That's How Theresa Broke Her Leg!

A few years ago, my husband and I moved across the country from Texas to the cold and negligently Dr. Pepper-free state of Minnesota. While we had wonderful neighbors there, I found the cold and the people’s refusal to carry concealed handguns offputting, so I stayed in our tiny duplex home, learning to cook and not knowing what to do with our basement (Is it a playroom? Storage? It’s the size of the whole house! Why is there a lone shower down here?  What are these lake lovin’ Minnesotans up to?).  So one day, I went to the pet store and bought a beta, which I named Nebby, after our neighbor, a mormon named Kevin Nebeker who would bend curse words with amazing skill to make them not only not offensive, but practically delightful. (“Damage!” “Shiitake!”) For months, Nebby lived happily in a mason jar in our kitchen window, watching me have to trim the sides off of frozen pizzas to fit in our Easy Bake sized oven and walk around with a grocery bag around my neck because my morning sickness ruled my life.

A few months later, I had a belly the size of a bowling ball, had graduated from Rachel Ray, who made me feel like a bad person for hating her so very much, to Paula Deen, who made me feel like a bad person for loving her so very much, to Bobby Flay and my husband had finished his training and it was time to go home. We packed everything into boxes and put it in the hands of movers, who would deliver it to Texas in two weeks. I put a lid on Nebby, drove with him in my lap for two days, and then handed him over to my parents ,while we looked for a place to live.

Two weeks later, our stuff arrived in our new home and that day, I went into labor. Two months after that, my mother showed up at our house with a mason jar, filled with algae and inside, little Nebby, very much alive and probably pretty upset.

I tell you that story because I have been confined to my house for 4 days and I remembered that I had a blog here at one time to find that someone, someone out there is dutifully checking this blog several times a day. I’m going to decide to overlook my secret fear that this person is someone either my husband or I dated and is now involved in some sort of Cape Fear type revenge senario (reaching over and touching my Texas-bought CHG for emphasis)  and just think it’s some faithful reader who, like Nebby, has never given up despite my attrocious neglect. Thank you, gentle reader. I will try to be more attentive in the future.

In my pre-baby days, I worked in an office with a woman who had the most dreadful home perm known to man. Home Perm Harriet, as I liked to call her, frequently cornered me, shoving pictures of sticky looking toddlers in my face and announcing “funny” things her preschooler said, clearly unaware of my body language and lack of eye contact that screamed, “I don’t care about this.” I went to her house once and it looked like someone had taken a Toys R’ Us and shaken the contents of it all directly into her home.

I thought Home Perm Harriet was the exception. I had such high ideals for when I was a mom myself. I would be stylish and witty, have an active social life. My children would simply be a part of  my life, not the dominating factor in it. Toys would be tucked out of sight. Noses would be wiped. Hair would be combed.  I was so blissfully naive. When our first son came into the world, we patted ourselves on the back for keeping a clean house and a nice, orderly life despite the fact that he was still too young to move. Our first child was and is, thankfully, a mild mannered rule-follower. He’s thoughtful and kind, and usually doesn’t have to be told twice to do something. I had lots and lots of free time in those early days, which I primarily used to bake mass amounts of cookies and judge people.

When he was 18 months old, we decided to start thinking about having another baby, which as it turns out was all it took in our case, and his little brother was born 9 months later. Still, I think I hung in there with the best of them-going places, doing things, wearing non-gym clothes and carrying on coherent conversations on a variety of topics. Then, 9 months after that, I felt like I had the flu. Maybe some sort of parasite? Mono? Could it be mono? It turned out to be a parasite alright, the kind of parasite that arrives in 9 months demanding food and every last drop of your time. At this time I had a 3 yr old, an 18 month old and a new baby, and I can pretty much pinpoint it as the moment I lost touch with reality.

And recently, it’s gotten ugly.

I have left my house less this month than Sigourney Weaver’s character in Copycat did when she had to go into the hallway of her apartment to get away from the crazed killer Harry Connick Jr.  Doctor’s visits and grocery runs aside, I have been out one time this summer, to a baseball game where we miscalculated how nice our seats were and spent ten minutes in what felt like hell’s sauna before my husband turned to me, defeated, and said, “I’m starting to feel cold. I think I am having heat stroke so I guess we have to go home.”

The cause for this forced agoraphobia is two fold: Of course I have a baby and it’s a total jerk about going places, but primarily it’s because our middle child, who is a toddler, developed tonsils the size of grapes causing him to give up little things like sleeping and eating in exchange for sticking his hands into his mouth to try to pull his own tonsils out and screaming until he is hoarse. We went to the doctor. He said, “He has big tonsils, he will grow out of it, your co-pay is $20.”  We went to the doctor again. He said, “Yep, his tonsils are still big and your co-pay is still $20.”  This went on for weeks before I climbed out of my sleep deprived stupor and went to a new doctor, who promptly scheduled a tonsillectomy for the next week and whom I may have hugged for longer than is socially acceptable as a result.

Since I’ve been away from society for awhile, things are happening to me. Strange things. My Facebook is the only proof that I used to exist outside of this place of laundry and child rearing and it’s  is less my own as it is more a gazette about things my children are doing. I don’t even know what to say about myself anymore. The deepest existential crisis come at the hands of caring for three other people with no rest or time to yourself.  In the off chance I have a moment to talk to a friend on the phone, I find myself plying her with the same stupid anecodotes that horrible Home Perm Harriet used to use on me. “Oldest son asked me why the Penguin can’t just get a job and leave Batman alone today,” I say excitedly, “Middle son says ‘belly butt’ for ‘belly button!’” “Look at this video of my infant trying to dance to Single Ladies!”  Coincidentally, I have been getting many more dropped calls lately.

I’ve become like Nell, except instead of spouting gibberish, I am just streaming useless information about my kids. I used to know stuff, I know I did. Interesting stuff. I spoke French, I went to a DeKooning exhibit. I met David Sedaris and he gave me a bag of pretzels. I had a life. There was excitement and drama.

Now my preschooler said “damn” and my husband and I have been having the Where Did He Learn This Word Summit for the last three days. Now if friends from college call, I ply them with questions about their lives and pretend I know what they are talking about when the reference new, hip bars, politics, or anything that is not reported on The View.

And despite the fact I think I could easily slip into a coma like sleep for at least a week, I’m weirdly pretty happy. There’s a certain freedom in letting go of the quest to be perfect. It’s a slippery slope, to be sure, from being okay with the fact that you wear gym clothes more often than someone who works at a gym to embracing the freedom and comfort of a floral moo moo, but I feel like for now, I’m holding fast at a temporary and welcome lull in my coolness.

Last week, my husband wanted to watch a documentary about soccer.  Despite the fact it was in Spanish, he insisted on having the volume set to deafening.

Here, my dear Heather, is a microcosm of married life.

Did I want to say loudly and with venom, “TURN THE DAMNED TV DOWN, YOU DON”T EVEN SPEAK SPANISH!”  Yes! Yes I did, with all my might.

But instead, I sat there and pretended to enjoy this soul searingly boring documentary.

And I do this on other things:  I pretend not to notice that he mispronounces the word “chic” (“chick?”), that I feel almost sure he is reading my Oprah magazines on the toilet, that he will drive a quarter of a mile before he turns his turn signal off.

He pretends not to be horrified by what my body looks in the weeks after I had a baby, that I will get lost in any building larger than 2000 sq feet, that I will get angry at him for things he does in my dreams.

This kind of head-in-the-sand mentality may seem crazy but trust me, it’s the key to a healthy marriage.  There are enough people in the world who will criticize your spouse, so unless physical injury or harm to personal property is imminent, just hold it in. Stuff it down. Smile. Forget. That’s the key. That’s why that relationship in The Notebook worked so well-that lady had Alzheimers. She couldn’t remember a damn thing.

I’ve known my husband for 11 years now and in that time, I have only seen him panic in three instances: when the Mavs were teetering on the edge of a particularly heartbreaking loss, when the North Texas football team almost didn’t hire Coach Dodge, and whenever the remote control is misplaced. He’s not a complicated guy, and I think that’s great.  He’s easy to shop for and care for, I like to call him a “wash n’ go” man-he can be ready to leave the house in under two minutes, even though that may mean that he’s wearing a shirt with a rip in the armpit and his pants on backwards.

Fortunately, he has a crazed, anal retentive wife to help smooth out the rough edges, turn his pants around, and throw away holey shirts (unless he is reading this, then I don’t know where those shirts are). But sometimes, in the moments when I am picking his socks up off the floor or crawling around in the backyard on my hands and knees looking for his eighth lost wedding ring,  I often wonder what his life would be like if he had never met me. That’s how Barb Titzer was born.

Barb Titzer is the imaginary lady my husband married in the Lost-type bizarro world in which he didn’t meet me. She is the player-manager of a slow pitch softball team, The Pink Ladies. She has a sensible haircut. She likes button-up shirts with crazy prints. She might be confused for an overweight KD Lang, were it not for her sassy collection of  earrings with dolphin charms.

They would be common-law married.  Barb Titzer does not like children, who she finds loud and dirty. She has a ferret named Snickers. She has an annual photo of she and Snickers taken at Olan Mills. 

Her favorite song is Fancy by Reba MacEntire. Her favorite TV show is The Quacker Factory on QVC. She collects Precious Moments collectable plates from the Bradford Exchange. She smells like Irish Spring and Vicks Vaporub. Her few cosmetics are the Costco store brand. Every year she enters the City of Mesquite chili cookoff. It’s the only time she ever cooks. She and Michael dine at her favorite eating establishment, The Golden Corral.

Barb Titzer works as a dispatcher for the City of Mesquite.  She has a sign above her desk that reads, “Your lack of planning does not make it my emergency,” despite the fact that no one has ever asked her to do anything urgent. When you ask her how she is, she gives you a wordless, incredulous look.

My husband loves Barb Titzer because she happily attends every manner of sporting events with him, she always puts the remote in the same place and somewhere in the deep recesses of his brain, he has a feeling there is a woman somewhere who got furiously angry at him for immediately turning on the Mavericks game in the hospital room, four minutes after their son was born and he knows Barb would never do such a thing.

Frequently, when my husband complains that I am crying too loudly during a documentary about Hank Gathers or that I passive-aggressively deleted every episode of Rescue Me from the TiVo, or during the seven million times a day I wonder if he’ll ever truly appreciate me for the gem I am,  I’ll tell him he should just go find Barb Titzer. But alas, unless Barb Titzer is hiding somewhere with our lost remote, I don’t think he’ll ever find her and he’ll be stuck with me for life.

Hello, gentle readers,

I have been keeping this blog as a way to empty out my brain for awhile now. It’s total garbage and I don’t know why you are reading it. I’m not really even sure why I am writing it since I don’t really ever promote it and hardly ever write on it. Still, I see from the stats that someone out there is reading it, so thanks for looking and feel free to leave comments!

It’s not my goal to write anything too heavy here, but I want to take a moment to say something about someone dear to me.

I named this blog “That’s How Theresa Broke Her Leg” because I overheard someone say that at my husband’s softball game once. The full story on that is here.  I didn’t know who the Theresa was that the man was talking about, but it was just a funny sentence to yell since no one there seemed to know the context.

But I did have an actual Teresa in my life, up until last Wednesday when she died, suddenly. She was my cousin. She was only 47.  She, like me, had three kids. She always made me feel like I was doing a good job and on days when the I crawled in bed exhausted only to find my dog had vomitted on my pillow and I was so tired that I actually weighed the pros and cons of sleeping with dog vomit in my hair, her compliments were like a life raft in a sea of motherhood insanity.  I write for a living, so I know my words have some value, but Teresa taught me that giving someone a compliment can give your words value that cannot be measured with money.  You probably didn’t know her, but our world is less kind now that she is not in it.

I dedicate this blog to Teresa. She was funny and smart, supportive and kind. I hope I always remember to be the same.

Now back to the silliness.

[Note: I slightly changed the name of friend because I wasn't sure if she would want me to plaster her name across the web for my whopping five readers to read.]

I don’t want to alarm you, but I’m pretty sure I killed Boner from Growing Pains and a SeaWorld trainer this week. Not on purpose. I think I have “the powers” as my grandma might say, were she the hillbilly I sometimes paint her to be because she’s old and doesn’t know what a blog is so she can’t fight back. 

But back to my problem. A couple of years ago my friend gave me a copy of that book “The Secret.”  The book basically says that your thoughts are powerful and that they manifest themselves in your life.   I think that is true.  For instance, once I thought about not taking my birth control because it made my skin look weird and now I have three kids.

Well, last week my friend, Abbey Bonner was really distraught to find that her name had been misspelled as “A. Boner” in our mother’s group newsletter. I, on the other hand, thought it was hilarious and wasted no time calling her “Boner” for the remainder of the week. Which lead me to ask my husband if he remembered Boner from Growing Pains, which lead him to wonder aloud what happened to Boner, and which lead me to say, “I can’t imagine his life didn’t go downhill after Growing Pains.” Cut to two days later when he was missing and my husband labeled our discussion a “coincidence.”

Then, my son asked me out of the blue (as kids seem to ask every question, just totally unrelated to anything) why people were afraid of sharks but not killer whales. I told him I didn’t know and that it seems like every now and then one of those SeaWorld whales would eat a trainer, totally by accident, just maybe it had to yawn or something while the trainer was standing on it’s nose and then (gulp!), they’ve been Jonah-ed.  The NEXT day a killer whale at Sea World killed a trainer.

I don’t mean to make light of these things…I am just reasonably sure I caused them with my giant freak brain.   Now I’m afraid to think anything. I’ve been walking around in a brain-neutral stupor all week.  I don’t want my neighbors cat to accidentally die of a heart attack while trying to pee in my kids’ sandbox. Okay, I do actually want that, but there are other things I don’t want to happen. I don’t want anymore 90′s TV sidekicks to die, that’s for sure. That’s why I’ve put myself on Buddy Limbeck thought probation. I saw Willie Ames on Celebrity Fit Club and I think he’s already done half the work himself.

Let’s just get to the point here.  I don’t know much (read: anything) about art. I’ve read about it, watched documentaries about it, could carry on a fairly coherent conversation about it, but in regards to art, there are only two things I am sure of: one, anything can be art and two, dolphin art is right on the cusp of becoming popular as irony, like wolf art t-shirts or lawn flamingos.

My favorite uncle dabbled in art collection. He had a painting in his living room that I found particularly heinous.  Done in a crazy collection of colors and mixed media that would make even Lady Gaga uncomfortable, it depicts a Mexican woman rubbing an uncracked egg on an infant, dressed in a red robe. Around the picture are some sort of paper mache bell peppers, and around that a wooden frame embossed with tin foil stars. I used to tell my uncle that it was the ugliest fleggin thing I had ever seen in my life.  So of course, when he died, he left the damned thing to me. And because he died young and unexpectedly in a house fire, I felt like I had to display it my house. I also sometimes suspect that he faked his own death just so I would have to place this monstrosity in my otherwise beautiful home.

Two things about this painting: one, I know is it distasteful on a surface level, but because I don’t really know what is happening in it, I’m afraid it might be racist and two, it’s really hard to find a place to put a four foot painting that doesn’t make it seem like it’s some sort of statement about you, like you really feel strongly about this whole Mexican-baby-egg process.  Our cleaning lady, who is from Mexico, won’t go within five feet of it (so now the paper mache peppers have a lovely coating of dust) and when I asked her why, she said something which I later translated into “the evil eye.”  Super.

I have approached this painting in every way possible, trying to pass it off as high art, saying I inherited it from an ecentric family member, but it still garners the same raised eyebrows and sideways glances whenever it is discovered. Still, something of it reminds me so much of my uncle, who like me, took great pleasure in curating awkward situations. Each time I have to (poorly) explain why I have a giant painting of  3D bell peppers in my house, I feel like I am reconnecting with him on that level.  So the painting stays up.  On the upside, I’m pretty sure it’s keep us from being burgled because it appears we practice some sort of Mexican voo-doo.

Call me a sucker, I like self help books.  Once, when we were younger and poorer, a Zig Ziglar CD got stuck in the CD player of our Ford Taurus and we listened to it from beginning to end about eleven times on a cross country trip from Minneapolis to Dallas. By the time we arrived in Dallas, my husband and I hopped out of the car and unpacked it with a level of zeal most people reserve for opening Christmas gifts or scratching off a final number on a winning lottery ticket.

So when I saw that The Pit Bull of Personal Development, Larry Wingit, had a book about parenting, I downloaded that goodness to my Kindle tout suite. Because frankly, between you and me, I have no idea what I am doing.  Tonight my four year old son told me an elaborate lie about how my mother-in-law caused a Mack truck to crash into our house, then stomped on his foot and poked him in the eye, which I found very disconcerting, so I’m open to all suggestions.

I read three chapters of that book, ignoring the nagging voice in the back of my head that said “Doesn’t this all seem like obvious advice?”  I mean, he’s right-you really should talk to your kids. It beats the latter-directing them with frantic hand motions in stony silence. And you should listen to them, another good call Mr. Wingit.  But when he started describing his own sons, and how impossibly perfect they were, the voice started getting incredulous. I have two boys. One day they took markers and colored our dog almost entirely blue while I was unloading the dishwasher in the same room. And they aren’t even in school yet.  Something told me that Mr. Wingit might not see his sons but a few hours a day, if that.

And then, in between self congratulatory anecdotes, he slipped in this little fact: That he was divorced from his wife and saw his boys on the weekends. Well, by all means, please give me your advice, as your poor ex-wife is in the trenches, raising these boys and you call once a night with the Lakers game on mute.

The truth, I think, is that no parent really knows what they are doing. I mean, we all thought Earl Woods knew what he was doing and look how that has turned out.  No sir, we’re all flying blind here in the world of child rearing, so let’s just be honest, Mr. Wingit: You kept your sons from doing anything that left a lasting permantent record and so you are free to paint them as though they are walking around curing lepers and taking a leisurely stroll atop a large body of water.

I cannot believe I paid fifteen bucks to get advice from a Weekend Dad. Basically all he had to do was keep those boys alive for two days and then turn them over to their mother (whom he never mentions, not once) for the nose wiping, the potty training, the overseeing of homework, the cleansing of the clothes,  the checking of the teeth, the scheduling of various doctor appointments, the de-licing, the “no your room is not clean yet”-ing, and the “be home by ten”ing.  It sounds to me like the Pit Bull of Personal Development is also the Slothful Peacock of Child Rearing.

The truth is: I don’t know.  I overheard someone say that repeatedly, emphatically at my husband’s softball game once. When the game was over, I asked my husband who Theresa was and he said he didn’t know, nor did he know who that man was that sat in their dugout and screamed that phrase at least once every couple of minutes.  But it’s been my go-to phrase since then.

This is my second blog. My first blog is about my family (stay away from it, you unwashed heathens) and it, like motherhood, provides little room for editorializing.  So I started this one because I can’t tell if the things I think are widely regarded as funny, or only funny to me.  I hope you weren’t really looking for answers as to how someone named Theresa broke their leg and stumbled upon this because I have nothing for you. I will say that Theresa should be more careful.