Wednesday, February 14, 2018

Teary Eyes and Crepey Skin (A Valentine's Day Post)

*After I initially posted this piece I realized that it was almost kind of appropriate for the holiday!

I don't know for sure when I understood the principle that old people are just young people whose skin has gone and shriveled up on them, but I am so intrigued by the concept. I cannot help but look at random teary eyed, crepey skinned old folks and see a young person with their whole lives ahead of them. I try not to stare too long, but I want to stare as long as it takes to grasp the reality that I'm looking at someone that played in the dirt, learned to ride a bike, served in the military, tried out new recipes, felt new attraction and fell in love. I never feel like I have enough time to really let it sink in, it's always just out of reach.

I've had a few experiences in the last little while that are stark reminders that my time for teary eyes and crepey skin is coming. I joined a basketball team a couple months ago. I've spent almost 20 years remembering how much I loved basketball as a teenager and young adult. I just wanted to have a chance to play again, so in a moment of irrational courageous midlife crisis I found an adult women's league, paid my $50 and waited for the season to start. I will write about my days as a chubby, middle aged, Mormon-mom-of-8-basketball player in a post all its own where I can really do it justice, but for now, suffice it to say that I was the proverbial black sheep on the team made up of much younger, much more in shape specimens. I felt old the first day I practiced with them, but I became comfortable and in essence forgot that there was a 20 year age gap with some of them.

During one practice the girls on my team decided that we should invite the young men, off shooting hoops in a nearby court, to come play full court b-ball with us. I played for all I was worth. I was so focused, so intense. I was having the time of my life for about 5 minutes at which point, having wet myself, just a wee bit, about 3 times (I hadn't transitioned to the idea of adult diapers yet), I could no longer breathe or raise my arms. I took myself out before I passed out. There was a girl there on the sidelines, darling and young, with long blond locks and a tiny waist, that was attached to this group of men somehow. I used to be very shy, but as a more mature woman I have grown out of this and so I struck up a conversation. It was then that the force of reality hit me, almost enough to wet myself again. Every last one of those boys on the court was 18. For all intents and purposes they could have been my daughter's friends. As the realization of my comparative antiquity dawned on me, it was as if my graying hair and arthritic knee started laughing. "Hahahahahah!!! You forgot you were OLD!!! HAHAHAHA!!!"

This morning I had an altogether different experience, but one that has kept me thinking all morning about aging bodies. I was driving Leah to school just after 9 so she could have the pancake breakfast offered by a teacher there in honor of late late start. (I remember when I used to get excited about pancakes, back in the olden days.) We were still in our neighborhood, which is a slightly sketchy part of town that is full of stray dogs and feral cats, when I noticed a darling white dog standing in the middle of my side of the road. Leah, fearing for the dogs life, while I was looking at it going 15 mph, said with much anxiety, "MOM! DON'T RUN OVER THE DOG!" I explained to her that part of my obligation as a licensed driver was to look straight ahead as I drove. I slowed down expecting the little white dog, with the floppy pigtail-like ears and innocent expression, to run when I got close. No. The dog just stared at me and then back at the object of her devotion, the Century Link guy. Now, I knew that the dog did not belong to the guy pulling equipment out of his work van but I looked at him anyway. Leah was chuckling, I was smiling and dumbfounded that a dog wouldn't run from the sight of a large  approaching vehicle, and the worker guy was trying to ignore the cute little dog. Eventually realizing that it was up to him to unstop the small traffic jam (another car had approached in the other lane), the Century Link guy tried to shoo the little doting doggie away from him back across the street where she came from. It was then that I saw this initially generic worker guy's face. Oooohhhh! Girl! He was ca-UTE!!!  He was tall, dark and handsome. Throw in the floppy eared puppy and the crooked embarrassed grin on the maintenance man's face and my heart reacted involuntary! It was as if the page from a calendar had come to life in front of my very eyes! ...It was like watching the Budweiser commercial from the Super Bowl ads on YouTube! I drove past the puppy who was still ignoring the danger, but was at least scooted enough that I wouldn't run over her. My heart was all aflutter and, chuckling, I glanced in the rearview mirror to see what my hair looked like. Dramatically I said to Leah,"he was cute!" She said, "what! The man or the dog?" Haha! Both!

I don't know about you, but I have a lot of conversations with myself. I once read on the internet (so it must be right) that it was a sure sign of intelligence. That made me feel a whole lot better about myself. The conversation I had with Erica this morning, as I drove from the scene of the unexpected heart palpitations, was this, "Erica! You are a 42 year old happily married woman with 8 kids! You stop that right now!" It was very effective, but I did start thinking about "cougars." Isn't "cougar" the term people use in reference to older women who are with a much, much younger man? Hmm, I get it now.

*Confession- I have no idea what gender the dog was.☺

Monday, February 5, 2018

What Goes In Must Come Out

I am writing this mostly so I can look back with fondness at the years of motherhood when my children still filled the house with stink and laughter.

* PSA for those of you with weak stomachs. You may want to skip this one.

Samuel fell asleep on my lap last night wearing his Sunday dress pants and no shirt. I did not have the wherewithal to change that. My recliner had been draped with a crib-sized quilt which we were sitting on top of. I assumed the quilt had been left behind by someone cozying up on my chair the night before because it was there when I got out of bed. Samuel, my sweet angelic caboose baby that is now 4, weighs about 50 pounds. Getting out from under him required a *momanuever. I leaned forward, picked up his legs from off my lap and dumped them behind my back, careful not to make him do a back flip over the armrest of my chair, and stood up. I was so grateful that it worked. Sometimes momanuevers, thought up in a moment of pure maniacal desperation, backfire.

Somewhere between 1 and 2 a.m. Samuel climbed up next to me in my bed. Not an unusual occurrence. John woke up enough to ask if he was dry, which IS abnormal since Samuel is NOT the bed wetter. More on that later. Samuel said his tummy hurt and then "popped a toot" on my back, this is also not uncommon. Mothers get farted on a lot. I was not totally awake for all this. If I was awake then I was falling back to sleep in record time, drifting in and out of consciousness. My eyes popped back open to see John roll out of bed then walk briskly around it toward my side and our bathroom. Samuel suddenly staggered out of the bed behind me. I figured John was helping him to the toilet so I dozed off again, but only for like 2.5 seconds because then I awoke to the sound of John's voice pointing out the vomit pile on the carpet between our bed and the bathroom. He got Samuel all the way to the toilet and now I had to really wake up because what kind of wife pretends to fall back to sleep,  making her husband do all the work of the vomit clean-up crew? Not me, I guess.

We have 8 kids, as you may know, and as unbelievable as this might sound, in all of our 18 years of working on the vomit clean-up crew we have had almost no carpet pukes. Really, it's true! I thought briefly about that fun fact while contemplating this Chocolate-Peanut Butter-No-Bake-Cookie-mixed-with-stomach-acid splat on my carpet and I kind of didn't know what to do. I went and got my pancake spatula (Bet you just decided to decline any offers of pancakes at my house!), a grocery sack, a wad of paper towels, and started scooping. Samuel is really good at chewing his cookies or else Hannah, the cookie maker, used quick oats, either way my pancake-flipper-puke-picker-upper plan was not really working. I did the best I could at 2 a.m. and was just rinsing out my first wet rag attempt when John said that the chunks needed to be up out of the carpet before we used a wet cloth. He left and came back in with a butter knife and a soup spoon. I'm surprised he wasn't wearing a bib. He was on his own after that. I refuse to sit on the floor in the wee hours of the morning daintily picking up minute pieces of partially digested food particals with the good silver. Instead I went in to the couch where Samuel was now recuperating and told him a story about a magic mouse who could make cheese appear whenever he was hungry. In hindsight maybe that wasn't the best choice. Who wants to think about cheese when your stomach is manufactuing its own curds? He threw up again a few minutes later.

Samuel didn't want to be alone. We came back to the recliner. It was a bit nippy so we stood up and I grabbed the quilt that was conveniently still under our bums. He situated himself across my lap so his head could rest on the soft arm of the chair, and as I fluffed the blanket over our laps, the smell of day old urine assailed our nostrils. Pee that had remained dormant all day and half the night night under this blanket was now soaking up into the seat of my pajamas. After a brief moment of horrified shock I made an executive decision... TO. NOT. CARE. Caring required a shower and new clothes and searching the house for a clean blanket. Some of you reading this will recoil in shock, some of you will just shake your head, but some of you know what I'm talking about. For some of us there comes that moment when all we can do is embrace the insanity and say to ourselves, "at least I am warm."

Before we were lulled back to sleep in our over stuffed urinal, I told Samuel how the throw ups can be contagious. I said that more people in our family would start throwing up just like him. His excited response, "then we can be MATCHERS!"

He is currently settled into a movie downstairs with a "matcher." His big sister made it to my husband's office near her school before throwing up in his garbage can. They have matching gallon Ziplock baggies. Dreams do come true.

*MOMANEUVER - the action taken by a woman desperate to get away from a sleeping child without waking them up. This can be anything from creeping at the pace of an ancient arthritic tortoise while rolling off of a creaking mattress after getting a toddler to sleep, to removing a sleeping 50 lb gorilla child out of the back seat of a vehicle while still wearing a purse and carrying ...stuff, stuff you refuse to make another trip for.