Lunchtime. Rambling. Tuesday.

So - I'm eating my lunch with a baby spoon today as our office does not keep utensils around and it was the only thing I can find. Sadly - chili does not lend itself to ladylike behavior when eaten with fingers.

It occurs to me that the maraschino cherry - a slightly hot topic of late - would fit quite well in a baby spoon...and in a manhattan...but I digress.

We started putting the tree up last night and it made me think of my mother who had great affection for all disgusting food products of the 70's.

To that end I bring you...

Horrifying "foods" and "beverages" of the 70's that are qualified as excellent by my befuddled parents.
Hey Brotherman - feel free to play along!

1.) Deviled Ham

2.) Port Wine Cheese Spread

3.) Raw Cauliflower (okay - probably not just 70's related, but I can't shake the association)

4.) Vienna Sausages

5.) Canned Asparagus (see "Raw Cauliflower")

6.) The Harvey Wallbanger

7.) Blue Nun

8.) Gherkins/ Pistachio Flavored Instant Pudding (tie)

9.) Rumaki

10.) Creme de Menthe

I can't that the universe for much, but I can thank it for making me a halfway decent cook given the history here. I've got that going for me, which is nice.

Judgement, Hat of

Those of you that know me, know that my mom died recently, in a vaguely long and drawn out fashion. (This is obviously not the "Joy for Monday" post...bear with me. I suspect it will get funnier, maybe not though. Continue at your own risk. There are some very funny monkeys below if you prefer that.) If you know me, you also know that I did not have a spectacular, or even an averagely bad relationship with my mom.

My mother was a kind woman, her intentions were the best, her mind was open, and she loved me immensely in her fashion, which in many books makes me a lucky lucky girl. That said - she was a disastrous parent in most ways. The best example I can give for the purposes of this post is that I, in my entire life, have never had a conversation with my mother that wasn't about her. How can that be? you might ask. Case in point: when I turned thirty, and was legitimately having some trouble with it, I had gone on one of my rare trips home and mentioned my struggle to my mother. I am not a confider in my parents (for good reason - but I may explain that at another time), mentioning this was a BIG DEAL. Her response was...

"Well, you know every time YOU turn a year older, I turn a year older too."

This exact type of reaction is merely one of the reasons that I, after years of using many tactics to come up with some sort of daughterly relationship with her - opted out. Her response to my (basically subconscious) decision was to use all of the family holiday letters to mention how uncommunicative I was, passive-aggressively call me out for being terrible at rare family functions, and end many conversations and social outings with "I don't understand why you are so MEAN to me." Now - you may think that yes, my treatment of her does sound mean, but in defense of myself, I will share that I had done legitimately everything within my young power to have a tolerable relationship here. It was just not in the cards, and with a woman as intense as my mom was, you have to draw the line somewhere.

However - due to my mother's kindness and generosity, she was loved and trusted by many. Her friends, save for one - to whom I owe a lifelong debt of gratitude - all knew nothing of me but what she told them. Her best day-to-day friend, also her housekeeper, who I will call Julie, heard the most of how mean and ungrateful "How sharper than a serpent's tooth...blah blah blah..." I was.

Which brings me to the events of the hour.

I got the call, from the lifelong-debt-of-gratitude friend , that my mother was really dying for real. I flew to my parent's home immediately and went straight to the hospital. My mother was in ICU, sedated, unaware, tubed up, the whole nine yards of all of the stuff. The first time I went home I was there for a week. We (my parent's friends, me , my father and the brotherman) taking care of each other. I was pretty much, as you would expect, rocked out of my world. I am, however, a professional planner and all of those skills (skillz?) served me well while I navigated all of the stuff that has to happen in a situation like this, while I was also attempting to keep everything in my "everything-is-time-sensitive" job afloat.

So - here I am at my "we-have-a-terrible-relationship-why-are-you-so-mean-to-me " mother's deathbed, with all of the relatives giving me the "nice-of-you-to-show-up" eye. This was not, what we commonly refer to as "fun." We go into the terrible horrible meeting of the Council, where my father, very bravely, stepped up and told the doctors that my mother, his wife of 35 years, should be "do-not-resuscitate." This was an emotional moment, to say the least. We all file out into the waiting room, me at the end of the line of council folk. When I get there, Julie the housekeeper is crying. Hasn't hit weeping yet, but she obviously needs some comfort. I, tenuously, still seem to have my shit together, so I go over to comfort her. I put my arm around her and grab her hand. I tell her how important she was to my mother and how much my mom loved her. She looks up with her big watery eyes, sniffling, and says to me....

"You know, Heather, I hated you for so many years because of how terribly you treated your mom."

I believe she followed up with something about how I wasn't the evil spawn of Satan destined to burn in hell while bound to a rock with my eyes plucked out by vicious tropical birds and was actually quite impressive, but I have no idea, because my soul had frozen in that moment. I excused myself to make a phone call, got up and slowly walked out of the waiting room, and then barrelled down the hall, blind and hyperventilating. My younger brother (thanks Brotherman) took one look at me, physically grabbed me with what I assume was basically all of his strength, and held me while I totally and utterly lost it, in the privacy of some random corner of the hospital.

So - Mom didn't die that week. And I flew home. And then flew back and forth. And waited. And flew back and forth. She died a few weeks later. And we planned the memorial.

At which point it was deemed important by Julie that my mother's "Red-Hat-Lady"* hat appear at her memorial service. This fact was communicated to me by the Brotherman. To which I responded "Well- then I hope Julie brings her big Hat of Judgement." Beat...beat...and then the Brotherman and I both bust out laughing uncontrollably...

I have since let go of my rage about this particular moment, Julie knew what she knew, and said what she said and has taken very good care of both of my parents. If that's the arrow I have to take to have the life I have and love, then so be it. But.... the Hat of Judgement! What a life it has!

The mighty "Hat of Judgement" has taken on a life of its own. Having shared this story with a few friends in Chicago, the Hat of Judgement is getting around. There is a man with whom I am acquainted that heard this story before he met me. Upon our first meeting, before hands were shaken or greetings exchanged, we physically tipped our hats of judgement at each other. We now speak of Flipflops of Despair, Boots of Shame, and my personal favorite runner up to the hat, the Cloak of Loathing.

So - the next time you are in a meeting, or onsite, or out in public, and someone is particularly evil to you or simply too dumb to exist in your personal space (yeah- pretend you are all above that - but you know EXACTLY what I'm talking about,) I say - tip your hat of judgement.

"I tip my hat to you sir."

Professional, polite, and will make you feel better on the inside.

*Hats! The Red Hat Society Musical at the Royal George Theatre, 1641 North Halsted Street, Chicago, IL

Dead Mom Rings

My mother was a woman of consumption. Not consumptive – that’s something else entirely (see Camille, Alexandre Dumas Fils) but a woman would could, with no sense that she was doing it, consume volumes with no boundary. Things she consumed in no particular order included space, money, time, people, attention, eyebrow pencil, pills and Danielle Steele novels...but the most obvious point of consumption was food. In the time that I knew her – a full 33 years – my mother went from to heavy, to large, to huge, to large, to huger, to Jabba-the-Hut sized, to large, then finally to completely emaciated. In order to take her body on this trip she went on an experimental all liquid diet program and had no less than two drastic weight loss surgeries. In doing so, she managed to destroy her body from the inside out. There are those who think that she was just “of poor health and constitution.” The unspoken, unacknowledged truth I always sensed, however, was that for reasons she may or may not have been aware of, my mother could just never get control of herself.

I eventually was compelled to give up engaging in her health peaks and valleys simply because it was too constant and too complicated. I, selfishly or not depending on what side of the fence you prefer, had to get on with my life. Mom was sick, basically inexplicably so, and that was just what our family was. She had been bedridden for years, on and off, and towards the end – which none of us realized was truly the end until we got right there, she was bedridden straight through for months.

So, one day I got the call to come home. This was it – Mom was dying.

I did what you do… I flew back and forth, I said the things that you say, I stood vigil in the ICU, took care of my dad, bonded with my brother, uncomfortably accepted the attention of relatives and friends…. and then she died. We went through all of the immediate rituals of death and then finally - there we were – me, my brother, and my father – alone for the first time in weeks. Flowers everywhere, leftovers from the bizarre post-memorial luncheon put away. We stood there - relieved of the tension of what was going on in the hospital – how was Mom doing, who was going to go there when, what we had to do with the relatives. We knew how Mom was doing – she was in a box in the living room. On the wall unit. With her red hat lady hat. I think this filled us each with a morbid sense of relief we certainly didn’t speak about in that moment. All at once, as if the room itself had the impulse, my brother and I went to see what we wanted of Mom’s and Dad went to clean out her purse. My brother wanted her cell phone. I went to check out her jewelry. And this is when I saw it. Appalling. Horrid. Yet not at all surprising in the end. My mother, while bedridden, had apparently spent all of her time watching QVC. She had amassed boxes and boxes and boxes of low to mid quality costume jewelry – the pièce de résistance though – was the ring box. On the left of her dresser at which I had watched her get dressed for years, was a 8” x 20”ish box of rings – probably 40 in total that she had been purchasing while she lay in bed. Each ring was uglier than the last, shiny, impossibly golden rings with brightly colored stones, akin to the adult version of toy jewelry from the machine at the grocery store.

I was intrigued and yet horrified by this discovery – Mom – in a box in a living room – and her utter lack of self control – which eventually killed her – in a box in front of me. Stunning…

I took the rings home. I keep them in my living room and do wear a few of them. Guests try them on. Sometimes my roommate and I put them on and then change them as we go through phases of our evening. My favorite? The big ugly rhinestone butterfly. It is the gaudiest, most spectacular ring I believe that I have ever seen – which is saying something, because I share my mother’s love of big jewelry. People will often comment on that one when I wear it. I almost always stop myself short of saying “Thanks. Dead mom ring” as that response seems to make people uncomfortable – can’t POSSIBLY imagine why. What most surprises me about the box though, is somehow having it here with me, I feel like I have more of my mother with me than I did when she was alive. Some day I will make sense of that, but right now I just wear the big ugly butterfly and say “thank you.”