Yesterday I called Beth approximately 24 times. Half of those times I was in the bathroom, once I was in the middle of changing the raisin diaper. She only lives a block away, so I suppose this is the stay-at-home-mom version of instant messaging the coworker in the next cubicle over, but there is no boss to fear catching us, just kids to hide from and a baby that likes to scream whenever mommy starts talking into her favorite toy.
We had A LOT to talk about. Examples:
1. Making sure the other one was aware that the next episode of “Project Runway” was only one day away.
2. How to respond to people who say things like, “My kids never did that,” THAT being any number of things little kids do ALL THE TIME. We came up with a) “You just don’t remember,” and b) “You’re a liar.”
3. Reminiscing about that one time I was in the car with her and her husband Dave driving behind a moving van being driven by my college boyfriend. He was in the process of moving in with me (so that we could sin all day every day), and one of the last things he needed to do was drop off a 250 pound television set from the late seventies at the local Goodwill. I cannot even describe how big this television set was: huge, mammoth, larger than a small mobile home. For some reason he never closed the back of the moving van and when he pulled onto the main street in Provo, Utah that mobile home-sized television FLEW OUT OF THE BACK OF THE VAN and landed on the dotted white line in the middle of the street. He had no idea that he had just flung 250 pounds of obsolete technology out the back of his vehicle INTO TRAFFIC, and he kept driving. Dave, Beth and I just started laughing — oh God, you know the laughter, the kind that hurts because you can’t stop and you’re sore two days later because you used muscles in your stomach that had never been used — and I don’t even remember how we got the television out of the street, but amazingly the TV didn’t even have a scratch on it. They knew what they were doing in the seventies!
My boyfriend didn’t even know what happened, only that he got to the Goodwill drop-off and the TV was no longer in the back of the truck. He could have KILLED SOMEONE, I know, but the image of that television being hurled into traffic, the delicate arch of its trajectory is one of my favorite memories of all time.
4. Planning another Girl’s Night Out (I HATE TYPING THOSE WORDS LET ALONE SAYING THEM OUT LOUD, LET’S JUST CALL IT WHAT IT REALLY IS: GETTING THE FUCK AWAY FROM OUR KIDS FOR A COUPLE HOURS AND TALKING ABOUT SEX NIGHT OUT)
We decided that we’d round up the ladies and head out to a bar on Thursday night. I called our neighbor Carol, but she said she had other plans (BITCH!). During our conversation we talked about each other’s blogs (I would link to hers here but I haven’t asked her permission to do so and she’s Midwestern and there’s no TELLING what she would do to me if I did, probably tie me to a chair and force me to listen to her say, “Kahn-creet,” over and over and over again, THE AGONY.) She said she was going to write about this commercial she saw recently about Mormon bridal dresses that had a tagline that goes something like, “Find hundreds of modest dresses,” which basically just means that your perverted uncle won’t get to see your cleavage at the reception.
I asked her if she had seen that commercial for that new sex drug, I don’t know what it’s called, but when it starts listing the HUNDREDS of possible side-effects it mentions, “In the rare event that an erection lasts four or more hours, seek medical attention.” FOUR OR MORE HOURS? AN ERECTION? OUCH? And I love this woman because she said, “I KNOW! My god, you’ve got to ask yourself, is it even worth it?” And I was all, “I KNOW! How about you just give your man a foot rub instead?”
So then I called our other neighbor Kelly who is currently eight months pregnant with her third child. Her second child is two weeks older than Leta. YEP. DO THE MATH. Her oldest child just turned three. YEP. DO THE MATH AGAIN. Kelly is a lawyer and is perhaps one of the smartest women I’ve ever met, but I guess she missed law school the day they talked about FAMILY PLANNING. (She is SO going to kill me for this but it will have been worth it.) While I was on the phone with her I could hear the utter chaos of two boys running/crawling in the background, and she said to me, “This is what you have to look forward to.” And I responded, “Um, no, actually, Jon and I practice birth control.”
Then I had to call Beth for the 25th time to talk about who was in and who was out (Heidi Klum says that at the end of every “Project Runway” when she’s about to tell some designer that HIS DREAMS ARE DASHED, GOODBYE). And I was sad because I knew it was the end of the day and I wouldn’t get to talk to her again until the next day, and I cried a little. Thus ends another episode of “Desperate Mothers of Childen Who Actually Do Do That.”