Adventures with Autumn

To the Head Whigwamp, Bigwig Parent-Policing People:

My mamma is defective. I want a new one.

I'm sure you get lots of these types of complaints, but I want to assure you that mine is 100% really and truly real. My mamma is the meanest mamma in the whole wide world, plain and simple.

She won't let me eat the plants, she keeps me away from all the interesting stuff like outlets and dish soap, and not once has she let me finish pulling all the pages out of the library books. I mean, really. What are all those papers even in there for if you aren't allowed to tear them out?

No matter how much I cry, she is always making me do things I don't want to do.

She makes me eat peas, and she knows how much I hate peas.

She makes me take naps, and she knows how much I hate naps.

She's constantly trying to wash my face, or wash my hands, or wash my hair.

Not once has she let me go outside in the cold without a jacket and mittens on, no matter how big of a fit I throw, how limp I go, or how stiff I make my arms.

I always puff out my belly as far as it will go when she puts me in the car seat, but she just cinches it up snug anyway. What part of puffed out belly is too hard for her to understand?

And no matter how many times I take off my socks and hide them, she just finds them and puts them right back on again.

To be fair, I suppose she is better than some of these yahoos I've seen around.

I bet the lady at the grocery store couldn't always guess the exact right song to sing to make me feel better. I am almost positive the one at church wouldn't know how to curve her arms around me just right when I'm feeling sad. And I know for a fact that lady over there doesn't smell the way mine does.

I guess I don't need a whole new mamma. But if you could write her a note about the peas, I'd really appreciate it.

Sincerely,

The Little Miss

It was a frazzled kind of day. The Little Miss was teething and tetchy, the laundry was piled high on the washing machine, and the dishes were really starting to get a bit ridiculous.

I hadn't done a thing all day except hold a grouchy little girl and let her pull my hair. (Apparently, misery loves company even when you're only seven-months old.)

By the end of the day, I was trying my very best to keep it together. I tried to be serene. I tried to breathe slowly. I tried to imagine myself floating on a lily pad in the clouds instead of sitting on an old couch surrounded by abject messiness. I tried, but the truth was I felt edgy, fidgety, and my hair was starting to look like Chewbacca after a good hour or two in the tumble cycle of a clothes drier.

Wayne texted to say he was on a call and running late, which meant I was on my own for the nightly wind down. Somehow, amidst a handful of mad-at-mamma faces and a few "Won't, won't won't!" head shakes, we made it to bed, ruffled, but on time.

Now all I had left to worry about was dinner.

My instinct was to summon what little energy I had left and text Wayne to pick up a pizza on his way home, then put up my feet and zone out until he got here.

That's what I felt like doing, but good wives don't do that. Good wives don't ask their husbands to bring home pizza. Good wives cook dinner. From scratch, on the cheap. Out of nothing more than a few cups of flour and a half-cube of bullion, good wives are supposed to be able to MacGyver up a mouthwatering masterpiece of a meal.

And I don't mean that in a 1950s, subservient kind of way. I mean that in an, I'm the one who decided to quit my full time job, cut our income in half, and move to a new city with higher rent rates, kind of way.

So, instead of crashing on the couch, I headed for the kitchen and pulled out one of my old trusty cookbooks. Just to prove it to myself that I wasn't such a bad wifey after all, I flipped to the more gourmet recipes and picked one that looked both delicious and impressively difficult.

I ran my finger down the list of ingredients, pulled a few things out of the fridge, and got to work.

I diced and sauteed. I whisked and simmered. I buttered, browned, and baked.

Then, I burned.

It wasn't my fault, really. I was so busy making sure the beaten eggs were sufficiently fluffy that I forgot about the chicken and onions, which were now starting to turn an ugly blackish-brown. I had just begun batting away the onion-flavored smoke when the oil in the extra skillet I had been heating up started to boil and splashed my hand. Then the water boiled over, my elbow knocked the flour onto the floor, and the white sauce turned into a gooey sludge and the bottom of the pan.

I was just starting to think that the world should really give those 1950s wives, with their "hot meal ready of the table" bit, a lot more credit when Wayne walked in through the door. His mouth dropped, and I realized how crazy I must have looked. I was standing over the oven holding a wooden spoon in one hand and sucking on the fingers of my other, with my hair, which hadn't exactly been helped out by all rising steam, now reaching Country Music Award proportions.

When I saw him, I gave a defeated grin and sank to the floor.

He chuckled, then settled in beside me. "So. Rough day?" he asked, raising his eyebrows.

I only nodded.

"Pizza?"

"Definitely."

I feel like I've lived several different lives during my 26 years.

I've lived the high school athlete life, full of Gatorade and team jerseys. I've done the journalist thing with pencil skirts and notepads. I've even been the grad student in bright cardigans, ballerina flats, and an adorable brown-leather laptop carrier.

Now, I have officially entered into what I like to lovingly refer to as my T-shirt phase.

I would never say that it's less glamorous than some of the other stages, but I will say this: It's definitely different.

I have been pooped on, peed on, and slobbered on within a ten minute time frame. I have used my own bare finger to clear away the boogers of another human being's nose without blinking an eye. I have even had strained sweet potatoes smeared all over my face and seen it as a gesture of love.

That's right, ladies and gentlemen. I'm officially a full-time mom. And full-time moms wear T-shirts.

I used to wonder why that was. I swore to myself that if I ever became a mother (a dubious idea at the time), I would never let myself go like so many other moms I saw, covered in half-chewed food and spit up. When I was a mom, I would still wear cute outfits, fix my hair daily, and use makeup. I would keep my house reasonably clean. I would never, ever, ever appear in public with baby food covering any part of my person.

If I haven't been able to keep every one of my promises to myself completely, I've at least tried to keep the spirit of them.

I might not vacuum as often as I used to or have spotless baseboards, but I keep our house at least tidy.

I always find the time to put on a little mascara, even if I haven't touched a tube of lipstick in seven months.

I shower.

Most days.

But the cute outfits, with their frilly tops and dry-clean-only labels, are a thing of the past. They just don't work with a baby. Which is OK, really. The payoff of hanging out with the Little Miss without worrying about ruining some pricey get up is well worth it.

Besides. It's not like I don't get any personal time where I can get gussied up and get out of the house. Why, just the other day, Wayne held down the fort and I went shopping all by myself after the Little Miss' bedtime. I put on a cute coat, fixed my hair, and drove to the store. I took my time, savoring my ability to linger over the different items without a constant countdown to meltdown ticking away in the back of my mind.

I felt content and happy the whole drive home. I was extolling the glories of wearing real clothes again to Wayne when he squinted, cocked his head to one side, and pointed to my neck.

"You've got a little a little something..."

I reached up. There, from jawline to collar, was a streak of baby oatmeal. I dabbed at it with my fingers.

Yup, I thought. I'm a mom all right, and moms wear T-shirts for a reason.

I'm in big trouble.

I should have expected it, really. With half of my kids' genes coming from a Dad like theirs, at least some of my kids were bound to be little mischief-makers. I guess I was just kind of hoping my tamer, less rebellious side would, if not override, at least temper the maverick within.

If anyone's obedient nature stood a chance at gaining a foothold in the gene pool, mine should have. My most defiant act of high school was to go over to a friend's house after school instead of going straight home. One time.

My big rebellion in college was to get my ears pierced. Not even through the top of my ear or anything like that. One hole through each side, dead center on my earlobes.

I once came home from an out-of-town volleyball tournament with a fake diamond stud in my nose, just to see my parents' reaction, and my mom didn't even take a second glance at it. I believe the whole scene went a little something like this:

Autumn walks through the door. Mom glances up from the dishes to say hello, rolls her eyes, and says in an unimpressed monotone, "I know it's fake. Take it out and come get your dinner from the fridge." Then she went straight back to the dishes.

Surely such super-tameness would come through in my kids, right? Wrong. When has anything chill ever overridden something with a wild side?

Needless to say, Wayne was hardly so docile. Stories about him are legendary. Before he could crawl, he was teaching other kids how to bust out of their cribs. When he was in elementary school, he rigged the science fair--and won. By the end of middle school, he had conned both the school band and the Boy Scouts of America and made a killing doing it. By high school, he was repelling down the sides of Las Vegas casinos and creating such elaborate fictions that his parents believed them wholeheartedly until years later when he felt guilty and confessed.

Wow. When I write it all down like this, I can't help but be a little amazed that two such insanely opposite people could ever fall in love and get married and have a kid to begin with.

But fall in love and have a kid we did, and it is becoming more and more apparent each day that the sly side won out.

The Little Miss' scamming skills are not exactly highly developed just yet, but they're there all right. She screeches and screams in church until I take her out in the hall, where she is miraculously transformed into her usual happy self. Later, she becomes ultra-cheerful, giggling and smiling in her most winning way the second I say the word, "bedtime." When I try to feed her something she doesn't like, she gives me a smile, then puts her chubby little fist on the spoon to help. Before she puts it in her mouth, though, she runs her hand up and over the top of the spoon, wiping all the baby food off. Then she closes her tiny paw so I can't see the mush inside, gives me a sweetly innocent look, and opens her mouth wide for the now empty spoon.

Stinker.

I may as well start planning my apologies to the school band right now.

I rank moving somewhere between a root canal and being mauled by an angry lion. There's simply no good way to do it.

First, there's the always humbling new-home-hunt. You start big. Not with mansions, of course, but with sweet little 5 bedroom houses on roomy corner lots. You show each other pictures online, admire the petunias, and imagine how good it'll look with the big bow window strung with Christmas lights and critically speculate how intense a tag game your future kiddies could play in the back yard.

Then, one of you spies the price. It's not too much, of course. Just about $500,000 out of your price range is all.

You gasp. You gulp. You suck it up, and keep lowering your sights until finally you've arrived at the renter's nightmare: the rat hole apartment. You take one look at it on Google maps and are afraid you might be mugged right then and there just for looking at it online. "We can't live there!" you cry. "We'll be murdered in our pajamas!"

You look at your budget. You take great slashing swipes at it until there's only the bare-bones necessities left and then, finally, you arrive in the duplex/town home price range.

You pick out a few promising handfuls, then set out visiting them. You find a few you love and fill out application after application. When you don't hear back from any of them, you start to feel a bit like the last kid picked for kickball on the playground. Like a Sneech on a beach.

You start upping your game, desperate as the move-date draws ever closer. First, you flatter. "What nice window shades you have here! I can tell you really put a lot of thought into where to put the bathtub. What a remarkably lovely thermostat!"

Next, you beg. "We'll mow the lawn! And scrub the sidewalks! For free!"

Then, you name drop. "This spare bedroom will be perfect for when the Obamas come to stay, don't you think, honey?"

Finally, you threaten. "So, when our good buddy Osama bin Laden wants to visit, do we need to notify you first, or...?"

At long last, you find the perfect place. It's in a nice neighborhood, with decent square footage, and has all new appliances. It's even within walking distance to the library. Even better, the owner has graciously deigned to let you pay him hundreds of dollars every month to live there.

You collapse back on your couch after getting off the call with your new landlord, exhausted but content. You won't be homeless. You've found a place to live. The hard part is all over.

You look at each other, smiling. Then you turn and look at all your stuff. Pots and pans. DVDs. Clothes. Couches, cribs, changing tables. And, of course, the books. The books are everywhere. They're on the bookshelves, in the TV cabinet, on the nightstands, in the desk, spread out over the kitchen table. How could you never have noticed how many there are before? Or how exceptionally heavy they look?

You groan. Congratulations. You've found a place to live. Now all you have to do is move.