Lessons in Driving

Under my wing is a budding new driver.  No, I’m not bragging, because under my other wing is an almost 21-year-old fledgling that hasn’t yet taken the wheel.  Maybe I’m not as supportive and encouraging as I should be.  Or maybe my sense of self-preservation is stronger than my need to pass along my vehicular knowledge and expertise. 

Stancey has been ready to drive since she learned to ride a bike.  She showed outward signs of road rage as soon as she started to talk.  “Come on jackass!” she’d call from her car seat. Never mind it usually occurred while we were waiting in the bank drive through.

Mayle, however, is just as content to ride shotgun as she is to pilot the plane.  Even when she was little, in that awesome little Barbie car of hers, it was all the same.  Passenger or driver, it didn’t matter. I will not at all be surprised if Stancey successfully manages the rigors of the BMV before her big sister.

That is, if someone else teaches her.

It’s not that she’s a terrible driver, nor is it that I’m a terrible teacher.  It’s just I see myself doing all the things I hated my parent’s doing when my seventeen-year-old self was learning to drive. I have a theory that teaching your children to drive is penance for learning vehicular etiquette from your parents. 

Don’t be fooled, I can see her rolling her eyes when I thrust my foot into the floorboards.  I am fully aware that my phantom braking is about as effective as my past birth control.

When I tell her she needs to slow down on her turns, she tells me they only seem fast because I’m so old.

I’m not sure I agree with that, but I do acknowledge my communications skills could use a tune up.

“F*%#! F$#@! F$#!”  offers little in terms of constructive instruction for a budding new driver.

But getting Stancey road ready is necessary.  Though it may forfeit a portion of my control, it will alleviate the inconvenience of running mom’s band / soccer / football taxi service when I’m really just too exhausted and loopy to be driving anywhere. 

As parents, it is our job to encourage our children to take care of themselves.  And while allowing Stancey to drive is helping her along the path toward adulthood, I consciously need to prepare myself for life’s inevitable.  Someday, all my children will leave me.  And with their driver’s license, they will be able to do it more quickly.

Lessons in driving are lessons for life.  Some lessons are funny, some can be scary, and most others fundamental.  As I teach Stancey to drive, she teaches me to let go. 

A little. 

After all, I’m pretty old.  I don’t handle those turns like I used to.

Keep Those Home Fires Burning

The focal point in our house is the TV.  As long as someone is home, it’s turned on.  We rely on it.  We’re a loose collection of unstable personalities.  If we have an equipment breakdown, we have a mental breakdown.

John says he could do without it, but then, he’s developed a peculiar relationship with his new “artistic” friends via his Droid.  “Draw Something” has really helped him develop the budding talent in his one finger.

But overall, the TV is our familial unified evil.  I love our upscale satellite dish and the 100 channels of infomercials that accompany it.  It’s the collective outward sign to all kindred White Trash--it cries out, we may be poor, but we’re not stupid. TV is the cheapest form of all entertainment.

Mostly, we’re not too particular about what it is we watch.  Especially first thing in the morning.  Madison is usually watching some pre-recorded episode of Cops while Max joyfully kicks his feet in time to the Bad Boys theme song.

The primo TV viewer is Kenny.   He absolutely shuts down when it’s on.  He sits mesmerized each morning before the bus arrives.  His bottom lip limply hangs as the world of television washes over him.  As I push on his shoes and attach his backpack, he hardly blinks.  The last thing he sees as he’s leaving for school is not my maternal image waving goodbye, but an image of the TV as he greedily takes in just one more glance. 

This morning, I think John tried to outsmart him.  When I came down from my shower, an infomercial for men’s prostate health was playing.  Six-year-old Kenny was totally sucked in.  He even made the comment as I pulled him to the bus stop, “I sometimes get up and use the bathroom during the night.  Maybe I need some of that.”

Even his little friend across the street has remarked, “Kenny!  I came over and rang your doorbell when you were watching TV.  You didn’t even budge!” 

Too bad he didn’t hear her. 

He was watching TV.

I sometimes wonder if our reliance on the box is problematic.  Last week, while having dinner at a friend’s house, she commented that not only was the blue band not working on their color TV set, but that they (gasp!) didn’t even have basic cable! 

You could see the visible concern on Sam’s face. 

Without Dish TV, there would be no paranormal Monday, Wednesday or Friday for me.  There would be no Finding Bigfoot, no reruns of Frasier.  No Monday marathons of Family Guy.  No South Park.  Without 300 superfluous channels, I would only be half the person without my TV counterpart.  What would I draw upon as I attempted to engage in meaningful conversation with others?  Everything I’ve learned, I’ve learned from TV!

Our modern-day hearth is our television, and short of a shut-off for nonpayment, it will remain to be the light that keeps our home fires burning.

When Nature Calls

Finding a pair of shiny silver tweezers at the bottom of our toilet bowl should have been a huge red flag that big trouble was looming.  Max, although immensely intrigued by the powers of the toilet, hasn’t the mildest interest in being potty trained.  Instead, his happiness comes in the form of flushing.  Unfortunately, he sweetens his experience by inserting tiny treasures beneath the lid.  Some treasures are more easily flushable than others.

A few days after finding those tweezers, the toilet began to show signs of distress.  It became sluggish.  The plunger roosting next to it was forever dripping wet, while personal remnants hung around the toilet bowl like hyenas around a watering hole.  Exasperated that Kenny’s last major fete could not be sent away, I yelled for John to take up the plunger challenge.

“My God, Kenny!” John yelled mid plunge, “have you been eating concrete, boy?!”

“No, just berries,” he replied, as he headed downstairs.

After some lively language and rigorous plunging, the toilet finally obliged and sent its meager remains to the sewer.  It was becoming most obvious that it was only a matter of time before we had a replay of Mayle’s Burrito Bar debacle of five years ago.  Taking John at his word, I put plan into action and vowed to call the plumber once I got into work.

The plumber arrived just a mere hour after I placed my call.  And with just five minutes notice that he was en route, I rushed home from work to let him in.  As he knocked on the pipes and snaked out the drain, I developed a sudden urge “to GO”.

Now while some have the ability to suppress bodily functions, I do not.  John, for example, can make it through it an entire day postponing it.  Of course, once he’s made it home, he’ll yell over his shoulder while bounding up the stairs,  “I’ve had to poop since this morning!”

I, however, have about five minutes from thought to action.  As I danced around the kitchen praying he would hurry, he made a second trip to his van in search of more equipment.  As I stood frozen in the kitchen prairie dogging, I nervously called out,

“Find anything good?” 

“I guess you could say that,” he replied before heading back upstairs. 

My eyes darted from object to object.  Max’s diaper?  A bucket?  The cat box?  Behind the garage?  I contemplated all these options as I felt the sweat form at the base of my neck.

From the scraping and scratching of metal to porcelain I heard overhead, I knew my options were markedly decreasing.  Grabbing a bucket and a garbage bag, I flew down the steps and thought about how nice it would be to have a second bathroom just about where I was just then sitting. 

I think Moxie agreed, because she sat at my knee wagging her tail.

As I pulled the trashcans out to the street, under the guise of kitty litter, the plumber met me in the drive.

“A few recommendations,” he began as I sheepishly looked at the can I was loosely holding in my right hand, “first, don’t use the toothbrush on the bathroom sink.” 

Pausing long enough to put his tools in the van, he followed up with, “And don’t flush cleaning wipes down the toilet.  They really jam it up.”

I would have explained that it wasn’t me who did it, but given the contents of the can that separated us, I decided that the less said the better.

Until Max is over this flushing phase, I think it’s wise to keep the plumber’s number on speed dial. 

Also, I might want to invest in a few more Homer buckets and bags for those impromptu moments when nature calls.

Bean is a Four Letter Word

If anything, Kenny’s distaste for vegetables is pretty impressive.  Maybe impressive isn’t the right word, but his disgust for all things healthy is. 

His idea of a well-balanced meal is a greasy hamburger topped with the only kind of vegetable worth eating, the pickle.  Don’t even try throwing on any “salad” atop his burger.  Nothing ruins the taste of a good hamburger like the unsavoriness of a leaf of lettuce.

His pervasive disgust of all things vegetable has moved beyond annoying.  Aversion to pasta I can work with, but his entire omission of the vegetable cog in the nutritional wheel is getting ridiculous.

This past weekend, I snapped.  In Martin’s Deli, as I watched Kenny gag down two lousy beans, I lost all self-control and became what I have fought against my entire grown up life.  In a nanosecond, I transformed into one of those ranting WalMart white trash mothers.  As I dragged him to the van, I snarled,

“THAT IS IT, Kenneth Montgomery!  You will start eating your vegetables every single day or I am going to find you another family to live with!”

As he tearfully howled in the back of the van, I quietly banged my head against the sticky steering wheel of what is my family’s roving mess hall. 

That evening, as John sat not blinking across from him at the dining room table, Kenny executed his patented “green bean slip.”  Nonchalantly, he stretched and dropped beans that he handpicked from his plate and casually slipped them over his left shoulder.  His form was breathtaking, but it didn’t at all fly with his old Pop.  As John reached for the phone, Kenny began to wildly shovel in beans, terrified that he was just one phone call away from being placed with some unnatural, vegetarian-style family.

But the following evening was worse.  Even with dinner guests, Kenny couldn’t conceal his aversion to all that is healthy.  Our first mistake was allowing him to eat out of sight.  Insisting that he at least try the fish before rewarding him a piece of the cake that our guests had brought along, he did the unthinkable. 

He threw up.

And I wonder why we so rarely entertain.

You think I might have noticed the lack of broccoli in his undigested meal, but I didn’t. I hurriedly cut him a piece of chocolate cake and sent him along.  It was John who discovered shortly thereafter Kenny’s broccoli florets wedged into the cushion of his chair. 

Due to recent progress, however, I do finally think we are on the road away from perdition.  As I watched Kenny eat almost an entire serving of canned green beans with almost no struggle last night, I finally felt a faint glimmer of hope. 

Kenny can tolerate vegetables.  I just know it!

And while it may be true that my family has two of the worst vegetarians ever, I refuse to blame myself for my children’s junk food ways.  I can lead my kids to the produce aisle, but I can’t make them keep it down. 

So for today, I will continue to coax Kenny with the power of vegetables, just as I’ll continue to coax Stancey with the power of peperoni.  

And between the two extremes, my mediocrity as mother and line cook will prevail.