*Old Me

Now that I’m in my 30’s, I’ve been forced to face the fact that I’m not the spry, limber teeny bopper I once was! I try daily to prove this wrong, but daily I am slapped with reality. When I was young, I danced, cheered and could do the splits on command! Oh, the fun I had at competitions and pep rallies! How cute I was with my teeny little skirt and boobs just the right size. Too bad those perfect body days are wasted on the teen years! I mean, no wrinkles, eyelids in the right place, and energy for days…..all wasted on teenagers. What are they supposed to do with that nice rack? I deserve those things now. I’m a little bitter I think. After all the hard work of growing as a person, having my own children and raising them with love and confidence, I get the thanks of wrinkles, low eyelids, boobs that are a likeness of a half deflated basketball, arthritis, and gray hairs (I know this because Joey points out new ones daily).

I feel that the correct thing to do is embrace these well earned ‘flaws’. Well, sorry, I just can’t. No way!! It’s wrong, wrong, wrong!! Damn it, I want my boobs back, tight skin and just once to have sex without my bones cracking like I’m 100. I mean, come on, how sexy is that? The mood is just right; I lean in for a kiss and crack, pop…UHHH….sorry! Joe, with a look of concern, like he has just broken me, asks, “Are you okay?” Shit…”Yeah, I’m okay, I don’t know about our sex life though”! Seriously folks, I even asked Joe if anyone would notice if we installed a handicap bar made for the shower onto our wall as a headboard. Hmmm…maybe if I decorated it somehow, it wouldn’t stand out so much!

For those of you who are younger…just wait, you’ll see!! For those of you who are older, you know what I’m talking about! For those of you who are ‘embracing’ these new quirks, you must be more mature than me, cause I can not stuff my boobs into a bra, tape up my eyebrows, and wax that unwanted hair quietly!! I can only sit back and patiently wait for these years to pass….the ‘Golden Years’ I think will be better. Granted, by then I will probably have uncontrollable gas and no boobs left at all, but the chances of me not remembering how great my tits used to be are better! That’s the key to embracing the older me, I think! When my memory of that dancer in a leotard has blurred, I will for sure love my wrinkly, gray-headed self!!

* New Disease

Okay, so it has been said many times, we have a generation of laziness, but I’m here to affirm that. I am guilty of contributing to and even enabling this ‘disease’. I call it a disease because everything has to have an excuse and label these days. Overeating, drinking, drugs, smoking, it’s all considered a disease, so; I figured that laziness should be added to that list and here is why…..

My daughter is 12. She is an honor roll student, has been in cheer and plays sports. She runs track, miles at a time. Impressive I think, until I look a little closer. I recently bought a trampoline, a nice fancy one with a net around it and all. She was so happy to get it!! Then she asked where we were going to put it. I pointed to an area in our massive yard about 100 yards behind the house. “I thought that would be a good place for all play stuff”, I said. She got a look on her face like I had just said she was going to eat a piece of crap for dinner, and she said, in her most disgusted tone, “Why there?” I said, “because it’s back behind the house and I don’t have to worry about the boys near the front”. She replied with, “but it is so far away to walk back there”. So, after telling her how lazy that sounded, to not want to walk 100 yards to a trampoline, we agreed on a spot closer to the house. So now, she walks 20 yards to a trampoline that she jumps on for hours!! This goes hand in hand I’d say to the phenomenon of people driving around a parking lot for a half hour to find just the right parking place up close to an entrance, when they will be walking around a store, mall or amusement park for hours, but that extra 50 yards to the entrance is a deal breaker!

My son Joey is 4. He is active and very smart. He can give us the directions to get from our house to anywhere we have been. He is like a walking map! Who needs GPS?! In my amazement of him getting us to my dad’s house 40 miles away in Louisiana from our house in East Texas and being so proud, I still can’t shake the fact that he too is lazy. Anything that is a ‘crap job’ I say, he wants no part of. Helping me make a cake, cutting the grass on a riding lawn mower, and directing Ariel of where to pick up dog shit are great jobs for him. But tell him to clean his toys up, put away clothes or for my sake wipe his own damn ass after taking a dump….forget it!! No way!! I plead with him…”Joey, you are 4 and you’ll be in kindergarten soon. Who will wipe your ass at school?” His reply is, “I’ll wait until I get home to poop!” UGH!! Why do I enable this shit?? This is like the boss at work, you know the one. The one who dictates from his or her high horse of what to do and how you don’t do it good enough, but yet they have no idea of how to do it themselves or even attempt to try. Wiping their own ass would be a huge feat!

My son Corey is 18 months old and yep, you guessed it, is lazy too. He is as smart as a whip. Will understand anything you tell him to do, however complicated you make think it is, he gets it. He knows the name of all animals and toys, he knows if I skip pages in a book that I’m reading him for the 10th time in an hour and he will even go to the bathroom on the toilet and attempt to wipe his ass. This one has to be the ‘different one’ I thought. Well, not so fast, he refuses to talk! Can he? YES!! He said his first words around 10 months old and he physically can speak…no disorders or anything, except that horrible ‘disease’ of laziness. I officially diagnosed him this morning. He points at what he wants and he gets what he wants. I’ve tried the whole, make him tell me and not point thing, yeah, it doesn’t work with him. His personality, to be polite, is a bit abrasive. But, to be perfectly honest here, he’s just an ass sometimes! So, to keep this playful, smart, tiger appeased, I give in to his refusal to speak.

As I sit here writing this on my portable laptop, with a cordless phone next to me and spaghettio’s in a can for the boys for lunch, I can’t help but wonder, am I the cause of the disease? Did I ‘give’ my children this disease, or are they simply born with it? I would appreciate any help with the matter and even welcome support groups to cope with this disease!

*Selective Amnesia

Ok, so I am convinced that selective amnesia is inherited from a child’s father. There is no other logical explanation. My children all have it, and I’m sure yours do too. Let me state an example of selective amnesia….You tell your child to clean his or her room before going to the video arcade. He or she conveniently forgets to do so, stating it must have slipped their mind. On the flip side, you tell your child to get $10 out of your wallet before going to arcade….do you think they forget that one??? Hell no! That $10 is gone and so is your kid. Is that room clean? No way! How does this happen?

There has to be some sort of amnesia gene our kids are born with and the defect comes straight from the father. No mother or wife could ever get away with having this problem. Oh, damn honey, sorry I forgot to feed you, but I did get a new duvet. I mean, Joe will completely forget that I had asked him to take some trash to the dump, but he will remember to overhaul his entire car that weekend. He will forget that he left his clothes on the bathroom floor, but he will remember that Jimmy Kimmel comes on at 10:35pm, on channel 3. It will have slipped his mind to have rinsed his hair down the sink after shaving, but the next car show is in September over 200 days away, and if I ask, he’ll tell me down to the minute how much time remains. He has passed this disorder down to my children. I try and correct my boys now, so that they too don’t pass this horrible amnesia to their own, but I fear I am failing.

I ask Joey to please pick up his legos so I do not permanently imprint the bottom of my foot, as I am trying to keep my cursing to a minimum (stepping on legos is an immediate deal breaker). Walk, walk, walk, oh shit, damn, damn, damn…”AHHH!!!!! Joey, I told you to pick these up!” His reply in his tiny 4-year-old voice, “Oh, yeah, sorry mommy, I forgot”. Never mind that I had asked him 5 times in the past hour, he plain forgot. But, tell him that he will see Sesame Street Live next week, and he remembers the whole plan. “We will take Ariel to school, then take Corey to Papa’s house, then we will go to the show at 10:30, then after have McDonalds and maybe a vanilla shake.” Poor kid…he has this horrible mutated gene, and it’s Joe’s fault.

I took partial fault in the lazy disease, this one is all Joe! I can have no part in this. I somehow remember to change diapers, clean the bathtub and check email almost simultaneously. How can they not remember step-by-step instructions? They will entirely omit one of the steps due to amnesia.

As you can see this is frustrating for me, and I’m sure all other moms and wives worldwide. So, what do we do about it? I’ll tell you….urge congress to fund a research for this gene mutation and stop it in its tracks. I did write a formal letter myself, but have had no response. I’m sure the receiver of my request was a man and he ‘forgot ‘ to respond.