Last night Mark put on his red long-sleeved AIDS Ride t-shirt when he came home from work.
Kate: “What that say, Dada?”
Mark: “Ride to end AIDS.”
Kate: “I love it! That is so cute!”
When I was pregnant with Kate I had the usual spate of irresponsibility nightmares. You know, the garden variety leave-the-store-and-forget-the-baby-in-the-shopping-cart type nightmares. Or the, “Where’s your new baby?” question that the kindly neighbor asks and you think, “Oh shit! That’s right! Where is she?” I also had one in which the baby was very small and I kept her in a Tupperware (before you judge me, I didn’t put the top on it–duh), and then I realized I forgot to give her water for a while–not something one generally gives an infant, but in my Dream Land it was appropriate. Oops!
Last night I woke Mark up in the middle of the night. “The snakes!” I implored him. “I forgot about them and they are loose!”
The situation being, that I was caring for two very large white snakes and realized that I was forgetful about ensuring they would stay in their bag or crate or whatever. I’d woken up from my dream, but was still certain that those snakes needed corralling before God knows what happened. (Sure, these snakes aren’t a baby, per se, but the lack of tending to them made me feel they ranked with the hapless mother dreams.)
Mark didn’t seem to care so much about this dire scenario. In fact, I’d categorize his reaction to the news as more annoyed than anything. “What?! I was asleep! It’s 1:45!”
Weird. If someone told me there were some huge loose snakes lurking around I’d hardly be feeling sleepy.
Anyway, ten minutes later after I assume we both dozed off, I woke up once more feeling an even more hellbent on imparting to Mark the extent of the danger I’d put us were in. I’d been irresponsible with these snakes–which it seemed were somehow the property of work, kinda like when you could sign up to take the classroom hamster home over a holiday–but with Mark’s help I figured we could get out of this pickle.
“Mark!” I called out to his side of the bed again. “The Sunset snakes! They are loose. I let them loose!” Again, Mark expressed apparent disinterest, and an even more ardent desire to sleep sans my reptilian jibber-jabber than he did when I first woke him up.
This morning after his alarm went off Mark informed me that I was talking in my sleep to him about snakes. “Oh, I was totally awake,” I assured him. Sure, it all started out with a dream, but when I woke up, the urgency I felt to get him to intercept the consequences of my irresponsibility was very real.
And he really didn’t seem to care much. Maybe I should scream out “Fire!” in the middle of his REM cycle tonight, just to see how he reacts.
Anyway, in the breaking light of day we laughed for a good ten minutes about it. But I still looked around good and hard before reaching into my closet for my shoes.
When I got to work I saw a woman whose family lives in San Diego, and realized where this whole snake thing hailed. She’d just told me that her parents are back in their house after the wildfire evacuation, but they have 6 inches of ash in their pool and throughout their yard. If that’s not bad enough, there are rattle snakes that have come down from the mountains (biblical, no?) that are lurking under the ash, so they’ve got to be vewy vewy careful when they walk anywhere outside.
Um, iiiiick!!!! A perfectly good plot line to inform my night’s dreams, no?
On NPR I just heard a sleep expert saying that pregnant women report having lots of weird dreams. It might be hormonal, the guy said, or it might just be because you’re sleeping less soundly and remember more of your dreams from waking up a lot. In which case you are always having freaky dreams, but just don’t remember them.
I think I’m just doing my part to ensure that my sleep–and God knows, Mark’s–takes on the restless and unpredictable pattern that having a newborn in your house presents. Just trying to ease the transition. And reinforce in Mark that as the man of the house, he has a responsibility to protect us women and children from whatever evils, real or imagined, dare to disrupt us.
About a month ago I was at a prenatal yoga class and we were doing the whole go-around-the-room-and-say-how-prego-you-are routine. It’s the kind of sharing with strangers that threw me for a loop at my first prenatal yoga class two-and-a-half years ago. It was weird enough to be in a room with 20 other pregnant women. And as a late bloomer to marriage and motherhood, it was even weirder that I had a legitimate reason to be part of the kind of pack I’d never been part of.
On top of that, the way everyone had a turn to talk in class was totally unexpected. Here I was coming to get some exercise, and suddenly this super personal thing–my pregnancy–turned into a slumber party-style sharing session.
Of course, it took me all of 4 minutes to drink the Kool-Aid and swap stories about late-night hip aches and perpetual peeing.
So here I was, back in the saddle at prenatal yoga for this pregnancy, and feeling smugly experienced as all these other women talked with wonder and amazement about their first times. Everyone else seemed to know down to the hour how pregnant they were–”On Sunday I’ll be fifteen-and-a-half weeks” they’d report smiling proudly–while I tried to summon up a reasonable approximation for how far along I was. (And spent the rest of the time comparing my belly-girth to still-slim first-timers who were even further along than me.)
When my turn was up I said it was my second pregnancy, and mentioned that my 2-year old also claims to have a baby in her belly. This resulted in some polite chuckling, and caused the only other second-time mom to exclaim from across the room, “That is so funny! My son says the same thing!”
Her son? Now that’s just weird.
Tonight Mark came home from work and was playing on the carpet with Kate in the way that’s so damn sweet you just bless your stars for your awesome little family. (I also get a strong hit of this feeling when Mark bathes Kate at night and I eavesdrop on their crazy-cute conversations. Some day I’ll tape them so we can play them back when she’s in the habit of stumbling home hours after her curfew and we need something to convince us to not put her up for a late-stage adoption.)
So Mark and Kate, playing on the carpet… After a few sessions of wrestling alternating with hugging, Kate pulled up her shirt and started to tell Mark about the baby in her belly. When he asked if it was a boy or a girl, she said matter-of-factly “Boy.” When asked his name, she said a quick “Ummm” in the new way she does, then said, “Rotto!”
This nearly caused Mark to fall through the floorboards with glee. “What’s that? What’s your baby’s name?” And again, with more confidence: “Rotto!”
“Rotto? The baby in your belly’s name is Rotto?” Mark was nearly as delighted by this name as he was when I came up with Wigwam Boy on the drive to our friend’s lake house in Minnesota. (I know. Isn’t Wigwam Boy a great name?!)
Thus far, Kate has only named one other thing. One of her small plastic baby dolls she calls Little Peanut, which, like everything she does, we find extremely adorable. And now Rotto. Well, it’s unlikely there’ll be a lot of other Rottos in his class at school.
I wonder what the son of that woman from yoga class named his baby.
It’s nearly impossible to anticipate the associations Kate will make.
Some of them are smart and surprising. Like when I mentioned to Kate in our recent trip to RI that we’d see my cousin Nancy, Kate said, “Pretty dress!” When Kate had seen Nancy at Easter Nancy commented a few times on Kate’s special holiday dress. “Ah yes, mother, your cousin Nancy. The one who commended me on my fine taste in formal wear.”
When she was younger and I was getting her used to sleeping in her crib, I’d prime for going to bed by saying it was time for “night night.” In turn, she made the connection that “night night” meant nursing, since that’s what we did before she went to bed. And she still has that concept in her mind a year later. One of her books shows a mother dog nursing puppies, and another a pig mama feeding her piglets. Kate, whose vocabulary has mushroom-clouded and can easily describe what she sees in a book, still points to those pictures and say, “Pig night night!”
So several months ago when Dr. Robbins proclaimed Kate precocious, he recommended we get her a potty and offer her a chance to use it before she takes a bath at night. If she didn’t want to, no biggie. Just get the concept going. (I’ve since learned this is called “toilet teaching” versus “toilet training.” William Saffire take note.)
Since Kate would always be undressed for her bath at potty time, she determined that using the potty is something one does naked. And now that she’s developed an interest in using the potty at other times of day, I have to vehemently encourage her to not strip down entirely for a quick tinkle. She doesn’t trust me when I say this though. So I’ve had to use the potty myself while pointing out in a loud sing-songy now-learn-this tone, “See? When Mama uses the potty she keeps her clothes on! It’s how big girls do it!” (Suggesting “big girls” do things a certain way is generally the key to Kate’s instant and enthusiastic compliance.)
So today, as I’m pulling down my own pants and outlining the merits of keeping them around my thighs versus taking them off to tinkle–along with my shoes, socks, and shirt–I remembered that this scenario has actually already been played out on the show Seinfeld. There was an episode where George was caught buttoning up his shirt after leaving a restaurant restroom. Jerry and Elaine manage to get to the bottom of the disturbing fact that George takes his shirt off to poop.
I’m open to Kate developing into whatever person she turns out to be, but George Costanza?
A few years ago (pre-Kate) I got together for dinner with my friend Marian. She was all aglow with news to share. Surprisingly, the news was that her daughter Nola had “pooped in the potty” that morning. Mar was beaming with pride. You’d have thought she’d won a MacArthur Fellowship. Childless at the time, I immediately concluded she was mad and/or that all parents are.
But today I too am bursting with poopy pride. Mark came into our room after getting Kate up this morning to announce that she’d pooped in the potty. He gleefully relayed the news: “So she peed, then she said, ‘Poopoo?’, and I said, ‘Yes! Yes! You can poopoo in the potty! And then–she did! I mean, so then I looked in the potty and there was totally a little turd in there!”
I was proud like a Jewish Mom on her daughter’s wedding day. I nearly regretted that Mark had flushed the evidence. (Nearly.) I should have called Marian then and there to apologize for my earlier ignorance. How was I to know?
Once I concepted the scrapbook page that would mark this scatological milestone (okay, not really), Mark and I immediately launched into a small parental panic over the fact that Kate’s interest in potty training has surpassed our research on the matter (though by now, 8 hours later, Mark has probably read everything ever posted online in English on this subject).
Our shared anxiety: What if we’re already doing something wrong? What’s the proper way to continue to encourage this delightful potty-pooping behavior? What are the best books on this topic?
And, of course, does this mean that she’s really advanced?
At any rate, one thing is for sure. I have every intention of breaking her of the stigma of becoming a Shirtless Pooper. She may be short, a little pudgy around the middle, and even a little whiny at times, but George Costanza she is not.
So Thursday night I come back from a dinner out with the mother’s group. And as I start to get ready for bed I walk from the bathroom where I’m brushing my teeth and washing my face to the living room where Mark is sitting to give him the download.
“Some of the babies are still not sleeping through the night!” I reported.
“Some can’t fall asleep on their own in their cribs!” I say between spitting toothpaste.
Not very charitable of me, as my mother would put it. I guess what I was trying to say to Mark was that we are pretty lucky with Miss Kate. She is doing a good job, and some of the things that we’ve now kinda taken for granted, are things that we should be grateful for.
But I didn’t really say that. I was gloating a bit. But I got my pay-back.
At about 10:30 while I was still awake, I heard Kate call out from her bed, “Mama!” as I was walking past. And it didn’t really phase me. If anything I smiled and thought, I’ll go in for a minute, arrange her blankies and she’ll doze back off. She almost never does this, so going in when she calls won’t start a bad habit.
In the middle of the night–God knows what time it was–Kate calls out, “Mama, uppy!” This is the annoying way she asks to be picked up, which dates back to our Easter trip to RI when Aunt Mary taught Kate a little game that had the phrase, “Uppity uppity to the wee house” in it. (The “wee house” of course being the armpit. Long story.) Somehow after that Kate started asking for “uppy” instead of “up” when she wanted to be picked up.
Sooo, back to the middle of the night. Here she is calling out, “Mama, uppy!” clear as a bell in the middle of the night. I was hoping she would doze back off, but she said it about 5 more times.
This was weird. Up twice in one night. But again, since she never does this I figured it wouldn’t hurt for Mark to just go in and quickly tell her to go back to sleep. But that didn’t work so well. First off, Mark didn’t think that was a good idea. So we had a delightful exhausted and grumpy exchange of varying parenting approaches. Then I won and Mark stormed off to Kate’s room.
She was not interested in Daddy, uppy, as it turns out. He tried to calm her down. He picked her up. He even went to the kitchen and got her milk (something we haven’t done in months and months in the middle of the night). When that all failed, he tried putting her back in bed and she was wailing.
But then she stopped. For 15 minutes. And as we are dozing off another, “Mama, uppy!” rang out. This time followed by crying. At this point it’s clear she is getting back at me for the not one but three other children I was gloating that she was sleeping better than.
Mark and I tried to tough it out. Since I won the last argument to go into her room, but that didn’t help, it was Mark’s turn to prevail, and he insisted that ignoring her was the solution.
20 minutes of hysterical screaming of “Mama, uppy!” was essentially Iraq prison torture to me. At one point Mark said he was confident she wasn’t losing steam, and could quite possibly continue bellowing “Mama, uppy” for a good hour at least.
So I went in. And all it took was me saying, “It’s time to sleep. Mama and Dada are sleeping [or should be, damn it]. It’s time for Kate to sleep.” And she didn’t even need to be picked up. Just wanted to know I was there, I guess. So I re-arranged her blankets and gave her a kiss and she was quiet as a mouse.
And I crawled back into bed exhausted and convinced that karma had dealt me an immediate and undeniable blow. Next time the mamas meet, my download to Mark will be all sympathy and no glory. I just can’t risk losing the sleep.
Whenever I throw something away I have to announce it to Mark. I’ll just scream out to him wherever he is from my position near the garbage can. “I’m throwing out these holey socks I’ve had since 7th grade!” Or, “I’m throwing out these flip flops with the paper-thin soles!”
I throw things out so infrequently I require positive reinforcement when I do so. It’s not like Mark is someone who has facility with tossing things himself. If anything, he understands how hard it is to part with crap, so he empathizes and cheers me on.
I’d say it’s a genetic trait since my mom was utterly incapable of parting with things. But it didn’t get passed down to all of us. My oldest sister Marie is living proof of the backlash of being the child of a hoarder. She throws things out with clinical ease, utter emotional detachment. In fact, at one point she told me she heard that things don’t last in the freezer for more than two weeks, so whatever she was keeping in there wasn’t around for long either. I don’t think that, aside from the humans, she’s got anything in her house that’s more than a few years old.
As the youngest, I represent the opposite side of the spectrum–though Ellen and Judy do their fair share of packratting. In fact, Judy has a storage unit with the contents of an entire apartment that she hasn’t lived in for years, so that counts for something.
At least everything that I hoard–with some exceptions–has some redeeming value. When my mother was selling the house we grew up in, which she’d lived in for over 40 years, my sisters and I slogged through three floors full of stuff. There were doll-sized afghans knitted by church bazaar ladies. Patterns for outdated outfits for pre-teens. Twin bed frames long unassembled, woven palm frond fans, mismatched shirt boxes from Macy’s and Lord & Taylor, circa God knows when (definitely pre-80s). And endless amounts of books and magazines. The woman had every Woman’s Day, Gourmet, and National Geographic ever printed (though not in any sort of order that might make them collectible), not to mention a pristine vintage set of The World Book Encyclopedia. (The Wold Book was the Internet back when I was in grade school.)
Much of this crap filled the eves of the attic, but much of it was in the living space. It wasn’t like she was a crazy-lady in a cat-filled house, but anywhere where there might be a couple magazines in a “tossers” house, there would be a treasure trove in which one could perform a sociological study of fashion and food trends through the decades in my mother’s house.
And her old magazines weren’t enough. You know when you go to a yard sale and someone is selling a carton of Bon Appetit magazines from 1974-1976, and you think to yourself, “Ha. Good luck selling those, buddy. Who the hell would buy those?”
Well, if the sale was east of the Mississippi, my mother would, that’s who. My cousin Nancy who is for all intents and purposes a sister, and certainly my mother’s fifth daughter, used to find ways to lug armloads of magazines out of my mother’s house after a visit, so she could recycle them. We would laugh until we cried talking about Nancy’s attempts to sneak out with a bag of yellowing National Enquirers (the dirty papers, as my grandmother called them), which my Aunt Mary would distribute to my mother after she and her sister, Mimi, had read them. Sometimes Nancy would almost get caught and oooh you didn’t want to cross my mother when you were trying to get rid of something she thought she needed. That was never an easy conversation, and always ended with you setting down the bag and Just. Walking. Away.
When we were getting ready to move her to her smaller house we’d argue with my mom over the smallest items. Up in the attic in a shoe box full of other random crap like pin cushions and crochet hooks I’d found a handle to a coffee mug–truly a white handle to a random mug, not even a china cup–and I remember my mother blew her stack when I tossed it in the garbage. “I’m holding onto that,” she scolded me. “That mug is somewhere and I’m going to glue it back on.” It would have been funny it was so absurd, if it weren’t for the fact that you’d been shoveling through stuff all day and wanted to just sit down and cry with exhaustion and frustration.
After my sisters and I had five of these arguments each with her, all over various worthless items, my mother grew incredibly defensive and upset over the whole enterprise. She was trying to hold onto all these pieces of her life, and we were thoughtlessly plowing through it all and willing to just throw it all away. I can see how the panic of something she really cherished getting discarded could be unnerving, but my sisters and I held staunchly to our side of the situation. We were blinded with drive to get more than 40 years of accumulation moved, organized, and/or somehow staged in a way that made it look appealing to a potential buyer.
Eventually we somehow managed to corral the save-able stuff, toss some of the crap on the sly, sell the better stuff we all agreed we didn’t want but someone else might, and get her into the sweet smaller house that she loved, without ever coming to blows or needing family mediation. Net net we must have somehow grown from the experience.
Part of the thing with my mother no doubt had to do with her having grown up in the Depression. She never used tea bags twice, but man did she scrape every last drop of batter from a mixing bowl. And in the way that you buy whatever laundry detergent you had growing up because that’s just what people use, I definitely picked up some of my mother’s Depression-inspired habits without realizing they were anything other than the way things are done.
When Shelley and I were first roommates I went into the fridge one night after dinner and saw that Shelley, whose mother was a bit older than my mom, had wrapped up the small heel of a tomato in Saran Wrap. I laughed when I saw it, thinking that even I would never have saved that, but Shelley would probably not hold onto flannel nightgowns for as long as I do, so it all evens out. Besides, how can you make fun of someone who is suffering from a version of an illness that you have?
At any rate, tonight I threw out a perfectly good shirt of Kate’s. Well, it used to be perfectly good, but it must have been in the laundry pile downstairs with some food on it because it got blue speckles of mold on it–even after going through the wash. The shirt was actually pretty new, but I knew it wasn’t ever going to come clean. So, after rejecting the thought of saving it as a rag, I just tossed it in the garbage can.
Maybe some day when Kate is helping us clean out the house so we can move to a smaller place, she’ll thank me for having let go of some things along the way.
1. Blue Morpho butterflies copulate for 5 hours straight.
2. Flying in 12-seater planes is both terrifying and exhilarating.
3. It takes about 5 seconds for safety-conscious parents to be convinced by an island cab driver that, “You don’t need to use a car seat–everyone drives slow here.” (Hey, what’s good enough for Britney Spears’ baby, is good enough for Kate.)
4. Apparently a fair number of Americans vacation in places like Belize and decide on the fly to move there and never go home. This concept has always concerned me. Do they truly not return home and “just stay” as they claim to have? In that case, what do they do with the contents of their homes? Do their mothers or friends clean up after them and put all their stuff on storage, or have a big yard sale? Aside from being way too much of a planner to take this approach to moving, it just seems plain selfish to me. Besides, paradise seems great until Week 6 of your job renting snorkel equipment to tourists. Sure it’s pretty there and all, but after a while those jobs have to wear on you as much as your cubicle gig did.
5. After days of constant togetherness, one day Kate was sweetly muttering, “Mama, Dada, Kate” to herself. I explained to her that Mama, Dada and Kate are what is called a family. She looked at me all excited and said, “Heiny!” Ah yes, the McClusky heiny. This is not something I learned while in Belize, but it was funny.
6. Bandits can be so meddlesome. Just when you want to check out some Mayan ruins, a group of gun- and machete-totin’ bandits hold up a group of tourists, and they end up closing down the place for the day before you can get in.
7. Spending a lot of money on an impractical white bathing suit is totally worth it if it makes you feel like you still got it on your 40th birthday.
8. The worst kind of American tourists are drunk Baby Boomers.
9. When not being toted around in a Gucci bag by Paris Hilton, Kinajous crawl around in trees in the jungle. Night-time jungle treks allow you to see these kinds of things, along with tarantulas, mega “witch” moths, and other creepy crawly things.
10. Having your husband spontaneously serenade you on the morning of your 40th birthday with a medley of Lionel Richie songs is both hilarious and sweet (and validates your choice in him as a life mate). Hearing a LR song on the cab ride back from dinner that night and bursting into song–along with the cabbie–is the perfect end to an evening (and validates that even at 40, one can still act immature).
A few weeks ago I was in my car and reached across the seat for something and realized that I’d made a dent in my shirt. In my bra in particular. Further investigation revealed that the bra was clearly huge on me. It was one of those padded-type ones that holds its shape even with no boobies in it, so it was kind of resting there, but you could poke at it and leave an impression. (And people attribute car accidents to cell phones. How many women are out there driving distractedly due to surprisingly large undergarments they discover they’re wearing?)
I knew that my breastfeeding buxomness wasn’t going to last forever—especially since it’s been four months now since I’ve weaned Kate—but this was ridiculous. Had I recently experienced a sudden, dramatic shrinkage that made a bra that fit me perfectly yesterday seem immense today? At this rate I’d be convex by summer.
Later that night while getting ready for bed I looked at the size on the bra and realized why it was so big, or rather, why I seemed so small in it. It wasn’t anywhere near my size. This bra was an imposter! This was not my bra!
So whose was it?
Although I was (thankfully) confident there was no foul play, I couldn’t resist teasing Mark about it. “Your girlfriend is clearly irresponsible—leaving her bra here. What a tramp!”
Mark played along with the concept of an imaginary girlfriend. “Oh yeah,” he said casually. “She’s always leaving that thing everywhere.”
Then I did a mental checklist of the many houseguests we recently had. My father. No, this black lace bra clearly wasn’t his style. My mother-in-law. Didn’t seem likely it was hers, and I don’t even thing she did laundry when she was here. My friend—or frienda, as I like to say—Brenda. “Aha!” I thought, utilizing all my Nancy Drew sleuthiness. Brenda had to be the rightful owner. She fit the bill in terms of bra size, and she’d done laundry while visiting.
I called her. “I’ve got your bra, I think. But if it’s not yours, don’t tell me. I’d rather not have to figure out how it got into my house.”
Of course, the bra sat on my bureau for a couple weeks. The mailroom at my office is in the building across the street and I never seem to muster the energy to make the trek there. And on my days off, jaunts to the post office didn’t seem like a good use of my free time. So one day as Mark was heading out to the office I handed him the bra. “Could you please mail this to Brenda? I’ll email you her address.” I could trust Mark to not be the kind of guy who would wear it on his head through his office.
A few days later I got a voicemail from Brenda who had gotten Mark’s package. “It’s a very pretty bra, but I’m sorry to say it’s not mine. Too small.” (Show off.)
I called her back. “I told you to lie if it wasn’t yours, remember?”
“Maybe it was yours from before you had Kate?” she offered. “You know, before you moved onto nursing bras.”
Huh, I thought. She’s got a point there. Maybe that was the bra that I was so proud to have bought in such a large size towards the end of my pregnancy. Walking home from the store I left about four voicemail messages for friends showing off my new cup size.
Brenda promises to bring the bra back the next time we see each other. In the meantime, a woman’s brown and black reversible jacket has now appeared on our coat rack. Mark’s Mom says it’s not hers, so I’ll have to call Bren again to check in on whether it’s hers. If it’s not, I hope she remembers to lie this time.
Mark and I had a sort of marital standoff about seeing the Borat movie. He’s a huge fan of Sacha Baron Cohen’s show, and–call me crazy–but it makes me uncomfortable watching someone interview a Bishop and asking them questions about sex with animals and such. To me it’s not funny, it’s painful. But Mark–and evidently millions of other Americans–find it uproarious.
So when we were in North Carolina for Thanksgiving, and were thankful for having Mark’s mother not only offer to but want to hang out with Kate solo for a few hours to allow us to skip out to a movie, the issue came to a head about the Borat movie.
Ultimately Mark caved. As much as he wanted to see it, he didn’t want to see it sitting next to me if I was going to squirm and sigh and make quiet disapproving noises while chomping on my popcorn. It’s a sad kind of victory when your mate gives into you based on the knowledge that when you don’t get your way you can be so unbearable that it’s better to just give you your way.
But be that as it may, I won.
Sadly, the movie pickin’s were slim. It’s the typical scenario like those rare times when your parents were feeling generous when you were mall-shopping as a kid. When every other shopping adventure left you desperate to own something that would change your life it was so great but you couldn’t get it, when you had the green light to shop you never found anything you really liked. But you bought something anyway, because you could. And like that, Mark and I still went to a movie. I mean, how often do we get to do this without spending a small fortune on a babysitter? Like all my friends with kids before me said, it really does make a good case for waiting for movies to come out on DVD.
It’s shameful what we settled on, and worse, how the whole afternoon panned out. I am, or rather was, a huge Jack Black fan. (Wither the days of High Fidelity?) So we went to see some abominable movie that he was in with his Tenacious D band mate. The movie was clearly for 15-year-old stoners. I mean, the opening credits were an animation of people farting, propelled around the screen like wayward balloons by the amount of gas they were expelling.
But we had hope. We had a babysitter and we were free!
Alas, the movie droned on. Painfully. So painfully in fact that our bad decision to see it in the first place was made more glaringly evident as each minute passed. Somehow through whispers in the dark we managed to come to the joint conclusion that cutting our losses and leaving mid-way would be the best tactic. We returned to a house full of Mark’s relatives, our heads hung low with shame. “How was the movie?” they all chimed in excitedly, knowing what a treat it was for us to get to one. I almost felt tempted to lie.
Well, shameful for us, but as an actor, you’ve got to be embarrassed about being in a movie that the parents of a baby–people who adore movies and never get out to them–are compelled to walk out of.
God, Jack Black. Fire your agent, dude.
Of course, this whole scenario just provided Mark with more Borat ammo. Every time any friend relayed some scene from the movie to us, and when we were quiet and they’d ask us if we’d seen it, Mark would just sigh and look at me with big cow eyes. “No, no, we didn’t,” he’d say, his voice heavy with regret. Sometimes he’d mention the other movie we saw instead. And sometimes he didn’t even need to say anything.
So once the Borat movie came out on DVD I was, of course, backed into a marital corner. What option had I other than to consent to bringing the awful DVD into our home? At least it would save Mark from the social stigma of not being able to chat with friends and coworkers about the movie if it ever were to come up in conversation years from now–it being so terribly past the point when all other humans had already seen it.
And I have to admit. It wasn’t that bad. It certainly wasn’t half as bad as that other movie, the name of which I’ve committed to deep repression.
At any rate, just when I thought we’d buried the whole Borat plot line from the McClusky family existence, Kate picked up a small verbal affectation. When she’s bidding her adieus to people, or inanimate objects as is sometimes the case, Kate lets lose a Bah-Biiiyeee that is a remarkably uncanny imitation of Borat. I mean, she did it at Macy’s yesterday to the saleswoman in the Faconnable area. And as I stooped down to pick up the hat that Kate’d dropped I muttered something under my breath about Mama’s little Borat, which the saleswoman heard and squealed, “Oh my God! She does sound like him! How funny!”
Adorable, I think as we trudge off, as Kate, excited that the woman is laughing and smiling at her, smiles back a huge grin and calls out another, “Ba-Biiiiyeee!” over her shoulder. The woman chuckles and shakes her head as she reaches to ring up the clothes of the next person in line saying, “Did you hear that little girl? She sounds just like Borat!”
Wonderful. Just the sort of thing I’d hoped for my daughter. This sort of karmic backlash will teach me to give into Mark’s preferences a little more often. When the next Lord of the Rings movie comes out, I will feign enthusiasm and put aside whatever “good” movie it is that I’d rather seen. Better that then risking Kate taking on some dwarfish Hobbit-like qualities that I’ll never live down.
It’s not something I brag about openly, but there is a certain sense of pride I have about my teeth. They’re not all that dazzling, but they are pretty damn straight, and I never had braces.
It’s something that never really phased me, until those who had gone through the apparent social and physical trauma that is braces have responded with all manner of hoopla when they have found this out about me.
So it’s particularly concerning to me that just the other day I realized that Kate seems to have an underbite. I’m still holding out hope that every time I ask to see her teeth she is just jutting her jaw out, but I’m fearful that’s not the case. And maybe if she does have a bull dog’s bite it’s nothing to worry about since these are just baby teeth.
At any rate, it’s clearly Mark’s genes at work. Ah well. He can start saving for the orthadontist.
