Monthly Archives: May 2011

Mirror, Mirror, On the Wall….

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Mirror, Mirror, on the wall…

Who’s the trashiest of them all?

Sigh.

Me.

~~~~~~~~~

I went wedding dress shopping with a friend the other day. I was late getting out of work, so by the time I screeched to a halt in front of my house, threw the kids into their carseats loving placed my children into the car, dropped the DragonMonkey off at the sitters and arrived after driving through evening traffic, I was pretty frazzled.

The Squidgelet was howling with hunger by the time I pulled up to the first boutique.
Thankfully, I’d planned ahead. While my work shirt wasn’t very nursing friendly I’d brought along a nursing tank top. I burst into the door with my howling infant and asked a startled employee where the dressing room was.

When I laid the Squid down on the ground to change into my tank top, it sounded like I was setting him on fire, completely drowning out the peaceful instrumental music they had piped over the speakers.

Oh, well… it was wedding dress shop. Pretty much everyone in there was either married or planning on getting married, and odds were that they’d probably end up pregnant at some point. I was just doing them a favor by preparing them for the reality, right?

Right.

After changing as fast as I could I popped the Squid onto nurse, covered up politely with a nursing cover, and then went to go paw through overly-expensive dresses.

Unfortunately, while I may have been discreetly covering up, the Squid didn’t really get the memo. It was way past his meal time, and he was slurping it up and going to town.

And by slurping I mean SLUUUUUUUUURPING. You could hear him gulping and sucking from ten feet away. Forget the discreet little nursing cover – everyone knew exactly what was going on beneath the blanket. He might as well have been holding up a little sign saying “HELLO. I HAVE A NIPPLE IN MY MOUTH.”

The problem with wedding dress shopping is that it entails a lot of waiting. Each dress has an enormous amount of buttons, ties, stays, laces, and clasps to wrangle with. That would have been okay, except for one other problem:

Wedding dress boutiques have lots of mirrors.

Many, many, many mirrors.

I’ve never been a fan of mirrors.

It’s not that I have low-self esteem and can’t stand to look at myself. Oh, no. It’s the exact opposite.

Every time I get around a mirror I turn into a large, human, parakeet.

Look! My eyes notice my reflection gazing back at me, and it’s all downhill from there.. It’s ME! Hello, me! Look at you! You’re me! Look at my hair! Look at my eyes! Hello, eyes!“

I mean, aside from some weight gain and a couple of funky hair cuts, I haven’t really changed all that much in the past decade or so. Why am I so enthralled?

I try to ignore the siren call of the mirror, but it’s futile. I flutter and fuss in front of my shiny reflection as if I’m the most interesting thing ever created.

Look at my pants. They are blue. Hello, blue pants! Look at my hair! It has a crooked part. I must fix that. There, all fixed. Hello, hair! Hello, eyes! I must get closer, so I can see myself better. Hello, me!

What the heck IS it about mirrors? It makes no sense. It’s not like I wear tons of makeup that I need to keep an eye on. It’s not like I have lots of accessories I need to constantly straighten. Why do I even bother looking? I try to keep a level head about the whole thing, but it seems impossible. No matter how much I try to be strong, any time there is a mirror in the general vicinity you inevitably will find me edging closer and closer, twisting my head this way and that as I preen and stare at myself.

The wedding boutique was no exception.

Even though I was doing my best to ignore the mirrors, the primitive parakeet portion of my brain instantly woke up. Look! A friend!

No, it’s just me. Be quiet.

No, seriously, look! It’s a friend! Go study this friend!

Look, I already know what I look like. I don’t need to stare at a mirror like some self-absorbed socialite.

Becky! Go! LOOOK! It’s a FRIEND! How neat! Hello, friend! Becky, go look at her! Go study her! What an INTERESTING-LOOKING friend!

Hmm. You know, you may be right. She does look kind of cool.

And with that, the mirror had sucked me in again.

Gone was the boutique.

Gone was the nursing baby cradled with one arm.

Gone was my real-life friend who was about to emerge from the dressing room at any moment.

Parakeet-Becky took over completely.

LOOK! It’s ME! Hello, ME! Hmmm. Your skin is looking rather nice to day.

Any pimples on your nose? No, no, you’re looking nice. It seems to be a good skin day.

Is that a bit of mascara under your eye? Here, let me take care of that for you.

Huh, if I crane my neck just so, I give myself a double chin. I wonder, if I squeeze my chin in really hard, does it make three chins? No, no, just two… Eww, are those blackheads on my chin? Yes, they are, aren’t they?

Weird, they seem really obvious from this angle, but not that angle. I should probably get rid of them.

Hmm. That one was easy. What do I do with it? Oh, well. That’s what pockets are invented for, right? Huh, there’s another one… maybe I should try to get that one too…

All of a sudden I came back to myself.

There I was.

Standing two inches from a mirror.

Cradling a baby schlurping loudly on one boob.

And using the other hand to scratch at blackheads and wipe it my pocket.

WHAT. THE. HELL. WAS. I. DOING?

I used the mirror to glance behind me…

And yup.

There was the owner and the salesperson, mouths slightly agape as they stared at me in horror.

Flushing red, I crept back to the little waiting room chairs. Great. Now I would forevermore be known as that-creepy-pimple-lady. And I still had about an hour left of interacting with these people and trying to seem normal.

Ugh. How embarrassing.

Writhing in discomfort and daydreaming of disappearing, my eyes happened to catch my red-faced reflection from across the room.

Look! A friend! Hello, friend!

Three Dollar Hooker

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I’m a three dollar hooker.

It’s sad. I always thought I would do more with my life. Write a book? Travel to Scotland? Balance a checkbook?

Funny, but “sell my body for slightly less than the cost of two king-size Snickers bars” was never very high on the list.

Still, a girl’s gotta do what a girl’s gotta do.

After all, the Bean refuses to buy condoms.

It’s not that he has anything against them—

Oh, who am I kidding? The Bean hates condoms – he just never comes right out and says it. To butcher a quote from Grey’s Anatomy: There is a land called Passive Aggressiva… and The Bean is their king.

What can I say? My husband is a prude when it comes to buying condoms, and I can’t say that I blame him. We’re both kind of prudes when it comes to buying birth control. The problem is, every time we get down to business (It’s Business Time!), he is accompanied by several million eagerly swimming little non-prudes.

With both of us hating to buy condoms, this is kind of a problem. I’d go on the pill, but the pill seems to be completely ineffective on my fertility.

So, what’s a fertile girl to do? Unfortunately for me, I seem to have all the self control of a rabbit in heat where my husband is concerned. Despite my better intentions, the same thing happens every time.

The kids are asleep, and I feel that familiar rub on my side….

I turn to him…..

Many short-breathed moments later, I gasp out, “Babe, we need, to uh… we need.. you know…”

And with that, my normally brilliant husband suddenly develops all the mental acuity of a half-dead houseplant.

“Huh?”

“We need to, you know… We can’t get pregnant…”

“Huh?”

“We need protection….”

“Mmmrphrmph…” He makes a noncommittal noise and tries to distract me.

Apparently he forgets how much I hate being pregnant. I am not that easily distracted.

“We need to do something about it!” I bite out, frustrated in more ways than one.

“Like what?”

Like what? SERIOUSLY? I’m supposed to believe this sudden onset of confusion from the man that carries a 4.0 in his university classes while juggling two jobs, a wife, and two kids? Yeah. Not buying it.

“REALLY, Bean? Do I have to spell it out for you? PRO-TEC-TION.” I bite out the syllables.

“Why can’t we just do what we normally do? It’s worked for us so far…”

“Who’s to say we just haven’t been lucky? Huh?”

He evades the question by trying to distract me yet again, and this time nearly succeeds. I surface like a drowning swimmer, clinging to my last remaining shred of self control.

“No, BEAN! You know what you have to do – did you pick any of them up?”

The Bean has been under long-standing orders to buy some condoms from his school. The school offers them ridiculously cheap, but you need a student ID to take advantage of the offer. He has one. I don’t.

Besides, we’ve been married three years and we have two kids. Maybe it’s time for me to pass the birth-control reins onto someone else.

Moreover, I think I offered him a pretty good deal. “Six months,” I told him. “Six months of you taking point and then I’ll take over all the embarrassing purchases.” The Bean agreed. Six months vs. a lifetime? That seemed reasonable.

And yet….

“No, I haven’t had a chance to get them yet…..” He tries to distract me yet again, but this time I slap his hand away.

“I’m gonna end up pregnant,” I warn.

“You won’t get pregnant,” he says soothingly.

I am not soothed.

I give a disbelieving snort and push him away. “Sorry. No babies. This shop is closed.” I know there are other ways of taking care of our “dilemma” but as far as I can tell, if I don’t take a hard stance, he’ll never learn anything.

I roll over on my side and face the wall, frustrated. The problem with taking a hard stance is that I’m not really sure who I am punishing.

Thirty seconds go by, but it feels more like thirty minutes.

“Fine.” He heaves a heavy, woe-is-me sigh. “I’ll pick some up tomorrow.” His hand touches my waist.

I look over my shoulder with a grin before pouncing on him.

The next day, when I text him, “SO??? Did you get them???” I receive vague excuses as to why he hasn’t had a chance to stop by. The line was too long. He was late to work. A giant herd of unicorns stampeded through the hallway and blocked the entrance.

Don’t get me wrong – I love my kids. I just don’t need thirty of them.

It didn’t seem fair that I had to be the adult in the situation. It takes two to tango, right? Shouldn’t it take two to wander up to complete strangers and ask them for sperm-blockading devices?

On the other hand, it was obvious we weren’t getting any closer to that goal, and who needs to live in a constant state of worry each month?

So I decided to take matters into my own hands. I came up with a plan and I put it in motion.

I bought a bunch of condoms.

I stocked them in “the drawer”.

And if the Bean wants to use any of my condoms instead of the much-cheaper condoms he can pick up any time…. Well, then he has to pay a premium.

Three dollars worth of premium.

I mean, come on. I’m a working mother with two kids. I don’t have the time or the energy to be worth $5 of premium.

And you know what? So far, the system seems to be working pretty well.

He no longer has to try to summon the courage up to ask a complete stranger for a big box of condoms.

And me? I no longer resent him for not going to the store. In fact, I actively discourage it. After all, it may only be $3, but it adds up.

So, yeah. There you go. Me love you long time.

But apparently only three bucks worth of long time. If you want some of that five-dollah lovin’, you’ve got to go to the ritzy side of town.

(Actual screenshot – names changed to protect our lascivious identities. I sure hope Wells Fargo doesn’t closely monitor transfer descriptions. )