365 Nights — A Memoir of Intimacy

May 13th – I had a dream last night that I was skinny.  Normally, I don’t dream at night about being skinny…I dream about being skinny during the day while snacking on Dibs and watching “The View” (that’s only partially true, I’ll let you guess which part). 

My nighttime dreams are pretty typical – in them I have long, flowing hair or I’ve lost all my teeth or  someone is chasing me and I can’t open my mouth to scream.  Usual stuff.  My skinny dream was disconcerting because I was so casually skinny. I was floating through my dream as if being skinny was the most natural thing in the world for me. 

Because if I ever were to be skinny again (yes, I once was…if I remember right), I think I would be quite obnoxious and vocal about it.  I figure I would be running around yelling “Get a load of these thighs – are they a vision of beauty?”  or “Look, Ma, no back fat!”  Or perhaps, “No Spanx with these jeans, girlfriend, it’s all me, all the time.” 

Instead, I’m nonchalantly slender, gracefully moving through my dream in skinny jeans and a black top. Someone could have a field day with this dream…any takers?

May 9th – Brad had a little procedure this week. No, it wasn’t the snip-snip as many have asked.  He was having what we thought was an inflamed lymph node removed.  It was a handy little outpatient procedure where they put Brad in a twilight sleep (I should be so lucky) and zip, they take it out.  I’m in the waiting room monitoring Brad on this giant plasma screen where his little patient ID number dances from the prep column to the surgery column to the post-op column in record time.  In the meantime, the surgeon comes in and tells me “Good news!  It wasn’t a lymph node after all, it was a fatty cyst! 

Silence.

Eeeewwwww is all I can say. Are there two uglier words in the English language than “fatty” and “cyst,” I ask?  Then pair them together for a double-whammy of an ick-out word.  The only thing worse would be if it was a “fatty cyst mole” or “fatty cyst pimple” or…well, you get the drift.  Anyway, I physically recoiled when he said it and then I asked “You mean a… (gulp)… fatty cyst is a good thing?”  It was hard to even get the words out, they got jumbled up in my mouth like marbles.  “Yeah, fatty cysts are better than swollen lymph nodes.” Apparently, this is a well-known fact.  When I shared the diagnosis with friends, they were in the know on, um…fatty cysts.  “Yeah, I get fatty cysts all the time,” one said.  “Oh, my husband has one, haven’t you seen it?” another said.  Well, there you have it.

May 8th – If you want a hard, cold dose of reality, go through the drive-through teller at the bank and look at yourself on the new cameras they have posted by your banking kiosk.  Those things are HIDEOUS.  I was at the bank today and out of the corner of my eye caught this bloated, slovenly, oversized figure moving around on that tiny screen and when I tuned in closer to see who that poor women might be, mercy be to Estee Lauder, it was ME! I looked like an Oompa Loompa in workout clothes.  I was so appalled that I couldn’t turn away until the camera switched to a ginormous talking teller head who blinded me with her toothy smile and told me to “have a nice day.”  Well, I was having a perfectly nice day, thank you, until my unwashed, blimp-sized head was broadcast on some weird banking mini-cam.  It was downhill after that.

May 8th – There is this strange phenomenon at my house – I find screws everywhere.  They seem to pop up in all sorts of places…in the window sill, on the kitchen counter, on the front porch, in the shower.  Obviously, this is a metaphor for my life and we could all have a good laugh at that.  But, I’m worried about the loose screws – the ones I find in my house, I mean.  Obviously they were once screwed in to something and I would reckon they had an important job to do.  I now have a little jar of loose screws sitting in my window sill.  Often, I’ll walk around the house late at night asking anyone that might listen… “I wonder where this durn screw came from?”  Or “Does anyone have any idea where this screw might go?” Or “Has someone seen a sagging cabinet or a leaning wall?  I think I have the screw to fix it.”   I am convinced that some repairman will come to fix something (who knows what) in my house and he’ll be hunting around for some loose screw…and I’ll have it.

May 4th – My mom just left and my home is better for it.  Let’s see what she did for me and for my family…and for all mankind, for that matter.

She washed and ironed four loads of clothes.  Since I pull random clothes from the laundry pile on the floor and simply iron on demand, it was nice to rediscover my bedroom floor and nice to use those things called drawers that are stationed in each of my children’s rooms.  She “darned” a few things and matched up at least a dozen homeless socks.  

She taught me how to clean my oven.  Now I know the GE repairman walked me through the process, but I’ve been afraid to go it alone and I admit it.  The first thing I learned is the phrase “my self-cleaning oven” is a misnomer.  Instead, it’s really “myself cleaning oven” as it’s a bit of work to get your oven READY to clean itself.  Kind of like cleaning your house before your house cleaner comes.  McGyver showed me how to scrub down the oven, sweep out all the carcinogenic dust and scraps and “prep” the oven for cleaning.  Then lock and load for five hours of 500 degree temperatures. Then she stayed up all night monitoring the oven as she was afraid it might blow up…it is a GE, after all.

She babysat my kids.  She babysat by brother’s kids.  She unloaded the dishwasher about a dozen times and swept my kitchen floor at least as many times (you know I’m bad about that).  She went shopping with me (three times) and told me with a barely perceptible nod of her head whether or not an outfit “worked on me.”   If that’s not love, friends, I don’t know what is.

May 2nd – I’ve been meaning to write about the recently deceased Edward Lorenz, considered the father of the chaos theory. But my life has been far too chaotic to discuss this amazing guy who discovered a theory that any working wife and mother worth her salt already knows.  As background, Lorenz discovered the Butterfly effect which is the idea that small effects (like a butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil) can trigger big things (like a tornado in Texas). 

Well, duh.

I mean, don’t we all know that two extra cupcakes consumed by a four-year-old can mean a tornado of vomit at 3 a.m. in the morning?  Or that a missed phone call can mean that a car full of people might show up at your house when you’re not remotely ready for company? Or that sweet sound of silence right now means that one’s kids might be hanging out of the second-floor bedroom window or perhaps hanging the cat out of the second-floor bedroom window. Or that extra 1/8 teaspoon of baking soda (which is such a very tiny amount) in your four almond pound cakes can mean a giant, oozing, inflating mess in your oven later.  That actually happened – Chaos Theory at its finest!