Got Milk?

Saturday morning I woke up with aching legs, a throbbing head, and a stuffed up nose. A cold coming on you say? Yes, I suppose if I were a normal person, I would have diagnosed myself that way. Instead, I decided that my legs were aching because of the yoga tape I had done the previous morning, my head was throbbing because I drank too much wine with my sister-in-law, and my nose was stuffed up because the heat had come on too much during the night, and I am somewhat allergic to the heat. Why couldn’t a grown woman identify the signs of a head cold? Here’s why – since I had kids almost seven years ago, I have not come down with my own cold. Much as the weather on the east coast always comes up from the south, the sickness in my house always comes up from the kids. If one’s got a runny nose, soon we all will; if one’s puking, soon we all will. At the moment, all of the kids are healthy, so it appears that four months after my husband left for Afghanistan, I have finally followed the advice of countless friends and family. They told me do make sure I take time out for myself, and I have indeed found a little something for myself, a raging head cold. But the bright red nose, scratchy voice, and nagging cough are not enough. On Friday night while eating a dinner of frozen pizza, I burned the top of my mouth, and thanks to all of the decongestants I’ve had to take and all of the open-mouthed breathing I’ve had to do, the burn has hung on for a good 6 days. And still that is not what is bothering me most – what upsets me most is that it has been 4 days since I had a glass of milk, and that may be the longest I’ve ever gone without one in my life .

Monday night, in the grip of this horrible cold, I got the kids to bed and went looking for some dinner. All I could create with the energy I had left was a few pieces of rewarmed frozen pizza. I realize that is no substitute for chicken soup, but at the time it seemed adequate. However, two hours later when I went to bed to read for a while, my nose sealed itself off so completely, I had a flickering thought that I might need to summon professional help before I passed out from lack of oxygen. I was also treated to a brief daydream where my 6-year-old, coming to sneak into bed with me, finds my cold unconscious body on the floor. Since neither scenario gave me a warm happy feeling, I ran for the Sudafed and managed to it down, alternating breathing with swallowing. In a few minutes, the medicine did open my airway again. As I sat propped up in bed trying to determine what caused such a quick and dangerous acceleration in my symptoms, I could find only one culprit – the cheese from the rewarmed frozen pizza.

A quick trip to WebMD produces the following advice: “While you have a cold, avoid dairy products, which tend to make mucus thicker…” (I apologize for using the word mucus, but even the Microsoft Thesaurus can’t come up with a more pleasant word than that.) I guess everyone has some idea that dairy products can make a cold worse, but really, I hardly considered the cheese on a frozen pizza to be a true dairy product and the amount of it was so small, I was astonished to think that it almost caused me to keel over. However, I had nowhere else to place the blame, so I decided for the safety of the household, I should avoid all dairy products, especially milk, until my symptoms showed a marked improvement.

I know that most of the population use milk in one of three ways – on top of cereal, in coffee, or as an accompaniment to a cookie. I use milk as a mainstay beverage, second only to water (and occasionally chardonnay) on my list of most consumed liquids. I love it - skim milk, chocolate milk, milk in my tea (I don’t use milk on my cereal but that is related to my inability to eat mushy food, which is really immaterial here). I feel real pity for the unlucky souls with milk allergies or lactose intolerance, who can’t down a cold glass of milk. They are truly carrying one of life’s heavy burdens. I have had so much milk throughout my life, that I am convinced that my bones must be larger and stronger than the average girl. I fully expect that in the future, when some unlucky home invaders throw my 80-year-old body down the stairs, instead of breaking a hip I’ll hop right up and beat them over the head with my fireplace poker. Although I’ve read that alcohol consumption can cause you to lose calcium, the stores I built up as a child must be enormous, and even now with the milk I drink, I must at least be breaking even.

Shortly before poor Dr. Spock teetered off to that great pediatrician’s office in the sky, the anti-milk people conned him into holding a press conference to say he had been wrong all of those years when he recommended that children drink milk. This seemed like such an obvious and shameless manipulation of a feeble elderly man, I assumed the backlash against the anti-milk people would be swift and complete. Unfortunately, I was wrong.

Last spring when I took my six-year-old to the clinic to get her school physical done, all of the clinic’s regular pediatricians were either gone or busy, so we saw a contract doctor. These are nonmilitary doctors that the army hires on a year-to-year basis. I suppose there are reasons why doctors would choose to work under those terms, but I doubt that the reasons are “I am making too much money as a successful well-respected private doctor” or “My vast stores of knowledge regarding cutting edge health care techniques are wasted in the private sector.” I believe the doctor we saw might have given her reason as “I am so crazy that I cannot convince even the most desperate sick children to become my patients, so I thought I’d find a job where kids are forced to see me.” I attempted to explain to this woman that my daughter had ear tubes put in earlier that year, not because of repeated ear infections but because she couldn’t hear anything and kept failing her school hearing screenings. Before I could finish, the doctor immediately began muttering. Here is a transcript of our conversation. Imagine the doctor’s voice as similar to a mental patient speaking to herself, and my voice as similar to a flabbergasted increasingly annoyed mother speaking to a mental patient:

Crazy Doctor: “It’s cows milk. No babies need to be drinking any cow’s milk. No children need to be drinking any cow’s milk. It’s cow’s milk. She’s allergic to cow’s milk.”
Me: “Actually, she’s not allergic to milk”
Crazy Doctor: “Yes, she is. No babies need to be drinking any cow’s milk”
Me: “No, she’s not, she drinks it all the time without any problem”
Crazy Doctor: “Yes, she is”
Me: “Well, what should she be drinking?”
Crazy Doctor: “No babies need to be drinking any cow’s milk. No children need to be drinking any cow’s milk. It’s cow’s milk. She’s allergic to cow’s milk.”
Me: “Then where should she be getting her calcium?”
Crazy Doctor: “Not from cow’s milk, from soy milk and broccoli”
Me: “Could you just sign that paper there please?”

Fortunately, I had six years of being a mom under my belt so I had enough confidence in myself to write this woman off as a wacko and continue to give my kids milk. While they are fans of broccoli, I don’t think they would be willing to eat 10 cups a day to get their calcium. And how could I keep them from the milk? How could they ever enjoy an Oreo for goodness sake?

Four days ago I also gave up my nightly glass (okay, sometimes two) of wine, partially because I thought it might aggravate my sore throat and partially because I thought that the alcohol on top of the sudafed might be a more potent sleep aid than I needed. After a long day tending to the needs of the 6-, 4-, and 2-year-old, that glass of wine is the most anticipated part of my evenings, topped only by kiddie bedtime. And yet I feel like I could continue to go without it if I had a good reason (I can’t think of any). But for four days now I have filled cup after cup of milk for the kiddies, becoming more and more envious with every pour. I have stood by and sipped my water in the hope of speeding my recovery and preventing my demise, but I am so ready for a milk fix. Tomorrow we are going to spend the weekend with my sister, and the first thing I plan to do when we are settled into her apartment is help myself to a tall cold, glass of milk. My nose may seal up again and I may pass out, but I am willing to take that risk knowing that at least there will be somebody there to look after the kiddies.

Home Sweet Home

Recently on some news magazine show, I guy did a bit on all the weirdly named streets in America. It was not a very funny bit, because you could tell that some of the streets had been named by the wackos who lived on them, probably for the sole purpose of getting onto a news magazine report about weird street names. I know there are funny addresses out there, which made this guy’s report more annoying, because he obviously hadn’t looked hard enough to find them. His report got me thinking about the names of the streets that I have lived on, because for many years now, each time I’ve had to give my address, the recipient usually can’t understand what I’m saying. While my addresses are not especially uproarious, I did find it somewhat interesting that the names seem to reflect my life at the time of my occupancy

From the time I was two until I moved away to college, I lived on Utah Avenue in Washington, DC. I always felt it was a noteworthy address, the sort that would bring appreciation from others who heard it. After all, I mistakenly believed everyone knew that in the grand plan of Pierre Charles L’Enfant, each state in the union had a street named after it in the capitol city. I believed I was quite privileged to live on one of the 50 state streets, but looking back, I can’t remember a single time that a person was impressed to hear that I lived on Utah Avenue. My friends in college ignored the street name completely and thought I had a weird address because the house number was four digits long instead of one or two like theirs. However, I blame Baltimore for the lack of appreciation my address received, because Baltimore has a “Eutaw Street.” I haven’t been able to determine who or what Eutaw is, but the word itself certainly looks like the Yosemite Sam spelling of Utah. So apparently as I was attempting to portray myself as a cosmopolitan sophisticate living on a famous street in our nation’s capital, what people were hearing when I gave my address was “Dagnabbit Rabbit, I say, I say, it’s EUTAW Avenue.”

When I went away to college, my address became a rather boring “1 College Street,” although none of the streets running through campus actually had a name. The only building on College Street was the guard shack that was always occupied by a guard who had nothing to do, since cars were generally not allowed onto the main part of campus. The street that ran past my first year dorm was known as Easy Street, but I guess using that as an address might have given my penpals the wrong idea about the Jesuit views on premarital sex and the Catholic views on frugality. A few years later, my off campus apartment was on Caro Street, but the house itself was referred to by the past and present students (as well as by my parents and my roommates’ parents)as “Red Hell” which didn’t really seem to be the sort of address I should be including on my letters to prospective employers.

Since employment was in short supply in the early 1990s, I instead became a professional student at the University of Virginia and found an apartment on Oakhurst Circle, an address that was much more refined and impressive-sounding than the College Street address of my immediate past. College Street denoted a kid in school, but Oakhurst Circle in Charlottesville was the home of a scholar. Unfortunately, the geographic change did not actually translate into my transition to a more refined and impressive-sounding intellectual. While my fellow classmates would happily leave a bar at 11:00 pm on a Friday to go check on their experiments back at the lab, I couldn’t imagine any circumstances under which I would set down a glass of water, let alone a frosty cold beer, and venture out into the dark to an empty academic building to make sure the magnetic stirrer was still spinning. Clearly I was not ready for such a sophisticated address, so I left school with a consolation master’s degree and moseyed back on home to Eutaw to do me some job lookin’.

After a few months, I found a crappy job in Philadelphia and moved with my sister into an apartment on Manayunk Avenue. When we moved to Philadelphia, Manayunk was an up and coming part of town, full of bars, restaurants and small stores. Everyone came to Manayunk to party and when they got there they would typically find my sister and I parked at the local bar, chatting with the bartenders and monopolizing the juke box. For people who were not quite in the know, Manayunk Avenue probably seemed like a pretty happening address. Actually, Manayunk Avenue was not in Manayunk but about a quarter of a mile straight up, on top of a cliff in Roxborough, more of a working class “low and sinking” part of town. So really Manayunk Avenue was the perfect address for us – although we had the party instincts of Manayunk residents, we had the budget and prospects of Roxborough. Eventually I was laid off from my crappy job, and then I really began to feel that the Manayunk address was a sham. While collecting unemployment, I became a true Roxborough chick, and when people asked me where I lived, that’s what I told them.

In time I found another job, my sister tired of Philadelphia, and I moved to a new address on Rittenhouse Place. Most cities have a Rittenhouse street of some sort, and sometimes it is the center of a quite impressive neighborhood, like the Rittenhouse Square section of Philadelphia. I was about 3 miles away from Rittenhouse Square, living in the Rittenhouse section of Ardmore, PA. While it was not exactly a tony address, it was an impressive address, because you could get absolutely everything you needed on its two long blocks. Among other things, it had a 5 and10, a beer distributor, a courthouse, a Christian Science reading room, an adoption agency, a coin laundry, pizza place, a German restaurant, a deli, an art gallery, and my apartment building. While I was living on Rittenhouse Street, I met and married my husband. He never lived there because he was stationed in Virginia and then deployed to Korea; when he got back we moved together to Maryland.

I suppose it is fitting that our first apartment together had a romantic name like Liriope Court (for you inexperienced hayseeds out there like me, it’s a plant that rhymes with calliope - strangely, there was no liriope on Liriope Court). My husband and I hated the street name because no one ever understood it the first or second time we said it, and eventually we wouldn’t even say it to people, we’d just spell it. However, when we said it to each other we always pronounced it with a sigh “liriiiiope” and threw our heads back and fluttered our eyelashes, swooning with the romance of it. Aside from the name, it was a great apartment, but a forth floor walkup, so when I got pregnant with our first daughter, we decided to move to someplace a little closer to the ground and, although it was not a top priority, someplace with an address that was a little easier to communicate to people. We ended up on Gairloch Place, which is probably a great address in Scotland, but in Maryland, it still needs to be spelled out every time you use it.

Since we left Maryland, we have lived on two different military installations, and these are places that know how to name a street. Our first address was Warhawk Street, and although it was easy to spell, we always had to spell it out for people, since “warhawk” isn’t actually a word. We wondered if having such an aggressive address would have an effect on the personalities of our children, but other than occasionally curling up their fingers like claws and giving a falcon shriek, they did not become particularly violent. While Warhawk Street was a rather weird name, at least we had it better than our neighbors who lived on 8th Armored Division Street.

Where will we go next? That is a question that dogs military families from the moment they finish unpacking. Not just where, but when will we go next? Only Uncle Sam knows for sure. Something tells me it will not be to Main Street or Walnut Avenue, but hopefully it will be a place the kids can pronounce and a place they can call home for a good long while.

The Taming of the Brows

I have the sort of eyebrows that everyone notices. Not because they are particularly attractive, strikingly arched, or perfectly symmetrical, but because they are big. They are big, dark, and look just like the female version of my father’s eyebrows. For the first 25 years of my life, I never gave my eyebrows much thought. They were certainly a dominant feature on my face, but since they always kept a safe distance from one another, each maintaining its proper place on opposite sides of my nose, I figured they were a trait I could tolerate. Instead I spent my energy obsessing about my enormous forehead and huge teeth. Unfortunately, at some point in the mid-1990s, regular looking eyebrows became a fashion faux-pas, and anyone who did not submit to the tweezing and waxing of eyebrow professionals was taunted by the beauty Mafiosos as having brows that were (gasp!) “ungroomed.”

My initial response to the wave of short, skinny, disappearing eyebrows was to grow my bangs long. I figured if they hit right in the middle of my eyebrows, the untrained eye would be unable to discern whether the hair that looked astray came from the top of my head or my eyebrows. I thought this strategy was working until one day, two coworkers began pestering me, wanting to know why I never got my eyebrows waxed, why wouldn’t I want to do it, everybody did it, and it made keeping your eyebrows groomed so much easier. I guess having broached the subject once, these women felt they might as well harass me on a daily basis and see if they could shame me into a salon where a trained professional could wrestle my radical eyebrows in line with acceptable norms. I resisted their suggestions, mainly because I had no interest in unnecessary pain, and having already found a husband, I didn’t think my future happiness depended upon it.

However, after several months of constant critiquing of my eyebrows, my coworkers attitude became more aggressive, as if they refused to believe that my eyebrows just grew that way, and instead thought that I must somehow be encouraging them to be out of step with society. I finally did make my way to a salon, I suppose in some respects in response to the months of badgering. However, my main motivation for finally going under the wax, was that I had to attend a wedding for a tall beautiful couple. I had just had a baby I was trying to do anything that would improve my appearance and make me feel a little less chubby and drab, particularly in the face of beautiful people primed and shined up for a wedding.

The following description of my first experience at the hands of an eyebrow waxer can also be used as a manual on how-not-to get your eyebrows groomed. I made my appointment at the salon in conjunction with a haircut, not what a beauty magazine might characterize as a top-notch salon, although it was a self-described “full-service” salon. When I arrived and was seated in the chair to discuss my haircut, the stylist was so distracted by my eyebrows that she found herself unable to listen to any discussion on my hair until my eyebrows were properly disciplined. Two warning bells should have sounded in my head, but as an eyebrow client novice, I had no idea. First, the hair stylist was also going to be the eyebrow stylist, although apparently this was absolutely no guarantee that she knew what she was doing. Second, the stylist’s own eyebrows were two inch long commas over her eyes, and I could not tell by looking at her what her “ungroomed” eyebrows might have typically looked like. Naïve as I was, I assumed that she would clean up the strays under and between my eyebrows and leave them looking like a better, neater, shall I say, better-groomed version of my original brows.

The warmth of the wax was actually quite nice, and the part where she ripped the hairs out of my brows while not fun, was not as painful as I had prepared myself for. I could not tell from the sensations on my face what the brows were going to look like, but I was optimistic, and proud of myself that I had finally become a modern woman with well-groomed brows. As I walked back to the stylist’s chair to get my first look at them, I was filled with anticipation, but as I gazed up to look in the mirror, I was suddenly filled with alarm. There, above my eyes, where my eyebrows used to be, surrounded on all sides by sunburn pink skin, were two little commas, each about an inch long. I looked, I thought, like a complete idiot. I had no notion how I would face my brothers and sisters who had inherited the same distinctive eyebrows I had just abandoned, no idea what to say to the bullying coworkers who had thought this was such a great idea, and no clue how to salvage my face for the wedding I was about to attend. I looked like one of those female movie extras from the twenties, who had shaved off her eyebrows and drawn them back on in such an unlikely manner, that you had trouble taking in any other part of her face.

And so I sat through the haircut, repeating over and over that I wanted my bangs left long, really long, maybe don’t even cut the bangs at all, they were my only source of camouflage for my now nearly naked browbone. I went home and faced my husband, waiting for him to tease me a little and then comfort me for the way I had been abused in the name of fashion. However, he did not notice anything other than my haircut. At work the next day, I ducked down in front of my computer screen, hoping the tilt of my head would provide my bangs with additional length and enable them to provide additional coverage. Eventually, the browbeating coworkers came by, and when I looked up to face them, they were absolutely delighted by what they saw, spewing compliments, asking “Aren’t you sorry you waited so long?” I gave them a weak smile, and while I believed they were sincere, I also thought they were out of their minds. Finally, on Saturday, as my husband and I sat around with our friends having a few drinks before the wedding, one of my friends said to an astonished me, “I see you’ve started waxing your eyebrows – they look great.”

I still puzzle over the universal acclaim my nondescript teeny eyebrows received. I guess eventually I began to think that maybe I was wrong, that eyebrows should all look alike, and that in order to be well groomed, I should fall in line with the rest of America. I also realized that having had my eyebrows removed, I was going to have a hard time growing them back into their original shape. As each hair grew back in, I was never sure whether it was one I should keep, or one that was stray, so month after month, I found myself back in the salon for another comma shaping treatment. I had heard that if you remove your eyebrows too often, eventually they will not grow back in, and I might have fallen victim to that quirk of nature if not for the US Army.

The Army is often hailed for its role in disaster relief, and I am happy to join the chorus. By ordering my husband and I to move away, the Army got me away from the eyebrow comma salon. Of course, settled into our new home I was a little leery of having my eyebrows or hair messed with in a new place, so I waited and little by little my eyebrows reemerged. When I finally went in to a new salon and asked the hair stylist about eyebrows, she referred me to the aesthetician. The what? They had a person on staff that looked at people’s faces and tried to determine the best brow shape for them. There is more than one brow shape? She took one look at me and said “Oh no, who took off the ends of your eyebrows?”

That was the beginning of my rehabilitation, but it still took a good 3 years to get my eyebrows back. I thought I had made pretty good progress until I watched an episode of Sex in the City, where all of the women have eyebrows that are about three inches long. I went from the TV to the mirror and decided, any eyebrow hairs that decided to move in at the far reaches of my eyebrows would be welcomed provided their neighbors eventually arrived.

And so I sit here in another new home provided by the Army, with my brows pretty much restored, except, now they need grooming. I know I can submit myself to the hands of an aesthetician if I can find one, but I would like to try to do it myself, so like the good scientist I once was, I have thrown myself into research. Apparently the pendulum has swung away from one-shape fits all tiny eyebrows toward more “natural” brows. Now, brows should be filled in to make them more prominent, and groomed to reflect their natural shape. Distinctive brows are considered an asset, crucial for providing character and balance to one’s face. Where was this attitude five years ago? Wouldn’t women have always wanted their faces to be distinctive? Why would thousands and thousands of women like me submit ourselves to someone else’s idea of beauty? I guess I was young, a little insecure, and looking to fit in, but I think the reason I fell in step so readily is that five years ago no one was asking questions - the punctuation mark of the times was the comma.

What's In Your Closet?

When the HP left for his Afghanistan adventure, his mother and I immediately identified one advantage of his deployment - once he was safely stowed on the other side of the world, I could get my hands on his clothes and do some much needed weeding, pruning, and downsizing. The HP is not materialistic or a hoarder, he is just a bit sentimental about his clothes. He is always afraid he will hurt someone’s feelings if he gets rid of clothes that were given to him as gifts, and so he holds onto clothes he doesn’t like, clothes that don’t fit, and clothes that haven’t seen the light of day in 10 years or more. A couple times each year he will disappear into the bedroom with a beer and tell me he is going to go through all of his clothes and put aside a pile for Goodwill. When he finally emerges feeling quite proud of himself, he generally has chosen to part with enough clothes to fill a small grocery bag. This is the equivalent of removing a grocery bag worth of sand from the beach.

The HP has amassed a wardrobe that can barely be contained by his dresser and his closet, which is packed not just the things that hang on the bar, but with clothes stowed in plastic crates on the floor and plastic bins on the shelves overhead. He even has some of his running clothes stashed in the bedside table. A quick count of the shirts and jackets hanging in the closet reveals 23 button-down shirts, 9 golf shirts (and I know there are more in the drawers), 4 blazers, 1 suit, and 5 jackets, in addition to all of his uniforms. He’s got 22 pairs of pants, not counting jeans, 10 pairs of shorts, and 3 crates of sweaters. To round the whole thing off, he’s got every tie his ever owned, every belt he’s ever been given, and every shoe he’s ever worn, including some from before we met 10 years ago. If he was a meticulous guy, who kept his closet in perfect order, I might be able to stand it. But as it is, I can’t even close the closet without putting my full body weight on the doors as I try to shove the mess back with my free arm.

His dresser has been obsolete since the day we brought it home, not because it is a small piece of furniture, but because we are asking too much of it. The upper drawers are so full of socks and underwear that they won’t pull open all the way. The lower drawers could contain anything, and a clothing item’s only criteria for being put in one drawer or another is whether or not it can be crammed in and the drawer forced shut. Pajamas, sweatshirts, bathing suits, long underwear, and running shorts all live together in the wonderful pluralistic society that is my husband’s bureau.

Did I mention that he wears a uniform to work? Not only to work, but also to work out? Most weekdays he comes home and pulls on a pair of ratty sweatpants, not even changing out of his uniform T-shirt. He gets the ratty sweatpants from his other favorite clothing storage unit - his clean laundry basket. Although he has more clothes than every other member of our family, he could (and does) survive on the contents of one regular Rubbermaid laundry basket, a laundry basket that he empties approximately once every three to four months. If a t-shirt or golf shirt is lucky enough to be liberated from the closet or dresser, it becomes part of the rotation – the clothes that are pulled from the clean laundry basket, worn, washed, and returned to the clean laundry basket. While a virtual rainbow of golf shirts hang in the closet, he will wear a red golf shirt in the rotation until it begins to fade to some sort of pinkish-orange shade. If he stains one of his shirts from the rotation, he will still continue to wear it unless I remove it and stash it back in the dresser. While his dresser holds approximately 50 pairs of white socks, he only wears the ones in the rotation, which quickly lose their sparkle after such frequent washing and wearing.

For a while the HP and I shared the closet in our room, but I quickly tired of tripping over his combat boots and pushing aside his clean laundry basket to try to wrench open the closet doors. I moved all of my hanging clothes into my son’s room, because he is too little to make a mess that will prevent me from opening the doors. And yet, since the HP left, this arrangement has caused an unexpected development – I am turning into my husband. Since I have a bit more to do at home, I have fewer chances to put away my laundry, and sometimes when I’m ready to put things away, my son is down for a nap or in bed for the night, and I don’t want to disturb him. So my clothes sit in the laundry basket, and then I wear them, and then I wash them, and then they sit in the basket again. I hate living that way, so I should do what any enterprising person would do – I should move my husband’s stuff into my son’s room and move my stuff back into our room.

The HP’s closet looks exactly the way it did the day he left. He has a hanging shoe organizer with 3 shoes in it, one shoe balanced across six or seven hangers at the top of the closet, and the rest piled on top of the crates of sweaters on the floor. Also in the pile on the sweater crates are a few golf shirts, some t-shirts, and a pair of Ho-Ho-Ho Christmas boxer shorts. A garment bag that he must have decided not to use is shoved in on top of everything. Several wire hangers hold only empty plastic dry cleaning bags, and some hangers hold only other hangers. Every now and then when I’m in a hurry, I will pull the closet doors open looking for a shoe that may be trapped somewhere on the closet floor. Later, when I go to bed, I get a full view of the mess in the closet. So why don’t I just do clean it out?

Every month when my mother-in-law visits, she asks hopefully, “Did you get to that closet yet?” and every month I say no. My husband left right before the holidays, so at first I was too busy wrapping presents and baking cookies and trying to entertain the kids so that they wouldn’t get too sad about Daddy being gone for Christmas. After Christmas, I turned my attention to sorting through the toys, donating old ones to make room for the new ones. Since then we’ve had houseguests, we’ve gone on trips, we’ve had a bout of the stomach flu, and with every new development, I push the great closet clean out a little further down the calendar. I don’t look forward to the lifting, and pulling, and untangling that will be required just to start this enterprise, but with three growing kids in the house, I am used to lugging crates and sorting through clothes. I know I will be much happier when I have a clean, organized, easily accessible closet all to myself. But when I finally clean up the mess in the closet, I will be removing the last thing in the house that has my husband’s trademark all over it. Only he could make a mess like that, and every time I look at it, I think of him, how annoying he could be with the stinking clean laundry basket, and how much I’d like it if he was back here ticking me off with his messes again. And when I organize all of his things, fold them up and put them away, everything will be ready for his return, but everything will also be ready if he doesn’t return – if something terrible happens – and how can I get ready for that?

But overall, I’m not a fatalistic or superstitious person, and I fully expect to be sitting at this computer a year from now grousing about how the HP has begun to stockpile clothes again, how he won’t get rid of the clothes he’s outgrown (or whatever you call it when your clothes are too big – the deployment diet plan is very effective), and how he won’t put away his clean laundry. If let my imagination take over and think about what could happen to the HP, I’d never get anything done, so one of these days, the closet project will begin. Once I’ve moved his stuff out to the other room, he’ll never have the ambition to move it back, and I will get my neat and tidy closet space exactly where I want it.

Knock Knock

Tonight the kiddies and I went to dinner at Arby’s, an establishment that I had never visited before. Magically, by doing nothing more than ordering dinner and eating it on a specified day, we were raising money for my child’s school. Several months ago, we went to a pizza place for dinner for the exact same reason. Every time I use my grocery card, my daughter’s school gets a kickback and every time I buy Cheerios, we get 10 cents for the school just by cutting out the coupon on the top. For every used printer cartridge we send in, the school can claim a dollar. These amazing innovations led me to wonder, what genius came up with these fundraising plans? The school fundraiser has come a long way from the days when I was knocking on doors with my Catholic school raffle tickets.

Fundraising at Blessed Sacrament School in the 70s and 80s depended upon a workforce of 6 to 13-year-olds pounding the pavement to scrounge up dollars. If motivation traditionally includes a carrot and a stick, Blessed Sacrament utilized one of those baby carrots (which had not actually been invented yet) and a huge battering ram. The elusive prize for the one homeroom out of sixteen that sold the most tickets was an ice cream party. As the kickoff for the fundraising season neared, the front hall of the school was adorned with drawings of 16 empty ice cream soda glasses. Throughout the fundraiser, each room’s progress was tracked by a volunteer who filled in the soda based upon homeroom raffle returns. Every morning the students from the front running classroom swaggered down the halls with a sense that the ice cream party was in the bag. The kids from the low-performing homerooms were left with a sense of helplessness – more tickets needed to be sold but how, and to whom? Now and then, the morning ice cream soda inspection would reveal a huge upheaval in the standings with a rogue classroom coming from nowhere to claim the top spot. Every morning the standings were announced and the rooms at the bottom of the standings were given a scolding for their sad display of school spirit.

My brothers and sisters and I had no hope of helping the cause of our homerooms, let along claiming a prize for individual achievement. Unlike many of our privileged classmates, our father was a government employee and could not take the tickets to work and foist them on all of his clients and coworkers. In fact, other than buying a few tickets in the name of my grandparents or aunts or uncles, my parents took no part in the fundraising game. Fortunately, we were the only kids in our neighborhood attending Blessed Sacrament, so we could count on our neighbors to spend a dollar or two on our tickets. But every year, one of us would chase the pipe dream of claiming individual glory and would set out to knock on doors for blocks and blocks. (The thought of any child doing this nowadays is rightly shocking, and I’m sure led to the recent innovations in fundraising). Our neighborhood was primarily populated by elderly people, who would look at us with puzzled expressions, either unable to hear what we were saying or unable to understand what we were asking, or both.

In one of my zealous years, I hit up every babysitting client, every neighbor, every friend of my parents that had ever asked me to pick up the mail or paper, every poor soul who rode the bus with my dad, and still I was far short of contention for the individual prizes. So every day after school I set out on foot and knocked on doors. While I never encountered anyone menacing or dangerous, I did encounter some people that came as quite a shock to a sheltered 12-year-old. One door was opened by a man who had a small yappy poodle, but no arms. I was so surprised that I launched right into my Catholic school spiel, and perhaps as a reward for not turning and running, the man bought 5 tickets from me. One door was opened by an elderly woman in her nightgown with disheveled hair. This may not seem shocking to some people, but my grandmother was always perfectly coiffed and never appeared in front of me in anything less than a dress, stockings, and heels. She would disappear into her room at bedtime fully dressed, and reappear that way in the morning. Several doors were opened by men and women who took one look at me and said “No” as they closed the doors in my face. Having been excessively schooled in proper manners, I was stunned to find grown ups behaving so rudely.

Sadly, even in my most productive year, I never came close to winning a prize, and I was never a member of a homeroom that won an ice cream party. The mighty efforts that students like me put forth on behalf of the school were never acknowledged, and instead praise was heaped upon students whose parents had sold hundreds of tickets. As the winning homeroom enjoyed its ice cream party, the other 15 homerooms could only wish that their efforts had produced more than a tsk-tsk from a disapproving teacher or principal.

I had hope that things would be different for my kids and I was encouraged by the advent of all the new painless ways to raise money. However, in addition to eating out and clipping box tops, and even though (at my daughter’s school anyway) door-to-door fundraising is prohibited, this year we have been the unfortunate recipients of three different glossy catalogues of fabulous wares that we are to try and unload on our friends and family. First it was wrapping paper, then it was candles, and this week it is cookie dough. Every child in our housing area attends the same school, so it is unclear which friends we should be soliciting. Since we are living where the Army tells us, we are not down the street from the family members that we could be hitting up. So guess who is the proud owner of new wrapping paper, new candles, and new cookie dough? What else can we do? Her school could not even find money for new basketball goals for the playground.

Fortunately for my daughter, the prizes for the kids have improved dramatically from the bad old days. If they manage to badger their parent into buying even one thing, they will get some token prize from the vast storehouse of “Made In China” goodies. During the fall fundraiser, kids who sold three things got to squirt the principal with ketchup and mustard while he was dressed up like a hot dog. For the first spring fundraiser my daughter got a bookmark with the school name on it (woohoo!), and for the next spring fundraiser she’ll get to see a BMX Bike Show if she sells even one thing, and if she sells three, she’ll get to sit up front (yippee!). I really wonder if the kids who don’t participate will be locked into a classroom with the windows blacked out to ensure they do not get a look at the prize they haven’t earned. The primary downside (or upside if you are a school administrator) of these irresistible prizes is that they motivate the kids to pester their parents incessantly so that they can win a pen that lights up or big balloon.

However, even if my daughter didn’t care about the fundraisers and even if she couldn’t win prizes, I would buy at least one thing from her every time. My years of knocking on doors have turned me into everyone’s easy mark. Every time a kid knocks on my door, I’m going to buy something, because I feel so bad for them and I remember how much I hated the fundraising routine. I buy candy I don’t want, candles I don’t like, wrapping paper I don’t need. I buy two boxes of cookies from every girl scout that knocks on my door. I do it all in the name of lightening the load of some poor kid with the weight of his school’s approval on his shoulders.