Read the Instructions or Else!

Kenzie’s dream was a lofty one — to sit upon her own throne on her 9 th birthday and unwrap her gifts. So she talked me into buying a Strawberry Shortcake inflatable chair to be used to fulfill not only her royal ambitions but another dream as well. When we moved into our current home four years ago she exacted a promise that I would decorate her room in pink. As you guessed it is still blue, but for one Strawberry Shortcake throw pillow, a Strawberry Shortcake poster, and an inflatable pink throne she would consider her room officially decorated until she Read more

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

Cruise Control

If the Good Lord had wanted us to eat sensibly this time of year, he wouldn’t have invented the cruise ship. It must have been divine compulsion that drove my family and a couple thousand of our closest friends to set sail recently on an after-Christmas cruise in the Caribbean. It’s not that we wanted to sail around the sea for a few days eating everything in sight. We certainly didn’t choose to arrive home after our gluttonous voyage weighing about the same, in tonnage, as the boat we came in on. So we must have been on a mission from God.

The human psyche is a funny thing. Despite having inhaled enough calories during the holidays to keep Paris Hilton alive into the next millennium, when presented with limitless amounts of food on board ship, we fell to eating as if we were famine victims. We ate and we ate. And when we were bloated and seemingly unable to cram in one more bite, we ate some more. 

Naturally, we needed drinks to wash down all that “free” food. Fortunately, there were always smiling attendants nearby to bring us round after round of beverages that were definitely not free. Then we poured more money into the cruise line coffers by visiting the casino and the onboard shopping mall, and by that time, we’d worked up enough of an appetite to devour platefuls of food at the midnight buffet.

The next day, after a hearty breakfast, we stuffed our bodies into bathing suits and rolled on to the deck, where we sunned our globular flesh, careful not to fall overboard lest we be mistaken for well-fed sea lions. After a few hours, just when we were beginning to feel hunger pangs, the ship’s staff roused us for a hairy chest contest.

When you are cruising with thousands of your closest friends, you are bound to discover that quite a few of these friends are sporting furry chests, many of which are accompanied by bald heads and very round bellies. An astonishing number of these, er, hunks took the stage for the contest, every hair bristling with excitement.

That’s when the cruise director began to look for the “lucky” woman who would be required to select the best bushy chest. Luck was certainly not a lady to me that day. I never win anything – not the lottery, not a makeover, not even at bingo. But, sure enough, I “won” the right to judge the shaggy strivers before me. Each man was encouraged to strut his stuff, wriggling and jiggling his chest and various other body parts for my enjoyment. It was almost enough to ruin my appetite. But I managed to select a winner, and then my family and I headed back to the buffet.

That night, we donned formal wear, leaving the zippers open, and went to meet the captain, a dashing and slender man who gazed upon us the way I imagine Captain Ahab must have looked at his prey, the great white whale in Moby Dick. Then – surprise, surprise – we sat down to a sumptuous dinner and shortly thereafter, we had pictures taken to commemorate our nautical adventure. When we visited the ship’s portrait gallery to order reprints of a picture of my husband and I, the young man who waited on us referred more than once to the picture of “you and your son.” Each time, I corrected him, speaking between clenched teeth and glaring at my highly amused husband – who, I must point out, is six months OLDER than I am.

My spouse foolishly took to calling me “Mom” for the rest of the cruise. Now that we are home, he’s sleeping on the couch, not only because I’m mad at him but because, for some reason, I need a larger portion of the bed.

  © Jackie Papandrew 2008

www.jackiepapandrew.com