I'm Just Glad It Wasn't MY Birthday!

Over the weekend, I went into our basement storage room to look for a three-pronged plug. I never find what I’m looking for in there, but sometimes what I find instead is even better. I found two type-written sheets of paper containing a post for Elaine’s Wonderful World. This would have to be my very first post, because I wrote it twenty-one years ago!

Yesterday was my husband’s birthday. It started out like most days, with little warning as to what was ahead. After the daily mad rush to get the children out the door to catch the bus, my morning chores began. After making beds and cleaning the kitchen, I tackled the bathrooms. Little did I know, this would be the high point of my day.

Shortly before noon, my five-year-old walked in the door with a huge welt on her face and a reminder that school pictures were the next day. She had been bitten or stung, and as the day went on, my daughter’s cheek got bigger and bigger. Last year when she was due to have her picture taken at preschool, she developed a bad case of pink-eye. The day before we had our annual Christmas family portrait taken, she walked into a counter at a department store and got a fat lip. I think if we really love her, we should stop having her picture taken, and ensure her of a trouble-free life.

Things got worse when my nine-year-old came home. He had a schoolbag full of workbooks which needed to be finished before school the next day. When I questioned him about it, he blew up at me saying that he wasn’t ever going back to school and he wanted to run away. I told him that if there was a place where you never had to work, I would gladly run away with him. He gave me one of those “But, don't moms love to scrub toilets?” looks. We talked things over, and after much anger and tears (some his, some mine) I agreed to go in and talk with his teacher the next day.

Then, the birthday boy came home. He was in a good mood when he left that morning, after our daughter guessed his age to be sixteen. Wanting in on the fun, I asked her how old she thought I was. She said sixty-four. I didn’t even know she knew numbers that high. Daddy’s mood had deteriorated considerably. He had just heard that an airline had gone bankrupt and was cancelling all flights. This was the same airline which was supposed to fly us to Disney World in three weeks. In our twelve years of marriage, every vacation had been a disaster. I started feeling like this bankruptcy was our fault. Thousands of employees were losing their jobs because we booked our vacation with them.

My husband decided to go to the gym and work out, which was his only normal reaction to a birthday. He came home an hour later swearing off sweets, just as I finished icing his cake. So, in one day, my husband became a year older, our Florida trip was ruined before it began, my daughter looked like a hamster storing food in her cheek (soon to be immortalized on film) and my son gave me a chance to do something I rate right up there with going to the dentist—a parent-teacher conference. Add the fact that my kitchen sink got clogged because I wanted to make my husband…..

Hmm...I don’t know what I was making for my husband, because the third page was missing. Or maybe there never was one, because I had to get ready to go to my son’s school. We’ll never know. Anyway, I hope you enjoyed this post from the past!

Knows How to Cook...CHECK!

I know women who don’t cook. That statement used to give me heart palpitations. No one…I repeat…NO ONE…told me that not cooking was an option. When I was opening wedding presents and Aunt Eleanor gave us a set of mixing bowls, I didn’t sit there and say “Who is going to use these?”

I didn’t go to cooking school. My mother didn’t teach me how to cook. I cooked because my husband and I were hungry and we wanted to eat. Lord knows, he couldn’t cook. But little did I know, from that moment of cooking our very first meal, I WOULD BE COOKING FOR THE REST OF MY LIFE!

To be honest, there was a time when I thought there was something really wrong with these women. But NOW, I think they’re geniuses. What foresight! I was up at five in the morning making snickerdoodles for my daughter’s class, and these women were sleeping in and stopping at the grocery store for a package of Chips Ahoy! And, guess what? The kids didn’t care. And, the mommy who didn’t cook was showered and smartly dressed, and I had on a hat and a raincoat to cover up the evidence of a cinnamon explosion in my kitchen.

Many years later, as a divorced woman getting back into the dating scene, there was only one thing I wanted in a man. Can he cook? I didn’t care if he was unemployed, on parole, or grew up with the circus. I just wanted someone who could cook. I wasn’t expecting him to cook every meal, but I just wanted to know that if I broke both arms or suddenly went blind, we would not starve to death. I wanted the thirty year tradition of baking my own birthday cake to end…just once.

The sad thing is I didn’t warn my daughter. She would call up for a recipe, and my first thought was how proud my mom would have been that she is learning to cook. But, if I was truly a good mother, I would have told her to take every cookbook, toss them out the window, and replace them with take-out menus. Then SHE could be the smartly dressed mom with a paper plate of Oreos. Oh well, I did do her a favor, though…I never taught her how to sew.