I Will Only Negotiate with the Child

If I could use one word to describe my family.. well, I don’t think there is one word that could ever depict our insanity with enough accuracy. But one word I definitely will never use to describe my family is boring. So heading home to the arctic tundra that is the state of Maine for Thanksgiving about a month ago, I was completely unsure what to expect, but the one thing I knew was that this trip would be interesting. And it certainly didn’t disappoint. 

Immediately after getting back to Maine, I found out I had to have my tonsils removed the week after Thanksgiving. After coming to terms with the fact that I would officially be joining ranks with the 5-year-olds of the world, my mother, sister and I started planning. Since I would be leaving to head back to Arizona as soon as I could swallow something other than jello, we had about a week before the surgery to fit in every holiday activity from Thanksgiving to New Years. Most families probably would have said “Too bad, you don’t want to come home for Christmas then you’re missing out.” That would have been the practical, sensible, logical response to my brief holiday visit. But my family is none of those things, so instead we decided to do it all. We would fit in all of the holiday traditions we could manage- everything short of dropping a disco ball from our living room ceiling at 11:59 pm. Although it wouldn’t have surprised me in the slightest if we had. 

First was Thanksgiving. The holiday started out like any other day- my mother waking up with the energy of someone who has already consumed 12 cups of coffee, and me chugging my 12 cups of actual coffee in an attempt to match the energy of the room. Our Thanksgivings are small- just my mother, sister, grandmother and myself- so in previous years we have kept it simple, making a small fish and salad lunch, or sometimes a turkey, but never going so far as to recreate a scene from a Hallmark movie. But this year, since it was my only actual holiday with the family, my mother decided to make it one to remember. The cooking started before I could open one eye wide enough to find the button on the coffee maker, and continued until my grandmother and sister arrived. My mother felt, and was completely justified in feeling I should add, that the rest of our group wasn’t nearly qualified to do any of the actual cooking, and so we were each given very specific, very simple tasks. My grandmother? She was bringing the pickles. And my sister and I were both assigned to make a charcuterie board. Now, what is a charcuterie board, you ask? Good. If you already know, you probably aren’t my target audience. But I’ll fill you in- it is a bunch of meat and cheese and nuts arranged on a wooden cutting board to look as fancy as is physically possible. The goal, so I have come to understand from my research, is to make it look as far as possible from being actually edible. If it looks like a work of art, something that shouldn’t be touched and definitely not consumed, but rather placed on a tiny pedestal under a bright spotlight to be admired for a seven-dollar fee for the rest of time (or at least until the cheese expires), then you most likely nailed it. Needless to say, this is not in my wheelhouse. But luckily my sister is a little more proficient when it comes to the classier things in life- or at least has better luck navigating Pinterest. More than happy to relinquish creative control of the stacked salami, I sat with my grandmother and mused over what exactly we were going to do with a charcuterie board when it was made, until it was almost finished. But eventually, not wanting to be accused of contributing nothing to the celebration, I felt that I needed to at least leave my mark on the board in some tiny way. After a couple minutes of googling, newly inspired, I ran to the pantry, grabbed the bag of Craisins, and begin placing them strategically around the board- a clump on top of the ranch dip, a few arranged in the shape of a smiley face on top of the salami, etc. But, much to my dismay, I was eventually busted by my sister for ruining her masterpiece, and retired back to my coffee and my joking grandmother. 

The rest of the day went by in relative peace. My Grandmother stayed for her usual 45 seconds and then announced that she had over-stayed her welcome and returned home to watch football, and the rest of us spent the afternoon helping my mother clean up from her successful holiday feast. I then spent the rest of the night drinking beer and watching Hallmark movies.. because yes, despite my best efforts, I cannot get enough of what life must look like inside a snow globe. Are you really that surprised? After the third movie in which someone got teleported into a snow globe, fell in love and moved to Christmas-ville to live happily ever after, I called it a night, because we were going have a long day the next day- we were getting our Christmas tree.  

When you picture a family getting their Christmas tree, a series of images come to mind (or at least they do for me)- hot chocolate, snow falling, children running around laughing and pointing to every tree they see, their parents laughing kindly at their antics and then choosing a beautiful, massive tree to load into the back of their red 1950’s pickup and take home, to be decorated later next to a roaring fire place with “Winter Wonderland” playing on repeat in the background… Not quite. In fact, our family Christmas-tree “operation” was about as far from this mental image as you could imagine. Let me set the scene.

My mother, sister and I are driving to the Christmas tree farm in my mother’s BMW cross-over. I am in my usual spot in the backseat. My sister is sitting in the passenger’s seat, horribly hungover, wearing a giant parka and massive, dark-colored sunglasses, circa 2002. Her window is open, and she is leaning her head farther and farther out of it every time I look at her. My mother is doing an impressive job of multitasking- managing to both drive and educate my sister on the dangers of alcohol abuse to her liver and every other aspect of her body and life. As we arrive at the farm, my sister announces that she can’t hold it anymore, to which my mother, not missing a beat except to roll her eyes, whips her BMW into the back corner of the dirt parking lot. She slams on the brakes, my sister throws open the door, vomits several times, and then jumps back in and we whip around to the front of the lot as if in fact it had been someone else’s family that had been puking in the back corner. Well aware that she now had a 10-minute window of feeling slightly less nauseous to get the whole thing wrapped up, my sister points to the first Christmas tree that doesn’t have a giant chunk missing or a colony of tiny forest creatures living in the branches, and we throw that sucker on the car and make a run for it- the whole time, my sister still sporting her giant sunglasses. 

But this was jus the beginning. In our haste, we hadn’t realized that the bottom of the tree was crooked- something we did realize when, after putting it in the stand and assuming we had made progress, I turned around to start cheering, and the entire tree fell over.. on top of me. This might have caught some people off guard.. but I was not the slightest bit surprised. Removing the tree, after a moment of reflection on the events leading up to this moment, we re-grouped. After running to the hardware store to purchase the tools that we needed but certainly didn’t own, we went to work- me sawing off a piece of the tree, while my mother and sister were attempting to figure out the tree stand I had just bought. After about 45 minutes of attempting to put the stand together, we determined that it was defective.. a conclusion I’m still not sure about, but that seemed like the only logical answer at the time as we stared at the pieces. The deciding factor was that I had been the one to purchase it.. somehow those things tend to happen to me 75 times more often than the average person. Strange. Still determined, we put the tree back in the original stand, and my mother began wrenching on the bolts in the base of the stand as my sister and I held the tree in place. To this day, I am not sure exactly what transpired underneath that Christmas tree, but several minutes into her wrenching, something caused my mother to let out a yell of “Julia! Get me a hammer!” My sister looked flustered. “Where is the hammer?!” She yelled back, because that seemed like the only appropriate volume for the current situation. My mother, never coming up from under the tree, yelled in response, “It’s in the utility room!!” To which both my sister and I burst into tears of laughter that took us at least ten minutes to get under control. “WHAT THE HELL,” my sister responded, “is a utility room?!?” 

As it turns out, my mother was referring to the closet under the staircase that holds her screwdrivers, wrapping paper, apparently a hammer, and the litter box for the cat. How we didn’t immediately know this was completely beyond my mother’s comprehension, but in our defense, I had never before been, and I’m sure will never be, in a room in my mother’s house that anyone would ever refer to as a “utility closet.” I’m currently working on having a sign made that properly labels the room, to avoid any further confusion. 

After attempting to hammer some unknown part of the tree stand, and failing to make any progress, my mother stood up from under the tree, tiny green branches stuck to her hair and an incredibly unsatisfied expression on her face, announced that it was “good enough, god damnit,” and we all stepped back and admired our lop-sided symbol of holiday cheer.. although I’m pretty sure that even as we looked at it, it slumped a little farther to one side.  

Next was movies and Chinese food. This seemed easy enough- what can really go wrong with take-out and a movie? The food will most likely be edible, the risk of falling trees is pretty low- surely even we couldn’t turn this into something ridiculous, right? Shockingly, wrong. My sister and I ordered Chinese from a place near our house- our go to spot for really good, really cheap food. We picked up the food at the front counter from a child that seemed to be no older than 12,  paid him and brought it home. But when we got back we realized that instead of crab rangoon, they had given us a box of chicken wings. Deciding we couldn’t live without the rangoon, we called and asked if we could come back and pick up the right food. They said yes.. but only if we brought back the chicken wings. My sister looked shocked as they put us on hold, and, with an uncomfortable laugh into the quiet phone, said jokingly “Let me talk to the kid!” But that didn’t seem like the best way to ask to speak to the child of someone who had just requested a return on our already-cold-and-sitting-open-on-the-coffee-table box of chicken wings, so I typed into the notes section of my phone and held it up to her so she could read the words: “ I will only negotiate with the child.” We returned the chicken wings without further resistance, minus the entire typed-up exchange, with receipts and all, that we received when we brought the wings back. Wing exchange complete and rangoon in hand, we ate our food while watching a movie that we just happened upon while cruising through the channels, called “The Spy Who Dumped Me”, which I will never even remotely understand but will always stop breathing from laughing when I think about. The mid-air trapeze fight was too good to forget.

Finally, we decided to make Christmas cookies. Earlier that day we had gone thrifting, and I had come home with a double-XL, bright red, hideously-decorated pullover Christmas sweatshirt (yes, it was in fact made of sweatshirt material) that I was determined to wear to every holiday-related activity from that day until New Year’s. I donned my sweatshirt, my sister started the Christmas music and we broke out the sugar cookie dough and M&M’s. Now, one thing you should know about my sister and I is that when we get together, we are weird. And I mean weird. Something about each other’s company brings out the most ridiculous side of both of our personalities, and the two in combination leave us both in tears and breathless from laughing at jokes that not a single other human being would even understand, let alone find entertaining. And this night was no different. 

In addition to the cookie mix, we had bought four Christmas cookie-cutters: a snowman, a star, a candy cane, and (most importantly) a gingerbread man. Feeling like Martha freaking Stewart, we doused the dough in flour, rolled it out and cut out the shapes. But somewhere between putting the cookies in the oven and taking them out, something went… terribly wrong. Our gingerbread men had gone from cute and normal-shaped to short, fat, distorted, gremlin-like gingerbread creatures. When we pulled the cookies out of the oven and discovered the transformation, we were inconsolable. I began laughing so hard that I could no longer feel my legs, so I laid down on the kitchen tile and continued laughing, and my sister was in tears as she impersonated Dobby from Harry Potter (the spitting image of whom we had just baked into cookie form). Naturally, since by now we had already starred in our own baking show brought to you only from our mom’s kitchen (very exclusive), we thought we could easily fix our sad little cookie-people by adding decorations. But what we forgot was that neither of us have an artistic bone in our bodies. The more icing we slathered onto the poor, stunted little cookies, and the more M&M’s I added to try to give them way-too-large smiley faces, the creepier they began to look, and the lower the age of the people who had most likely made them dropped, until they could not possibly have been made by humans at all, but instead surely the cat had come and finished them for us when no one was looking. Finally, we ended up with an entire family of terrifying little sugar cookie.. people. Surveying our handiwork, the laughter increased to a level I didn’t even think was physically possible. Neither of us could speak for the next hour in between gasps. I have not laughed that hard in a very, very long time, and I doubt I will again for years. Incredibly proud of our creations, we offered them to everyone we knew.. and, shockingly, they did get eaten. Although when I ate mine, I did so with one eye open. 

Then came the tonsils. Or went…? Either way, leading up to it, I thought for sure it would be easy- kids do it all the time, with just a little bit of ice cream and a few days on the couch. Surely I was a little bit tougher than your average five year old. But the thing they told me, and the thing I completely disregarded, was that it’s much worse when you are an adult with actual adult-sized tonsils. But I found out pretty quickly that they weren’t messing around. Swallowing was tough enough, but what added to the disappointment the most was that before the surgery, I had announced to everyone my expectations of coming out of it with an amazing singing voice, and using that to become an international pop star in a matter of months. But, much to my dismay, I couldn’t, and still cannot, sing. Needless to say, I was devastated. But one thing did sweeten the deal a bit…

My whole life, I have snored horribly. Yes, snored. And no, not the cute kind of snore that you would expect to come from someone so short and child-like. I’m talking a grown-man, full-volume, wakes-up-anyone-within-a-ten-mile-radius snore. It has always been horribly embarrassing, especially as I’ve gotten older and have entered into new relationships. Necessity has forced me to come up with a strategy to handle this…unfortunate situation, and since I am who I am, I can’t help but handle it in the most awkward fashion possible. I open with a very understated warning: “Sometimes, and I mean every once in a while, when I’m really, really exhausted, I might possibly maybe snore.” And then I leave it to the guys to find out for themselves that in fact I snore almost every night without fail, and just hope that, by then, they are attached enough to me that the snoring is just an annoying complication. It’s a delicate dance, and I’ve been tripping over it for as long as I can remember.. until I had my tonsils out. Worth it? 100%. If they had told me that I would never snore again, I would have been waiting at the operating room front door months ago wearing only a surgical gown, asking if they had any free time for an extra tonsillectomy and trying to hand over the entire contents of my wallet, my watch and a box of cold chicken wings from the local Chinese restaurant just to sweeten the deal. And it comes at the perfect time, because I just started dating someone new… and after asking hime 27 times since I’ve been back in Arizona, he confirmed that in fact I no longer snore. And just like that, my list of non-lady-like characteristics goes from 500 to 499. I feel good about it. 

So, spoiler alert, after two weeks of non-dairy ice cream that tasted like cardboard and was somehow still rock-hard even after 2 minutes in the microwave, and my mother staring at me from a chair less than two feet from my face and asking me every 23 seconds on the dot if I was alright despite the fact that I couldn’t really speak and I hadn’t even blinked since the previous 23-second check-in, this homeless, unemployed and now tonsil-less girl said goodbye to her family and headed back to Arizona, and Sheila.. and my new boyfriend. Yes.. I used that word on purpose. I also threw up in my mouth a little, but I think that’s how happiness is supposed to feel.. so sappy that you puke a little but somehow also smile the whole way through it. And I’m definitely, definitely smiling. Although I think Sheila is a little jealous. But I’m not giving away any more details yet.. I’m saving that for the next blog. Mainly because I haven’t come up with a fake name yet. 

But, in all seriousness, as excited as I was to see Sheila again, it’s always bitter-sweet to leave my family. They’re probably the weirdest people I know, but I couldn’t possibly imagine having it any other way. Besides, that’s where I get it from. And they are the most amazing weirdos I have ever met. I know it’s something that people say all the time and may or may not actually mean, but we truly love each other unconditionally. They always have my back, and they would always drop anything for me, as I would for them. The four of us (my father included) are a team, a support system, a group of best friends, and above all a screwed-up, crazy, incredible family. And I am so thankful for every one of them. So on that incredibly sappy note, Sheila and I are back together, better than ever, and we’re off to keep screwing up.. but this time maybe with a plus one? But don’t worry too much- I’m certainly not planning on becoming a normal person any time soon. 

“It’s not what we have in life, but who we have in our life that matters.” -J.M. Lawrence