The unbearable lateness of being... me

So, tonight I inadvertently cured my daughter of ever wanting to be early again.

You see, I can’t seem to be on time for ANYTHING. I actually once used the wind as an excuse for being a half hour late to pick up my daughter from school.¹

On this allegedly blustery day I went for a walk with a friend (good for me) and completely misjudged how long we would be gone (bad, but typical, for me). It normally takes me six minutes to walk from my house to the local Starbucks,² but it took fifteen minutes to do the reverse that day. Now, according to my mother-in-law, there is an incline on the road to my home.³ Plus this was the end of an hour-long walk and I’m pathetically out of shape. The hurrieder I’d go, the behinder I’d get, so I deduced that the wind must be impeding my progress.

Since I was already fifteen minutes behind schedule, I started to panic. Daughter’s school is at the top of a hill⁴ that generally boasts some absolute gale-forced gusts,⁵ but on this particular day (of all days) there was nary a breath of air to be found atop the hill. I arrived at the school to find a beautiful, breezeless sunny day. An observation I, of course, did not make until after I told the other parents I was late because of the wind.

Oh well. I’m sure they’ll be nicer to my kid if they think her mother’s developmentally delayed.

At any rate,⁶ my point with this idiotic digression is that I tend to be late a lot, seemingly for no good reason. Or rather, whenever I try to explain the reason, I further reinforce my DD designation.

But tonight we were early for soccer. Well, actually, we were late picking up hubby after work which somehow made us a little bit early for the game. We wanted to have plenty of time because daughter and four of her Under-10 teammates had been called up to play for one of the Under-12 teams.

We were the first to arrive for the 7 o’clock game – we were just in time to see another U-12 team from our club get to half time. They spotted my daughter in her striped game shirt and ran over, begging her to play or they’d have to forfeit the game because they didn’t have enough players. Only eight years old but already showing promising signs of the full-fledged guilt of a grown woman, daughter agreed to play even though she was absolutely terrified to play alone with these big girls – some of whom were four years older and about a foot taller than she is.

My point?

Uh.... Who the hell knows by now? Maybe it's that I’m always late because I never shut up?

Oh wait, I remember now. My point is... sorry I’m late with my blog. Again. :)


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1. Don’t worry, there are usually other parents around, and she knows to go to the office if the others leave and I’m not there yet. She knows this because, well, I’m late a lot. Or at least I used to be. I did ok this past school year. Most days. Except windy ones.

2. A fact determined once when my in-laws visited us for three weeks.

3. Albeit a slight incline. A really slight one. Like, not visible to the naked eye nor detectable by anyone who walks more than the length of themselves twice a week.

4. A bona fide hill this time, I swear.

5. Lemme esplain how frikkin' windy it is up there. If Chicago showed up and challenged the St. Stephen's hill to an arm-wrestling contest, the home of Oprah would henceforth have to be re-nicknamed the Gentle Tropical Breeze City. 

6. My father’s “time-to-end-this-conversation” catchphrase.

Please, Sir, may I have a shower?

I had an interesting conversation with a good friend today about how as wives and mothers we feel compelled to ask permission to do – well, anything.

Even in this age of the enlightened husband/father, we still have our unhealthy doses of mother/wife guilt that somehow seep into everything we do.

And we do a lot. A helluva a lot.

There has never been so much pressure on women to do it all and be it all. With a smile. With time to spare. And yet we feel guilty when we have a night meeting. Or when we have a volunteer responsibility (often undertaken for the benefit of our children and their peers). Or when we go to a movie or for supper with a friend. Or when we don’t balance the books. Or when we get a shower.

Wait now – guilt over a shower?

We all need to shower, right? Isn’t the world a better place when you don’t stank up the joint like a rotting cowpatty?

So why do I feel the need to check that it’s “ok” for me to get a shower before I do it? I can’t remember the last time my husband asked me if it was ok for him to get in the shower.

Oh yah – that’s because it’s never frikkin’ happened.

It’s not really asking permission directly, as in “May I get a shower?” It’s more like “I’m going to hop in the shower, ok?” It’s the ok that I tack on the end. It seems like an afterthought but it is, essentially, asking permission.

And that makes me throw up a little on my twin set and poodle skirt.

Now, granted, we put a lot of this pressure on ourselves. Sure our worser halves can be jerks about stuff like this, but I believe that we (ok, I) can be paranoid about reprimands and reproachful glances that sometimes don’t exist. (Sometimes. Not all the time.)

How did we end up with this guilt and need to get sign-off before we do things? What would happen if we did as our husbands do most of the time and just said “I’m doing this right now.” The “Deal with it” would be implied. We deal with it. We may grumble, but that’s what we do. (That’s usually what they do too, but the grumbles are more whiny – at least at my house.)

But seriously – would the world fall apart without female guilt? Would shit just not get done without it?

Ugh – this topic makes me feel dirty. I’m getting a shower.

OK?


P.S. RIP Peter Falk... As you wish.

Psst...Call Crimestoppers!

So my daughter’s friend told me yesterday I could play a witch in some production they were concocting.

“Is it because of my ginormous streaks of white hair?” I asked. She nodded.

Yes, indeed, I had a bit of the old Bride o’ Frankenstein action going on thanks to a number of factors: my advanced age, the lack of haircut since before Christmas, the lack of any sort of colour treatment since Jesus wore short pants,¹ and my advanced age.

Since it’s tax season and I am therefore one bounced cheque away from debtors’ gaol, I decided to colour my hair myself. ² My daughter and I had picked out a colour last week—it was sort of reddish brown on the model, but on top of mouse brown hair like mine, it should have turned to a rich brown with a tinge of auburn.

Operative words being “should have.”

You know when someone with dark hair robs a bank and goes on the lam and they dye their hair so NO ONE WILL EVER RECOGNIZE THEM? And they won’t stand out at all now that their hair is a colour that CANNOT BE FOUND IN NATURE? Or in mob movies, where there’s one guy³ who tries to go all Hollywood and he dyes his hair “blonde”? Or my grandmother, who is Lebanese and (presumably) has black hair and whose main desire in life is apparently to be a blonde so she keeps trying to dye her hair “blonde”?

Aside from if you pour a bottle of peroxide onto your hair à la Ponyboy Curtis, or if you know that Jose guy who does celebrity hair,⁴ chances are you’re not going to get blonde (or in my case, rich brown with coppery undertones) in any of those cases. No. You are going to get a surreal orangish colour that is just—weird.⁵

So that’s what colour my hair is right now. At least in the front. I have no idea what it looks like in the back—it could be stripy clown hair back there for all I know.⁶

Now, as I sit here trying my best to make comic blonde out of my Pesci-head situation, I think to myself, “It’s not as bad as I’m describing it.” So I go have another look.

It is. It is, in fact, THAT bad.

Frigg it. I’m robbing a bank.

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1. I don’t really know what that means, but it sounds funny so I say it all the time.

2. Back in the days before self employment/destitution, I would go to a shop to get lovely multi-colour highlights that cost a bloody fortune and took two hours. Time and money. Or, two things I simply can no longer afford to squander.

3. Usually Joe Pesci or that Joey Pants guy.

4. But who apparently doesn’t have access to a mirror to see his own lid.

5. Sorry Grandma.

6. Don’t colour your hair alone. Case in point: “Rinse until the water runs clear.” Uh, you just told me 6 times that if I got this shit in my eyes I AND MY FUTURE OFFSPRING WOULD GO BLIND. How the hell am I supposed to keep my eyes covered/shut tight AND watch the water drain off? Phone a friend, people.⁷

7. Of course, not only did I NOT phone a friend, I didn’t do the 48-hour allergy test either. That’s the kind of crazy gansta-bitch I am. Word.

Can someone PLEASE get this sticker off my ass?

Know what’s funnier than a dog chasing its tail?

A cat chasing its tail. Seriously. Cats are smart,¹ so it doesn’t happen that often. But my cat got a sticker stuck on her tail recently and spent a full half hour in a white-and-gray blur of fluffy frustration, chasing and chasing a petite piece of post-it that was making her unclean, dammit!²

So, today, as I look around my hovel, I have to wonder,⁴ is there someone out in the cosmos⁶ ROTFLHAO⁷ as I run around and around and around getting, well, nowhere? I mean, I’m smarter than a cat, right? Or, at least, a dog?

Maybe it was the frustration of two snow days in a row.⁸ There’s certainly a missing housework chromosome or six. But I swear I spent so much time taking a step and saying “I should do this now,” then turning around and saying “No, I should do that now,” then turning towards something else and saying, “No that is definitely the priority,” that I got precious few of the one million⁹ things that needed to get done this week, done. I literally¹⁰ found myself running around in circles. Chasing the post-it notes from my massive colour-coded to-do-list board that had somehow gotten stuck to my ass.¹¹ Ugh.¹²

So, do me a favour. Help me climb up the evolutionary scale a wee bit and, if you see a post-it note on my ass, just take it off, OK? Or clean my house. Or make my kid’s lunch. Or write my article. Or pay my bills. Or get my kid’s skates sharpened. Or pitch my story. Or shovel my driveway. Or finish my novel. Or attend my seminar. Or...

I think I’m gonna lose my kibble...

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1. My loyalty in the cat/dog dichotomy of life becomes blaringly obvious right—here.

2. I eventually stopped laughing long enough to take it off for her—I was worried her head would explode or she’d chuck her kibble.³

3. And, lest you think I am the kind sort, I later I tried to duplicate the scenario for others by sticking something on kitty’s tail. Didn’t work—I couldn’t find that one little inaccessible sweetspot of hilarity, and, as mentioned, cats are smart.

4. With apologies—I’m certainly not cool enough to channel Carrie Bradshaw, but sometimes I have to pay homage.⁵

5. Go ahead—you know you want to say it out loud... “Homage.”

6. A totally accidental homage to SATC. Mmmm, cosmos. Ohhh-maggge. Hom-idge.

7. Rolling on the floor laughing her ass off. Pre-empting Muzzah's inevitable question.

8. The fact that I invited four little girls (in addition to my one) into my house on the first snow day makes me seriously question my place on the mammal smartness hierarchy. A cat would NEVER do that. A dog definitely would, though.

9. Figures rounded to the nearest ten.

10. I am using this term correctly, my friends.

11. That was figurative. Well, the board is real. But, they were figuratively stuck to my—oh, I don’t need to explain this, do I?

12. Is the ridiculous number of notes making you feel like you’re reading in circles? Sorry—I just didn’t want to feel alone here between the pets.