HAUSFRAU CHRONICLES
"MY INJURY"
from The European Issue (#15), spring 2009
(click on images and enlarge to 150% for best readability)
From We Travel to the Big Apple (Hausfrau #12: the SIRE! Magazine issue)
Click on each page and zoom in to 150% for best readability.
How It Came to Be that I Bought a Miracle Bra®
from Forty Things to Do When You Turn Forty (Sellers, 2007)
My kids are the only ones who’ll tell me the truth, and they do so without fail and all the time, like the little hyperactive yin/yang sages that they are. Sometimes I think other people avoid confronting me with unsavory truths because they’re afraid that I will seek revenge by lampooning them in my writing. It’s true. I would do that. But my son George (age nine) and daughter Dora (age five) have no fear about it. For a long time they were too young to read, and by now they’re so used to being caricatured in my stories that they know they have nothing to lose. Therefore, they tell me the truth with reckless abandon. And lately, that truth tends to center around my body: its odors, its imperfections, its myriad signs of deterioration.
Dora likes to hang out in my bedroom and harass me while I get dressed. She pinches, grabs, lifts, and scrutinizes my body with the enthusiasm of a marine biologist stumbling upon a beached leviathan. Of particular interest to her is my aging skin (which has all the suppleness of an old boot; I can now pinch the skin on the back of my hand and it will stay like that, in pinched formation, for several seconds before sinking back into the hand itself) and my boobs (sucked into shriveled oblivion first by George and then Dora, in a nearly uninterrupted six-year breastfeeding stint).
With a spirit of inquiry, Dora sits on the trunk at the end of my bed and watches me, asking questions like, “Why do your legs jiggle around so much when you walk?” Of my stretch marks, she’s mused: “What are all those wiggly white wrinkly things on your hips?” And then there was the classic: “Will I have big, loose, squishy boobs like you when I grow up?”
Interspersed with her questions come the shrewd observations. I can’t knock her for using advanced thinking skills, such as metaphor and simile, to describe what she sees. But what really bugs me is the way she draws comparisons between my body and other icky things in the natural world. One morning after she woke me up, she announced: “Pew! Your breath smells like poop!” And one evening, as I was luxuriating in the bathtub after a hard day’s work, I was treated to this zinger: “Wow! Your boobs float in the water like huge, dead jellyfish.”
But the harassment is the worst at the beach, here on the rocky coast of Maine, where the distasteful qualities of my forty-year-old bod are exposed to the glare of the sun and provide fodder for my children to crush--like so many barnacles under my sandals--whatever delusions I’ve managed to build up about myself. Like, I thought I looked pretty good in the halter top-style bathing suit I’d purchased at Amaryllis after the perky twenty-something sales clerk assured me that even though there were no “cups” inside the halter top, I could still “totally carry it off” (her words). And, like the desperate fool that I am, I believed her.
I was desperate because I had been searching in vain for a bathing suit that both fit me and that looked good. I ask you: why are there no attractive bathing suits for forty-year-old women? The only ones I could find that would hold my breasts aloft (with a series of trusses and steel supports) were those horrendously matronly tankinis with matching skirts that seem to shout: “I’m covering up the nastiest mess of cellulite and creeping pubic hair you’re ever seen in your life!”
And so when I tried on the halter top-style bathing suit at Amaryllis and the perky clerk crossed her fingers behind her back and told me that I looked “really great,” my vanity got the better of me and I bought it. I wore it to the beach the next day with the kids, and I thought I was looking mighty fine.
But then truth-teller George, trying also to be tactful, looked me over when I pulled of my t-shirt and studied the halter top-style bathing suit for a moment. “Um, Mom,” he said. “I think that bathing suit is supposed to be for a younger person.”
“Yeah,” Dora concurred. “When you bend over, your boobs look like socks with pebbles at the bottom.”
But enough about the beach. Let’s get back to the boobs. I come from a long line of foremothers who were meaty of thigh and pendulous of breast. My grandmother Mildred was particularly well-endowed. After birthing and nursing three children, her breasts hung clear down to her pelvis. But she celebrated her mammaries and was not at all repulsed by her aging body. She’d get up every morning and go swim a mile at the Ramada Inn pool in Mystic, Connecticut well into her eighties, laughing and shouting “Look at these poor drowned puppies!” as her enormous breasts floated up and bobbed around in the wickedly chlorinated water.
Oh, how I wish I could be like Milly and celebrate my God-given teats! But I’m not like Milly. I’m too vain. I don’t want drowned puppies. Ever. I’d like my breasts to be secured in dignity, somewhere above my navel.
Enter the Miracle Bra®.
I was first tipped off to its magic one day at work when I noticed my friend Leanne’s drastically improved side view. She’d turned forty the week after I had, and she’d celebrated by going out and buying herself a Miracle Bra®. At first, I thought she’d gone under the knife. She had called out sick from work the previous week, hadn’t she?
Leanne explained that for a little over thirty dollars and a trip to the mall, she’d been able to completely transform her upper body. “I love my Miracle Bra® so much that I sleep with it on,” she said. “It’s so nice to have boobs again and not a couple of deflated balloons.”
I have to agree. I went out and got a Miracle Bra® soon afterwards, and now I’m hooked on mine. I bought the “extreme push-up” model, which has some padding where I need it most (the top) and also creates some nice cleavage as well as the illusion of all-over firmness. If I didn’t know better, I’d think I had a boob job.
And I have been amply rewarded for my purchase. My husband has been more helpful around the house. People I haven’t seen in awhile stop and stare and say, “You look great!” and wonder, just like I did, if I’ve been under the knife.
And then there’s the most important reward of all: the kudos from my little truth tellers.
“Your boobs look really good now, Mom” Dora says, watching me as I serve dinner.
“Yeah,” says George. “Can you wear that new bra thing under your bathing suit, the next time we go to the beach?”
Regrettable Parenting Moment: Condoms or Candy?
(from Hausfrau issue #11--winter 2007)
Click on the comic to read it.
The Needy Hour: A Tale of Hausfrau Passion and Mango Raspberry Popsicles (from Hausfrau #10--fall 2006)
‘Twas the needy hour—that emotionally charged period between school and dinner on Wednesday afternoons when I am my most fragile from the day’s fallout from my job as a counselor at Planned Parenthood, and yet I find myself having to amp up my mothering duties and skills because a whole helluva lot needs to happen and the kids are equally if not more fried than I am. Let’s take a peek, shall we?
3:00 p.m.
I leave work at Planned Parenthood and drive over to pick Dora up from school, where all the three and four year olds in her class are napping, because it is rest time, except for my daughter, who has a preternatural ability to survive without sleep. She rushes over to greet me at the door with her heart-melting grin and says, “Hi Mommy! I made this picture for you!” and we gather up her things and place them in her little purple LL Bean backpack and head over to George’s school to get him.
3:15 p.m.
True to form, my eight-year-old son refuses to leave the premises of his school without putting up a good fight. When I tell him that he can’t play baseball with his friends because we have to go shopping, he screams at me in front of all of the other nice parents: “Mom! No! I can’t believe you’re doing this! Why? Why can’t I play with my friends?” Even though it is now spring and the year is almost over, it would seem that in George’s mind, each day happens afresh and without any recollection of the routines and rules and schedules and requirements of all of the previous days that have fallen beforehand, so that the memory that, say, on Wednesdays mom picks us up from school and then we go grocery shopping has absolutely no relevance for him.
We have to go grocery shopping because this is what’s in the cupboard at home: a bag of stale cranberries, a can of tomato sauce, a very old box of falafel mix, and a bag of some grain I bought in bulk several years ago when I was trying to introduce more whole foods into our diet, but have no idea how to cook it or even what it is. It looks like cous cous, but it is not, I assure you.
3:30 p.m.
We arrive in the vicinity of the grocery store triangle that is Hannaford, Wild Oats, and the Whole Grocer, which was just bought out by Whole Foods or 365 or whatever the hell it’s called now, and I am once again thrown into my weekly dilemma: which of these stores should I patronize? To which of these stores in the grocery store triangle should I give up my scant and hard-earned clams? A Hausfrau decision tree begins to sprout in the thought bubble above my head.
It looks something like this: If I go to Hannaford, it’s the least expensive and they have those red plastic carts that look like sports cars for the kids to ride in, which keeps them preoccupied for awhile, but George always smashes into other shoppers and also he’ll throw a fit in the candy aisle. If I go to Wild Oats, it’s so flippin’ expensive that I’ll blow my whole wad there but they do have the deli and the kids are getting hungry and we could stop and get a snack. But then if they don’t have those chicken wings that Dora loves she’ll scream bloody murder. If I go to the Whole Grocer or Whole Foods or 365 or whatever, it’s nice and small there and not so overwhelming to the kids and they have those popsicles—the healthy ones—those mango raspberry popsicles that have saved me on many an occasion and which will save me yet again today because the kids are starting to tweak.
In the backseat, they bicker.
Mom, can I have a snack?
Me too!
Can I have chocolate?
No I’m allergic to it!
But I’m not.
That hurts my feelings!
So what.
You dumb boy.
Mom, George is hurting my feelings.
I’m just hungry, mom, for god’s sake!
And I say: knock it off right now, the both a ya! Knock it off right now or you’ll get nothing. And like it!
3:35 p.m.
Inside the Whole Grocer, I am alerted to the dwindling window of time I have to provide nourishment to my charges when my four year old’s speech regresses to that of a toddler (she begins speaking in a sort of crude cave man language: Me hungry! Me want treat!), and bangs the push bar with her fists from atop her perch in the shopping cart seat. George catches a free ride and hangs off the cart that I’m wheeling down the aisles so that if I take a hand off the cart to, for example, reach for a food item off the shelf, it will upset the delicate but crazy symbiotic balance here and the cart will flip over and my four year old will crack her head open. George is saying: Hey I want a mango raspberry popsicle! Mom! I want a mango raspberry popsicle! Can I have a popsicle? Mom! I want a popsicle! and I decide then and there to cut my losses and I high tail it over to the frozen foods section, where I grab a coupla mango raspberry popsicles from the frosty chamber therein.
I rip off the wrappers like a crack addict trembling for a hit, pass the kids their popsicles, and then: ahhhhh. Sweet silence.
I calculate that I now have approximately seven minutes max in which to round up the ingredients I’ll need to provide a nourishing and tasty meal that evening. I purchase some hamburger meat and some spaghetti to go with the tomato sauce in my cupboard and also some of those greens in a bag, a.k.a. salad.
Also, on my way to the register, I pass through the toiletries aisle and throw a bag of chlorine-free maxi pads into the cart. Dora waits until I pull the cart up in back of a hip-looking, twenty-something guy before she screams: “Oh, yes! These are the pads for the blood that comes out of your vagina!”
3:42 p.m.
At the register, the be-pierced and be-tattooed cashier takes a disapproving gander at my kids, who are greedily licking the mango/raspberry juice off the wooden popsicle sticks and off their fingers before they pass me the sticky wrappers for scanning and then head over to the cart corral, whereupon they commence to climb the gate, Dora hanging upside down and George screwing with the electric door, jumping on and off the sensor so that he manages to break it, and I just know that this cashier is judging me and my food choices and my wild offspring, and I am suddenly overcome with the urge to drop to the floor and sob and pour my heart out and beg for mercy, saying Please! I am a fragile and vulnerable human being! Please take pity on me!
But instead I write a check for the groceries, which is roughly equivalent to an entire day’s worth of work at Planned Parenthood, and I gather up those groceries, and my children, and I trudge forth into the waning afternoon sun and deeper still into the Needy Hour.
Click on each page and zoom in to 150% for best readability.
How It Came to Be that I Bought a Miracle Bra®
from Forty Things to Do When You Turn Forty (Sellers, 2007)
My kids are the only ones who’ll tell me the truth, and they do so without fail and all the time, like the little hyperactive yin/yang sages that they are. Sometimes I think other people avoid confronting me with unsavory truths because they’re afraid that I will seek revenge by lampooning them in my writing. It’s true. I would do that. But my son George (age nine) and daughter Dora (age five) have no fear about it. For a long time they were too young to read, and by now they’re so used to being caricatured in my stories that they know they have nothing to lose. Therefore, they tell me the truth with reckless abandon. And lately, that truth tends to center around my body: its odors, its imperfections, its myriad signs of deterioration.
Dora likes to hang out in my bedroom and harass me while I get dressed. She pinches, grabs, lifts, and scrutinizes my body with the enthusiasm of a marine biologist stumbling upon a beached leviathan. Of particular interest to her is my aging skin (which has all the suppleness of an old boot; I can now pinch the skin on the back of my hand and it will stay like that, in pinched formation, for several seconds before sinking back into the hand itself) and my boobs (sucked into shriveled oblivion first by George and then Dora, in a nearly uninterrupted six-year breastfeeding stint).
With a spirit of inquiry, Dora sits on the trunk at the end of my bed and watches me, asking questions like, “Why do your legs jiggle around so much when you walk?” Of my stretch marks, she’s mused: “What are all those wiggly white wrinkly things on your hips?” And then there was the classic: “Will I have big, loose, squishy boobs like you when I grow up?”
Interspersed with her questions come the shrewd observations. I can’t knock her for using advanced thinking skills, such as metaphor and simile, to describe what she sees. But what really bugs me is the way she draws comparisons between my body and other icky things in the natural world. One morning after she woke me up, she announced: “Pew! Your breath smells like poop!” And one evening, as I was luxuriating in the bathtub after a hard day’s work, I was treated to this zinger: “Wow! Your boobs float in the water like huge, dead jellyfish.”
But the harassment is the worst at the beach, here on the rocky coast of Maine, where the distasteful qualities of my forty-year-old bod are exposed to the glare of the sun and provide fodder for my children to crush--like so many barnacles under my sandals--whatever delusions I’ve managed to build up about myself. Like, I thought I looked pretty good in the halter top-style bathing suit I’d purchased at Amaryllis after the perky twenty-something sales clerk assured me that even though there were no “cups” inside the halter top, I could still “totally carry it off” (her words). And, like the desperate fool that I am, I believed her.
I was desperate because I had been searching in vain for a bathing suit that both fit me and that looked good. I ask you: why are there no attractive bathing suits for forty-year-old women? The only ones I could find that would hold my breasts aloft (with a series of trusses and steel supports) were those horrendously matronly tankinis with matching skirts that seem to shout: “I’m covering up the nastiest mess of cellulite and creeping pubic hair you’re ever seen in your life!”
And so when I tried on the halter top-style bathing suit at Amaryllis and the perky clerk crossed her fingers behind her back and told me that I looked “really great,” my vanity got the better of me and I bought it. I wore it to the beach the next day with the kids, and I thought I was looking mighty fine.
But then truth-teller George, trying also to be tactful, looked me over when I pulled of my t-shirt and studied the halter top-style bathing suit for a moment. “Um, Mom,” he said. “I think that bathing suit is supposed to be for a younger person.”
“Yeah,” Dora concurred. “When you bend over, your boobs look like socks with pebbles at the bottom.”
But enough about the beach. Let’s get back to the boobs. I come from a long line of foremothers who were meaty of thigh and pendulous of breast. My grandmother Mildred was particularly well-endowed. After birthing and nursing three children, her breasts hung clear down to her pelvis. But she celebrated her mammaries and was not at all repulsed by her aging body. She’d get up every morning and go swim a mile at the Ramada Inn pool in Mystic, Connecticut well into her eighties, laughing and shouting “Look at these poor drowned puppies!” as her enormous breasts floated up and bobbed around in the wickedly chlorinated water.
Oh, how I wish I could be like Milly and celebrate my God-given teats! But I’m not like Milly. I’m too vain. I don’t want drowned puppies. Ever. I’d like my breasts to be secured in dignity, somewhere above my navel.
Enter the Miracle Bra®.
I was first tipped off to its magic one day at work when I noticed my friend Leanne’s drastically improved side view. She’d turned forty the week after I had, and she’d celebrated by going out and buying herself a Miracle Bra®. At first, I thought she’d gone under the knife. She had called out sick from work the previous week, hadn’t she?
Leanne explained that for a little over thirty dollars and a trip to the mall, she’d been able to completely transform her upper body. “I love my Miracle Bra® so much that I sleep with it on,” she said. “It’s so nice to have boobs again and not a couple of deflated balloons.”
I have to agree. I went out and got a Miracle Bra® soon afterwards, and now I’m hooked on mine. I bought the “extreme push-up” model, which has some padding where I need it most (the top) and also creates some nice cleavage as well as the illusion of all-over firmness. If I didn’t know better, I’d think I had a boob job.
And I have been amply rewarded for my purchase. My husband has been more helpful around the house. People I haven’t seen in awhile stop and stare and say, “You look great!” and wonder, just like I did, if I’ve been under the knife.
And then there’s the most important reward of all: the kudos from my little truth tellers.
“Your boobs look really good now, Mom” Dora says, watching me as I serve dinner.
“Yeah,” says George. “Can you wear that new bra thing under your bathing suit, the next time we go to the beach?”
Regrettable Parenting Moment: Condoms or Candy?
(from Hausfrau issue #11--winter 2007)
Click on the comic to read it.
The Needy Hour: A Tale of Hausfrau Passion and Mango Raspberry Popsicles (from Hausfrau #10--fall 2006)
‘Twas the needy hour—that emotionally charged period between school and dinner on Wednesday afternoons when I am my most fragile from the day’s fallout from my job as a counselor at Planned Parenthood, and yet I find myself having to amp up my mothering duties and skills because a whole helluva lot needs to happen and the kids are equally if not more fried than I am. Let’s take a peek, shall we?
3:00 p.m.
I leave work at Planned Parenthood and drive over to pick Dora up from school, where all the three and four year olds in her class are napping, because it is rest time, except for my daughter, who has a preternatural ability to survive without sleep. She rushes over to greet me at the door with her heart-melting grin and says, “Hi Mommy! I made this picture for you!” and we gather up her things and place them in her little purple LL Bean backpack and head over to George’s school to get him.
3:15 p.m.
True to form, my eight-year-old son refuses to leave the premises of his school without putting up a good fight. When I tell him that he can’t play baseball with his friends because we have to go shopping, he screams at me in front of all of the other nice parents: “Mom! No! I can’t believe you’re doing this! Why? Why can’t I play with my friends?” Even though it is now spring and the year is almost over, it would seem that in George’s mind, each day happens afresh and without any recollection of the routines and rules and schedules and requirements of all of the previous days that have fallen beforehand, so that the memory that, say, on Wednesdays mom picks us up from school and then we go grocery shopping has absolutely no relevance for him.
We have to go grocery shopping because this is what’s in the cupboard at home: a bag of stale cranberries, a can of tomato sauce, a very old box of falafel mix, and a bag of some grain I bought in bulk several years ago when I was trying to introduce more whole foods into our diet, but have no idea how to cook it or even what it is. It looks like cous cous, but it is not, I assure you.
3:30 p.m.
We arrive in the vicinity of the grocery store triangle that is Hannaford, Wild Oats, and the Whole Grocer, which was just bought out by Whole Foods or 365 or whatever the hell it’s called now, and I am once again thrown into my weekly dilemma: which of these stores should I patronize? To which of these stores in the grocery store triangle should I give up my scant and hard-earned clams? A Hausfrau decision tree begins to sprout in the thought bubble above my head.
It looks something like this: If I go to Hannaford, it’s the least expensive and they have those red plastic carts that look like sports cars for the kids to ride in, which keeps them preoccupied for awhile, but George always smashes into other shoppers and also he’ll throw a fit in the candy aisle. If I go to Wild Oats, it’s so flippin’ expensive that I’ll blow my whole wad there but they do have the deli and the kids are getting hungry and we could stop and get a snack. But then if they don’t have those chicken wings that Dora loves she’ll scream bloody murder. If I go to the Whole Grocer or Whole Foods or 365 or whatever, it’s nice and small there and not so overwhelming to the kids and they have those popsicles—the healthy ones—those mango raspberry popsicles that have saved me on many an occasion and which will save me yet again today because the kids are starting to tweak.
In the backseat, they bicker.
Mom, can I have a snack?
Me too!
Can I have chocolate?
No I’m allergic to it!
But I’m not.
That hurts my feelings!
So what.
You dumb boy.
Mom, George is hurting my feelings.
I’m just hungry, mom, for god’s sake!
And I say: knock it off right now, the both a ya! Knock it off right now or you’ll get nothing. And like it!
3:35 p.m.
Inside the Whole Grocer, I am alerted to the dwindling window of time I have to provide nourishment to my charges when my four year old’s speech regresses to that of a toddler (she begins speaking in a sort of crude cave man language: Me hungry! Me want treat!), and bangs the push bar with her fists from atop her perch in the shopping cart seat. George catches a free ride and hangs off the cart that I’m wheeling down the aisles so that if I take a hand off the cart to, for example, reach for a food item off the shelf, it will upset the delicate but crazy symbiotic balance here and the cart will flip over and my four year old will crack her head open. George is saying: Hey I want a mango raspberry popsicle! Mom! I want a mango raspberry popsicle! Can I have a popsicle? Mom! I want a popsicle! and I decide then and there to cut my losses and I high tail it over to the frozen foods section, where I grab a coupla mango raspberry popsicles from the frosty chamber therein.
I rip off the wrappers like a crack addict trembling for a hit, pass the kids their popsicles, and then: ahhhhh. Sweet silence.
I calculate that I now have approximately seven minutes max in which to round up the ingredients I’ll need to provide a nourishing and tasty meal that evening. I purchase some hamburger meat and some spaghetti to go with the tomato sauce in my cupboard and also some of those greens in a bag, a.k.a. salad.
Also, on my way to the register, I pass through the toiletries aisle and throw a bag of chlorine-free maxi pads into the cart. Dora waits until I pull the cart up in back of a hip-looking, twenty-something guy before she screams: “Oh, yes! These are the pads for the blood that comes out of your vagina!”
3:42 p.m.
At the register, the be-pierced and be-tattooed cashier takes a disapproving gander at my kids, who are greedily licking the mango/raspberry juice off the wooden popsicle sticks and off their fingers before they pass me the sticky wrappers for scanning and then head over to the cart corral, whereupon they commence to climb the gate, Dora hanging upside down and George screwing with the electric door, jumping on and off the sensor so that he manages to break it, and I just know that this cashier is judging me and my food choices and my wild offspring, and I am suddenly overcome with the urge to drop to the floor and sob and pour my heart out and beg for mercy, saying Please! I am a fragile and vulnerable human being! Please take pity on me!
But instead I write a check for the groceries, which is roughly equivalent to an entire day’s worth of work at Planned Parenthood, and I gather up those groceries, and my children, and I trudge forth into the waning afternoon sun and deeper still into the Needy Hour.
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