Sharp Corners

One of the hardest things about raising children is the constant repetition. "Did you put your clothes in the hamper?" "Please put your dishes in the sink." "Stop whacking your brother with the wiffle bat." Parents, you know the drill. But it pays off during those oh-so-rare times when the child actually does what you want without asking.

And that’s when you wish they hadn’t.

Last weekend I was running hither and yon trying to cram 400 things from my to-do list into one 14-hour Saturday. My kids had a skating party to go to and I’d offered to take another neighborhood kid with me who’d also been invited. She was across the street getting her stuff so I herded my kids into the car and said we’d just meet her at the end of her driveway. Once the kids were all shoed, seated and buckled, I realized I forgotten one minor thing – the car keys – and ran back into the house.

Back in the van, I did a roll call to make sure everyone was present and accounted for, then put the car in reverse. Glancing over my shoulder, I realized getting past the other cars in the driveway was going to be a tight squeeze so, in the interest of time, I cut into the grass.

And drove directly over my son’s bicycle.

Now, mind you, he’d put it just where he was supposed to, in the grass and off the driveway. But, obviously, not far enough out of the way for a klutz like me hell-bent on being at the rink for the first group skate.

After months of telling my son to "park in the grass before someone runs over his bike," he parked in the grass only to have someone run over his bike. As I stared at the pretzeled metal that now somewhat resembled origami pop-art, I waited for the wrath of Son Three to rain down on me.

As he came around the side of the van to survey the damage (Van and tires: fine. Bike: DOA), all he had to say was, "Cool! Now I get a new bike! I want green!"

I felt pretty bad about the whole incident, apologized profusely on the way to the party and even considered offering to splat myself against the wall of the rink in penance. I was obviously more upset than he was because all I’ve been hearing for a week now is, "Green! It’s gotta be green!"

And green it shall be.

Let me be the first to say that if I were ever to become famous, this is not how I would want it to happen.

Good god, a festering groin boil? It must have been a slow sports news day.

I like to help out at my kids’ school as much as the next sucker mom. The boys’ teachers are fabulous and, in fact, the whole school pretty well rocks so I’ll do what I can to support them. Besides donating construction paper and pipe cleaners or showing up for classroom projects, I also help out with the PTO and another school council. The inherent politics are enough to drive me mad but I’m pretty good at tuning it out:

"Did you hear? Sally’s mom brought pre-made cookies to the class party! I spent all last night with my angelic offspring, toiling in the kitchen and measuring everything just so. Then my cherubs and I took an extra hour to decorate each cupcake with sprinkles applied with tweezers. Didn’t my daughter do an excellent job mapping out the African Rain Forest in butter cream frosting?"

"Here, have a Clamato and Ready-Wip cracker. It’s all I had handy this morning when I remembered today’s party."

Moms tend to leave me alone after that.

Anyway, I have far more pressing things to think about (where did I leave my cute red flip-flops?) than the things these moms get lathered up about so I usually check out mid-sentence. That bit me in the butt a few weeks ago when I didn’t listen carefully to what a fellow mom was saying to me when she cornered me in Wal Mart. I thought she was telling me about her plans to run for PTO president. I muttered something about how that "sounds great" and next thing I knew, I found out I’d offered to run for PTO as well.

Oh, bloody hell.

A few days later, another mom chatted me up at school and said she, too, was running for PTO president. Stupid me, I said "sounds great" again. Whoops.

Now the two warring factions had a pull toy. I gracefully told them over an over again that I would help out if there was a need but, please, by all means, if someone else wanted to be on the PTO, I would gladly step aside. What I really meant is "please leave me out of this little cold war because I just won’t go there." I guess I should have been more clear about that point.

I got a call from the principal today that I have been nominated for Treasurer. God help me, I’d rather be lunchroom monitor for the next ten years than be Treasurer! If I wanted to play accountant, this blog would be called Sharp C.P.A. Even the principal said, "Hey, I wouldn’t want that job." Gee, thanks.

I politely declined, using the old excuse "I’m probably not the best person for the job." Again, what I really meant was, "In the grand scheme of things I could do for this school, I’d prefer shaving my head, applying blackboard paint to my scalp, mounting a bookshelf on my back and becoming a traveling classroom."

But I’m sure if I said that out loud to the principal, he would have just replied, "sounds great."

I flew to Chicago a couple weeks ago and if you know me at all, you are well aware of how I feel about planes. I would have sooner crawled semi-naked over live cockroaches the entire way than fly but J couldn’t make the arrangements soon enough so I was forced to board a Jetliner of Death.

But let’s back up a minute.

Though I haven’t been back to Chicago (my hometown) in almost two years, and my mom and step-dad were waiting there with enticing bottles of wine and promises of authentic pizza, I am so terrified to fly that I nearly didn’t go. After hearing for the umpteeth time that driving a car was far more likely to kill me, I updated my will, picked out a casket, gave away my cats, cleaned out my fridge and headed for the airport.

The saving grace to this trip was that J would be on the plane with me to mop my brow, hold my hand and administer smelling salts as needed. Though nothing would make the trip a cakewalk, at least having my favorite grown up with me might serve as some sort of distraction. "Boy," I thought, "I sure am glad J will be sitting next to me as we take off on the Mission of Doom."

It turns out we were on separate flights.

Damn.

I was traveling to Chicago with a party of four other people and the person that made the travel arrangements changed something at the last minute and forgot to tell me. J and our three traveling companions were leaving roughly the same time as I was but now had a stopover in Atlanta. I was on a direct flight to Chicago.

Alone.

As in, solo.

By myself.

Once the ringing in my ears stopped, I decided it was just as well because this way no one else in my Donner Party had to see me cry during takeoff.

I issued kisses and goodbye-waves to the rest of my group (I hope I kissed the right person, I was a little distracted by nerves) and sat down to wait my turn for the Boarding Call Death March. I pretended to read a magazine but by page 19, I realized it was upside down. I grabbed a book and it took until chapter six for me to become aware it was written in Cantonese. I tried listening to music on my Zen Micro (the kick-ass product of the century) but the only songs on it were funeral dirges.

So I popped a Xanax (doctor-perscribed) and picked my cuticles until they bled.

As I boarded Flight 666, I tried to be as cool and aloof as the other people around me. I seemed to be the only one who understood we were about to be sealed in a flying coffin and sent hurtling into space at 450 MPH. What was wrong with these people?!

I was hoping to be alone in my row but, alas, a businessman parked himself next to me tried to engage me in conversation. Since I needed to harness my energy to keep the plane from falling out of the sky, I was rather cool to him. He finally got the point that I wasn’t going to make small talk so he fell asleep and started drooling. And we hadn’t even left the ground yet.

Oh, the take-off. Or, as I like to call it, the catapult. Anyone who can honestly say that going from zero to 385 MPH in eleven seconds and suddenly shooting hundreds of feet in the air isn’t a sickening feeling, is lying. And what the hell is with this wheel-retraction thing? The damn pilots pull those wheels up into the plane so quick you’d think they were on fire (wait, bad analogy). I mean, let them be for a while, okay? We might need them sooner than you thought when the gravity gods realize something weighing 870,000 pounds (look it up) is not meant to leave the ever-loving ground and decide to drop us. Those wheels would be mighty handy then, yes?

About three minutes into lift-off, my nerves got the best of me and I shed a tear or two (and you thought I was kidding about crying). Yes, I get that terrified. I calculated that, at that moment, J and the rest of my group were somewhere over Tennessee, enjoying free peanuts while I was clawing the fabric off my armrest.

As we reached altitude, the pilot (sensitive guy that he is) announced that we were flying at 900,000 feet or some such thing, giving me just enough information to ascertain how many minutes it would take for us to plunge to our death when we were struck by lightening or after we sucked a flock of hapless geese into all four engines.

Now trapped in the Cocoon of Peril, there was nothing to do but wait. I kept busy listening for any unusual noises that would indicate pieces of plane were falling off. I also kept a sharp eye on the flight attendants, figuring that if they were happy passing out drinks to the needy and not running through the cabin administering last rites, I was safe for the moment.

I survived the trip and landed safely at the airport. The rest of my group was lagging behind by about two hours, which gave me plenty of time to breathe into a paper bag, down two shots of vodka, reapply my deodorant and find a place at the gate so sit pretty and look casual.

As J and our friends deplaned later that afternoon, they asked me how my flight had been.

"Fine," I said. "Just fine." (Hell yes, it was fine. Because I didn’t DIE!)

Next time I fly, if there ever is a next time, just shoot me with a tranquilizer gun, stuff me in a dog crate and put me in the storage area. Mmm’kay?