Month: July 2012

It has been my experience that we women can be a pretty cut-throat bunch.  We judge everything all the time, and, for better or worse, there is little that escapes our scrutiny.  Maybe it is inherent in our DNA, causing us to be suspicious in nature and punishing in practice.

In the report on Penn State and the serial child rapist they employed for decades, it wasn’t much of a secret when even the janitors related stories of unspeakable things they witnessed with this coach and young boys in the locker room.   

Like the church I’ve belonged to all my life, there was an informed network of educated men who made decisions to enable the crime and the criminal in order to save the institution, and doing nothing became an acceptable solution lamb after sacrificial lamb. 

From the defensive and head coach to the parish priest and bishop, the inept and immoral leaders in power thought they had it figured out until it began unraveling, for they didn’t count on the mother who sensed that something was horribly wrong with this man who befriended her and then her child.   They didn’t count on the mother pleading with her child to tell her what happened while praying that it wasn’t what she suspected it might be.  They didn’t count on the mother, though trembling with fear, who refused to back down from the institution or the intimidation or the payoff.  They didn’t count on the mother who wasn’t about to let any of them get away with abusing the child she loved before she even knew the color of his eyes. 

They didn’t count on the mother picking up the phone and calling the police to report a crime, thus deciding that Judgement Day would be coming with or without God.

I’m here to tell you that you can score 50% on an interview math quiz and still be considered for employment.  Not only considered, but dated.  A few days after my interview, I got asked to come into the office to see if we were marriage material.

It might have been one-sided as they were a little more in love than me.  They were nice people.  Really, really nice people, but the job seemed so boring I wondered if it came with cyanide pills for when you couldn’t take another minute of entering insurance authorization codes.

I couldn’t pull the trigger.

I was telling Mallie Bee about it on the way home from driving school and she said, “So, it was one of those soul-sucking jobs?”

Yes……….that’s the perfect way to describe it.

“Yeah, Mom, I can’t see you doing something like that.”

I would be miserable eight hours a day.

“Well, it’s too bad because the pay was so decent.”

I know.  While my soul was being sucked my bank balance would go up.

“You could buy a lot of shoes with that kind of a paycheck.  That might make your soul suck less.”

I will miss driving Miss Daisy.  Immensely.

With time off for wedding planning, I am back to my job search.  I have decided that working in a doctor’s office would be a good fit for me.  The pay and hours are better than retail and you can sit.  Winning!

Specifically, I thought an eye doctor’s office would suit me because I love picking out glasses for myself and others, and I’d likely not be called upon to save somebody’s life in the waiting room.  Three hours after I responded to a Craigslist ad, I got a call to come in the following day.  It was as if the universe agreed that I was on the right path.

It wasn’t an easy interview by any means, but I felt like I was holding my own until the doctor mentioned the math test. 

I am sort of a whiz at math.  If I’m at Macy’s and shorts are $39.00 less 30% plus a 20% off coupon, I can figure out exactly what I owe with tax.  All in my head.  I’m especially gifted when it comes to the clearance rack.

I was presented with four problems.  Four. Word. Problems.

Help me Jesus.

If Patient X has an eye exam that costs $92.00 and there is a co-pay of $20.00 and $40.00 of that is a contact lens exam that insurance does not cover but allows a 15% discount less an annual deductible of $50.00, how much does Patient X owe at checkout?

No worries.  Add this column, carry the one.  No, no, carry two.  Or should I double that and subtract four?  82………82…….82……….246.

I read the problems over and over and over which didn’t result in any answers, but more of a pre-diarrhea feeling settling in.  I scored a below average 50% on my employment quiz.

The doctor asked me to explain how I arrived at my answers.

My what?

Your answers, she said.  Explain your logic.

Here’s my logic.  I  kept throwing shit against a wall and waited for something to stick, and lookie, here, half of it did.  You should hire me for your relief pitcher.

She’s going to do a background check on me and will be in touch in a few days.  There’s a 50% chance that it will reveal to her that I am deficient in logic.  Math and otherwise.

After some freedom in her schedule and consistent nagging of her parents, Mallie Bee is finally enrolled in a driving school.  If you’ve done this before………..twice but who’s counting………..you know that it costs an arm and a leg to get somebody else to agree to teach your kid what the pioneers did long ago with the horse and buggy.

Day One’s lesson ended in the Scare The Shit Out Of The Kids movie which parents were invited to. I only saw the last few minutes of it as I scare the shit out of myself all the time.  I can do without the reenactment.

The 2nd day, we arrived a few minutes early so I got to see all the soon-to-be drivers getting dropped off by Mom or Dad.  In walked a prepubescent kid, just over the five foot mark, working a whole lot of swag with his driver’s ed folder of pertinent information.

The age in which you can get a permit in Kansas is fourteen.  Yep, fourteen.  That Bad Ass likely just finished the 8th grade and is anxiously awaiting the deets of his high school locker and combination, some pubic hair and a driver’s permit.

Oh, Lordy.

Sometimes when The Big Daddy and I are sitting on the porch with our adult beverages, we discuss what we’d do if we won the lotto.  That we never play until the odds are ridiculously stacked against us.  Without exception, we first decide who we would help out.  That’s not because we’re stellar citizens, but because we can’t help but notice the number of people affected by a shitty economy or ongoing health problems.  With a lump sum payout in the millions, we could make things easier for them.

After that, we decide what to bank, what to use to blow out the back of the house, what to set aside for a dream vacation for everybody we like/love/just met.

It’s pretty much a pipe dream, but we do it often.

When Maggie and Nathan married, we had the perfect day as parents.  This hard, hard work of raising people all came together, and a dozen times that day I looked at this guy I married 29 years ago and thought…………..Look what we did.  Look at our family who traveled from all over to be with us.  Look at the friends we’ve made over the years who were so happy to share this celebration with us.  Look at these kids of ours who love and laugh and dance and make us oh so proud.  Look.

If I ever come into a pile of money I’d share it with everyone I know who needs help, but I am very aware these days that I have already won the Lotto.

For at least ten years, I spent nearly every summer afternoon at the community pool with the kids.  It was the cheapest entertainment in town with an annual pass for the entire family a whopping $120.00.  The kids loved to go and while they played shark and Marco Polo, I’d have some desperately needed adult conversation with other moms.

At the time, there was a baby/toddler pool, the main pool, a diving pool and adult pool.  The baby pool sat up higher with steps that went down to the toddler pool.  Wet steps that water constantly ran down.  And what does a toddler like to do more than anything?  Climb steps.  And what happens when a wobbly toddler climbs up and down wet steps?  They smack their face.

For most of those years, I was with one toddler or another on those steps and even if you were mere inches away, if you took your eye off of them for a second, they’d do a face plant onto the concrete stairs.  Some face plants required lifeguard intervention when the screaming wee one was bleeding from a fat lip.

It. Was. A. Design. Cluster. Of. The. Greatest. Magnitude.

A fence separated that pool from the main pool, and I’d look through the chain link with such envy.  One time, I saw a kid go up to his mom who was laying on her chaise lounge smoking a cigarette and she yelled, “WHADDYA WANT????” when he was still ten feet away.  Snack bar, he said, and she threw some dollars his way and told him to leave her alone.

Sigh.

One more summer and I could join those lazy slackers who actually relaxed at the pool and left it up to God and the lifeguards to make sure their kid didn’t drown.

That fall I got pregnant.  It would be four more years before I finally had my Shawshank Redemption.

While Maggie and Nate went on their honeymoon, we were the guardians of Butters…….the Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disordered dog.

Butters has an affinity for underwear, garbage, toilet paper, cat food, and sleeping on my white sofa.  She barked at everything that walked by the front of the house and phantom sounds at 1:00 in the morning.  She harassed the cats, the dog and Mallie Bee.

I walked her twice a day and took her for play dates down the street.  You would think 100+ temps would do her in.  Instead it slowed her down until she got a second wind.

She wore on our nerves and wore us out, but in the end we prevailed.  On the last day of her visit, The Little Shit finally rested.

Soooooo…………….Tom Cruise got kicked to the curb by Katie Holmes.

Wow.  Never saw that one coming.  Said no one ever.

When he yanked that young one off the street and decided she was his fresh, new “love interest”, all I could think of were her parents……..normal, low-key, average people who sent all their kids to Catholic schools.  Along comes Mr. Celebrity married twice before for all of five years each time and a Scientologist to boot.

The conversations those two must have had lying in bed and wondering how to come to terms with their daughter’s new manfriend.  Before long, he was visiting Oprah and jumping up and down on her custom leather sofa declaring his love for this woman nearly twenty years his junior.

Oprah said she could tell this one was someone special.

Go figure.

Through the magic of television and hundreds of miles away in front of my Samsung in Kansas, I thought it all seemed bat-shit crazy.