Throw Mama From The Slide

Sometimes life just hands you a pearl. For instance,  I was skyping with Rebecca (my sister in China) and we were discussing books.



She said, "Yeah, my college professor assigned us East of Eden once, so I bought the book. I kept reading it and thinking, 'But this can't be Steinbeck? It's kind of dirty.' And then I realized the book I bought was Exit to Eden, not East of Eden. So that explained why the sales lady gave me a funny look."



See? It was like the universe said, "I'm sorry it's Wednesday, Liz. This week has been a bummer. Here, here's a pick-me-up. Laugh at your sister."



Apparently, the universe thought Jane needed a pick-me-up this weekend, as she discovered the joys of pushing me down the slide.

Truthfully, she enjoyed pushing me because she didn't want to slide herself. She tried it once, got tangled up and went down butt first. Afterwards she decided her sense of survival was stronger than her need for adventure.

But after a while, I began to feel a bit, what's the word? Abused. She got this wild look in her eyes and it quickly became apparent that this was more about revenge than fun. This was about payback.

"Remember that time you gave me a pink hair bow and I specifically asked for red?"

 "Remember when I put necklaces and a hat on Mabel and you told me that Mabel didn't want to play princess with me?"

"Or that time I tried to pee standing up like the little boys in my daycare class and you told me I had to sit?"

"You're going down old woman."

"Just wait. Just wait until I choose your home. I'll make sure you have brown walls and the cafeteria serves lots of noodle salad."

And did I mention that after a certain amount of slide induced static build up I was my own personal battery? Every time I touched the slide a shock traveled through my fingers and out my teeth. Normally this sort of irritating, and recurring, pain would make me curse, but I couldn't do that since Jane was maintaining constant vigil over my speed, saying things like, "Hurry up, Mommy! SLIDE MOMMY!"

After 4,000 trips down Jane's slide of revenge I was done. This, of course, made the Janester furious, and all the way home she kept repeating, "We slide later." An outsider would listen to her chirp "we slide later" and hear an angelic little chirpy voice. I, on the the other hand, know better. I know she was really threatening me with future sessions of static shock and being pushed off tall objects.



This is what comes from throwing mama off the slide.

Sometimes Life Give You Lemons. And Sometimes It Gives You Spiderpocolypse Instead.

I've tried to think of a clever way to segway into this story, like telling a joke about lemons, or the time I naired my lip when I was 16 the night before school pictures and I ended up looking like Captain Red Beard. But none of that makes any sense, so I'm just going to jump into the middle of this thing.

My friend Jeanetta and I went back to our cabin Saturday afternoon during the Arkansas Women Bloggers Conference. We were participating in the handmade craft bizarre, and Jeanetta was gathering up her lovely aprons, pins and hair bows, among other things.



Don't worry, I didn't hand make anything, I just signed copies of my book. No one lost fingerprints, or got superglued to a homemade acorn frame (true story).

As I went to get my books, I moved the box and my suitcase and tiny spiders rushed out from underneath.

I should remind all you gals that this is Arkansas, the hottest hot spot for all things spidery. This is not a critique on the lovely establishment that hosted our conference. The bottom line is: spiders happen, especially in the woods, especially in hot weather, especially to me.

It took a moment to process what was happening. You know those movie scenes where the lead is in a dangerous situation, and you're yelling at the screen, "RUN STUPID RUN" and they don't run, they just dope around like idiots? Staring? Asking idiotic questions only the soon-to-be-dead ask, like, "What the?"



That's me.



I moved in closer, and lifted up the suit case. 

Thousands of spiders exploded out from underneath it. 

Fine, maybe not thousands. But hundreds, definitely hundreds.

I bolted into the air like a 150 pound wet cat, screaming a garbled mix of words that sounded like, "Spiders my leg in my clothes I want mommy sweet Jesus save me."

"What? What is it?" Jeanetta crossed the room and in one short second she grasped the situation.

"Get something to spray them with!" she yelled, running into the bathroom.

I grabbed my hairspray, and she got a Clorox spray bottle and we began our battle.

The tiny baby spiders were brown, and the floors were brown, and it was only when they moved that we could see them. They were under my suitcase, and backpack, and up the wall beside my bed.



THEY WERE EVERYWHERE.

At one point I gazed at Jeanetta in awe. I was doing battle as well, but it mostly involved lots of screaming and slapping and swatting. I was battling out of fear. Jeanetta was battling like a (excuse my language dear classy readers who are more ladylike than me) bad ass. I mean seriously. Give this woman a fur coat, a necklace of bear teeth, and a sword and I'd bet dollars to donuts she could survive every season of Game of Thrones.

Eventually we encased all of their tiny bodies in a heavy layer of sulfate-free hairspray and bleach. The entire cabin smelled like a hair salon and a hazmat team had a baby together. We high fived, I counted ten new gray hairs and back to the conference we went.



Ding dong the spiders were dead. Or so we thought.



After a cookout by the lake our cabin turned in early for a night of pajamas and gossiping and cocktail making. I leaned over my bed to get my favorite pink and white polka dot pajama pants and there they were: tiny, almost invisible, feathery baby spiders running straight for my leg.



I screamed and grabbed my handy hairspray bottle. Jeaneatta didn't bat an eye and grabbed her bottle of bleach. The other girls stood and watched in horror. Surely it was just my bed area? We slaughtered dozens of spiders and I commenced with moving to another bunk.



Then we noticed spiders running out from under the rug in the center of the room.



Long story short, I went home to sleep in my own bed that night.



I realize this makes me a gigantic girl. But listen. I grew up in the sticks. I grew up in the woods. I grew up in a place where our neighbors trash got ransacked by black bears, coyotes circled our house and howled during a snow storm, and it took 30 minutes to drive to a store for ice cream. I know wildlife. I know spiders. And I've never seen this many in one place.



Obviously there was a nest (or nests) of thousands of baby spiders just waiting for us behind the doors of Birch Cabin. But here's what I know, or learned.



1. You want Jeanetta on your side. Whether its killing spiders or going on the run from the mafia, she's your girl.



2. I scream in falsetto. Bring it boy choirs.



3. Small fast moving spiders are way scarier than the big ones.



4. UNLESS the big ones move even faster than the tiny ones. Never mind. All spiders are equally scary.



5. Yes. I will still wear my favorite spider necklace. It's made of silver and polished stone. It does not breath, bite, or crawl up the leg of my pajamas.



Also, I now consider it a token of survival, a token of Spiderpocolypse. 

Bows, Vasectomies, and the Weekend I Gave Up and Skipped Church

I have a lot of problems in this life. Such as:

I have sturdy, German ankles and sometimes people ask, "Are your legs swelling?"

Jane has started calling me Liz.

Mabel bit me on the toe because I came in between her and a goldfish cracker.



For some reason I still feel the need to say "Exsqueeze me?" Like it's 1993.



My camera is going crazy, turning itself off at odd times, refusing to focus. Basically it's giving me the technological equivalent of a middle finger.



I've developed an allergy to fresh peaches, but I eat them anyway, and then I get migraines, and a weird rash, and I sit in a pile of ashes and cry, "WHY ME?"



But you know that quote from Emerson?



"Consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds."



Well that's not my one of my problems.



I am not consistent. I can't remember where I put my keys. One day I get inspired to paint our dining room navy, the next week I paint it white. I love a tv show for a month, then decide I hate it. Things change day to day, minute to minute.



But thank you, Mr. Ralph Waldo Emerson. It's good to know I don't have any hobgoblins hanging out up there in the cobwebs. Clowns? Maybe. A few brown recluses in the part of my brain that should be fully adept at math? Most definitely. But no hobgoblins.



So this weekend. I'm used to my own lack of consistency. But everyone else fell off their wagons too, and the Owen house became a black hole of chaos.



Matt had a vasectomy and Jane decided she couldn't possibly live her life without at least 30 bows in her hair at all times. Our entire world was thrown off its axis by these two things. Even Mabel felt the changes in our universe's rip tide, which is, I suspect, why she bit my toe.



I could tell you several hilarious things about Matt's vasectomy, but I won't. He's too sweet, it was too traumatic (not actually traumatic in the literal sense, but it did affect his man-parts so to HIM it was traumatic), and it's not my story to tell.



But I did spend a good deal of time monitoring medicine, and ice packs, and shuttling food trays up and down the stairs. Which is fine, I was glad to do it. But you throw in a two year old who has discovered the upper levels of her already Alvin-and-the-Chipmunk-like-vocal-chords, AND who has a bow fetish?



Let's just say I needed a drink.



Every fifteen minutes.



I kid.



Anyway. We made it to Sunday morning. I was looking forward to leaving my ice-pack loving husband behind, dropping my child off in class, and spending 50 heavenly minutes sitting in a chair by myself. And that's when this happened.

Jane walked into the bathroom with every part of her scalp swathed in bows, every color, every size.



"I do bows mommy."



I took a deep breath.



"Let's just pick one bow. How about the pink one?"



Jane threw herself prostrate on the ground, which reminded me it's been at least a month since I mopped the floors.



"NOOOOOOO. I do ALL THE BOWS!"



I backtracked, "OK, fine. You can wear all the bows."



But the damage was done.



Her sensitive swollen toddler ego was bruised, and in need of one of Daddy's ice packs.



"I DO ALL THE BOWS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"



For a moment I considered the fact that her tears were doing a fairly decent job of cleaning the floors, and then I picked her up and put her in my lap.



"Watch Einstein?" she asked pitifully, bows jutting out in all directions like multicolored horns.



(Little Einsteins is a cartoon that strives to be educational about classical music and art, and while I appreciate that, it also makes my left eye twitch.)



We never made it to church. I totally gave up. But in a good way. Jane needed all the bows. She needed to sit in her eye-twitching mother's lap and watch Little Einsteins. Matt needed a human shuttle for his ice packs. Mabel needed goldfish crackers.



It's not too often that I can say I was defeated by bows, a schnauzer, and a vasectomy.



But church will always be there next week.