June is wedding season. As evidenced from the date of this, it's taken me well into July to recover from it.
But this isn't going to be a wedding post. All of those stories I've tucked away until a later date, when everyone's memory is a little less clear. Let's be real, everyone's all about a shout out until somebody gets an ego hurt.
Even when you choose an alias. Sorry to disappoint, DeMarcus. You secretly fantasize about being a 6'8'' black man who plays professional basketball player, don't you?
After the fun and excitement of setting up...
"I just wanted to bend it!" (broken flower in hand)
"Well, ya did. Permanently."
The camaraderie and encouraging banter...
"I can't work in this negative environment! Art can't flow right now."
"...or ever."
The beauty of the ceremony and the fun of the reception with free-flowing food and drink...all over the front of my dress...
"Don't worry, you can just walk behind me for the rest of the night. Or pretend that you're lactating. ...Or walk behind me for the rest of the night.
After all this, the reality hits. This couple has been joined in holy matrimony for the purpose of bringing children into the world.
Now, kids do not intimidate me. When I offered to help my BFF babysit her toddler while she had her second baby, I twas pretty confident in my abilities. I used to be very competent at taking care of children. People paid me a lot of money. I was like the Dwayne Wade of nannies.
After a day with JD, I felt more like Michael Jordan after he came out of retirement. The second time.
I have a new found respect for all mothers.
After a 5am wake up call, I closed my eyes mid-morning for two minutes on the couch. He came to me with a pack of matches in his hand. Half an hour before, I couldn't find matches when I was actively looking for them. I should have sent him out to find the ant poison too.
Then I left him to play in the toy room while I made lunch.
"JD? JD?"
A much too silent silence.
There are different types of silences. There’s the silence of the wilderness, the silence of no electricity, the silence of morning and evening. If you were blind you could probably tell where you were just from the type of silence you experience. Well, when you are watching a child you learn to detect a new type of silence, an ominous silence, the silence of all of your makeup being pulled out of the bathroom cabinet and spread across the wall by your burgeoning Picasso.
I walked to the back bedroom to find JD with an open package of nails methodically punching them into the back of a desk chair.
Ok, kid, come with Emmy to the kitchen while she makes lunch.
I pulled some canned goods out of the cabinet to amuse him. I remembered playing with them when I was a kid, building towers and organizing them into families (That big can of crushed tomatoes made the perfect Italian mama for a brood of tiny tomato pastes...) I guess I was just a little more imaginative than JD. Or my imagination tended more to the domestic and nurturing and less to the violent.
His first reaction was to pick up a can and hurl it at the wall. That's when I realized that to a one year old, everything is a potential projectile missile.
So we switched to tupperware.
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When I first mentioned to my family that I was going to help Mr. & Mrs. BFF, I said that I was going to be making meals. “Are you sure?” was the skeptical response.
Well I was pretty sure. But then I tried. I think I hit a new culinary low, in fact.
Grilled cheese is hard, y'all.
How on earth do you make the pan hot enough to melt the cheese without burning the bread?
Since then, I have been told that patience is the key, but I have trouble accepting this. Grilled cheese is the bread and butter of 6 year olds. Ain’t nobody got time to spend 45 minutes making a sandwich for a 6 year old. By that time they’re ready for another meal!
The smoking carbon mess was unceremoniously buried at the bottom of the trash.
Did I say grilled cheese, JD? I meant peanut butter. We shall never speak of this again.
Or so I thought.
A few nights later, washing the dishes with Mr. BFF: “So I was taking out the trash yesterday and there was the weirdest thing…”
I braced myself. There was definitely a layer of burned popcorn on the top of that trash but really, nothing to write home about. We’ve all burned popcorn before.
He continued, “There was a hole in the bottom of the bag.”
Rats? Mice? Palmetto bugs? (Palmetto bugs, to digress, are basically roaches with a Southern pedigree).
“Then I noticed a piece of burnt toast sticking to the bottom of the can. Then I noticed it was stuck because there was a layer of cheese on it.”
Busted. Next time, wait until the failure cools before disposal.
And fantasize about the things I could do without a carbon thumb...namely, this list of mouth watering grilled cheeses...
