Angie Kinghorn

Messy, and a mystery

This morning, as I stood in the kitchen making peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, Grant yelled from upstairs, “Mommy! I dropped my toothbrush and the toothpaste got all over the wall!”

“Well, just wipe it off the wall and put it back on your toothbrush,” I said, spreading jam  on bread. It didn’t even occur to me until later in the morning that a few years ago, I’d never have thought that, much less said it.

Do I know which wall had the toothpaste smeared upon it?

No.

Do I care?

Not particularly.

Whenever I do see it, I’ll clean it up. And yes, we do clean the house. But “clean” is a relative term when you’re harboring six-year-old twins and an elderly and often incontinent bichon frisé.

I’m not a bad mom or a careless one, and my kids aren’t hellions. They’re delightful, normal children. I’ve just been a mom for a while now. Six and a half years of spills, smears, messes, and broken stuff (usually lamps). I don’t sweat the small stuff anymore because there’s none of it left.

When the kids are old enough to end a meal with all the food either in their stomachs or on their plates (what’s that, 13 or so?) and our dog shuffles off the mortal coil, I figure we’ll replace the furniture and be able to have people over. And we’ll invest in new lamps so we won’t walk into every other room and be like, “Oh, yeah, this is one of the rooms where the lamps don’t work.”

Until then, I marvel at those of you whose houses aren’t slightly sticky all over and covered with goldfish crumbs, broken crayons, and chalk dust. Where do you keep the kids?

It’s not that I’m not obsessive about things. My kids wear sunscreen almost every day. And I’ve trained them pretty darn well about the whole hand-washing bit. We read. A LOT. But I also hear them fighting upstairs and have gotten to the point where I yell, “Work it out or you’re both headed to time-out!”

Do I know how it works out?

No. But it almost always does.

Mark and I re-watched Shakespeare in Love the other day. Throughout the movie, different, freaked-out characters kept asking “How will it all work out?” and the theater manager says, “It will. I don’t know how, but it will. It’s a mystery.”

For me right now, that kind of sums up parenting. Messy, and a mystery.

Braving the stage

Tomorrow I have an audition.

Which is weird, because I’m a writer, not an actor, but I promise it all makes sense. You see, there’s this fabulous show called Listen To Your Mother. It’s produced by Ann Imig in multiple locations across the nation on or around Mother’s Day, and features women reading their essays about motherhood to a live audience.

I first heard about LTYM a couple of years ago, and made a promise to myself that if it ever came to North Carolina, I would submit something.

This year, LTYM is being produced in Raleigh by KeAnne Hoeg and Marty Long. Several talented and brave women will take the stage at Kenan Auditorium on May 8 to read their pieces on motherhood for an audience of 275 people.

I wrote a piece that I love, and submitted it. I’m so excited to have gotten an audition, but y’all? Writers don’t prepare for auditions well.

Obviously I started by printing my piece so I could practice reading it. Our printer helped by refusing to print. Upon fiddling with it (read: pressing a bunch of buttons), I told Mark it appeared to be dead. Which was really strange given that I’d turned it on just five minutes before and it was fine.

I won’t tell you how long it took me to figure out that the damn thing had come unplugged.

Also? Nobody would admit to unplugging it. My guess is that it had something to do with the twin six year olds running around the house.

After printing the piece and practicing, I decided I needed new lipstick and headed to the mall. Which was fine until I also decided I needed new jeans.

Warning: do not, ever, under any circumstances, do anything which requires you to be in front of a three way mirror trying on jeans the day before your LTYM audition.

If you are stupid enough to do so, do not wear a sorority t-shirt with a 1998 date stamped proudly on the front. Because then you must be prepared to resist the urge to clobber the 22 year old sales associates who say, “Wow, we were just talking about whether we could still wear our sorority t-shirts!” and “Wow, you don’t look that old!”

Also, if you happen to be married to a litigator and are practicing your readings on him, think twice about asking him to give you a brief Q&A practice session afterwards. Mark cross-examined the hell out of me.

On the bright side, I feel prepared for pretty much any question that might come my way. Whether remotely relevant or not.

And I now own a pair of jeans that are long enough, not faded or ripped, and make me want to chant “I’m sexy and I know it” as I walk.

Worth the trauma.

Wish me luck.

Or a broken leg.

Or both.

I will try (almost) anything

Tonight Mark had a work-related function that was supposed to keep him out of the house until 9:30.

Instead, he waltzed in the door at 8:50.

And found me in dim lighting, listening to new-age yoga music, while rubbing an egg all over my body.

“Well, this is awkward,” I said.

Fortunately I’d told him about the conversation I’d had with our housekeeper last week. She’s from Ecuador, and when she took note of my latest health issue, she proclaimed that there was simply nothing for it but that I should see a witch.

“A witch?” I asked. “Seriously?”

“No, not a witch, exactly, it’s a, how you say, a witch doctor?”

“A witch doctor.”

“Yes, every village has one. They do all kinds of things with herbs and teas, and what would really help you is what they do with the egg.”

“So you mean, like a naturopath kind of thing? Or more like voodoo?”

“No, not like voodoo. They are Christian, and they pray over you. This thing with the egg – they take an egg, and they rub it all over your whole body, and they say prayers the whole time. They pray for evil spirits to leave you, for any negative energy to go away.”

“Negative energy?”

“Yes, like if someone is sending bad thoughts to you, ill wishing you. It can pull the negative energy out.”

“Like the evil eye?”

“No! Just bad energy. Negative thoughts. You should try it.”

“Yeah, well, where’s the local witch doctor? Charlotte’s a pretty big village.”

“I do not know one here. What I need to do is take you to Ecuador with me the next time I go.”

“I doubt Mark would be ok with that.”

“Well, you can do it on yourself. I do it sometimes when I am feeling low. You run the egg all over your body, and then you crack it into a glass of water. And it doesn’t look like a normal egg. It takes in all the bad things, and you can see bubbles and weird stuff in there. Try it. You will see.”

So I thought about it, told Mark about it, and asked him if he would perform this egg rite upon me. After he finished laughing his head off, he waggled his eyebrows and said he’d be happy to rub an egg all over my body. Especially if I didn’t mind ending the ritual by having said egg cracked over my head.

I declined, then turned to the internet for more information.

Come to find out, “witch doctor” isn’t exactly the right term. “Curandero” would be more accurate. And these traditional healers are the norm in certain parts of Ecuador, where they are called upon to cleanse a person of physical or spiritual illnesses. They use all manner of herbs, and yes, eggs. They’re totally legit.

I had eggs in the fridge.

And a free night.

And I will try (almost) anything once.

So I did. After letting the egg come to room temperature, I cleansed it thoroughly with a baby wipe (no sense getting salmonella during a spiritual cleansing, after all), then turned on my music and proceeded to pray and run the egg along what I thought were the acupuncture meridians of my body, concentrating hard on the points that dealt with migraines.

And then Mark walked in, just as I was entering this wonderful, meditative, trance-like state.

He stared.

“It’s not what it looks like,” I said.

“Um, well, it looks like you’re rubbing an egg all over yourself.”

“I am. But remember that thing Rosy told me about? About how this can rid you of negative energy and make you feel better? Well, that’s what I was trying to do. But you’ve totally harshed my mellow. Why are you home early?”

“We finished early.”

“Ok, well, I’m not done with this,” I gestured to the egg, “so I’m gonna need you to go upstairs for a while. I can’t mellow out and do this while you watch and laugh at me.”

So he did. And I put my yoga music back on and continued with the egg until I felt sufficiently cleansed.

Then, as Rosy directed, I cracked the egg into a glass of water. And it sure did look strange. However, the scientific part of my brain couldn’t help but remark that I don’t often crack eggs into glasses of water and that I have no idea what “normal” looks like in such a situation.

egg, diagnostic egg

The new-age-hippie part of my brain snapped a picture of the egg on my phone and texted it to Rosy. She got back to me within minutes. The news was not good.

“Would u believe me if I tell you that I was just thinking about you and the egg conversation we had-crazy uh! (Big-eyed emoticon)-do you see those little bubbles and the whites thickening that is what some believe is the bad someone is wishing you – you have to throw this one in the toilet wishing it to go away – do the same thing for two more days and you’ll see the difference in each egg.”

I showed the evidence to Mark. “You see! Someone has been ill wishing me. It’s clear from the thickening of the whites, here, and these little bubbles.”

“Or, that could be how all eggs look when you crack them into a glass of water.”

“You need to open your mind,” I said, walking to the bathroom and flushing the egg, wishing fervently for all my bad ju-ju to go down the drain with it.

“Uh-huh.”

“Well, let’s face it, you could have walked in on me doing something much worse.”

“Like what, the mailman?”

“I was going to offer to do you, but forget it.” Pause. “And by ‘do you,’ I meant do the egg thing to you.”

And so I may have figured out who is wishing me ill. It’s the guy on the other side of the bed who’s upset that he’s missing out on all the cleansing eggy ju-ju.

Or maybe not.

I still haven’t found what I’m looking for (and apparently that’s by design…)

The grocery store.

In my personal lexicon, synonymous with “9th circle of hell” and “places to avoid at all cost.”

I hate the grocery store.

Which is bad for me, since I’m a mom and my kids keep eating all the damn food, and what they don’t eat, my husband eats. Some days I think it would be easier to buy a cow than to keep getting milk, ‘cause Lord knows the milk isn’t free.

And our local chain of grocery stores, bless their little commercial hearts, is on a constant quest to improve the shopping experience. By doing thoughtful things like:

  • Completely reorganizing the produce section. And then moving the potatoes and onions from week to week.
  • Shuffling the bakery items so that a map is needed to find the muffins.
  • Narrowing the aisles to fit more in, thus improving the shopping experience.
    • With the result that if two carts are next to each other, nothing else can possibly get through. Which really puts a damper on that whole “stopping to browse the shelf” experience. Around the tenth time per trip that someone behind me says “excuse me,” I want to pull a Gandalf and say “You shall not pass, dammit! I am trying to figure out whether this chicken broth has MSG!”
  • Every month or so, they switch products from aisle to aisle, again, to improve the shopping experience. Which means that I’m trying to find tonic water and looking at a wall of Doritos. Or looking for crackers and finding cereal.
  • Those little essentials you buy every time? They are helpfully moved around from endcap to endcap to make them easier to find. Riiiiight.

They’ve also made helpful changes like moving the eggs – at least three times now. The yogurt seems to have a mind of its own, flitting from one side of the aisle to the other, up and down the refrigerated case. And don’t even get me started on the cheese.

Until recently, I was buying the whole “trying to improve your shopping experience” line. But recently, as I was racing around the store pushing a full cart, trying to find cocktail sauce, I said to a sales associate, “Please, please, for the love of all that is holy, tell store management to stop moving things around!”

And she said, with a perfectly straight face, “They just do it so people will spend longer in the store.”

Mission a-freaking-ccomplished.

I spend longer in the store.

But my shopping experience? Not improved.

P.S. If someone could direct me to the SnapPea Crisps I would be forever grateful. They’re not with the chips. They’re not with the croutons. They’re not with the Chex mix.

P.P.S. Don’t bother. If I find them this week, they’ll have moved by next week.