The family that lies together, stays sane together!

I’m often quite oblivious to what’s going on around me. Perhaps it’s because I spend so much time in my own imagination. So it should come as no surprise that when my family lies to me— in the name of protecting my sensitive sensibilities— I’m totally oblivious to their deceit.

One Saturday evening, my man and I splurged on a couple of mega-size chocolate bars, and with our treats in hand, sat down to watch TV. My man finished his bar, but I only ate half of mine, so I wrapped up the remains and set it on the end table beside my chair.

On the following Monday, I returned home from the day job, ravenous with hunger. While supper cooked, I decided to alleviate my hunger by scarfing down the rest of my bar. But the bar was gone.

I searched the floor, under the table, under my chair. Nothing, nada, zilch. Not even a piece of the wrapper in the garbage. The only explanation was that my man or boy had found it, consumed it, then hidden the evidence of their crime, which was in truth, odd behaviour for them both. Although I’ve been known to raid their stashes, they never touch mine. But I digress…

The inquisition was on. When my man and boy arrived home from work, they both denied eating the bar. My man suggested I’d woken in the middle of the night, done the deed myself, then forgotten it by morning.

Huh? I’ve never sleepwalked in my life.

The next night after work, too hungry to wait for supper to cook—yes, there’s a pattern here—I widened my search and again found nothing. Perplexed, I emailed our oldest son. Had he dropped in while we were all at work? His answer…a definite no.

Over the next few nights, still fixated on the missing chocolate bar, I searched the house and quizzed my family. But they stuck to the sleepwalking story.

The following Thursday, I headed downstairs for potatoes and opened the cold room door. A mousetrap, along with a poor dead mouse, was on the floor between me and the potatoes.

I closed the door and went back upstairs to cook rice.

Later, my man and boy confessed they’d conspired to keep silent to protect me from myself. They knew me well enough to know that a mouse in the house would bring out my latent crazy gene. If I’d known about the mouse, I’d have had them tearing apart the house until they found the poor frightened creature.

Instead, they quietly resolved the issue, setting traps and determining how the mouse gained access to the house so they could prevent it from happening again.

Has your family ever lied to you to protect you from a similar truth? Or do they man-up, tell you the facts, then live with your craziness?

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Why Is My Face Red?

We all suffer from it, that infliction known as embarrassment. At the moment it occurs, our face turns red and our body flushes with a heat that can only be compared to a hot flash.

Each time I get caught in an embarrassing situation, I believe I’m the only one this has ever happened to, and yet common sense tells me that’s not true. So I did a pole of a few of my blogger friends and they were more than happy to share their most embarrassing moments with me.

Lisa Hall-Wilson: I Can’t Believe I Said That and Biking In Panties

Susie Lindau: My Most Mortifying Moments

Jenny Hansen: Embarrassing Blonde Moment and No Porn On The Job

August McLaughlin: Sweaty Impulses & The One That Got Away

My most embarrassing and painful memory occurred in grade eight science class, when a racy little note got passed around from student to student and finally fell into my hands. It was something about sex, which I read, of course. As I turned to pass the note to the boy behind me, our teacher – well known for his cruel and inhuman ways to torture his young students – snatched the note from my fingers and silently read it.

The room went quiet. It was one of those just-kill-me-now moments, although that particular phrase hadn’t yet been invented. After a few tense seconds, during which I braced myself for the inevitable emotional pain of his punishment, the teacher decided I should stand up and read the note to the rest of the class.

It should’ve been so simple. After all, half the class had just read the note and had been fortunate enough to escape our teacher’s detection. While I turned a brilliant shade of scarlet and read the note aloud, the teacher and my classmates roared with laughter.

Can I blame them? Heck no. There’s something so funny about witnessing someone else’s embarrassing moment. Caught unaware, we laugh in reaction, and it’s only afterwards that we consider how our laughter might have affected the person involved.

Of course, it’s all part of being human. There was the time I came out of my first ever massage, only to trip over the curb and land on the street on my butt. There was another time when I asked a former co-worker when her baby was due, only to discover she wasn’t pregnant at all.

Will the embarrassment ever end? Will I someday learn to pay attention to where I’m going or what I’m saying? Not likely and maybe that’s a good thing, because if we can’t laugh at ourselves, is it fair to laugh at others?

So now it’s your turn to share a moment of sheer embarrassment. I promise not to laugh too hard.

PATIENCE, GRASSHOPPER

I interrupt my writing time to take my 92 year old father-in-law (FIL) and 83 year old mother-in-law (MIL) shopping. My FIL uses a walker and shuffles at a snail’s pace. My MIL moves almost as slow.

I must constantly remind myself Patience, Grasshopper, for one day you will need assistance, too.

We start at the bank, where my FIL and I chat in the car until my MIL returns. Then we drive to the health food store and wait some more. Every time I have to help one of them in and out of the vehicle, it’s pure agony. We’ve only been gone an hour, and we still haven’t reached our main destination.

At Wal-Mart, I park beside the front entrance so my in-laws won’t have so far to walk. I almost – almost – leave the car running and the keys in the ignition. At the very last moment, something tells me to grab the keys and I pocket them. By the time I get around to the passenger side, my FIL has locked himself in the vehicle and can’t figure out how to get out.

After unloading my passengers, I park the vehicle and hurry inside. My MIL is watching for me and the moment she sees me, she races off at a surprisingly fast clip. My FIL decides this is the perfect opportunity to do his own grocery shopping. Soon my arms are filled with cereal and wagon wheels and bananas and bread.

I find a cart and dump the groceries in, but by now my FIL misses his wife. We spot her snow white hair on the opposite side of the store and we start our long journey toward her – shuffling forward inch by inch. Half way to our destination, my MIL disappears up an aisle. By the time we reach the spot where we’ve last seen her, she’s gone.

We search the aisles and finally find her, only to have her race off again. By the time we’ve made a complete circle around the store, we’re both exhausted and agree that it’s time to sit down at the nearby fast food joint.

But the moment we have our coffee and juice in hand, my MIL appears. Strangely, the items in her cart are not bagged, but since she’s headed off to buy herself a coffee, I assume she’s finished shopping and has run her items through the cash register.

We finish our refreshments, which means I’m nearly home-free, and now all we have left is one quick stop at the pharmacy. Then my MIL remembers a few more items she has to pick up. And oh yeah, she still needs to pay for her purchases.

It takes us three and a half hours to do what would normally take me less than an hour. I smile, silently thank my Dad for sharing his patience gene with me, and sit back to wait.

Three and a half precious hours. As far as time goes, it’s a drop in the bucket of my life. My in-laws won’t be here forever. I remind myself Patience, Grasshopper, for one day you will need assistance, too.

He Said, She Said What?!

I have been known – on occasion – to disagree with my sweetie.  I know, shocking to admit. Still, I feel the need to get a few things off my chest today.

Inspired by Alicia and Roy Street’s recent blog post about their husband and wife writing team, Mars and Venus Writing Together, I decided to list all the reasons why my husband and I could never write together.

1) He’s total logic.
2) My brain is like a pinball machine on speed.

3) He works from point A to point B.
4) I start at the beginning, jump to the end, fiddle with the middle, then fill in all the holes in between. And then, move the beginning to the end, the end to the middle, and shift around every other word in the manuscript.

5) He likes to give orders.
6) Ummm, you want me to do what?!

7) I know how to drive him crazy in 2.5 seconds flat, and sometimes I do it for the pure joy of seeing him hit the insanity button.
8) He can drive me crazy, but it’s usually because I’ve waited for the perfect moment to deliberately push his buttons.

9) He’d want to write about guys doing guy stuff, rolling cars, shooting guns, being like, you know, James Bond, or Clint Eastwood, or maybe Rocky.
10) I just want to write dialogue, mouths moving, talking heads. Basically women talking to men and their men listening.

11) He’d want to work … well, together. In the same room. At the same desk. Maybe even in the same chair!!!
12) I’d want to work in a room, with the door closed, with no one for company but my computer. Oh, and email, and all my email buddies, and everyone I know on Twitter and Facebook and on the internet. Alone, yes, I really do need to work alone.

Despite our differences, we’ve raised two sons and worked as a united team whenever it was THEM against us.

We’ve built two houses together without killing each other. We know our roles. He pounds the nails and lifts all the heavy stuff. I’m his Go-For-The-Hammer-Honey girl.

Ying and yang. For some reason, it works for us.

Do you have someone you enjoy working with or do you prefer to work alone?

Fun With Santa

A few years ago, my husband decided it was time to decorate the house, you know, like regular folks do at Christmas, with more than just a Christmas tree. Since I’m not much of a decorator, he went out himself and bought a whole whack of Santa ornaments. When our youngest son came home from work that night and saw the house littered with Santa figures, he said, “Our house puked Santa.”

Since then, it’s been a running household joke. This year, when the boy removed Santa from his bathroom counter and stuck the figure on a shelf where we would be sure to find it, we decided to have a little fun. Every day, the boy would come home and find Santa in a different location.

The first day we tucked Santa into the boy’s bed. When the boy arrived home and found him, not a word was said.

The next day, we went looking for Santa. The boy had hidden him so well, we had to search the whole house. Finally, we found him on the top shelf of a book cabinet. This time, Santa got a note hung from his beard and we put him on the counter next to the fridge, where the boy usually leaves his lunch kit. The note said, “My darling boy, I missed you so much today, I cried while you were away. Your parents won’t play with me. Please take me to work with you tomorrow.”

Again, Santa was not mentioned but it was obvious the boy’s after-work mood was getting a much needed lift.

The next morning, we located Santa in our bathtub. Because this Santa was of Scottish heritage, we left the boy a note that said, “I’m Scottish and I like to go commando. I dare you to look under my skirt.”

And so the countdown to Christmas continued, with the boy hiding Santa every night and us finding fun ways to entertain him… or perhaps we were simply entertaining ourselves.

Do you have a holiday Grinch in your family and if so, what kind of tricks do you use to beat humor the grinchiness out of him/her?