Machinery Sucks - a love story

This morning as I pulled warm clothes out of the dryer, I fell in love again with the used machine that I was able to buy after I had given up trying to fix my old one.

I'm a tomboy and everything, but not the kind that is good with tools. Still, I'm smart so when my dryer stopped working I looked at it and thought, "I'm a quick learner. I can figure this how. How complicated can a dryer be?" I knew of people who had fixed their own dryers, and I was confident that with some internet research, phone calls to fix-it savy friends, and a few trips to repair shops I could have that dryer up and running in no time. And for less than it cost to buy a new one! I was going to be resourceful and thrifty! I was going to cook dinner AND fix my dryer at the same time! I was going to be...SUPER SINGLE MOM! (triumphant horn blast)

Several hours and two trips to the hardware store later I was lying on the garage floor taking out a screw from the back of the dryer with a tool that I can't remember the name of but was having trouble with. I don't even remember what the working theory was about what might have been wrong with the dryer, but whatever it was required me to remove the back of the thing, take out a part and put a new part in. So far, unscrewing the screws and keeping them all together was proving much more of a challenge than I thought it would be, but worse than that was while I was lying there on floor I noticed old cobwebs inches away from my mouth. I backed my head as far away as I could. I guess I could have stopped what I was doing and swept them away, but I was making progress, I had already had to stop a few times to stir the spaghetti sauce and check the pasta, and I wanted to get this whole dryer business over with. Plus, someone had left the garage door open long enough for a swarm of mosquitoes to get in and they kept biting me while I worked. I imagined that this must be what it's like for an evil repairman when a dryer breaks in Hell.

Then a terrifying thing happened. Christopher came in to ask me when dinner was going to be done and my sister walked in behind him to ask if she could help - no that's not the terrifying thing, that's just the build up leading to it. Jees! Lemme tell a story already! Anyway, I asked Steph if she could check on the pasta.

"Ok," she said, and then she slapped her arm. "Man, that mosquito was huge!" She slapped at her other arm. "Oh my God, they're everywhere!"

"I know," I said. I let go of whatever tool I was using to slap the right side of my head and frightened off the little jerk buzzing around my ear.

"How are you able to stay in here?" Steph asked, smacking her leg.

"I don't know," I admitted.

Christopher's eyes went wide. "I'll help!" he cried. "You need a fly swatter!"

A minute later he was back heroically weilding a potato masher. He swung it at a black speck flying by. "I'll save you, Mom!"

"Christopher!" Steph scolded. "That's a potato masher!"

Swish! went the masher. "I couldn't find the fly swatter," he said, and hacked through the air again.

So this is the terrifying thing. When I laugh really hard, I become paralyzed. And watching Christopher race around the dryer swinging a potato masher and yelling "I'll save you!" while almost hitting Stephanie over the head with the thing was too much. I lay there, my mouth frozen open in an insane smile, laughing with no sound, unable to even let go of the screwdriver thingy, or to kill the mosquito that landed on my face, or to move my open mouth away from the cobwebs. I knew if I breathed in I would inhale them. This also struck me as funny. I laughed harder. I laughed so hard I COULDN'T MOVE OR BREATHE. And in that moment I knew that if I kept laughing at us I would die.

"Christopher," I forced myself to say. "Stop!"

""I can't! I have to kill them all!" He scowled at one. "Come here, mosquito!"

"Steph," I whimepered and laughed at the same time. "Please... make him stop!...Going to kill me!"

Stephanie only laughed harder.

"Please...help...spiders...I...hate...dryers."

I rolled over on my back. Somehow. I stared at the ceiling and felt the exhaustion creep in. Christopher's footsteps stopped and he peeked down at me.

"Mom?" he said. "I'm done killing them. Is dinner done?"

"HfgewrwnIwernwer wjguy2y17," I said.

"What?" he asked.

"Derwqeopurwrw01231nnawy," I repeated.

"Mom, you're mumbling and I can't undertsand you. I'm hungry."

"I'm buying a dryer," I said.

And I did, after I tried working on the dryer for a few more days. By the time I officially gave up I had bought two parts that didn't fix anything and spent many hours almost breathing in spider webs. But I did manage to get the back of the dryer off. I considered that a small voctory.

My new dryer is used, it cost less than what I paid trying to fix it myself and it's almost as old as me. But it works like a champ. I love that thing. Because I know that when it eventually breaks I will not fool myself into thinking that I can fix it myself. I look at that machine and think, "I will never ever have to work on you! If a repairman can't fix you, you're out of here!"

And I'm confortable with this. I'm comfortable with the part of me that is not good with tools, and does not want to inhale spiderwebs. I need never learn what a rachet or a screwdriver is or raise my potato masher in violence again.

House of Louse

Hmm, it's been two years. Where to begin? Well, I think I'll start out by saying that since the family dynamics have changed, this blog will change a little. Chris and I have gotten divorced, my sister Stephanie lives with us, we've adopted pets and other pets have died. But since we're still a family and since there are still two and four legged creatures in the house, Creature Feature House is picking up where it left off.

Here's the creature count as of today:
3 kids: check
Two adult sisters: check
1 rabbit: check
1 dog: check
1 cat: check
wasps that fly in and out of the house to terrify us: check
lice: AHHHHHHH!!!

Oh dear heavens. The lice. They decided to invade just as my dryer broke. First, they were defeated and the dryer was fixed. And then they returned, and both the dryer and the washer broke. When that happened I was tempted to shave all of the hair off of everything in the house. I didn't do anything that drastic, but I did cut our hair.

I remember it vividly. I had come home from work that day, and was sitting in between Emma and Christopher at the kitchen table. Sitting in between them enables me to help them with their homework simutaneously, and doing that helps me go insane. Which apparently I like. But on this day in particular, sitting so close to them, helping them with 2nd and 3rd grade math problems that I no longer understand, not only did I go insane, but I nearly shaved my head. Because what happened was, I gave Christopher some instruction with his math, and then turned to Emma while she was bent down at her page, obediently scribbling down answers to horrific division problems, and I saw it. I saw a small, light gray bug walking across her hair.

I knew what it was. I had seen it's like before when Claire had had lice two years ago, and suddenly I remembered all of it all at once - the stinky shampooing, the hours of singling out hairs and pulling nits from them while a miserable child tugged and begged for release. And all the laundry....the dryer. Oh crap. Our dryer was broken. "Maybe it's not lice," I told myself. "Maybe it's just some bug that got in her hair." There was only one way to tell. I had to catch it.

All of these thoughts happened within seconds of seeing the bug. That's what happens after your first bout with lice. The second you see what you think might be a louse, or your kid scratching her head, you switch into Lice Survival Mode. You must seek and destroy.

"Emma," I said, heavily. "Don't move."
So of course, she moved. She twisted to me, and saw the severe, determined look on my face. She also probably noticed that I wasn't looking at her. Just the top of her head."What? What's wrong?" she asked.
"Don't move your head!" I snapped. "I saw a bug."

Most girls, or anybody really, would jump out of their seat at this kind of news, and go into a wild dance hoping to shake off the bug. But Emma just looked up.
"On my head?"
In response I seized her head and began sorting through hairs until I found it. And of course it was a louse. I searched the other two and found the same thing. Then I had Stephie check me, even though I knew odds were I hadn't escaped. And I was right. Luckily, Stephanie was spared. She credited this to the daily use of hair products, regular color treatment, and blow drying every day. Us no-chemical-air-drying fools didn't stand a chance.

Our house immediately went into lock down mode. No one was allowed in or out. All of the sheets were stripped from the beds and stacked by the washer. I drove to the store and bought sixty dollars worth of lice treatment shampoo, spray for the upholstery, extra laundry detergent, and hair scissors.

"Scissors?" Claire asked, taking them out of the Walmart bag. "Why'd you get these?"
"Because I'm cutting our hair."
They screamed louder than when I told them that they had lice.
"It's so long and thick," I said, looking from one light brown-haired child to another. "There's more of a chance that I'll get more of them out if we cut it."


And so I did. Claire's hair is trimmed to her ears, and Emma's is to her shoulders. She couldn't bear to lose more than that. Christopher...oh that poor boy. I thought, "Hey! He's a boy! I can give him a buzz cut!" No one should ever allow me around clippers. His hair is not only shockingly short, but it's patchy. Looking at that kid's head is like looking at a wheat field with poorly drawn crop circles on it. Who would have thought that trimming a boy's hair would be so difficult?

Trimming my own hair was easier. It felt good actually. After a year or two of all of these crazy emotions and fears - going through the divorce, frantically trying to find a job for months on end, answering REALLY tough questions from the kids, etc, etc. Holding it together has been tough. Maintaing composure is stressful.

"I'm gonna cut my hair," I said, gazing into the bathroom mirror with a mischevous grin that I hadn't seen on myself in a while. Usually I look into the mirror in the morning and say something like, "Everything is going to be ok." But now I was giving myself a sideways smile, the one I would get as a teenager when I painted my toenails black, saying, "And I'm going to cut it as short as I fucking want to."

It felt ceremonious, or tribal somehow. War paint felt appropriate, a sign of my determination and ferocity in my War on Bugs.

But apparently the bugs were slathering their war paint on too. See, I started this blog post two months ago. Every time I think I've gotten rid of those things they pop back up. I think I've finally licked 'em in this last bout, only because now I'm washing, spraying and wiping things down every day.

At least my washer and dryer are working now. Or I would definitely shave our heads. And all of us would go naked from now on. We'd be the hairless, nudist family on the block. But bug-free!