Holiday of the Heart

Now that football season is finally over (YEAH! Oops, did I say that out loud?), it is time for American men to focus on something far more important. It’s almost Valentine’s Day, fellas - surprisingly, it is falling on February 14th this year, just kind of snuck up on you, didn’t it? If you have not yet made preparations for the Big Day, it is officially time to panic.

There’s a reason that Cupid’s commemoration comes so soon after the Super Bowl. It’s an obvious test of the depth of men’s romantic tendencies, and, sadly, it’s a test they fail more often than a Cosmo relationship quiz.

My husband, God love him, is no exception. He will not become aware that it’s time to pay homage to the holiday of the heart until he begins slipping on newspapers that I place in front of the shower. As he steps out, dripping wet and then quickly ends up face down on the floor, staring at a full-page ad that mentions Valentine’s Day in a font large enough to be seen by the astronauts on the space station, a light will begin to dawn.

It has taken a mere 20 years of this type of subtle training for my beloved to become adept at interpreting signals from his sweetheart. This year, I can expect a heart-warming present designed to compensate for past transgressions — something like a useless kitchen item that we already have or an exquisitely wrapped collection of hotel toiletries. I haven’t, however, always been so fortunate.

One year, just after our second child was born, I received a bottle of stretch mark-treating cocoa butter clearly purchased last minute at the nearest 24-hour drugstore. This was accompanied by a box of Christmas candy with a 75-percent-off sticker and a card (sans envelope) featuring two kissing chimps. In an attempt to personalize the card, my man had tenderly tried his hand at poetry. Under his name, he’d written:

Roses are red
Violets are blue
You want my body
I know you do.

I’ve also received my share of ego-shattering lingerie, little bits of fluff that would barely fit the anorexic hips of a Victoria’s Secret model. But the worst was a pair of silk pajamas - size XL — that my husband brought back from a business trip to China. Designed for the smaller Asian woman, these pernicious PJs wouldn’t go past my knees. I can tell you, nothing gets a wife in the mood for love more than struggling to fit into anything marked XL. I’m still in therapy over that.

My spouse has also tried to be sweet with scent. One year, he gave me two sample-size bottles of the same perfume worn by his mother for the past five decades. Big, big mistake.

Another time, in a bid to impress me with his thoughtfulness, he procured a cylinder head from a World War II-era airplane (if you don’t know what this looks like, consider yourself lucky) and created a lovely lamp that added a certain je ne sais quoi to our living room décor. It took me weeks to arrange an accident that sent this romantic piece of wreckage back to the junkyard.

I’m hoping that by our 30th or possibly 40th anniversary, my mate will have progressed to the point where he’ll fill a vase with a single rose and a diamond necklace, or maybe the keys to a new Jaguar. In the meantime, I’ll try not to lose heart.

© Jackie Papandrew 2008

Jackie’s hilarious new book — Airing My Dirty Laundry — will soon be available. Please visit www.jackiepapandrew.com to read more.

The Loose End

To celebrate the end of football season, I’ve posted something I wrote back at the beginning of yet another season of insanity…

Anybody who watches three games of football in a row should be declared brain dead. — Erma Bombeck

By some strange twist of fate, I’ve brought forth a football fanatic. My son is one of those addled individuals whose very DNA, I’m convinced, has a pigskin membrane. Unfortunately for him, he has a mother who wouldn’t know a touchdown from a hoedown. For the life of me, I can’t understand the appeal of the game - a chaotic mix of men pushing, shoving and bellowing, slobber and obscenities flying. And that’s just the fans.

But my boy has been hooked from an early age, spending countless hours watching, playing and dreaming about football. He’s consumed whole forests of paper drawing intricate plays marked with Xs and Os. And I’ve grown tearful remembering other Xs and Os my sweet child long ago scribbled on construction-paper cards, right under the words “I Love You, Mommy.”

I’ve tried, occasionally, to fight back. Once, I suggested he end a six-hour football fest and read a book. But my son has the same regard for reading that I have for cellulite, and his withering response cut me to the quick.

“Print is dead, Mom. Nobody reads anymore.”

“There is no way,” I wailed, “no way you came from my loins!”

He gave me a blank look. “What’s a loin?”

By the time he reached adolescence, his fixation had reached a fever pitch, and when he made the high school team, his ecstasy knew no bounds. He even figured out how to combine his pigskin passion with the only other thing that currently captures his interest. The kid who can barely find time to do his homework or hold a meaningful conversation with his mother nobly volunteered to coach his school’s powder puff football team, a fact that seemed to fill his father with pride.

“It is a great way to meet girls,” said my husband, his chest expanding. I just shook my head.

Realizing it was a losing battle, I decided, reluctantly, to embrace the madness. I boned up on gridiron lingo and proudly spread the word to all my pals about my boy’s performance on the team. Sadly, my football-averse friends failed to point out that I’d gotten his position slightly wrong. I found that out when I went to pick him up after a powder puff practice. Approaching a pack of puffs on the sidelines, I smiled warmly.

“My son is your coach,” I said. “He’s a loose end, you know, on the school’s team.”

For some reason, the group of girls began to giggle. Baffled, I later informed my son that some of his puffs were not the sharpest knives in the drawer. “They were laughing at me for no reason.”

His face acquired a look of dread. “Mom,” he said slowly, between gritted teeth, “what did you say to them?”

“I just said you’re a loose end on the team.”

He grabbed his head with both hands as if he expected it to explode and wanted to catch the pieces. “I’m a tight end,” he practically screamed. “Not a loose end!”

“Tight end, loose end,” I shrugged. “What’s the difference?”

He avoided me like the plague for several days after that. To redeem myself, I invited some of his friends over to watch a game on the obscenely enormous new television the men in my household had insisted was vital to our existence. I’ve noticed that when you combine 52-inch, high-def and TV in a sentence, it induces a Pavlovian response in males of any age. Sure enough, my son’s buddies began to salivate at these words and eagerly agreed to come.

I gained some yardage right off by offering snacks. Then, perhaps overconfident, I attempted to lose my rookie status by tossing out lingo I’d learned like blitz, field goal and third and long. But then I fumbled by mentioning how attractive I found the teams’ costumes. My boy’s mouth compressed into a scrimmage line of fury. “Mom,” he muttered, “stop it!”

Feeling unwelcome, I retreated to another part of the house, where my eye fell on several baskets full of clean clothes in need of folding. Taking advantage of the idle hands in my living room, I placed a basket in front of each boy. You’d think, by the looks of horror on their faces, that I was experiencing a Janet Jackson-style wardrobe malfunction right in front of them.

“You want us to fold during football?” one gasped as nacho cheese dribbled down his chin. My son was speechless, emitting only strange, inhuman noises that made me fear for his sanity.

“Never mind,” I sighed, retreating. That’s when I understood that football and I could never be allies; we’d have to remain wary competitors, sharing the love of our loose end. Then I went to fold my laundry.

© Jackie Papandrew

www.jackiepapandrew.com

LBD Conspiracy

It’s funny how one’s self-image tends to stay frozen in time. Your mind picks out a moment when you looked your best, sometimes a moment that occurred many moons (and many pounds) ago, and it goes through some kind of freezing process that crystallizes this warm memory into a mental ice cube tray where you can periodically pull it out of the figurative freezer of dreams and lick it with the symbolic tongue of delusion just to make sure it’s still there.

Or something like that.

For my husband, this frosted fantasy is more than 20 years old and revolves around his balmy bachelor days when he drove a little red sports car and spent his weekends logging hours as a private pilot. He keeps a picture of himself — I call it his Top Gun picture — from those days. He’s leaning against that sports car, handsome and dashing in a flight suit, with his airplane in the background. The car and the plane are long gone, and the flight suit would require a considerable amount of alternation if he wanted to wear it now (sorry, dear), but I know my Tom Cruise clone still sees himself as that studly single man.

My flash-frozen picture of myself occurred about the same time, back in my skinny season, when I first wore a Little Black Dress. For a woman, the LBD is far more than a piece of clothing. It’s a canvas on which she can showcase her stylish self, one of the most important items in her wardrobe. And once a woman, say one like me, has felt beautiful in this essential item of apparel (a la Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s), she tends to assume she will always look good in it.

So with this assumption firmly in mind and having not worn an LBD for quite a while, I went shopping recently for a new little black dress to wear to this year’s holiday parties. I had my teenage daughter and my mother in tow. And I stumbled upon a shocking scandal, one that should have every woman in the country up in arms.

Someone is sabotaging the LBD. Someone, probably the same folks adding lead to children’s toys, is removing fabric from the fundamental fashion frock and skewing the sizes. These pernicious people have a lot to answer for.

I tried on dress after dress in what I thought would be a quick quest for a trendy, yet timeless LBD. I started, naturally, with the size that I know fits me, the size that has fit me for years. But for some reason, the dresses in my size failed to flatter my figure. In fact, each terribly tight toga refused to go much past my knees! I was astounded, and then annoyed, as my size-zero, soon-to-be-disowned daughter snickered and rather cruelly implied that my love for a certain Italian dessert could have contributed to my size shrinkage problem: (”Oh, tiramisu,” she said mockingly, “how could you?”)

My mom, trying to be helpful, began bringing me LBDs in larger sizes. I refused to try them on.

“That’s my size and I’m sticking to it!” I said heatedly, pointing to one of the discarded dresses.

A warm flush of embarrassment began to spread over my face and threatened to melt that icy illusion in my head.

That’s when I realized I was the unwitting victim of a vast LBD conspiracy. These people are trying to make me look fat and send me into the little black dress doldrums. But I won’t give them that satisfaction. I want my original size back. I’m calling my congressman.

© Jackie Papandrew 2007

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‘Tis A Few Weeks ‘Til Christmas

‘Tis a few weeks ’til Christmas and all through my house
Not a gift has been bought, and I’m feeling like a louse.

The dog chewed up the stockings I left in her reach without care
And I’m hoping St. Nicholas will soon take her with him in the air.

My consumers, er, children, nestle each night snug in their beds,
With craniums full of toy commercials that cause visions of dollar bills to dance in mass marketers’ heads.

And me in my stained sweatpants, with my hair in a cap
I’m too seasonally stressed for even a short winter’s nap.

When out near my lawn the other night, there arose such a clatter
I tripped over some of last year’s toys trying to see what was the matter.

Down hard on the floor, I fell with a crash
Tore a hole in those sweatpants and on my leg was a gash.

The moon on the tops of our inflatable holiday decorations below
Gave a luster of true tackiness to my fake falling snow.

When what to my weary, yet competitive eyes should appear
But a miniature plastic sleigh across the street, surrounded by eight adorable reindeer.

Being erected by my nasty neighbor, in a manner so lively and quick
I knew in a moment that my house’s Yuletide décor needed a good kick.

Slightly more rapid than turtles, my children they came
When I whistled and shouted and called them by name.

Now, Boys! Now, Girl! Now, Bad Dancers and Little Vixen!
On, Retailers’ Dreams! On , Merchandisers’ Minions!

Put more lights on the porch! Put more lights on the walls!
We must impress the neighbors – now dash away all!

As dry leaves that before the manic shoppers’ eyes fly
When they rush to the stores, their panic mounting to the sky.

So the next day, at my bidding, my husband he flew
To our housetop with more lights, and a bad attitude, too.

And then, in a twinkling, I heard on the roof
The prancing and pawing of his big, awkward hoof.

As I rushed outside and was turning around
Sliding off the roof, my husband came with a bound.

He was dressed in his grubbies, from his head to his foot
So it didn’t matter that his clothes were tarnished with leaves and a root.

But a bundle of lights he still held on his back
And he looked like a murderer when he gave me that sack.

His eyes, how they glared at me, ‘til I felt very wary
His cheeks, they were burning as red as a cherry.

His not-so-droll mouth told me his anger I did sow
And I feared that his temper, it surely would blow.

A stray piece of grass he picked out of his teeth
Then he brushed off the leaves encircling his head like a wreath.

He had a mad face and his little round belly
It shook when he moaned like a bowl full of jelly.

He’s a bit chubby and plump, usually a right jolly old elf
But I didn’t dare laugh at him then, if I valued myself.

The frown on his face and the twist of his head
Soon gave me to know I had something to dread.

He spoke not a word, but he’d clearly given up on this work
With a hand on his sore back, he turned with a jerk.

I started to speak, but he pointed his finger at my nose
And shaking his head, up the stairs to our bedroom he rose.

He fell into bed, to the dog gave a whistle
And the children all scattered, like the down of a thistle.

But I heard them exclaim as they dove out of sight,
“Poor Dad! He’s not going to have a good night.”

© Jackie Papandrew 2007

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Of Mice and Martha

Every year about this time, I harvest a new crop of hope that’s been watered by an abundance of denial. I envision a holiday season infused with peace, saturated with a spirit of thankfulness and goodwill. There will be no chaos this year, no crush of time bearing down on us like a frenetic freight train. Order will prevail in my world of good things and gracious living. Martha Stewart will be proud of me.We’ll be giddy with gratitude at Thanksgiving, goes my fantasy. We’ll gather before a table tastefully turned out and groaning with good food, and I will bask in the awe accorded domestic doyennes such as Martha and me. Gone will be the snickers brought on by past disasters; my mother-in-law will eat crow along with the succulent turkey I place on her plate. The cranberries will be expertly jelled, the green beans and sweet potatoes dressed up for the occasion, and the pies mighty with meringue.

At Christmas time, there’ll be parties for hosting in my immaculately clean house. My joyfully jingle-belling children will make delightful decorations. There’ll be cookie baking and eggnog making, marshmallows for toasting and chestnuts for roasting. Loved ones will gather near, and hearts will radiate good cheer and glad tidings. It will truly be the most wonderful time of the year.

Psychiatrists have another term for such delusions, but I prefer to think of it as eternal optimism. My hopeful harvest will soon begin to wither, however, under the heat of seasonal expectations. I’ll turn to Martha for help, consulting her books for guidance. She will perch on my shoulder, a stylishly dressed angel of ambiance, whispering in my ear. Failure will not be an option. Some people excel at execution; others, like me, are dreamers, those for whom the best-laid plans of mice and Martha almost always go awry.

If tradition holds, Thanksgiving Day will dawn as gray and gelatinous as my gravy. My mistakes will be of the classic variety: the cranberries will quiver, and the beans and potatoes lie limp. The piecrusts will pucker, the meringue meander, the rolls run amok with assistance from my brawling brats. And old Tom Turkey, when pierced, will spurt ice-cold juices from the depths of his still-frozen interior.

My in-laws will leave with empty stomachs and wagging tongues, and my ruinous reputation will remain intact. By December, I’ll be walking on the dark side. We will burn the cookies and scald the eggnog. My formerly angelic offspring, their greed and wish lists growing with every commercial they watch, will grow cantankerous, shredding the decorations, tossing the tinsel and bashing each other with the bells. The dog will manage to knock over the Christmas tree almost every day. The gifts I have purchased will be hidden away so well that they are forgotten, and I will hurry out to buy more, wondering how I can be so disgustingly disorganized. My Christmas spirit will spring a leak.

Martha, now dressed in black – a Darth Vader of domesticity — will prod and nag and threaten until I am drowning in a sea of self-reproach. I will crumple under her pressure like ill-conceived origami, promising her the world. And still, she’ll want more. Peace and calm will give way to panic. I will suddenly have a much better understanding of the Grinch, and old Ebenezer Scrooge won’t seem like such a bad guy.

Yet, on Christmas Day, somewhere in the midst of all the un-Martha-like mayhem, I will be awakened early by the sharp poke of several young and eager fingers. Breathless voices still full of wonder, from children who don’t care that I’m not the queen of homemaking, will urge me to get up.“Mom,” they’ll whisper, “it’s Christmas!” And suddenly, nothing else will matter.

Later, we will gather at my in-laws, where the food is nauseatingly good. My kith and kin will promptly begin to bicker, in the crotchety, comfortable way only a close family can, over old insults and fresh resentments. Between mouthfuls, accusations will be hurled, political stances scorned and ethical standards questioned. Love will linger at its cranky, unvarnished best. And that’s a good thing.

© Jackie Papandrew 2007
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Testosterone Trouble

Men acquire a particular quality by constantly acting in a particular way – Aristotle

For every woman, there comes a bellwether moment when she realizes that all men are, indeed, created equal. Like it or not, she must face the fact that every male in her life is a walking testament to testosterone. From the time the first manlike creature crawled out of the primordial muck and used his newly developed hands to grab the remote and put up the toilet seat, it’s been the same. The bearers of the Y chromosome, those creatures unable to pick up socks or discard over-used underwear, are doomed to forever repeat hormonal history.

But mothers don’t tell this to daughters. In a conspiracy of silence designed to ensure the survival of the species, they allow girls to grow up blissfully ignorant, thinking their Y guys are different. That’s what I thought, years ago, when I found myself in a restaurant with my father and my new husband. I gazed fondly at these two men in my life. They were polar opposites in personality, and I loved them both.

Then along came a well-endowed woman in a low-cut blouse. As she walked past our table, my men’s heads whipped around in identical fashion and all four ogling eyeballs locked like missile radar on the ta-ta target. Shocked and angry, I attempted to get their attention, finally kicking them under the table.

“That woman could be a nuclear physicist, for all you know,” I said indignantly. “But you’re treating her like a sex object.”

Without missing a beat, my own dear father cracked, “If she’s a nuclear physicist, I’d like to see her reactors.”

Then the man I called Daddy and the man I called Darling made complete, er, boobs of themselves, high-fiving and breaking into loud, obnoxious guffaws.

Although disillusioned, I was determined to go on, and soon, I had a son. Somehow, I was convinced that I could change this boy’s genetic destiny, reverse the macho march of his life with my humanizing influence. And at first, it did seem to be working.

But then he entered puberty, and one day, I got a call from the middle school principal, who told me that the Neanderthal to whom I’d given birth was sitting in detention and whimpering about the agony in his nasal passages. On a dare and apparently trying to impress a nearby group of girls, he had snorted wasabi sauce, then run screaming through the halls swatting at his inflamed nose. This intelligent activity is apparently the highlight of a very popular movie named after a male donkey, which I think pretty much says it all.

Unfortunately, adolescent behavior in the human male extends far beyond the teen years. Take my husband, for example. He decided, after a mere 10 years of consideration, to get a vasectomy. Women can turn to other women for honest opinion and concerned counsel. Men, on the other hand, take great pleasure in throwing their friends into turmoil with derogatory comments designed to undermine a buddy’s manhood. This is a competitive instinct that evolved when primitive hunters had to battle each other for the meatier parts of the mastodon.

When a man undergoes a vasectomy, all his friends will deliver countless cutting remarks about the expected failure of his masculinity, assuring him his life as a he-man is history. My husband fell right into this pattern, but somehow still managed to go under the knife. I gave thanks that it was finally all over.

How wrong I was. The urologist who performed the procedure happened to have a son on the same soccer team as our son. Week after week, this highly educated descendent of Hippocrates would gather the other fathers on the sidelines to exchange jokes about the alteration of my husband’s nether regions, and my spouse would join right in.

They’d all slap each other on the back after every goofy gag and double over in laughter, endlessly amused in the same way that younger males never fail to find humor in their own bodily processes. It took a good year before we could get through a game without some reference to the silly snip and tuck. A woman could give birth to triplets, alone in the woods, with far less hullabaloo.

It was then I came to the estrogen-chilling realization that testosterone will always triumph. Women may be the bedrock of society, but men are the life of the party.

© Jackie Papandrew 2007

The Most Wonderful Time of the Year

My all-time favorite commercial is the one where a father with an ear-to-ear grin is pushing a shopping cart through a Staples store, gleefully tossing in school supplies as his dejected children follow glumly behind and “The Most Wonderful Time of the Year” plays in the background. Read more

The Tyranny of Towels

I’ve decided that I must be the victim of towel tyranny. Those rectangular household items that Douglas Adams, author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, called “massively useful” seem to have taken over my home, appearing all over the place in varying stages of cleanliness and with a disturbing disregard for proper proportion. Read more

Blackberry or Bust

When I say “camping,” I mean, of course, camping in the civilized way practiced by middle-aged city dwellers with tender backsides and uncompromising hygiene standards. That’s how my family camped last summer, renting an RV and heading out across Colorado, stopping in the shadow of Pike’s Peak.

Read more

A Mother’s Day Manifesto

Even though Mother’s Day is fixed on the calendar, I’ve noticed in the last few years that it seems to catch the motley crew of kids who call me Mom (and the man who helped create them) by surprise. Despite my subtle system of reminders that begin in April — in which I sigh heavily and say, to no one in particular, “I just can’t believe Mother’s Day is coming up so soon” — my family invariably arises on that special Sunday and expresses astonishment — while trying to avoid the flames shooting out of my eyes — that the darn day has snuck up on them again. Read more

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