Month: November 2009

First of all, since this blog was born at Thanksgiving three years ago, let me take a moment to acknowledge the one that just passed. As usual, it was lovely and stuffed with grace, and we again avoided any near-death experiences, even despite the fact that my Mother-in-Law sat next to my precious baby boy at the Thanksgiving table and FED HIM BUTTER WITH A SPOON.

Basically all the boy ate for Thanksgiving dinner was butter and sweet potatoes. But he managed to live through the torture to his tiny little arteries, and continues to be one of the most perfect things I’ve ever encountered.

Now on to the continuing story of my own IMperfections:

***WARNING: TMI BEGINS HERE.***

OK, so we’ve discussed the beginnings of my lifestyle fabrications. Let’s move on to early adolescence, shall we? While early adolescence for most people is probably rife with falsehoods and pretense, I chose a particularly challenging pretense to try to uphold—or rather, it was chosen for me.

The Adolescent Deception: I am so cool I’m exempt from bodily functions.

Again, this deception was more the result of opportunity than cunning. When I was around the age of 14, my younger cousin (whom I’ll call Joey for identity-concealing reasons that will become clear later), who was roughly half my age, commented (in that wonderful forthright and openly curious way that cool kids have, because he was a very cool kid) that he’d never heard me fart.

Before I go on, let me just say in my own defense that I was 14 years old, people—at that age, you’re not mature enough to deal with certain bodily functions in that practical, all-part-of-being-human way that adults (well, most of them, anyway) do, so you usually go in one direction or the other: you look for any and every opportunity to flaunt your functions in everyone’s face and laugh about it, or you deny their existence altogether.

I’m sure you can guess which direction I chose.

It wasn’t really deliberate—it’s just that I was so mortified by the idea of discussing anything that came out of my ass with a 6-year-old, I responded only with stunned and idiotic silence, thus unintentionally encouraging him to draw his own conclusion: the Insta-Princess simply did not ever pass gas.

It could be true, right?

So I decided to roll with that. And it worked, for awhile, until Joey started sharing with other people the fact that his cousin Insta-Princess did not ever pass gas, at which point I was outed by an adult family friend, who insisted that of course I did—everyone did, or else we’d all get very sick!

Traitor.

But still—it was her word against the solid evidence of my silence and odorlessness (at least in Joey’s presence), so I still managed to hold on to my ultra-cool, body-functionless persona until the following summer . . .

As we all know, girls around the age of 15 are just beginning to have one particular very special bodily function that only applies to the female population, and I was no exception. And tho’ I wasn’t all Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret about the situation (crying and thanking God when IT finally arrived), I was certainly OK with the situation, considering that the alternative was to be a teenage girl who DID NOT have IT yet, and never mind the medical freakiness that could have gone along with that—the REAL trauma would have been trying to fake my way through sleepover conversations about it with other girls! I mean, my divorced-parents deception aside, I’m not known for being a good liar, so I can just see my 15-year-old self trying to get by on what scant info I’d gleaned from my two older sisters, which consisted primarily of three key facts:

1. Nothing related to menstruation should ever, EVER be discussed, alluded to, or even hinted at within 300 feet of anyone who has a penis.
2. Teeny tiny 1970s track shorts and gigantic 1970s maxi pads are not a good combination (though both were probably invented by people with penises).
3. When you have cramps, you’re allowed to cry about any damn thing you want.

But I digress. The point is that although I accepted my feminine fate, I certainly counted it among the bodily functions that should be kept secret from (most of) the masses.

And then.

Remember Joey? Ever-so-smart and inquisitive little boy cousin? Well. Joey had an older sister. An older sister who, though still younger than I am, was close enough in age to me to be somewhat more aware of Things Private and Girly.

Which is why I don’t buy for a second that that beeyotch (let’s call her Jezebel, shall we?) didn’t know exactly what she was doing on that fateful summer evening when, as we all relaxed in our grandparents’ family room with Grams AND GRAMPS (please refer to Fact #1 above so that you can truly appreciate the magnitude of this next bit), she slyly left the room and returned a moment later, breathless with excitement as she reported to EVERYONE that there was “something BLOODY in the bathroom trash!”

Now before you even ask, OF COURSE I DID. Of course I wrapped it, sufficiently I thought, in toilet paper before depositing it into the trash.

Apparently my mummification of the damn thing didn’t take.

And poor Grams. Her mind was quick, so it only took a second for her to surmise what exactly was going on. It took a lot longer, however, for her to get to her feet to try to remedy the situation, by which time Joey had launched himself off the sofa and flown halfway to the loo as if powered by jet fuel. She called fiercely after him to come back, using her best threat, reserved only for truly spectacular offenses: “I’LL SLAP YOU TO SLEEP!”

So bless her. She tried. Which is more than I was doing, frozen as I was in adolescent horror and disbelief (which, as we all know, is far more intense and deadly than regular horror and disbelief) at the scene that was unfolding before me as a result of Jezebel’s betrayal.

But, alas, her efforts were in vain.  Next thing we knew, Joey came strolling back into the room (in which sat, as you may recall, MY GRANDFATHER), holding my used tampon—WHICH HE HAD FULLY UNWRAPPED—between his bare fingers like a cigar, and casually declared, “It doesn’t SMELL like blood—it smells like mascara.”

Go ahead. Throw up a little if you want. I’ll wait.

Honestly, I don’t even remember what happened after that. I think I passed out from sheer mortification.

At any rate, when I came to (with a fresh and burning hatred for Jezebel that lasted well into my 20s), I gave up on keeping my normal bodily functions a secret. I mean, what could possibly be worse than my grandfather (my GRANDFATHER, people!) knowing I had a period? Hell, I might as well go ahead and start audibly farting at job interviews and having diarrhea in white pants on first dates! It was all lost now.

So I gave up on that deception, and moved on to more deliberate deceits, which I shall have to tell you about later, because Season 1 of Mad Men beckons . . . .

OK. I do not intend for this blog to be all about unemployment. For one thing, it’s boring; I mean, aside from what I said about it in my last entry, there’s really not enough material here to entertain anyone. And for another, I’m certainly hoping that it won’t last, so eventually I’d have to come up with a new topic anyway.

One more thing I’ll say about it, however, is that it allows me to be privy to much more gossip than I was when I was still employed. Strictly a time issue, I’m sure; now that I’ve got the time to listen, folks have got the dirt to share. However, as much as I like a little scuttlebutt, I have to say that it’s just a reminder about the rampant deception that people create about their lives on the internet. Oh, hell, I do it, too, either by omission of certain details in a story (like how my unemployed endeavor to cook dinner every day for my family resulted last week in the explosion of a 9 x 13 glass baking dish that sent bits of glass tinkle-plinking all over the first level of my home, requiring a full hour of cleanup, despite which my husband found chunks of blue glass in his shoe the next day), or by slight manipulation of facts in order to create a better story (the truth is, that Scotch Egg I got at the Ren Fest is probably completely innocent of causing the horrible illness I suffered later that night, but come on—near death from a Scotch Egg is such a better story than a mere virus).

So I know that the internet is no court-o-law as far as the truth is concerned, but that doesn’t stop me from being surprised when I learn from other people about a person’s crappy marriage or pot-head kid or career failures or near-psychosis, when his or her blog or Facebook page is full of nothin’ but glowing reviews of his or her spouse, offspring, work, or life in general. Don’t get me wrong; I don’t expect everyone to air a bunch of dirty laundry all over the web every day, but I still forget how convenient the internet is for creating an entirely different picture of your life. Which is perhaps a little ironic, since for most of my life I have been the champion of trying to concoct the public image of a life or personality that I haven’t actually had.

And this is where the examples start.

The Childhood Deception: I am a child of divorced parents.

Yep. I seriously pretended that my parents were divorced when they weren’t. I was a weird kid. And I had so many classmates whose parents were divorced that, even though most of those kids hated the fact that the parents with whom they’d begun their lives were no longer together, I still wanted to be one of those kids. Every year, as soon as the school directory was published, I’d scuttle it home and pore through it to see which kids had divorced parents, which was made obvious in the directory, because the kids of divorced parents usually had “last name issues” that were revealed in the booklet. So if your parents were still married, your entry would look something like this:

Student: John Dough
Address/Phone: 1234 Main Street / 555-4321
Parents: Robert and Mary

BO-O-O-O-ORING, right? But if your parents were divorced, you got something like this:

Student: Jimmy Dough
Address/Phone: 1234 Main Street / 555-4321
Parents: Patricia Biscuit / Stanley Dough (555-6789)

. . . or this, if your custodial parent (who was usually the mom at that time, it being the ‘70s and all) had remarried:

Student: Jane Dough
Address/Phone: 1234 Main Street / 555-4321
Parents: Steven and Sandra Muffin

Oh, yeah. All of your business was out in the street like that, for everyone to see and—if everyone = Little Insta-Princess—for everyone to envy. Really, the kids I envied most were the ones whose parent(s) had remarried, because those were the kids who got to call adults in their lives by FIRST NAMES (which I was NOT allowed to do in any circumstance). How cool was THAT?

Me: Hey, Jane, what did you get for your birthday?

Uber-cool, disaffected Jane: Oh, my mom and Steve got me a bike, and then my dad and Diane took me to the circus.

(See? SO cool. Plus, DOUBLE PRESENTS for every occasion! Who wouldn’t love THAT? Having parents who’d been married for over 20 years, on the other hand, was SO gauche! So old-fashioned! So . . . so . . . woefully un-hip!)

So in my pathetic attempt to join the leagues of the rebellious, embittered step-kids, I totally disowned my poor, sweet father.

It wasn’t some sort of pre-meditated plan; like my songwriting skills, my cunning is kinda lacking. But when I stumbled upon the opportunity to make everyone think that my dad was actually my stepdad, I jumped on it.

See, my father and I were awfully good pals, and used to play a charming game in which he was my butler/chauffeur/servant. (Ahem. In case you were wondering why I’m known as Insta-Princess … ) And it was, as I mentioned, the ‘70s—the height of the Love Boat era. I never missed an episode. So in one episode, a rich woman took a Love Boat cruise with her butler, whose name was Bertram.

Well.

I thought Bertram was a simply divine name for a butler (/chauffeur/servant), and so started calling my dad Bertram. Of course, the Love Boat lady and HER Bertram wound up in a romantic relationship, which was either too gross for me to contemplate (so I didn’t), or went straight over my head because I was too focused on the sheer perfection of Bertram as a butler name. But I digress.

The point is, I started calling my father Bertram, and he thought the whole Bertram thing was sorta cute, so he went along with it, not knowing that one day I would use it against him. But somewhere around my 5th grade year, the moment came. Bertram had given me a really groovy pen of some sort, that squirted water, or changed colors, or morphed into a hippo in a tutu or something—who remembers? At any rate, one day I brought the pen to school, at which point one of the girls in my class eyed it covetously and asked where I’d gotten it. Without thinking, I replied, “Bertram gave it to me.”

“Who’s Bertram?” she asked, and that was when the pathetic wannabe light bulb went on over my head.

“My dad,” I sighed, which was certainly not a lie per se, but I did my damnedest to say it with that special tone of step-kid ennui, hoping that my simple two-syllable truth would also manage to convey a “my-mom-insists-that-I-acknowledge-him-as-my-father-but-I-am-in-no-way-related-to-that-annoying-bastard” message.

It worked.

Why, I’m not sure, because you’d think that other kids would, as I did, check the directory, which would have kicked my jig straight up. Turns out, however, that OTHER KIDS WERE APPARENTLY NOT TOTAL NUTBALLS LIKE ME, so nobody ever knew or, at any rate, never called me on it. And so I was part of “the club,” at least for awhile and among the kids who never actually came to my house or interacted in any way with my family. And that was when I discovered that the club really wasn’t that much fun. Who wanted to walk around every day resenting someone with whom you actually had to live?

My charade pretty much ended a couple of years later, anyway, when I graduated from Elementary School and headed to Middle School, where I had bigger issues than the tragic fact that my parents were still married. The Middle School period is, I think, a tragedy in itself. Don’t you? But I digress again.

I did continue to call my father Bertram for the rest of his life (he passed away when I was in my mid-20s), but more out of habit and affection than anything else. I also succeeded in pulling an unintentional fast one on the friends I made in High School and beyond, because although those people (who called him Bertram as well) knew that he was my actual father, they thought that his name really was Bertram. Only upon reading his obituary did they discover the truth.

As to the truth about my intentional “Divorce” deception of years past, I did confess it to my mother a few years ago. She thought it was pretty funny.

Anyway, here’s where Part I of my Multiple Personality Confession comes to an end; I’m spending today with my baby boy (who is home from day care with a little bug), in hopes that he will not one day try to disown ME. Stay tuned . . . .