupid things, they are always burned out.

So, if they don’t hang them up and I know there’s so such thing as evil phone fairies that lurk in dark corners, it must be my mother-in-law.

She is annoyed by the fact that when she finds the phone lying around and hangs it up that I make such a criminal offense about it. One I would love to make punishable by loss of a limb.

“We never had this kind of commotion in my home.” She NEVER fails to mutter, in the nicest possible way of course.

In my defense, not once was I asked to sit in on any design or engineering committee before the phone went into production. It’s a good thing to or I may have had my own ideas of where they could put the things.

Once we mastered the problem of mom not hanging the phones up, we had a new problem. When you do have to put the phone on to charge, how do you know when you can take it off the charger?

“Who hung this phone up? What time is it finished charging?’

“I hung one up this morning.” A voice rings out from somewhere.

“Which charger did you put it on?” Someone very brilliantly put two charges next to each other. “I don’t remember.”

From the corner, in the nicest possible way, “I’ve never seen a household with so many problems finding the phone.”

Garret finally devised a plan. He ripped a piece of paper, wrote down the time the phone would be charged then secured it to the phone with an elastic band. The boy is brilliant, takes after his mother.

Our phones looked like happy little penguins wearing white waistcoats while they recharged. Peace reigned again for about two weeks.

“Who didn’t write the time on this phone? How long is it supposed to be hung up?”

“I hung up the one with the paper on it,” said Ariana.

“It wasn’t me,” said Rick and Garret in unison.

In the nicest possible way, from the corner of the living room, I hear. “I’ve never seen a household have so many problems with the phone.”

Perhaps you heard me scream and rant, while I chased my eyeballs around in my head. I demand psychotherapy.

I should never be allowed to use the phone. Check back next week for part two.