Snide Reply

Category: Writing life

  • Running, Writing and the 20-point Shot

    Waiting to start

    “Give me your hands,” she said, holding her own out, palms up.

    Confused, I took them nonetheless. Was this some kind of congratulatory high-five? I wondered. No, this felt comforting, her warm hands making me realize how cold my own were.

    Another woman grabbed at my waist, slowing me when all I wanted was to keep moving. “I know it’s hard,” she said, “but we need the bottom part.” Then, she ripped off the bottom of my racing bib and with that, they released me to walk off the momentum and adrenaline of finishing my first race.

    I started running a little more than two years ago. I’ve logged probably 2000 miles since then. My first runs consisted of sixty seconds of shuffling like an eighty-year old woman interspersed with ninety-minute segments of walking. I recall the first sixty-second shuffle vividly. Ok, time to run, I thought, as the voice from my C25K app directed. I can do this. I look ridiculous. I hate running. “Walk,” the app directed after what seemed an eternity. I walked, then shuffled, then walked again for twenty minutes.

    Yesterday, I ran for thirty minutes and 6/100ths of a second without stopping, except to slow down twice for a cup of water from a Cub Scout by the side of the road. I finished second in my age group.

    I started blogging at about the same time I started running. Both were things I did because I thought I ought. Running would get me the bone-strengthening impact I’d been missing swimming laps. Blogging would give me a way of exercising my mind while kicking the cobwebs out of my tech savvy. And, both filled the massive amount of time I had on my hands while looking for a teaching job in a crashed economy.

    Running and writing have become integral parts of my life, but for some reason, I’m able to be more disciplined in my running. I find it far easier to get my butt—and legs, of course—out the door three times a week than I do to park my butt—and my typing fingers, of course—in front of my computer everyday. OK, that’s not completely true. It’s very easy to park in front of the computer, what’s not so easy is doing it to write.

    I’ve read many stories of successful people translating skills learned from one discipline to another, where they also inevitably become successful. I believe it’s possible for me; I believe my running regularity and success should make it easier to develop discipline, and achieve success, in a writing career. But so far, I haven’t done it.

    The stakes are much higher for my writing. No one pays me to run and no one is depending on me to be paid when I run. People are depending on me being able to make money writing. My husband wants to retire, my kids will go to college. We need, desperately need, to be out of debt.

    And yet, I hesitate.  The thought of cold calling prospects leaves me breathless with anxiety. Writing letters of introduction takes hours of torment and deliberation over every word. Networking events? Weeks of self-pep-talking to get me there.

    I know the answer is going to be something like a C25K program for writers. I could even say I’ve stalled because I’m not good at inching toward a goal; this weekend proved that isn’t true.

    When I watch basketball and my favorite team is behind by 20 points, I wish for the 20-point shot. But, there is no 20-point shot, not in basketball, running or writing. I’m going to have to start writing professionally the way I did running,  sixty seconds of shuffling at a time.

     

    Yesterday was the second anniversary of starting my blog. I’ve gone from approximately 45 readers to nearly 300 since then and I thank you all for your loyal support.

     

  • Fractured Fiction: You finish it!

    Like many writers, I have attempted writing fiction. I have attempted it so many times that I think there is more fiction on my computer than there are entries in my Quicken files. I have a plethora of ideas and I’m really good at starting. But I get stuck. Maybe, I thought, my loyal readers can help me get over the hump. So, I’m going to start going through the mountain of beginnings I’ve written and throw one out to you every week. YOU finish it!

    Here’s the first:

    I woke to the sound of the shower running. This was a problem; I live alone. So, either I had turned the shower on and fallen asleep, or there was someone in my shower. My head was fuzzy about the night before. In fact, I had no recollection beyond hitting my head as I sat up too quickly while backing out of the undersink cabinet. The damn disposal had choked on something again and, in my effort to get it running, I’d had to crawl into the cabinet up to my shoulders. Getting back out is never as easy as getting in, is it?

    So, my memory was going to be of no use in figuring out why my shower was running. A pile of men’s clothing lay on the chair beside my bed. My own clothes lay on the floor, short black skirt on the bottom, black silk blouse next, then red lace bra and panties. At least I’d dressed nicely.

    But this was bad, very bad. Not just because of the obvious; I had had sex with someone and couldn’t remember the act, let alone the actor. I’d done that before.  Oh, crap!  Check for condom.  There, near the panties, a used wrapper. One little bit of good news. No, it wasn’t so bad that I had woken up with no memory of my activity the night before. The bad part was that this time, I’d brought the stranger home. Or, was it a stranger?

    The water stopped.  I heard the shower curtain being pulled back. In a few moments, I assumed, the mystery man would make his appearance. I closed my eyes, feigning sleep. Obviously, he wasn’t going to kill me. If he were, I assumed he would have already. Why take a shower before getting all bloody?

  • Tomorrow Is Another Day

    Profound, I know, but some days just really suck. I should have known that today would be one of them.

    The day started like this:

    “Mom,” my son said, “the dog pooped all over his crate.”

    Wonderful, I thought. “But Dad cleaned it up,” he added. I breathed a mental sigh of relief. I hugged and kissed my son goodbye and went back to bed.

    A little while later, my daughter and I got up, got dressed and went downstairs for breakfast.

    “Mom,” my daughter said, “the dog pooped in his crate.”

    “I know, honey,” I said. “Daddy cleaned it up.”

    “No, Mom,” she said, “he pooped again. Looks like he barfed, too.”

    I screamed a mental scream of anguish then I did what a mother has to do at 8 a.m. I cleaned the poopbarf, made a pot of tea, toasted bread for my daughter’s breakfast, toasted buckwheat pancakes for myself, made lunch for my daughter, turned the toasted bread into cinnamon toast then ate my pancakes standing up while drinking the tea. I did, of course, wash my hands between the poopbarf and the tea making.

    Following dropping daughter off at school, I drove to Chicago to visit my psychiatrist. It is a measure of the suckitude of my day that this visit was the highlight. The week prior, I had driven down to his office and found him not in it. The door was, in fact, locked. After thinking him dead in the office, it occurred to me that it might be me that was in error. Indeed, I had the wrong day. So, it was with great relief that I saw him today, alive, in his office. We had quite the little laugh over my misadventure. We also discussed why I had put my empty coffee travel mug in my coat pocket and brought it to the session. I had no answer. I paid him $200 for a half hour for him to tell me that people do that kind of thing.

    After my session with Dr. Funnypants, I drove to Aurora where I taught reading skills to a handful of kids who really don’t want to be there with the exception of the one who stalks me. Let’s call him Stalker Boy. He meets me at the front door of his school every day. None of the other kids in the class do, but he is there every day that I am there. If I’m late, he has the school secretary give me a tardy slip. He determines when I am late, not me. I still have not figured out what time it is that constitutes lateness in his mind. Of course, today he gave me a tardy slip.

    The unmotivated kids and I ground through the day’s lesson. Stalker Boy interjected comments about his day, my hair, the sharpness of his pencil, the quality of snack the school had supplied, my children, and the weather. Finally, the hour was up and the unmotivated skipped merrily from the room. Stalker Boy walked me out the door as he does every day that I am there. He made sure I turned my tardy slip back in at the front desk.

    I drove home, found my children glued to screens, stuffing their faces with relatively healthy snacks. The dog had stuffed his crate with further poopbarf. My children, perhaps wisely, did not tell me that the crate was full again.

    I cleaned the poopbarf and made dinner. I did, of course, wash my hands between those activities. The kids and I downed the entire batch of linguine and clam sauce, leaving nothing for my husband. He can add a little suckishness to his day, I thought, as I slurped up the last linguine noodle.

    We can fast forward through the rest: attempt to write newspaper column; testy phone call with sister regarding assistance in caring for tremendously ill father; mad dash to gymnastics class; discover last-class show is planned; decide that it is better to be a marginally attentive parent at the gym show than to miss column deadline; write column on heroin use with nosy dad hanging over shoulder; peek up from writing every other line to catch daughter doing cute things on dangerous equipment.

    When I got home, I left a message for my sister apologizing for my testiness, emailed my column to my husband to proof, then ran upstairs to fulfill my mother-son bonding responsibility of watching “Top Chef” together. The suckiness continued as my favorite contestant, the Zen-like Beverly was eliminated in favor of the paranoid Sarah.  At the first commercial break, I checked with my husband to see if he had gotten the column. He hadn’t. I checked my email and found that it was doing the thing that I have taken it to the Apple Genius to repair only to find that it won’t do that thing for the Genius. Mail works fine when the boyishly handsome young Genius is in the vicinity. Mail is a bitch to the harried middle-aged woman just trying to get her column done on time.

    Eventually, I got the column to my husband and edited it, ignoring his suggestions. He could deal with a little more suck in his day, I reasoned. I got an email from my sister which I should have ignored until I was having a day that didn’t suck as much as this one did. So, my response to my sister probably sucked.

    Tomorrow will be a better day. I’ll grovel a little . . ok, I’ll grovel a lot with my sister. I’ll start taking deep breaths as soon as I see Stalker Boy. And I’ll get my teeth cleaned. Yeah, that will be a much better day.

  • Why I’m A Bad Blogger And How You Can Be, Too!

    I am a bad blogger. Awards and accolades aside, according to those in the know, I am doing this thing all wrong.

    My first error is in my headlines. I use clever headlines. I am, in fact, quite fond of my clever headlines. Indeed, I have written entire posts just so I could use a particular headline. “I Don’t Have ADH…”, for instance. My son has ADHD. So do some of his friends. One of those friends is fond of telling people, “I don’t have ADH . . .” and then staring off as if watching a butterfly flit by. I thought that was hilarious. I had to use that line, so I wrote a post around it.

    If I were a good blogger, I would use titles like, “Top Ten Ways Americans Are Weird About Birthdays,” instead of “And Many More.” I would have written “Why Your Nine-Year-Old Drives You Crazy and What You Can Do About It,” instead of “Number Nine, Number Nine.” A friend and loyal reader suggested “ ‘Tween a Rock and a Hard Place” for that post. I think his idea has more universal appeal; my headline dates me. Still, neither of our choices has much marketing impact.

    Blog marketing experts assure me that “How,” “Why,” and “Top Ten” are all words that should be included in post headlines if one is to capture attention in our blog soaked world. Maybe I’ll re-title the one on adoption. I could call it “Top Ten Idiotic Things People Say About Adoption.” Or, “How Your Comments About Adoption Make You Look Like An Idiot.” Or, “Why I Think You’re An Idiot When You Say Those Things About Adoption.”

    My second error is in my content. I write humorous personal essays. There is no market for humorous personal essays, apparently. There is a market for mom-to-mom advice and I do give some mom advice on occasion. I like to think of it as parent advice, commie liberal politically correct pinko that I am.

    There is a market for cooking advice, travel advice, craft advice, all kinds of advice. And there’s the rub. I don’t want to write an advice blog. I don’t care if you have a problem. Well, ok, I do care and if you want to email me to ask my advice about something, go ahead. But in my blog, I want to ramble, rant and rave with little-to-no thought at providing anything more useful than a laugh. Humorous personal essays are only marketable if you are a mean-spirited skinny bigot like Chelsea Handler. I’m not skinny, nor a bigot but my kids think I’m mean, so it’s a start.

    Error number three also relates to my content. I write long. The most effective blog posts are 300-500 words. My posts come in at about 1,000 words. Apparently, not a lot of people want to read that many words. With the popularity of twitter, it’s no surprise to me that my 1,000 words are the blogosphere equivalent of War and Peace. I will admit that my writing goal of 1,000 words is completely arbitrary. It seemed like a nice round number when I started blogging. Now, it’s a habit and one that’s given me proof that I can write enough to produce a book. If I were Chelsea Handler, in fact, I’d already be published.

    I commit my fourth error on a weekly basis: I post only once per week. If I were serious about blogging, I would be posting on a daily, even an hourly basis. I would also have no life. I am interested in having a life. At the same time, I can’t imagine why anyone would want to know more about me than I already reveal. I imagine that my readers are interesting people who also want to have lives.

    I could avoid my fifth blogging boo-boo by including more photos in my posts. Adding photos is a lot more complicated than it seems, though. There’s the privacy thing. My kids deserve it. I am not overly worried about privacy for myself but I am overly critical of photos of me.  There’s the practicality thing, too. Pictures of naked Barbies is one thing; pictures of me riding pachyderms is another. Then there’s the copyright thing. I could just use other people’s photos, but then I couldn’t tsk-tsk my son when he pirates music and videos online.

    My sixth error, and a grevious one it is, is my failure to market my blog. When I started blogging, I had no idea I was even supposed to market it. I wrote something that made me laugh, I posted it on WordPress, I told some friends and they read it. Many of them laughed, too. The next week, I did the same thing. And I’ve pretty much done that every week since September 30, 2010.

    If I were a really good blogger, by now I would be running clickable ads in my blog. When I wrote about naked Barbies, for instance, there would be a link to click so that you could purchase your own Barbie. Whether or not you kept her clothed would be up to you, of course. My ADHD post would include a link to drugstore.com, where you could purchase your own supply of Concerta. If I were really savvy about this blog marketing thing, there would be a flashing banner across the top of my posts, hawking the things I’ve blogged about from bacon and dead squirrels to lawn services, elephants and condoms.

    Perhaps the biggest blogging mistake I make though is this: other than the making more money from my writing bit, I don’t really care if I’m a bad blogger. I write what I feel like writing. I write even if I don’t feel like writing, but I don’t write because I have to. I write because I want to. I write about what amuses me and animates me. In short, I’m blogging because I like it and I like that you like it, too.

  • How WordPress Gave Me A Migraine but I Found Blog Love Anyway

    Many of you know that WordPress, the service that manages my blog, recently featured my blog on its homepage. For those in the know, I was “Freshly Pressed.” For those in the don’t know, WordPress is the place on the Internet where I post my blog. Every day, WordPress, the biggest hosting service out there, picks the best of that day’s posts. They say they wade through more than 650,000 posts and who am I to argue.

    The Monday before Thanksgiving, WordPress picked my post on gratitude. Now, WordPress promises that they will let you know if they pick your post for Freshly Pressed. WordPress lied to me. I found out I was Freshly Pressed when I checked email that day and saw I had, oh, say 100 emails from strangers commenting on my blog. I was shocked, amazed, astounded and all of those other words I tell my students to use instead of “surprised.”

    I did not count how many people hit the like button or made some nice comment about that post. WordPress kept track of the activity on my blog, though. Over the course of two days, I had 3,450 views on my blog. A typical Monday prior to that, I would get about 3,400 fewer.

    At the same time . . .

    Many of you also know that we are broke. One of the expenses we’ve put off is veterinary care. That same Monday, my daughter was playing with her Littlest Pet Shop figures. “Mom,” she said, looking at something lying on the floor, “is that one of Pogo’s teeth?” It was, indeed, one of our dog’s teeth. Our dog can’t eat soft food without diarrh—oh, I mean—dire circumstances. His teeth are, therefore, tremendously important to me. I checked the checkbook and called the vet.

    Vet expenses are one of those things that you think are going to be affordable in the “we can probably pay for it if we eat vegan for a month” category, but always wind up in the “we can only pay for this if we eat hay for a year” category. I never have to have a blood test before getting my teeth cleaned, but my dog does. So, blood test. His rabies vaccine had also expired, so rabies vaccine. Fortunately, he pooped on the waiting room floor, so I was spared following him around with a little plastic spoon to collect fresh turd. So, fecal test.  Total: $500.

    I got Pogo home and went to my office, where I responded to probably 60 more comments.

    At the same time . . .

    It was Thanksgiving week. Thanksgiving is at my house. My house was trashed.

    At the same time . . .

    I’d been training for my first 5K. I needed to find time to run.

    Comments answered, I went to the kitchen for a tea refill. Pogo’s face had swelled to the point that his tiny Papillon snout was nearly buried in bulging fur-covered flesh. We went to the vet. Injection to counter allergic reaction: $100 and we still hadn’t done the dental work.

    I deal really well with crises; I keep calm. I took my dog to the vet. I responded to the comments. I made the pecan pie. I trained for the run. No, crises don’t faze me. It’s the letdown afterward that’s a bitch.

    I woke at 5 am Thanksgiving morning with a migraine. I took a thermonuclear pain pill and went to bed. I skipped the run. The turkey was great.

    At the same time . . .

    Things were still hoppin’ on my blog. In addition to the humbling praise, I received awards from two other bloggers:

    the Versatile Blogger Award

    and

    the Liebster Award.

    Both have strings attached.

    Requirements:

    •  Thank the bloggers who nominated me for the award. Totally up on that; a Southern woman raised me. I’m hoping it’s ok to combine the two. So, thanks to The Waiting, Nevercontrary, Katy Stuff and Aprillbrandon for the Versatile Award and CrudMyKidsSay for the Liebster.

    Please check them out. They are great bloggers writing clearly and creatively.

    •  Pass the award on to 15 (5 for the Liebster) other bloggers. Now, this was kind of a problem as I didn’t really read other bloggers. SHAME! I found them though and they’re listed below.

    • List seven things about me you may not know. See FAR below. You don’t know these things for a reason, people!

    The blogs you will check out and may like as much as I do.

    A Clean Surface: sort of Martha Stewart with a life. Check out how to make a gingerbread house.

    A Buddhist in the Rust Belt: just discovered this. It takes some . . . guts to be a Buddhist in Montana.

    Kpgarcia: poetry and photos.

    Boggleton Drive: really cool comic. Check out this gem.

    Teachermother: writing about teaching and mothering. Duh.

    Violet Sunday Studio: ART!!

    People I want to punch in the throat: kind of like my blog only. The post on the Elf on The Shelf is priceless.

    (Crap! We’re only at seven!)

    Democratic Party of DuPage County: don’t laugh. There really is one. Is it bad to nominate a blog I edit? So what!

    Renovating Rita: she’s got a recipe for latkes. What’s not to like?

    Scribblechic: sweet musings on motherhood. (Yes, I can appreciate sweetness.)

    Philosopher mouse of the hedge: the selling mistletoe story is about one of the best Christmas stories I’ve heard.

    You’ve Been Hooked: tales from a bellman. Really. Funny!

    (Twelve . . .almost there.)

    The Anvil: Colonel Klink for President?

    Kvetchmom: doesn’t every mom kvetch?

    Huffygirl: a nurse practitioner on life and wellness

    Whew! Done.

    Now for the seven things:

    1.     I match my bra and panties. Every day.

    2.     I hate green peppers.

    3.     I watched Jersey Shore. Once.

    4.     I eat Hellman’s out of the jar.

    5.     My hair turns orange if I color it myself.

    6.     I don’t care how my alma mater fares in sports.

    7.     I was a sorority girl.

    Thank you all, from the bottom of my heart, for your kindness and support. I’m loving the wild life on my blog and you’re the reason.

    Janice

  • Let Me Take You To Funky Town

    It had to happen eventually. I’ve been riding pretty high on this writing thing. Every week, I told myself, I would write 1,000 words. I would get them written and published without fail. I set my deadline: Monday before noon. It’s been about six months now and I’ve achieved my goal every week. Copious pats on the back for me.

    Then, this week rolled around and shoved me right into the writer’s block wall. I’m not really surprised. I kind of felt it coming early in the week. “What will I write about,” I asked myself. “Hell if I know,” I told myself. “Maybe I’ll write about what goes on inside my brain,” I thought, then realized there wasn’t enough going on to fill 1,000 words. There wasn’t enough going on to fill the back of a Target receipt.

    I’ve gotten to Saturday and wondered what I would write for Monday many times. I’ve always come up with something. Maybe not what I originally intended, or how I originally intended, but generally, Saturday ends with me set on Monday’s topic. Not this week. At the end of the day on Saturday all I knew was that “Camelot,” the new series on Starz, looks like it might be good, though Joseph Fiennes looks really silly bald.

    This week, though, it was Sunday night and I still didn’t know what to write. It became our dinner table conversation.

    “What should I write about?” I asked.

    “Write about me and my friends,” my daughter said.

    “Did it already.”

    “Pets!,” she said. “Write about pets.”

    “Done,” I said.

    Not to be deterred, she said, “Houses. Write about houses and how they protect you.”

    “I try to write about funny things.”

    “Oh,” she said. “It has to be funny?” That ruled out houses in her mind though I had considered writing about how I coped with a portion of Spring Break by allowing her to string yarn all over the house.

    “Write about condoms,” my son said.

    “I have,” I told him. “You came up in it.”

    He offered suggestions for a number of truly obscene things about which I could write. I informed him that my mother’s cousin reads my blogs. He shut up.

    I turned to my husband, who had said nothing throughout the children’s suggest-o-rama, though I did see him hide his head in his hands over one or two of our son’s suggestions. He looked at me and without saying a word, I knew that he knew the problem.

    “I’m in a funk,” I said, “and it’s not very funny to write about being depressed.”

    The conversation turned to lethargy, which is a fancy word for feeling so tired that you just want to stay in bed forever even though you aren’t really tired and you know you’re not tired but somehow getting out of bed just seems impossible. I mentioned that antidepressants can actually give some depressed people the energy they need to off themselves. I am already on antidepressants so there’re no worries about that here.

    My neighbor calls our house “The Fun House.” I know she means that I don’t care if the kids paint or build a blanket fortress in the family room or tie the house up with yarn. But, to me, it’s a pretty good description of the atmosphere in our house. Things are a little wonky, often outrageous, definitely not normal and that’s fine by us. So, I laughed full and loud when my son described how I could commit suicide without leaving the bed by having our cat nap on my face.

    While I’m in no danger of taking the feline express to the afterlife, I am most decidedly down. I’m sure its primary cause is the whole morbidly underemployed thing and the now-due student loans that are part of my economy-induced nightmare. There are also a number of other factors inhibiting my ability to maintain my generally cheerful-ish demeanor.

    First, there’s my health. You know how people will go on about the problems they are having in their lives and you don’t know what to say and so eventually you wind up saying something lame like “Well, at least you have your health”? Well, I don’t have my health. Now it’s not like I’m really, really sick. I don’t need a benefit for me. (Wait . . .a benefit might help pay off those loans.) No, I’m not gravely ill. I have a nagging respiratory infection of some sort with one of those coughs that doesn’t bother you until someone makes you laugh and then you wind up hacking up a chunk of lung. And a toothache. I have never had a toothache in my life. Now I have a toothache. And a pulled groin muscle. What the heck is that about? I’m not a linebacker. How do I rate a groin pull?

    Ordinarily, I’d be running and laughing to cope with my troubles. Can’t run, because I’m still resting and rehabbing the offending muscle. Can’t laugh without paroxysmal coughing.  I thought I might garden away the blues, so I decided to clean out the garden beds. Seeing all those little green and purple shoots sticking through the soil would surely improve my mood.

    Gardening didn’t improve my mood at all. On the contrary. with every dead grass whacked back and every dried-up leaf pulled, I was more and more convinced that it was time to move into a nice little townhouse. It was sounding better and better in my mind until I got to the selling the house we already own part. Then I got to the packing up everything we have part and the part where the movers somehow misplace the box containing all of my shoes. I went inside for a cup of tea. The garden beds looked better, but my pity party continued.

    With laughing, running and gardening put out to pasture, all that was left was reading. Usually, reading helps me relax. Lately, though, reading is just making me feel terrible. It started with “The Name of the Wind” by Patrick Rothfuss. I am thoroughly enjoying the story and its imaginative setting. There are just enough fantasy elements to remove the story from reality but not so much as to overwhelm the narrative. It is, in short, wholly imaginative and beautifully crafted. And it makes me feel completely inadequate as a writer. When I tell my husband this, he tells me I am being ridiculous and that, if I were a full-time writer who started full-time writing when I was in my twenties and who had someone to take care of everything else, I would be writing wholly imaginative, beautifully crafted fiction.

    He’s right, of course. I am a mom, a wife, a teacher, a dog trainer, a cat wrangler, a gardener, a runner and a writer who somehow managed to write more than 1,000 words despite a week-long bout of the blues.

  • Mendacity

    When my son was eight, he and I were cuddled up in bed reading or watching TV or something. I don’t remember exactly what we were doing, but I’ll never forget the conversation.

    “Mom,” he said. “Will you tell me the truth about something?”

    “Well, yes,” I said, hoping he didn’t ask a question I would have to lie to answer.

    “Even if you think it will hurt my feelings?”

    “Yes, of course,” I said, crossing my fingers.

    “Mom,” he said, “is there a Santa Claus or do you and Dad buy the presents?”

    Whew, I thought. Nothing about sex.

    “Are you sure you want to know?” I asked.

    “Yes, just tell me.”

    I swallowed hard.

    “Dad and I do the presents.” He stayed still in my arms, head tucked against the soft spot just under my shoulder. He sighed.

    “That’s what I thought.” We cuddled for a little while longer.

    That September, we went to China. We came home with a little girl. Not too long afterward, I started preparing for Christmas.

    “Pretty soon,” I said to my daughter, “it will be Christmas. Santa Claus is going to come to our house to bring you toys. Won’t that be fun?”

    My son happened to be passing through the room. He stopped, looked at me and said, “So, you’re going to lie to her, too?” We lied to her for seven years.

    This year, my daughter turned eight. She wanted the truth.

    “Mom, is there a Santa Claus?”

    “Why do you want to know,” I said, expecting her to tell me she’d had it with the years of lying and deceit. “Did someone tell you there isn’t?” Like your brother, I thought.

    “Oh, some of the boys in school said that there’s no such thing as Santa Claus and that their moms and dads buy the presents. Do you buy the presents?”

    “Yes, we do.”

    She didn’t need any cuddling, just went back to whatever she’d been doing.

    My husband used to lie to me all the time. Here’s how it would go:

    “Will you give our daughter a bath?” I’d ask.

    “Yes, right away,” he would say.

    Ten minutes later, I would find that our daughter was still dirty and he was still playing card games on his computer.

    “I thought you were going to give our daughter a bath,” I would say.

    “Yes, I’ll do it right away. As soon as I finish this game,” he would respond. My brain would then explode trying to figure out if our daughter would get her bath immediately or when he finished his game.

    Turns out, “right away” does not mean immediately. Silly me, I thought it did. In my world, right away meant that my husband was that very minute standing up, pushing his chair away from his desk, looking for our daughter and marshalling her upstairs for her bath. In my husband’s world, right away means, “in about five or ten minutes.” So, my husband was not lying when he told me that he would give her a bath right away. And I was not lying when I told him he was full of crap. He no longer tells me he will do something “right away.”

    I don’t lie very much. It’s not that I’m not good at it. I’m a fairly convincing liar, but I was raised Catholic. When I lie, I do it well because I was told to always put forth my best effort. But then, the lie eats away at me. Even though I haven’t called myself a Catholic since I was 14 years old, I squirm and sweat, convinced I will be discovered and I will burn in a hell I don’t believe in for all eternity.

    The range of lies I tell and squirm over is wide. I have lied about the beauty of everything from babies to bridesmaids’ dresses. “Yes, of course, I would love to wear a teal lace riding hat for your wedding. I’m sure I’ll wear it again and again.” I have lied about interior decorating, hair color, any number of peoples’ cooking and macaroni necklaces.

    I will lie to the March of Dimes next year when they ask me to be their Mothers’ March volunteer. I accepted the task this year after copious amounts of pressure on their part. The volunteer kit came. It sat on my counter. I vowed to do it. I never did. I felt terrible. Next year, I will lie and tell them that I just don’t have the time. Someone else will volunteer, I know they will.

    I have a friend who, like me, was raised by a Southern woman. We were taught never to say anything impolite or unkind. My friend is adept at finding something truthful to say in even the most horrendous circumstances. At a friend’s (terrible) movie premiere, she said, “What an exciting night this must be for you?” This is a woman to be admired and feared.

    The lies I tell most convincingly are those I tell myself. Recently, I’ve been trying to write fiction. It goes slowly. Still, I enjoy it. I allow my husband to read it. He reads it. He responds favorably. I feel good about his responses. Then, my lying brain gets to work. I convince myself that he can’t possibly be telling me the truth, that every thing I write is terrible drivel and I am, in general, a talentless hunk of female flesh. When I tell my husband this, he rolls his eyes. He can’t win. He goes back to his card game. I go back to beating myself for thinking that I am a talentless hunk of flesh.

    I told my kids that I was sad that Santa wouldn’t be coming to our house any more. They looked at me and said, together, “Why?”

    After recovering from the shock of them doing anything together, I said, “Neither of you believe in him. I’ll wrap your presents and I won’t have to stay up ‘til midnight waiting for you to go to sleep so I can put the presents under the tree.”

    “But I still want the presents under the tree,” my daughter said, pouting and looking extremely sincere. My son did his equivalent of pouting, which comes out something like, “Meh.”

    So, we’ll pretend that we believe in Santa. I’ll stay up until midnight waiting for my kids to fall asleep so I can put their presents under the tree. I’ll enjoy it and that’s the truth.

    Copywrite 2010 by Janice M. Lindegard. All rights reserved.