Anne Nahm

Oh, and also the letter L. Flu! Flu! Rah, rah, rah!

Here’s some things I pondered this week while staring at the ceiling and waiting for the Angel of Death to arrive for High Tea:

1. Before The Flu, I got my kids these amusing umbrellas at a local weekend festival. Three bucks each. Nice, huh?

Anyway, I’ve decided I’m going to steal one, get myself a strapless yellow prom dress, and a cherry red wig. Halloween ’08 my friends. I’m going as a Mai Tai.

2. Some things my mom used to say to me when I was a kid, most of which I’m still unsure as to the literal translation:

.
Don’t tickle the bird’s tail
Don’t try to teach your granny how to suck eggs
I’m going to scob your knob
I’ll tell you when you have spinach between your teeth and your skirt tucked into your pantyhose

.

3. What it would be like to answer the question, “Are you sure you want to delete your entire blog?” with “YES”.

Wheeeeee! Free time abounds. Because my! God! Sometimes I barely get the spinach out from between my teeth and my skirt pulled out from my pantyhose before I get out the door. I need to scale down. I need to simplify. I need to worry less and stare at the ceiling and whine more.

But then? The blog is all, “don’t blame me, man. I’m here for you when you want to talk.” All fake sincere and slump shouldered and everything.

And I get real pissy and I think, “don’t give me that martyr blog bullshit. You own me like Siegfried owns Roy*”

And the blogs all, “uh-uh”,

And I’m all, “Yah-huh”,

Until at some point my brain actually fires me. And I’m all: Sweet! Cue Mai-Tai time! Just let me get my big cherry wig.  There are plenty of other ways to embarrass myself.

And then my husband kicks me in the leg to gently remind me it’s two in the freaking morning and some people have to get up and go to work the next day.

4. Time to start using NyQuil only at the recommended dosage levels. And perhaps surrender my Flu Party Hat and get back to the real world.

*to steal a Simpsons’ quote.

Thursday Weekly Manifesto: The Wife is the Last to Know.

A woman I know casually has been asking a lot of questions lately. To the general audience of other women around her. About her husband. And with each progressive question, I become more suspicious that the husband is having an affair. The questions have already started when I get to the group and I presume they continue after I find an excuse to get the hell out of that conversation.

(And let me just preface this by saying, the bummed I am about this is nothing compared to what anyone with a cheating spouse goes through. This is just my tiny little facet of bummitude for having witnessed it and all these ugly feelings I have had about it since. I imagine some of you will think I’m a horrible person for talking about my irritation over this woman’s husband’s affair when I should just be thinking good things for her or something. I kind of feel like a bad person about that too, which is why I’m blogging about it.)

I am completely bummed. The past week, I have the urge to just yell suddenly into the group of women, “Really? Are we really at this stage of life? That place we watched our parents’ marriages crumble and we all became kids from broken homes and we spent the next twenty years proving we weren’t going to be here ever again? Because ughhh. I really don’t want us to be here. Let me off the bus.”

I’m not going to say anything to the woman. Of course I’m not going to say anything.** I don’t actually know anything. And after your husband’s girlfriend’s husband slashes your husband’s tires and your husband says you, the wife, are acting jealous (ed note: WTF? Jealous you didn’t get your tires slashed?) – and you are still not quite sure if there is something going on? Then you’ve probably got your reasons for not wanting to look further into that whole scenario. Fine. When you ask my opinion, I’m going to mumble something vague and supportive.

But holy shit, the stress of listening to her life unravel is so hard. The questions are getting to me. It is all rapid fire, asked in such a way that presumes her husband’s innocence. Like, “how do I not act jealous while expressing my concern about my husband’s friendship with a woman when I have to tell him tonight at dinner that the woman’s crazy ex-husband yelled, ‘you’re husband is fucking my wife!’ across the parking lot at me today in front of Wal-Mart***? – Because I think that kind of crazy might not be good to expose our family to, even though my husband and this lady are just friends.”

And trying to come up with an answer that does not violate the presumptions of that question is really. freaking. hard. Especially when she asks a bunch of them all together in a row. I have had mad fantasies of answering and answering, and breaking into a sweat over the questions. I’m nodding and smiling and mumbling. And then all the sudden, I end up shouting, Jeopardy Game Show Style, “What is ‘keep your dick out of other people’ for 500, Alex?”

Ugh. I don’t know why I care. I mean, why I care enough to feel weird about it. I guess because when I see her talk, I know she knows and she doesn’t know. And that could be any of us, I guess at any time now. I would hate to be the last to know. I would hate for anyone to tell me before I was ready. I would never be ready.

** I’m guessing some of you will say, “you must say something! Why is the wife always the last to know?” While others will say, “stay out, it is none of your business!”

But we all kind of know that if I say something, the person hates me and then they chose to do whatever they were going to do anyway. Just like we all kind of know that if I say nothing, the person will eventually say something like, “Why didn’t anyone tell me before I went and had another kid with that guy and then caught his girlfriend’s STD?”

And this is exactly why I am blogging about it, because although I am not discounting a person’s personal hell, I hate being here right now, accomplice to the situation and with nothing good I can say or do to make anything better.

*** Box store identity has been changed to protect the innocent.

Part III of the Weekly Manifesto: Chunky Monkey.

Am fat again. Fear of breaking the scale has kept me off it. Maybe photos to document later this week. Right now I am too cowardly. Thoughts of taking pictures make me run and hide. In the refrigerator.

Because you’re still here, and I still have TMI:

When I eat too much junk food, I eventually get these really stinky farts. The kind where I have to get up and leave the room, often wiggling my butt to shake all the stink down my pant legs so it won’t follow me because Oh Mah Gawd. Stinky.

I have recently started wondering if my digestive tract is doing this in self defense to get me to stop eating. If so? Checkmate. You win. Small woodland animals are falling out of the trees. Bald, dead, and covered in blisters. No more Chunky Monkey. But you, digestive tract, you must stop using my butt like I’m some kind of freakish skunk on crack with a crack on Mace. Or something. Just stop it.

TMI Flashback, because damnit, you’re still here:

Once when I was first married, I had one of those farts while alone in bed. My new husband came in and jumped into bed with me. I swear, he did not jump right back out of bed in disgust. I actually saw him rewind Time Itself, he bounced back out of the bed so quickly, walked backwards out of the room, and shut the door behind him. Swear to God, completely in reverse. I laughed and laughed until I laughed so hard I farted again. And then I just about puked from the smell since the door had been closed to hotbox me in with the farts. Karma is what that was.

Part II of the Continuing Manifesto Series (Perhaps soon to be known as ‘gee, Anne, weren’t you funny once?’ week): Money

We lost a lot of money. Not so much that we are downsizing or wondering how to pay off the credit cards or thinking about selling kidneys or anything. But enough that my husband has been walking around in a bit of a daze the past six weeks, saying in a kind of giggling disbelief: I guess I’ll be working a lot longer than I thought I would be.

Every time it gets brought up, he cringes. Every time there is a conversation or thought that could possibly lead up to money, he berates himself about the loss. When he reads this post, I expect he will hunch his shoulders and grit his teeth and perhaps howl at the moon like a wounded and/or caged animal later this evening.

I don’t miss the money. I miss my husband.

PS- he’s having a hard time believing I really am not mad at him. His disbelief is starting to make me a little mad at him for a lot of reasons that are difficult to describe and feel private, but two of the big ones boil down to this:

1. He means the world to me and it really pisses me off that he seems bent on believing that what I see in him is nothing more than a checkbook. The insult added to this injury is that if insists on believing I am secretly the gold-digger type, at least he could have faith that I would be a smart gold-digger, who would choose a guy who might get knocked down but who had the ability to pick himself back up and shake the money tree again. His underlying belief that I am a failed, surly, disappointed, poorly skilled ‘digger is really infuriating.

2. His inability to wear a pair of socks more than ten minutes without taking them off and leaving them wherever he is does tend to piss me off. Times in which I am actually mad? It is hard to get him to shake in fear over the wrath of my domestic ire. I want to make an instructional. Zounds SOCKS! EVERYWHERE! = My pissy face. Learn it. Know it. Sketch it on an index card, keep it in your pocket, reference it often. Now see if there is any similarity between that face and the one I am making now. No? Good.

I love you, you awesome man.*

*and you gotta know I love you know because you know how hard it is for me to imbed stuff.

Illness

Three people in our extended have recently discovered they have serious illness. Globally, our extended family is kind of a wreck about this. It is no good when someone you know is healthy and then suddenly, they are not.

One person has cancer and is not expected to live through this calendar year. The type of cancer he has is mostly found in smokers and in drinkers. Guess what? He smokes and he drinks. And there is no time to be pissed at him or work this out, because all the time left is about loving him.

Lots of us in our family have been smokers or drinkers at one time or another, so there is no place to cram that cheated angry feeling. It could have been (and could still be) any of us where he is now. Coffin- where- there- used- to-be-a- healthy- person? That is just a big sink hole waiting until he’s gone to open up and pull us all into it.

Another person was just diagnosed with a disease that is going to slowly ravage him over the period of about twenty years. This is not the first case of this disease in the family, so everybody kind of has a vivid idea of what might be in store for the future. And the underlying guilt and fear about whether this means there is a hereditary link makes everyone say, ‘this is not anyone’s fault’ and look at the little kids and feel their own secret hearts do the slow Lurch of Worry.

Finally, one person has had extreme but unclear medical problems that have suddenly cropped up in the past three months. Life used to be normal. Now it is not normal at all. There are all these terrible phone calls, each with new and conflicting information: It was a stroke! It is delusional thinking – Bipolar! Schizophrenia! Is this person a secret drug addict and nobody knew all this time? No wait! Turns out it is a hole in the heart!

If it could be any of those things, you get the idea of how bad it has been for that person and immediate family. Out of nowhere. No one knows what is going on. None of the options are good.

In a terrible way, each phone call is like tuning into the Discovery Channel in the middle of the hour – those shows where you see a lion chasing a zebra, but you don’t know yet which one you are supposed to be rooting for. Let it be bipolar so that it is not a stroke? Let it be brain damage so it is not a psychiatric disorder? One of the worst feelings I have felt in my adult life was finding myself relieved to think both of those thoughts at different times this month. I mean, yay stroke, right?

And like the others, there is that hanging dread that when all the chaos is finally settled, the person who was so easy and comfortable to love might be pretty much gone, leaving a bunch of children and adults and parents and sisters and brothers wondering what even happened.

I don’t know what to say about these things yet. Anything I think of saying on the topics of death or grief or illness just seems like it has probably been said before, and by people with better understanding and greater devastation.

Right now it feels like each of these people was a critical bone in the skeleton of our family. And now we have these huge broken places that cripple our movement and have left us laying wherever we were when it happened, wondering when the ambulance is going to come and sedate us.