Anne Nahm

Today’s embarrassing confession: I have those parents. Not just the parents who kiss each other every time they part. Not just the ones who say “I love you” to each other on a daily basis. No, I have the mom who says, “pat my butt” to my dad as he’s walking out the door. I have the dad who says (often, unfortunately), “our marriage works because of two rules: I let my wife think she gets her way. And I let my wife get her way.”

Ugghh. Do you know it was like to grow up in that house? To have a slumber party and have all your girlfriends giggle hysterically because your parents have no shame (at least to your 13 year old mind)?

To see the kid who you suspect has a shitty home life, and how she starts finding reasons to hang out with your parents instead of with you and all your girlfriends? Growing up, more than half of my friends called my mom “Mom”. Lots of kids kept coming over for Saturday morning pancakes long after I was gone from my own house.

What are you saying here, Anne? I dunno. Just that my parents are the type that like hanging out with each other. And evidently had the common interest of totally embarrassing their kids with Public Displays of Affection. PDAs are cute on twenty year olds. On your middle aged parents? Gah! Not so much. Get a room, parents!

Now? My dad has developed type II diabetes. He is quite a bit older than my mom, and neither of them are spring chickens. My dad has started framing his life decisions on the idea that he might only have 5 more years of full functioning of his body. My mom (who is seven years younger and on average expected to live three years longer if they were both in perfect health – giving her a suspected 10+ years of widowdom after my father) has started treating her body poorly.

I’ll be more frank. Since my father found out he has diabetes, he has been doing all the right things to extend his life. My mother has started to do all sorts of things to decrease the length of her life. She has gained weight. She exercises half heartedly. She talks about the length of her life only as much as my father is willing to guess he will live.

I am devastated. I am devastated by my dad’s surety that his functionality is at its end. I am devastated that my mother is seemingly making plans to throw herself on his funeral pyre. I cannot seem to write this without bawling like a 5 year old.

What I want to say: Don’t subvert the plan of the Universe! It is arrogant and it is faulty logic. Either of you could be gone tomorrow, but so could I, so quit dwelling on it. Live your healthiest life, because more people love you and count on you than just the love you two have for each other. Mom? Quit eating that and I want to see you actually break a sweat on that treadmill. Dad? Quit saying that! Can’t you see you are breaking Mom’s heart and scaring her into a fudge brownie head first? And also? Let’s just pretend no one is ever going to die and quit talking about it, because you are my mom and dad and I love you. Wahhh.

But here’s the thing: My parents always knew how to give me grace. I smoked for ten years. I dated questionable guys. I got in trouble in school and with friends. Mostly, their policy was to love me and see the good I did and give me grace for being an imperfect creature.

But they also tried to tell me the truth as they saw it. How many times did they tell me I had food between my teeth? Or my fly was down? Or that big hair was going to look pretty funny once the ’80′s were over?

But mostly, I have always been the child and they have been the adults.

And so my question is this: What constitutes love from a child to a parent? Is it to trust that the person is master of their own lives, and to love them and support them?

Is it to tell them the truth as you see it? To speak loudly when you see someone you love doing something that you think is hurting them? That is potentially selfish and hurtful to others?

I know they are hurting. I just don’t know if they need a gentle touch or a slap upside the head. And I’m sure as hell not sure if I’m the person that is supposed to give them either. And it is breaking my heart to watch it.

Here’s some snippets from my sister’s visit. She and ‘M’ left yesterday afternoon. Now, I am listening to music and blogging so I don’t have to listen to my mother on the phone, moderating a huge cat-fight between my youngest sister and my middle sister, who got together last night five hours south of here. I guess it takes them approximately 2 hours to go scorched earth nuclear on each other. Anyway, here’s to happier times. Or at least stranger times:

Walking past a Beading Convention at my sister’s hotel:

ME: What was that?
MOM: Beads.
ME: People just came out here to bead?
MOM: I guess a lot of people feel beading relieves tension.
SISTER: Did you just say ‘beating it relieves tension’?
MOM: No! Beads.
SISTER: Because that’s one of the first things I learned in college.
ME: How to beat it?
SISTER (shrugs): Well definitely that you should wear shoes in the shower.

And at dinner last night (while ‘M’ ran 18 miles or something on the beach just to avoid the estrogen fest that is my family):

ME to SISTER: Sorry if I embarrassed you or Matt with the things I said.
SISTER: Like what?
ME: Well, anything…. You know. That ‘A cup’ thing.
SISTER: Oh no, Matt thought that was funny. Actually, you should talk to mom.
MOM (holds head up with hands and covers face). Muffled: Don’t tell her!
SISTER: Mom told me yesterday that she thought Matt had a cute butt. Naturally, I told Matt this.
MOM: (Strange embarrassed strangled sound)… She didn’t tell me she told Matt this.
SISTER: So Matt has been spending the last twenty four hours ‘accidentally’ knocking things off the table and bending waaaaayyyyy over to pick them up. (Demonstrates). He’s got the wiggle down perfect.
MOM: I think there’s something wrong with that kid.
He may fit in here fine.

Anyway, in a few minutes my mom will get off the phone and I will hear the blow-by-blows of this latest snafu. I don’t know why my family can be so good when they are happy and so devestating when they are angy.

Anne

On the strange journey of post partum body changes, I passed another milestone: I can now see the bottoms of my boobs. Yes it’s true. That pad of Anne-Butter that was lingering around my ribcage is starting to melt away. Without their little platform to rest on, I may have to buy some sort of support bra. What’s really sad is that I did not realize I was not seeing the bottoms of my boobs until this week. Then, hello! There they are. Revealed like dinosaur bones… If dinosaur bones were buried in mom fat.

How did I achieve this miracle of a tiny wee bit of weight loss? Well, I’ll be perfectly frank – it is like 100 degrees here. We have no air conditioning. It is very hard to be hungry in these kinds of conditions. In fact, it’s very hard to do more than lay around in a pair of underwear with your butt aimed at the oscillating fan. And actual cooking? As in bringing heat into the house? Forgettaboutdit.

I have been subsisting on a grueling diet of beer and ice cream the past week just to survive. And while that seems like the Best! Diet! Ever! I must confess that the beer is Light Beer. And the ice cream? Is really just ice pops. So piss and sugar water is what it really boils down to. And that diet, as you can probably guess, is not quite as fun.

But Yay Slightly More Skinny! In celebration, I left the kids with my mom and I went to the beauty salon. Mainly? Because air-conditioning. But also? People, I got my eyebrows waxed. Behold! I now have TWO eyebrows, instead of one unruly caterpillar napping on my forehead.

I sat with a very nice beautician who politely asked how many millennia it had been since I had last tweezed. I confessed that it had probably been six months, coinciding with the birth of the last child. Shamed by her hesitant silence (which was presumably her getting up the nerve to ask if I minded the use of a weed whacker on my monobrow), I confessed, “I promised myself I would never be one of those mothers who lets herself go. But here I am.”

To which my tweezer woman confessed in an awed whisper, “I’m 38 and I’m afraid I’ll never have children. I just know I couldn’t take care of a kid and keep my eyebrows up.”

So, I guess I am just living her nightmare, huh? On the other hand, she then proceeded to do the most fabulous job on my eyebrows. And painless! After some talking, it turns out she has a hair tweezing fetish.

While she wasn’t looking, I managed this snapshot of her amongst the remnants of my eyebrows.

I think this is the start of a beautiful relationship.

Edited To Add: Lest you think I’m all high on myself for butter loss, let me assure you, am still matronly fat and not the least bit comfortable wearing anything other than the roomiest of clothing. Am only reveling in the slightest decrease in my mommy sized ass.

My youngest sister, her boyfriend, and my mom are all in town the past few days. We are meeting the boyfriend, if you can dig it.

I take my official sworn duties as oldest sister (this being to embarrass my sisters and their guy friends as much as possible) very seriously. I figure this also serves the purpose of giving potential husbands fair warning that our family sometimes resembles a fraternity. Only snarkier, because the siblings are all girls.

For example, we will not make you drink until your liver crawls out of your body and flags down an ambulance, but we will say things in your company such as, “it is so cold in here, my goose bumps are A cups” and then discretely watch you to see how you handle your trip to Planet Amazonia.

See, our method is better. Instead of shouting “chug, chug, chug!” and putting a drink in your hand, we just make you so uncomfortable that you go home and do the binge drinking yourself. HA. Welcome to the sisterhood, newbies.

We took him to the beach.

See those hills? There are cows grazing on those hills. With ocean views. Although, being either a dairy cow or a hamburger cow are possibly the only two jobs I would not trade for an ocean view.** But still? Cows with ocean views. In California.

(Anyway, my sister’s boyfriend is named Matt, and despite my duties as older sister, I will simply call him ‘M’ so my sister cannot later blush to the roots of her hair if she ever sees this. You know, ‘M’ could be any guy. So ‘M’ we will call him. But between you and me? Matt.)

So, we ran poor ‘M’ around and around with our girly antics. He was a perfect gentleman and did not cry even once. This fact alone puts him in the top 25 percentile for guys who have been thusly ‘screened’.

However, he did eventually fall exhausted into a pit that small children had dug to make a sandcastle.

I’m not even kidding: He fell asleep there.

So like any self-respecting big sister, I photographed him without his knowledge.

And put it up on the Internet. Ha! Was tempted to put his fingers in warm water and see if he’d wet himself. Also? Tempted to write with magic marker on his forehead. As it was the beach, I was poorly equipped to do either of these things. I know – failed in my duties. Must put together some kind of Big-Sister-Boyfriend-Screening Kit to keep in the trunk at all times.

Then, as ‘M’ slept, the tide started coming in.

And I really, really had to restrain myself from just giggling and waiting for the climatic moment.

But my sister seems to like him, so we did wake him up. He only got wet a little.

The island gods who oversaw our dinner were clearly not happy with my softhearted decision.

I also snapped a secret shot of their feet under the dinner table. What do you think of their shoe chemistry? True love? Passing fling? My sister does have two feet. I don’t know where the other one went. It is hard to make up stories about why you want foot pictures without revealing a secret blog.

** Although maybe I would trade for the dairy cow. I mean, I’m not being sqouged for milk morning noon and night anyway.

Ohmigosh!

Of course on the day that I am looking even more like a tool than normal, the super-cool SheWearsPlaid is giving me props. God, it’s like that dream where you show up for a test wearing only your underwear. Or, when you are talking about dreaded unpopularity and a bunch of new people show up to read it. Yay! Can I have a stroke from blushing too hard? We’ll certainly find out, won’t we?

In the meantime, I must confess:

I have totally wanted to whisper my girly crush on her into your ear. But she is a lawyer, and I’m sure she knows her way around a restraining order. But now that she has opened the door, even a crack, I must tell you all: Go and read her! She is living my fantasy life of no kids and a cool job and skinniness. Also? Lots of wine and living in Napa.

http://shewearsplaid.blogspot.com/

And this one. On my browser, it comes up: She Wears Plaid Panties