The Healing Power of Anger

I am the type of woman whose throat physically hurts if there is something I wish to say, but don’t.  When I am not just merely miffed but genuinely angry, I pace, fragile things spontaneously break with the slightest graze of my fingertips, and the top of my head tingles as my hair literally stands on end.  I become an impossible, immovable force and when I have finally had enough, you will know it.  I ought to wear a sign across my chest that says, Do Not Reach Inside the Animal’s Cage, or Don’t Fuck With the Mama Tiger.

Cut to early this weekend.  Telephone.  Living room.  Mother-in-law.  Pregnant woman who had not yet eaten breakfast.  You see where this is going…  I shall not re-enact the torrent of fury unleashed that morning, but I think its quake may have postponed the Big One in Los Angeles for at least another few years.

Confused, silenced and stunned, I do believe my mother-in-law is now beginning to understand how serious this Mama Tiger really is.  So a bit of advice to all the accomodating and polite ones out there, sweetly operating under the pretense that whatever must be said can be communicated kindly:

“Kind” only works if the party you are dealing with is SANE.  Don’t squeeze another compromised moment’s worth of sweetness from your body.  Pounce.  Hard.  Show your fangs and watch the unheard points you’d been offering with honey for a year suddenly received in an instant.

And sleep like a baby.

 

The Prego Chronicles

The word prego is often used as a cute little reference to pregnancy.  It is also a marginal pasta sauce.  Prego, in my case, as a woman both pregnant and eating a lot, can be used interchangeably. 

This morning I am in pain.  Everything hurts.  I began my nifty new pregnancy workout video yesterday, armed with only a sports bra and the naive expectation that after three nauseous months of relative inactivity, my muscles would still be raring to go.  Talk about a miscalculation.  It was the equivalent of thinking that because I can tilt my head to look at the sky, I am qualified for space travel.

The woman in charge took me through 45 minutes of yoga, calisthenics and breathwork.  She looks to be about 6 months pregnant, speaks with a French accent, and is adorable.  I may develop a crush on her before this pregnancy comes to term.  Also, she is a Cirque d’Soleil acrobat, a smug fact in which she rubbed my nose every time she effortlessly cast her leg above her head.  And flex.  And down.  And breathe.  I lay there cursing her ligaments as my own hips underperformed.  Surely, I am more flexible than this!  Aren’t I?

Dammit, no.  This pregnancy is already wreaking havoc with my body.  Let’s start with the tummy.  If I didn’t know me, I’d be one of the women about whom I’d say either, “She really should not be wearing low riders,” or more likely, “Lay off the beer, lady.”  This is that in between stage when my whole middle is getting thicker by the second, but it really just makes me look like I am coupling too much wheat with too few sit-ups. 

This pregnancy thing is also getting expensive.  Not only will I have to buy new clothes in about a week, but I believe that I may be contributing to the deforestation of the Amazon with the amount of toilet paper I am using.  Pregnant women get very thirsty, and so we pee A LOT.  I could probably power a small third-world country with the force of my urine stream alone.

And the breasts.  Ohhhh the breasts.  I won’t complain too much that I am about to need a bigger bra, because that secretly delights me and openly delights my husband, but the pain certainly is odd.  The worst time of day is when I am in bed at night and have to get up to tinkle (see above).  It has something to do with gravity, with moving from a prone position to leaning over to lift the toilet lid, and there are no words to describe how achy and uncomfortable this can be.  Actually, the words “bricks”, “weights” and “gallons” come close, but not quite.  It is an utterly new sensation – everything about them is novel.  I actually raced home from one of my walks last week to phone my best friend and announce breathlessly that my boobs are now casting shadows.  I am mortified, but thrilled.

On the subject of walking, I have no idea what the hell is going on with my hips.  I used to be very graceful, and even received frequent compliments on the way that I walked.  Now it’s as if my legs are tied into splints; I am beginning to plod.  My lumbering through the neighborhood sends small animals scurrying and local geologists running to their desks.

I don’t know what this body is doing, but it’s certainly up to something…

 

Bewildered Update!

It was bound to happen.  All good things change.

When you visit this blog from now on, you should be automatically redirected to my new home:

www.BewilderedHousewife.com

Please update your feed subscriptions, just to keep it easy.

I still love you, WordPress.  It isn’t you; it’s me.

Mother’s Day Countdown – The Revolution!

My husband is a wonderful critic.  He enjoys my use of humor as defense, and prods me to keep writing even when my mind goes blank for days, or weeks, at a time.  Last night we were talking in bed, various arms and legs asleep under the weight of our animals. 

“It’s just a little dark,” he said.  He was talking about yesterday’s post, which apparently reads like a Grimm Fairy Tale.  He’s right, it is dark, but only because it’s true.  I huffed and puffed and channeled my inner Steve Martin and said, “Well, I can’t be funny ALL the time!”  People who are funny ALL the time are a bit creepy, to be honest.  I want to smack them upside the head and tell them to come out with what’s really hurting them.  I figure that if I falter into such “darkness” every once in a while, I’ll escape the resident creepiness that comes from denying it.

People have been asking if I truly hate my mother-in-law, so let me clear this up.  I do not hate her; I simply don’t like her.  This is a certain distinction.  I don’t wish her harm or that her airplane will fall out of the sky, and if it did I would surely feel badly.  Kind of like when my husband immediately apologizes to the big black spider we just smashed and flushed down the toilet – sorry, little buddy – even after I’d hopped from foot to foot shouting, “Kill the bastard!”  It’s not the spider’s fault it is ugly and potentially poisonous; it is simply being itself.  I, however, don’t have to give it the chance to bite me.  This is the way I feel about my mother-in-law.  Make sense?

Tomorrow is Mother’s Day and the second year in a row I have managed to escape spending the afternoon with my husband’s mother.  Last year at this time, we were newly engaged and I was plagued by a string of migraine headaches that were miraculously cured by saying the word No.  (I ought to bottle the word and sell it freely to daughter-in-laws everywhere, sparing them unpleasant experiences while simultaneously making myself rich.)  This year, it is refreshing to have stated openly and weeks ago that I would not be attending the worship ceremony.  I have my OWN mother to adore (albeit, over the phone) for being such a wonderful woman; I have no need to make smiley faces at another dame who would change my hair, my clothes, my attitude and, oh yeah, my husband if she could.  Call me crazy for banning the holiday, but the last time we celebrated an occasion in public (aka my rehearsal dinner), she pulled me aside before leaving the house and pounced on me with a tube of lipstick and a can of spray-on tan for my legs.  Do I feel like being accosted AND bringing flowers this time?  Sorry, but no.

Oh, look!  There went my headache!  Damn, this stuff WORKS.

 

Mother’s Day Countdown – The Origins

It’s that sweet time of year when the apricots are ripening on the trees out back, the birds wake me up before the alarm clock, and mentally ill mothers everywhere expect their alienated children to come bowing, hat in hand, at their feet.  And somehow, for no logical reason, it works.

Now this is what I call a neat trick.  I’d love to learn how to be needy and rude for 364 days in a row and still have people bring me flowers and candy.  I wonder if the size of the bouquet would be to scale with the degree of misery I impart?  Imagine the possibilities!

Given the imminence of this special day, I’ve done a bit of research and discovered its true origins.  Mother’s Day originated not in the heart of a strong, loving Mama whose only requested reward was her child’s happiness.  Nay, the day sprouted from the darkened mind of a short, tyrannical woman who insisted on being praised for her marginal mothering.  And it goes a little something like this:

The poor lonely Mother awoke one morning to find herself utterly alone; alone in her bed with the ironed sheets, and alone in her mansion with only the live-in housekeeper as company, but he’s Philipino, so he doesn’t count.   She rolled out of bed, casting a remorseful glance at the four Snickers wrappers lying empty on the bedside table, and padded on pedicured toes into the bathroom.  There, she slathered cavier on her face, just as the doctor had ordered to preserve her face-lift.  Mother looked into the mirror and sighed.  Oh, how she wished her son would just show up with flowers and tickets for a cruise.  Or that her daughter-in-law would surprise her with a stack of magazines, from which she’d permit her to choose a haircut that she felt more suited the young wife.  These kids today, they need guidance, they need HER.  Why can’t she make them know that?

Mother wrapped herself in her robe and sauntered toward the kitchen in search of coffee and doughnuts.  She stopped along to the way to check her emails and voicemachine for the familiar presence of her grown children, only they had long since stopped phoning, although she had no idea why.  She thought they’d said something about “invasive” or “manipulating,” but clearly they were high on drugs because they made no sense at all.  Whatever they had said, apparently they meant it, for she hadn’t heard from them in a very long time.  Mother could barely even remember what the youngest one and his wife looked like; she’d never bothered to put up a picture.  How typically selfish of them to leave her memory!

Mother chewed her doughnuts in a silence that no click of Vivier heels could fill.  She stewed.  She lamented.  She made a few phone calls, and then wept herself into a frenzy in the presence of her similarly surgically-altered friends. For she did, after all, sacrifice everything for her ungrateful children, who only sought to take from her every other day of the year.  And for what?

‘Is it too much to ask for these selfish little brats to at least pretend to love me for one measly afternoon?  Don’t you see how they treat me? ’   Her friends, drunk on the standard Upper Class Cocktail of acrylic nail fumes and Xanax, clucked their tongues and helped her devise a way to guilt her adult children into submission.  Once they felt confident with their plan, they telephoned their good friend Ari Hallmark in New York and sold him the idea.  The rest is history.

Yes, folks, that’s where Mother’s Day came from.  Just because you didn’t know it, doesn’t mean it isn’t true.

Coming up:  Mother’s Day Countdown – The Revolution!

Comic Relief

I had just lifted my fingers over the keyboard to complain about something in-lawish, when my husband called from across the house, “I love you babe,” for no apparent reason at all. 

See, this is why I keep him around.  And for the rest of the day I can no longer complain about anything in good conscience.

Instead, I’m giving you an assignment for the evening, which is to click on my mostest favoritest blogs in my Blogroll… to the right… scroll down just a wee bit… there you go.  I highly recommend Buttercuppunch and The Not if you like sassy forays into girlfriend things and (my favorite) wedding planning, Passive Aggressive Notes if you want your funnybone tickled, and Married Kitty if you’d like… um… something else tickled.

Go ahead, don’t be shy.